Thursday Writing Advice
Lebowski, The Fangs, and Hozier
Thursday Writing Advice: Film, Novels, and Music
Last time for Thursday Writing Advice we looked at three flaws found at each of the three stages of the writing process (submission, drafts, and published works). This week, we’re taking a more positive slant and talking about good writing in a range of disciplines from scripts, to novels, to songs that have jumped out at me through the course of the week. As an editor you can find good writing almost everywhere, and principles that can be applied to helping writers improve.
1. Put time into naming things
The easiest large choice to make in writing fiction is naming things, while simultaneously being one of the hardest to get right. Names are perhaps our most basic of reference points. Naming someone or something the right way can do more work per letter than almost any bit of descriptive writing. That’s because names pack a high accumulated cultural baggage per square inch. We know, intuitively, which names feel normal, which feels average, sinister, or innocent. Paired with characterization, names become the capsule that retains that characterization. If the name is ill-fitting or slipshod, then it will be a bad container no matter what you try to put in it. If you name the town in your novel Babylon or Eden, there are a lot of expectations to play off of before the first line of description. If said town has a Main Street, there’s a whole kind of architecture in place before you describe the local drugstore or barbershop.
I re-watched the classic Coen Brother’s film The Big Lebowski this week, which has a screenplay with some Grade-A character names, starting with the tutelar Lebowski who goes by “The Dude” (or Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing), to Donnie (the perfect name to accompany the phrase “shut up Donnie, you’re out of your element” and Steve Buscemi’s face), and finally the over-the-top bowler named Jesus (“Nobody f***s with the Jesus”). These are great names, evidenced by the way the play a crucial role in the actual lines of the film and reflect back exactly who the characters are. By way of contrast within the same film, although John Goodman is incredible as a parody of the broken, shell-shocked Vietnam Vet, his character’s name, is forgettable. Goodman’s character name, Walter, doesn’t do any of the work that the The Dude, Jesus, or even the also “normal” but perfect name to shout put-downs at, Donnie, does. There is a lot of power in a name.
The Dude writing a check for a pint of half-and-half.
2. Great writing doesn’t have to be showy
After reading an exorbitant number of books through the eyes of an editor, my definition of what great writing entails has shifted a lot from my younger reading years. Primarily, the idea that excellent writing on the sentence level has to be showy either in its vocabulary, construction, lyricism, or all three, to be considered on a different plane. I’m thinking about authors like Pynchon, Nabokov, Morrison, whose seriousness of writing and command of language is advertised in bold across every line. However, there is also seriously good writing that isn’t showy, but is just as impressive, which becomes especially evident after reading many, many average, below average, and even moderately good books. What follows is a paragraph from an incredible novel, The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. The paragraph has not one flashy sentence but each hits concussively with a refined sensibility and sharpness of clarity:
“Hobart would recover. He would become one of the most talked-about artists of the decade. He would win an NEA grant the following year. The university, desperate to compete with UCLA would present him with a distinguished chair. He would get to live off the infamy of this piece for years to come, and Caleb did not begrudge him this windfall. He had received an apprenticeship from Hobart, had learned the almost magical skills necessary to make the world reconfigure itself in order to fit your own desires. Hobart had taught him what was important. Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.” (190)
Even out of its full context this paragraph drives hard at an idea and is a perfectly contained unit. The Family Fang is an incredible example of not needing to rewrite the rules for how language is used in every sentence in order to be funny, insightful, or profound.
3. Perfectly imprecise metaphors
Unreal Earth, the third album by Hozier, the Irish musician of “Take Me to Church” fame, came out last month and I’ve been listening on repeat ever since. He’s something of a literary songwriter. A friend of mine recently wised me up to the fact that this is pretty intentional. Hozier has a song on the new album called “I, Carrion (Icarian)”—using a comma, parentheses, and a Greek myth in a song title are three deeply highfalutin choices. But he’s great, because he is amazing at the singing and music parts, of course, but also because his poetics are actually…a lot of the time…poetic.
In last Thursday’s Writing Advice I wrote about avoiding “almost metaphors.” But to show just how fine a line writing can have, between incoherent under interrogation and rich under interrogation, a Hozier lyric provides a stellar exemplar of when you cannot only twist a common metaphor but complicate it further. Here’s the lyric from the song “Who We Are” (if you click on this link to listen to the song, prepare yourself for a terrifying animation).
“What I had left here
I just held it tight
So someone with your eyes
Might come in time
To hold me like water
Or Christ, hold me like a knife”
The perfectly imprecise metaphor that I love here is “hold me like water, or… hold me like a knife.” The first line is fairly straightforward: you can’t really hold water or, if you can, you can only do so precariously without it slipping through your fingers. The beautiful imprecision is in the second line, because you can hold a knife in two, incongruous ways—one in which you, unlike water, absolutely hurt yourself, and the other being by the handle as an instrument that is deadly. Put these two lines together and you have wonderfully up-for-interpretation poetry of metaphor. What makes this metaphor good and not just sloppy is that its perspective is meant to describe a feeling that itself is imprecise, some kind of desire for something passive (water) and violent (a knife). These kinds of metaphors probably work more easily in poetry or lyrics rather than prose, but this example presents an interesting way that metaphors don’t always have to be straightforward or exactly logical to be evocative and brilliant.