That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping.
Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen.
How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?#6213•
Chapter 20
For writers and other creative artists, knowing what not to do is a major component of taste. Two jazz pianists may be equally proficient. The one with taste will put every note to useful work in telling his or her story; the one without taste will drench us in ripples and other unnecessary ornaments.
Painters with taste will trust their eye to tell them what needs to be on the canvas and what doesn't; a painter without taste will give us a landscape that's too pretty, or too cluttered, or too gaudy—anyway, too something.
A graphic designer with taste knows that less is more: that design is the servant of the written word.
A designer without taste will smother the writing in background tints and swirls and decorative frills#6246•
What exactly is wrong with "the top brass"? Nothing—and everything. Taste knows that it's better to call people in authority what they are: officials, executives, chairmen, presidents, directors, managers. Non-taste reaches for the corny synonym, which has the further disadvantage of being imprecise; exactly which company officers are the top brass? Non-taste uses "umpteenth." And "zillions." Non-taste uses "period": "She said she didn't want to hear any more about it.
Period."#6222•
Part of the answer takes us back to taste. A writer with an ear for language will reach for fresh imagery and avoid phrases that are trite. The hack will reach for those very clichés, thinking he will enrich his thoughts with currency that is, as he would put it, tried and true. Another part of the answer lies in simplicity.
Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in "ion" and embodying a vague concept.#6249•
Notice how many of the governor's words are anything but vague: leaves, wind, frost, air, evening, earth, comforts, soil, labor, breath, body, justice, courage, peace, land, rites, home. They are homely words in the best sense—they catch the rhythm of the seasons and the dailiness of life. Also notice that all of them are nouns.
After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.#6248•
Toni Morrison, one of the most eloquent of black writers, once said: "I remember the language of the people I grew up with. Language was so important to them. All that power was in it. And grace and metaphor. Some of it was very formal and Biblical, because the habit is that when you have something important to say you go into parable, if you're from Africa, or you go into another level of language.
I wanted to use language that way, because my feeling was that a black novel was not black because I wrote it, or because there were black people in it, or because it was about black things.
It was the style.
It had a certain style.
It was inevitable.
I couldn't describe it, but I could produce it."#6252•
Chapter 21
The good news, which he had lived long enough to see, was that many species had made a comeback from their narrow escape, helped by a citizenry that now takes an active role in protecting birds and their habitats. Then he said: "The attitude of people towards birds has changed the attitude of birds towards people."#6218•
Chapter 22
Two final words occur to me. One is quest, the other is intention.
The quest is one of the oldest themes in storytelling, an act of faith we never get tired of hearing about. Looking back, I notice that many students in my class, assigned to think about a place that was important to them, used the assignment to go on a quest for something deeper than the place itself: a meaning, an idea, some sliver of the past.
The result was that the class always had a warm dynamic for a group of strangers.
(Some classes even held reunions.) Every quest that a student embarked on found an echo in some search or yearning of our own.
Moral: any time you can tell a story in the form of a quest or a pilgrimage you'll be ahead of the game.
Readers bearing their own associations will do some of your work for you.#6234•
Chapter 23
Notice how simple those five sentences are: plain declarative sentences, not a comma in sight. Each sentence contains one thought—and only one. Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence.#6206•