Prose on Prose
I’m reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. As some of you know, I am personally a plot slut, and I find style sluts enormously annoying. They speak as if somehow imagination is irrelevant, if you massage a dull story about boring characters enough it will somehow achieve the status of art. They imply that if, as a reader, you find a story tedious if well written, there’s something wrong with you as a reader. I disagree, vociferously at times.
Surely others are in my camp. In fact, I almost wonder if Jonathan Lethem’s recent brilliantly witty New Yorker story, “The King of Sentences,” was a sly send-up of Prose’s chapter on sentences.
Nonetheless.
Right now I’m doing rewrites on a story about cats (what else do I have to write about these days?) and about people who love cats way too much. That’s what it’s about. The protagonist is a woman with a personality disorder which I am afraid readers will find annoying, but for good or evil, that’s where my material has led me.
And the thing is, I’m massaging the damn thing sentence by sentence, word by word, shining and polishing -- and wondering, what could be worth this amount of work?
Gene Wolfe, from whom I have been lucky enough to take a workshop, once took a manuscript of mine and copyedited the hell out of it. For me, this was a watershed experience. All the flab and blab gone from my little story, which ultimately sold to Interzone under the title “The Sleel.”
(Yes, your jaw is dropping. Can you imagine a style lesson from Gene Wolfe? Would you give your right arm? How about both your arms?)
What I learned from Gene Wolfe I will not summarize here. I was immensely flattered that he thought I was smart enough to understand what he was doing, crossing out this phrase, moving that word to the front, etc. Writers learn this stuff by doing it, just as you learn to cook with the materials you have, in the kitchen as it is, rather than just from a cookbook.
My own worst affliction is prolixity. Certain words infest my first drafts like the marbling saturated fat in corn-fed steers, words like very and somehow. And I tell the same thing five times, and then can’t figure out which four times it should be excised.
I’ve been doing that for the last four days with this obsessed cat-woman story. I’ve cut almost a thousand words out of it.
But why does it have take so long?
Francine Prose does talk about more than word by word style, of course. She does admit that talking about Isaac Babel’s style implies reading across translation, and that she may as much taken with Constance Garnett’s word choice as with Chekhov’s. She talks about gesture, and she talks about looking, really looking at how the masters do things.
I feel a flash of recognition, for example, when she talks about excising the clichéed gesture (“Her heart beat faster.”) and finding something authentic and fresh. This is a lesson I learned from Maureen McHiugh when she told me that my point of view character in a story was too unimaginative, that he needed to make the occasional sarcastic little jab.
Helpful! And not all that hard to do, once I saw the possibilities.
Reading Like a Writer is a useful book, and like all opinionated works, it can be infuriating at times. Why this obsession with words, words, words?
(I should mention, by the way, that the book is also entertaining. Prose can tell an anecdote brilliantly, and her material -- the one-legged student with the black cat, for example -- is often delicious.)
But here I am, annoyed with the whole topic, the whole work-ethic of style. And maybe the reason I think substance is more important than style is that it’s so hard to clean that windowglass, polish that prose, so the style serves the substance.
I spend so much time cutting and pasting and testing and snipping and beating my head against the wall.
Trying to make it simple. Trying to make it read easy.
Sentence by sentence. Word by bloody word.
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maryturzillo) wrote,
