I read a couple of great articles this weekend in the paper. One was an interview with Phillip Roth. I expected to really like this article, so I was surprised that I didn't. The second article, about writing, I only read on a lark, I was happy to discover that this article stimulated the old grey cells far more than the Roth article.
Two facets of the article stood out. First, a quote from The Great Gatsby.
I've said as much to my own students, in the course of asking them, say, to describe a lawn. They shrug. Blink. "It's green," one of them invariably says. "Grassy." Here's how Fitzgerald describes one: "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run."
The lawn ran? The lawn jumped? Is it an ill-tended lawn? Obviously not, because it's so sleek and swift, in such a well-groomed hurry to dash over every obstacle and splash itself festively against the bricks. Burning gardens? Why not be specific and tell us what flowers grow there, or vegetables perhaps, the colors and so forth? Well, because the lawn is moving too fast and can only glance—whoosh—as it passes: burning!
This is writing that makes us see the world afresh—the kind of writing that is better than actual living. Or rather it makes us want to live better, in every way. I cannot read about Gatsby's parties without wanting to drop everything, go for a swim, get plastered and dance the Charleston.
Why did I key in on this paragraph? I have written before, most recently about Catch-22, that I think too much editing tends to ruin prose. I feel certain that had I written that a lawn ran, my editor would have noted it and said something along the lines of "lawn can't run." Nota bene to self, don't trust your editor too much.
Secondly, I read this at first and was confounded momentarily. Once I read on I found that is the best description of the maxim that writers hear so often "show don't tell" I have ever heard.
"Action is character," Fitzgerald wrote in his notes while working on his unfinished novel, "The Last Tycoon." Many times I've written the same motto on my chalkboard, in the same emphatic capitals, and said to my students: If one of our greatest writers had to exhort himself with that phrase, right up to the end, it must be pretty important.
Don't, therefore, simply tell us that a character is "arrogant" or "blasé" or whatever; show her reclining on a divan "with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall," as Fitzgerald gives us Jordan Baker in "Gatsby," or show her "revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air," as one will forever remember the vulgar Myrtle Wilson.
Action will suggest the most salient qualities, along with myriad ineffable others, until finally you've earned the right to pronounce explicit judgment—and thus the moral implications of "Action is Character": "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
I love being pleasantly surprised by an article. Went into expected nothing, came out with two nuggets of info I'd previously not had.
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