Recently I had the pleasure of helping a co-worker out on his query letters for a sci-fi novel. Most of my remarks are along the lines of using “compact language”. I’m sure there is a better literary term for that, but since I am from journalism land… I make up terms. The biggest writing lesson I learned was during a month long journalism fellowship program in North Carolina. On this day, maybe 10 years ago– we were told to examine the front page of The Wall Street Journal, particularly the one sentence national and international briefs– and to do the same for a set of stories from our texts. Saying everything you need to in one captivating sentence. Saying everything you need to with brevity. Brevity. Not my strong suit. But, I try.
So it extends to other areas of my life. When I pull my hair out over this level and that level of synopsis for the films I work on, I suck in my breath and say, “Okay. If I can’t say this in one sentence, is it worth saying at all? Or is my story just not there yet.”
To take it further, you hear the term in scientific problem solving; KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Occam’s razor.
I typically keep the company of non-fiction books as I have always felt there’s enough in our own universe to keep us busy, why create another one? But I do often read boat loads of Stephen King. He’s just so good.
Contrary to what I am saying here about making things compact, King has put out a one-thousand page epic entitled Under the Dome. I wondered how one could pull off encasing small town New England in an unexplained dome without it feeling lame, but of course King can do that. I was fascinated by a chapter following a chipmunk as he encounters the dome. And I guess that is the hallmark of why I like King so much. The story is never superfluous (in fact I feel odd using a word that big) and gives you so much.
About a year ago, I read King’s On Writing in it, a memory about workshopping with his future wife Tabby. She had written a poem about a bear. (Page 54)
King has this to say about her construction:
There was also a work-ethic in the poem that I liked, something that suggested writing poems (or stories, or essays) had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation. There’s a place in A Raisin in the Sun where a character cries out: “I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!” to which his wife replies, “First eat your eggs.”
In the discussion that followed Tab’s reading it became clear to me that she understood her own poem. (Page 56)
Later when Tabitha is explaining her poem and its meaning she says, “Besides, I like bears.”
And isn’t that just it? Write with purpose, an honest purpose. Know every sentence. Why it is there. Defend it. As one writer in my journalism program remarked “I fight for every semicolon.”
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I had the misfortune of spending two years at a severely underfunded Christian college. One classmate who was an acquaintance of mine used to crack me up for his consistent misuse of “really big words”. I think his name was Lloyd and he fancied himself as a philosopher who was out of place and surely belonged 30 minutes south at the University of Georgia.
Truth be told– if you could pony up Harvard prices, Toccoa Falls College would take you. SAT words notwithstanding. Sometimes when I read student papers out of the public high schools, and I catch a kid who has been too friendly with his thesaurus I wonder about Lloyd. I wonder if he’s in a PhD program at UGA writing tremendous papers. 45 pagers on Foucault and pipes. I’d like to see one.
I probably sound harsh, and I’m sure one of my former writing teachers is looking at this chuckling about what misery my academic papers were to grade– but I have to tell you, if it weren’t for dear journalism and the rigors of writing tight stories in short time periods– I’d be hopeless.
Write what you know.