Words Fail Me Part 11

But enough about you.

23. Promises, Promises.

MAKING THEM, KEEPING THEM.

Every playwright knows you don't put a gun onstage unless you intend to use it. That's a good rule to follow, no matter what kind of writing you do. A careless hint or a subject that's raised and then dropped is a gun left in plain view but never fired. It's a promise to the audience-"Trust me to deliver the goods"-that's never kept.

A writer makes promises to keep the reader reading (or the audience awake). The promises can be quite obvious, like saying you have a major announcement to make, or more subtle, like the gun that leaves folks wondering when it will go off.

A promise is anything that piques interest and begs for explanation: As we shall see, his failure to test the bungee cords was to have tragic consequences. Or: Leona bailed out at $13 a share, a decision she would later regret. Or: They kissed outside the cryogenics lab, vowing to meet again in a better world, but it was not to be.

Even small details can be promises. You might begin a profile of a corporate executive by describing her office, littered with promises: a wheelchair in one corner, a stuffed sailfish on the wall, a half-eaten jelly doughnut on the desk. Every promise raises a question. Is that her wheelchair? If so, what happened? Did she land that fish? Is she going to finish the doughnut? Readers will keep reading because they want to know.

And you have to tell them. An audience has the memory of an elephant. Never raise expectations you don't plan to meet. You might forget a casual teaser, but readers won't. And what you see as an insignificant aside (He knew he had to fix that step one of these days) might seem a portent to your readers. Don't leave them hanging.

Suppose you're writing a magazine article on dry-cleaning methods and you mention that you were furious when your marabou boa came back from the cleaner's. Readers will expect to be told why. Or you're giving a speech on exotic pets and you happen to recall warning your late brother-in-law not to hand-feed his crocodile. The audience will expect to hear the rest of the story, so keep your promise.

Those of you with attention deficit disorder may need nudging, especially if you're writing something long. Jot down a note whenever you make a promise in your writing-when you mention a subject or refer to an incident you plan to pick up later. Stick your reminder in an obvious place, on a wall or bulletin board or at the edge of your computer terminal. Any loose ends should be tied up eventually.

Our reading, both fiction and nonfiction, is full of promises that hint at where we're going and help move us along. Since we could be going almost anywhere, a promise can hint at almost anything, from unusual plot twists to a startling scientific discovery.

A promise or two at the beginning of a book can give readers a taste of what's to come: "How did our Sun come into being, what keeps it hot and luminous, and what will be its ultimate fate?"

(George Gamow, The Birth and Death of the Sun).

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

(Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier).

"Benjamin Disraeli's career was an extraordinary one; but there is no need to make it seem more extraordinary than it really was."

(Robert Blake, Disraeli).

A promise at the end of a chapter can engage readers and make them turn the page. In these examples, the promise is a note of suspense: "As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out of work, the middle cla.s.ses facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the n.a.z.i chieftains that they would not have long to wait."

(William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).

"Halfway down I paused and leaned on the handrail and told myself that I was descending into trouble: a pretty young woman with a likable boy and a wandering husband. A hot wind was blowing in my face."

(Ross Macdonald, The Underground Man).

"The truth about his new American correspondent was a great deal stranger than this detached, innocent, and otherworldly Scotsman could have ever imagined."

(Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman).

"It would be many hours before I learned that everything had not in fact turned out great-that nineteen men and women were stranded up on the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives."

(Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air).

Promises can put readers on the alert that something important is about to happen. In these pa.s.sages, hints of ominous doings create a sense of foreboding: "Now I thought: There's going to be trouble here."

(V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River).

"So do not forget this Marvin Macy, as he is to act a terrible part in the story which is yet to come."

(Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe).

"From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently."

(Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays).

"Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there."

(Truman Capote, In Cold Blood).

Promises are glue, gripping the reader's attention by holding a long piece of writing together. A good writer can juggle three or four or more promises at once, so there's always something else the reader wants to know, another reason not to switch off the light and go to bed.

Some promises, though, are subtle; the reader recognizes them only in retrospect. They may be as un.o.btrusive as a recurring image, like the umbrellas that pop up at fateful moments in Madame Bovary. Flaubert's first mention of an umbrella comes early in the novel, when the local priest tells the innkeeper he's left his umbrella behind and asks that it be sent on to him. That same evening, the Bovarys arrive in town. They dine at the inn, and then a servant carrying the cure's umbrella shows them to their new home. Later, Emma Bovary will buy her lover a present from an umbrella shop, a costly gift that she has to steal from her husband to pay for. And still later, she secretly meets another lover in a raging storm. As lightning flashes around them, they embrace and kiss-under an umbrella.

Whether they're subtle or not so subtle, promises make a book worth reading again and again because they seem more meaningful with each reading. As you read and as you write, think about promises and keep your eye on the ball-or the umbrella. And anytime you raise the reader's expectations, remember that you have promises to keep.

24. You Got Rhythm.

WRITING TO THE BEAT.

Mention rhythm and most people think of music: hip-hop, polka, fugue, march, waltz, rockabilly. But almost everything in life has rhythm, from your heartbeat to the clickety-clack of your keyboard, from a jackhammer in the street to rain drumming on the roof. And your writing has it, too.

By "rhythm" I don't mean just the toe-tapping beat created by the rise and fall of syllables as word follows word. I mean all the patterns in writing: the sound of words and phrases, figures of speech, rhymes, repet.i.tion, and so on. Taken together, these give a piece of writing its flow, its stride, its timing-that's rhythm.

Open a book, any book, and start reading aloud. Forget for a moment what the words mean. Just listen to the rhythm. Is it jerky because the phrases are short and choppy? Is it leisurely because the clauses are long and drawn out? Does the monotony of the cadences make you drowsy? Does the pulsating drive get your adrenaline going?

It should come as no surprise that language has rhythm. Our first acquaintance with it, after all, is through our ears. As children we hear language before we can understand and speak it; we speak before we can read; we read before we can write. And the language we write has something of the language we hear-the quality of rhythm.

We know that poetry has rhythm. So does prose, though its rhythms may not be as obvious. Great prose writers have always used rhythm to give their words another dimension. We mere mortals may not be able to do that. But when we're trying to write our best- in a love letter, a short story, an essay for admission to medical school-we should make sure that our rhythms don't detract from our words.

Not everything has to sing, of course. If you're writing a recipe or instructions for a.s.sembling a tricycle or dosage directions for an aspirin label, rhythm may not be your first consideration. Readers won't mind monotony or a b.u.mp or two, as long as the facts are right. A lot depends on how much time you have to fuss. A reporter covering a plane crash on deadline won't play around with rhythm as much as someone writing a feature story about the birth of a panda. Then again, rhythm may not be as critical in a news story that has its own excitement and drama.

Snooze Alarm.

The most important lesson about rhythm is also the easiest to learn: Too much of it may put the reader to sleep. And that's the last thing you want to do, unless you're writing bedtime stories. A repet.i.tive rhythm can have a hypnotic effect, lulling readers instead of holding their attention. This is the kind of writing I mean: In the still of the night, a crack in the floor caught the heel of Mae's shoe, and she fell down the stairs of the rickety house. The b.u.mp in the dark put a limp in her walk and a run in her hose, but it didn't disturb a hair on her head.

Are you thoroughly anesthetized? The problem with the pa.s.sage is that too many phrases (still of the night, heel of Mae's shoe, crack in the floor) have the same rhythm. Two or three similar phrases may be all right, but a long string of them becomes monotonous. The solution is easy. Break up the singsong pattern by changing a few words or moving them around: In the dead of night, Mae's heel caught on a crack in the floor of the rickety house and she tumbled down the stairs. The fall tore her stocking and left her with a limp, but it didn't disturb a hair on her head.

Can you hear the difference? There are still a few phrases with similar cadences, yet the overall rhythm isn't sleep-inducing. Don't be obsessive about avoiding repet.i.tive rhythms. Use them but don't abuse them, particularly if you're trying to convey excitement or tension.

Out of Sync.

Here's Irritating Situation Number 47. You're in a romantic restaurant, enjoying an intimate meal with your one-and-only, when some jerk at the next table starts shouting into a cell phone. Kind of spoils the ambience, doesn't it? A piece of writing can be spoiled, too, if its rhythm is out of sync with its content.

Imagine you're the president of a family-owned company beset by rumors that it's about to close and everybody's going to be laid off. Your object is to a.s.sure employees that the rumors are false and that their jobs are safe. You draft an e-mail statement like this: Dear friends: You're upset. Of course you are, and we are too! Who wouldn't be? The rumor mill is out of control. But all the loose talk is untrue. This company is not closing. It's doing well financially. Sales are up. No one's being laid off. We expect to be in business for many years to come. And we hope you'll all be here.

That doesn't sound very soothing, does it? The choppy rhythm gives the writing a nervous edge, and the employees are nervous enough as it is. So let's fiddle with the rhythm: Dear friends: We're just as upset as you are over false rumors about our company's future. None of them are true. In fact, our sales are up, business is good, and we're doing well financially. So there's no reason we would close or let anyone go. We'll be here for many years to come, and we hope you'll be here with us.

The first version could have been written by Barney Fife, the jumpy deputy on The Andy Griffith Show. The second one sounds more like the laid-back Sheriff Taylor.

Sometimes, though, an edgy, percussive rhythm might be just what you're after. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer describes demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and he does it in a marching cadence, one that swells along with the crowd: "In broken ranks, half a march, half a happy mob, eyes red from gas, faces excited by the tension of the afternoon, and the excitement of the escape from Grant Park, now pushing down Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel with dreams of a march on to the Amphitheatre four miles beyond, and in the full pleasure of being led by the wagons of the Poor People's March, the demonstrators shouted to everyone on the sidewalk, 'Join us, join us, join us,' and the sidewalk kept disgorging more people ready to march."

In that single sentence we feel the sting of the tear gas, hear the wagons rolling, and see the march growing in strength ("Join us, join us, join us"). He's got rhythm.

The Rhythm Section.

Avoiding inappropriate rhythms is easy enough. Only the best writers, however, can go a step further and use rhythm to make their meaning more meaningful. That takes a good ear and plenty of practice. If you'd like to try, listen to what you read, and learn from it. The writers you admire probably use rhythm in ways you've never noticed; look up favorite pa.s.sages and start listening.

Here's a sampling to get you started, from writers who use rhythm so well that it becomes part of the action. The first is from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. Listen to the biblical cadences in this rising storm of words: "The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad gra.s.s, and broke the neck of the flower."

The pa.s.sage owes its stately tread not just to the beat of the syllables, but also to repet.i.tion (rose, rain, wall) and to its forceful verbs (drove, clapped, licked, beat, trampled, broke).

Some mystery writers are wizards at using rhythm to convey fear and suspense. The rhythm in this pa.s.sage from Elmore Leonard's Glitz underscores the confusion of a desperate fight scene: "And Vincent closed and opened his eyes, saw her juggle the gun and drop it as Teddy slammed into him and Teddy's gun went off between them into the grocery sack of bottles, went off again and went off again, the bottles gone now as Vincent tried to grab hold of Teddy clinging to him and put him down, step on his gun. But something was wrong."

Nonfiction can be equally suspenseful. Barry Lopez, in Arctic Dreams, follows a long sentence with several short ones to convey the thrill he feels as he senses the presence of a group of narwhals, then the letdown when he misses a chance to see the elusive unicorns of the deep: "I strained to see them, to spot the vapor of their breath, a warm mist against the soft horizon, or the white tip of a tusk breaking the surface of the water, a dark pattern that retained its shape against the dark, shifting patterns of the water. Somewhere out there in the ice fragments. Gone. Gone now."

Joseph Mitch.e.l.l raised journalism to art in his profile of Joe Gould, a wandering Greenwich Village eccentric. In this pa.s.sage, which you can find in Mitch.e.l.l's book Up in the Old Hotel, the peripatetic rhythms are as circuitous as a typical day in Gould's life: "I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office-the one on Tenth Street-or I would see him sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square."

Note how the "I would see him"refrain and the -ing word ending reappear at intervals, just like Joe Gould. Then there's that loopy stream of adjectives at the end, as cranky and off-beat as Joe himself.

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d, Zora Neale Hurston invokes rhythms that re-create what's happening on the pages. Here she helps us hear as well as see the tossing of dice, the shuffling of cards: "All the rest of the week Tea Cake was busy practicing up on his dice. He would flip them on the bare floor, on the rug and on the bed. He'd squat and throw, sit in a chair and throw and stand and throw....Then he'd take his deck of cards and shuffle and cut, shuffle and cut and deal out and then examine each hand carefully, and do it again."

You can almost dance to some authors rhythms, and what better way to write about dance than to imitate the rhythm of the movement? D. H. Lawrence, in an evocative essay called "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn," describes a Pueblo Indian ritual: "Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud! goes the drum, heavily the men hop and hop and hop, sway, sway, sway, sway go the little branches of green pine....The men are naked to the waist, and ruddy-golden, and in the rhythmic, hopping leap of the dance their b.r.e.a.s.t.s shake downwards, as the strong, heavy body comes down, down, down, down, in the downward plunge of the dance."

In much the same way, the sportswriter Red Smith used words to convey the rhythms of the boxing ring. This is from his column about the historic 1964 Sonny ListonCa.s.sius Clay match: "Dancing, running, jabbing, ducking, stopping now and then to pepper the champion's head with potshots in swift combinations, he had won the first, third, and fourth rounds and opened an angry cut under Liston's left eye."

Some of the most rhythmic writing anywhere can be found in the Bible. Here's a pa.s.sage from the Song of Solomon, in the King James Version: "My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come; and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

Rhythm doesn't get much better. But then, we expect rhythm in biblical writing. We don't expect to find it in writing on, let's say, mathematics. Unexpected pleasures are the sweetest. In their book The Reader over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge tell a story about a mathematical work that included this sentence: "It may at first sight seem unlikely that the pull of gravity will depress the center of a light cord, held horizontally at a high lateral tension; and yet no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight."

Years after the work was published, a careful reader discovered the perfect little rhymed poem hidden in the second half of the sentence. Someone was listening.

To judge the cadences of your own writing, speak the lines aloud, or at least recite them in your head. For comparison, think of some familiar rhythms. If you ride, think of a horse's gaits: walk, trot, canter, gallop. If you're musical, use your toe or an imaginary baton to mark the tempo: adagio, andante, allegro, presto. Think of an oncoming train, the waves of the sea, wheels on a cobblestone street.

If speaking your own words makes you feel silly, rest a.s.sured that you're not the first to do it. Flaubert went outdoors and tested his phrases by shouting them from his terrace. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the translator of Proust, held forth out on the moors. When words don't sound right, something's wrong. Next time, don't just write. Listen.

25. The Human Comedy.

WHAT'S SO FUNNY?.