Stein on Writing (26 page)

Fiction and Nonfiction

Amphetamines for Speeding Up Pace

T
he success of a book is measured by the satisfaction of readers. The measure of a reading experience is often expressed as “This really moves fast” or “This book is slow going.” Each describes the
pace,
or tempo, of a book in which fast is good and slow is bad.

I’ve heard editors, authors, and readers describe books as “a cannon-ball” or “a zipper,” assuming speed to be a virtue. Yet the best of good books have purposeful slowdowns in pace from time to time because the authors know that readers, like athletes, must catch their breath.

Why then the obsession with pace? Because a laggardly pace is characteristic of a majority of novels that get turned down by publishers, and, alas, of some that find their way into print but not into the hearts and recommendations of readers. Most rejected manuscripts move too slowly, encouraging their readers to put them down.

I was tempted to call this chapter “teaching the unteachable” because of an event that happened many years ago. Five editors from New York publishing houses, myself among them, were on a panel at a meeting of the American Society of Authors and Journalists. Amid the many faces staring up at us were quite a few belonging to professional nonfiction writers who wanted to try their hands at fiction. When one questioned the panel about “pace,” my four colleagues suggested in turn that pace was a matter of ear or instinct, and hence unteachable. I answered last and said in as inoffensive a tone as I could muster, “Here’s how it’s done.” There was an immediate rustle of writers reaching into their briefcases for pen and paper.

There are quite a few techniques for stepping up the pace of fiction, ranging from the simple to the quite complex. Most of these techniques are adaptable for nonfiction also.

Journalists know that short sentences step up pace. They also know that frequent paragraphing accelerates the pace. Short sentences
plus
frequent paragraphing step up pace even more.

Those are simple observations that come to fiction writers only belatedly. And when nonfiction writers turn to fiction, they often forget these simple rules.

In fiction, a quick exchange of adversarial dialogue often proves to be an ideal way of picking up pace by the use of short sentences and paragraphing. Here’s an example.

Ben Riller, Broadway play producer, has been ducking phone calls from a reporter named Robertson. When Robertson calls again, Riller decides to take the call. Note how the brief exchange starts with a relaxed paragraph and how the pace picks up as the sentences get clipped. Also, note that there are twelve paragraphs in this brief conversation:

“Hi, Mr. Riller. I’ve been trying to reach you about a little item we’re running in tomorrow’s paper about the show. I’d just like to get your comment to the story around town that
The Best Revenge
may never open.”

“Mr. Robertson?”

“Yes?”

“If I tell you you’re wrong, your story will say ‘Producer denies show folding,’ right?”

“Unless you’d care to confirm that it is folding or make some other comment.”

“I do,” I said.

“Slowly, please,” he said, “so I can take it down.”

“Mr. Robertson,” I said, “does your wife have syphilis?”

Robertson’s voice shrilled, “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “I’ve got an AP wire service reporter here finishing up an interview and he’d like to run a story saying ‘Post reporter denies wife has syphilis.’ Well, has she or hasn’t she?”

I could hear Robertson breathing. Then he said, “You win, Mr. Riller,” and hung up.

It isn’t necessary to use dialogue to pick up the pace; short sentences and frequent paragraphing alone can do the job. Here’s a rather extreme example:

The alley was dark. I could see a rectangle of light at the other end.

I had no choice. Joad was gaining.

The clop-clop of my shoes echoed as I ran. Damn these high heels.

Suddenly a figure filled the rectangle of light up ahead.

Was it Leach?

Or a cop?

I stopped. The silence was awful.

Over my shoulder I saw Joad enter the alley, boxing me in.

There were no doors. I couldn’t climb the brick walls.

I dug in my purse for the police whistle.

A deep breath, I told myself.

The whistle was ice cold against my lips. I blew, again and again till my ears hurt.

Joad’s laugh echoed down the alley.

The figure at the other end laughed, too.

Note that in addition to stepping up the pace, the clipped sentences and frequent paragraphing increase the tension.

Skipping steps can also increase the reader’s sense of pace. The following example provides information in what might be described as a normal pace:

In the morning he would shower, brush his teeth, shave, dress in a suitable business suit with shirt and tie, get down to the kitchen in time to have his coffee and then rush off to the station, but he’d frequently miss his train anyway.

Here’s how my friend and neighbor John Cheever did it in his celebrated story “The Country Husband”:

He washed his body, shaved his jaws, drank his coffee, and missed the seven-thirty-one.

Eliminating about two thirds of the words steps up the pace brilliantly. I call this “skipping for effect.”

A technique for stepping up pace in fiction that isn’t used enough is flipping forward past a scene
that never appears in the book.

Not too many decades ago, when a door closed on a couple getting into bed, the chapter would end. When the next chapter started, the coupling was long gone. The bedroom scene existed only in the reader’s imagination. The effect on the reader was that of the pace quickening. Here’s how the same effect can be achieved in today’s less prudish environment.

In my novel
The Magician,
there is one scene in which four rough teenagers meet with an older girl for beer and sex. That chapter ends with the girl saying, “Okay, who’s first?” The next chapter goes to a different location with other characters. The scene that the reader anticipates
never happens.
I was not being prudish. I did it to step up the pace. Though the book had several million readers, none ever complained about the missing scene. The point, of course, is that the more that happens in the reader’s imagination, the greater his appreciation of your story. This applies to any kind of scene.

There’s an extra benefit to picking up pace by skipping a scene. In revising your manuscript, you may find some scene that doesn’t work as well as you had hoped. Consider skipping that scene and turning a liability into an asset if removing the scene propels the pace of your story.

In the chapter on suspense, I showed how suspense can be prolonged throughout an entire book by following each cliffhanging chapter ending with a chapter that moves to a different location or has different characters. While that technique of scene-switching is designed primarily to sustain more than one line of suspense throughout, it also has the effect of increasing the pace of a story.

I mentioned earlier a technique widely used in film called “jump-cutting.” It works just as well in novels as it does in movies. With this technique, a story moves from one scene to the next without the in-between matter that would be part of getting from one place to the next. In life, you might leave your apartment, go down the stairs and out into the street, get into your car, drive to your destination, and enter a restaurant. Showing all of that in a movie, or including it in fiction, would be a drag and boring.

In jump-cutting, the viewer of a film might see a character close the door of a house and immediately appear in a restaurant, perhaps even at a table in the middle of a meal. Viewers have no trouble with jump-cutting. And it makes the film seem to move fast. In a novel, a character might close a door. This would be followed by a line space. The next scene is in a restaurant.

Jump-cutting is also available to the nonfiction writer. Skipping in-between matter increases the reader’s sense of an agreeable pace, and keeps him turning the pages.

There are three more techniques for stepping up pace that are inherent in the process of deleting the flab in a manuscript. That is the subject of the next chapter.

Liposuctioning Flab

I
t was a reviewer for
Publishers Weekly
named Jeffrey Zaleski who first suggested in print that a forthcoming book needed liposuctioning. It’s a perfect description of an important part of the editorial process. Flab is not only the enemy of anyone with excessive flesh, it is the enemy of every writer. Superfluous words and phrases soften prose. Fortunately, there is an antidote.

Flab-cutting is one of the best means for improving the pace of both fiction and nonfiction. When eliminated, the loss of fat has the welcome side effect of strengthening the body of remaining text.

Flab, if not removed, can have a deleterious effect on the impatient reader, who will pay less attention to each word and begin to skip. Skimming—trying to pick out the best parts of text while reading—is as unsatisfactory as trying to pick out the seeds of raspberry jam.

The quickest way of increasing the pace of a manuscript and strengthening it at the same time is to remove all adjectives and adverbs and then readmit the necessary few after careful testing. One of the students in my seminar who had an adjective habit found that after eliminating all unnecessary adjectives and adverbs from his book-length manuscript, it was seventy-three pages shorter and considerably stronger!

Mark Twain said, “If you catch an adjective, kill it!” Take his incitement to murder as a measure of his conviction. The depth of his feelings about adjectives is understandable. He was attempting to pierce the resistance of writers. Most writers erect a Great Wall against the process of eliminating all but a minimal number of adjectives and adverbs. I will guide you through the process of examining them knowing that Twain is dragging you by one arm as I am by the other.

Most adjectives and adverbs are dispensable. The easiest ones to dispense with are “very” and “quite.” Word processing programs make the
process simple. Find and delete all the
verys,
and
quites
that crept into your first draft.

Waste adjectives are entirely unneeded. Here’s an example of a waste adjective that needs dumping:

The conspicuous bulge in his jacket had to be a weapon.

You don’t need the word “conspicuous,” and the sentence is stronger without it.

Adjective surgery can be painful until you practice it rigorously and examine the results. Let’s try some less painful preoperative procedures first.

Go through your text and find any place where you have used two adjectives with a single noun, such as “He was a feisty, combative reporter.” Eliminate one of the adjectives, keeping the stronger one. In the example, I’d keep “feisty” since it’s more evocative than “combative.” Experience proves that when two adjectives are used, eliminating either strengthens the text. The more concrete adjective is the one to keep. Or the one that makes the image more visual.

Let’s think together about the following sentence:

He was a strong, resourceful warrior.

If we delete “resourceful,” we have a strong warrior. If we delete “strong,” we have a resourceful warrior. Each would give us a different meaning. A strong warrior is commonplace. A resourceful warrior might be a more interesting choice, but the meaning we are striving for would dictate our choice. The point is that the elimination of either adjective would lend strength to the sentence. And in context, the cut would help improve the pace. Quite apart from eliminating one out of six words, the comma goes too, and commas tend to slow the reading process. Here’s another example of the use of two adjectives with a noun:

He was a very strong, very powerful tennis player.

The first step, of course, is to take out those “very”s. What’s left is:

He was a strong, powerful tennis player.

Still too much. Which adjective do you eliminate to strengthen the text? You have a choice:

He was a strong tennis player.

He was a powerful tennis player.

Each is better than the original. “Powerful” has a special meaning in tennis—someone who hits the ball hard and has a hard serve. A “strong” tennis player would be one who plays well tactically, and delivers excellent strokes. Few players are both. The choice should not be arbitrary.

In addition to eliminating unnecessary words, I am focusing on using words for their precise meaning, which is the mark of a good writer.

Here’s a more difficult choice. What would you remove from the following sentence?

As he walked away, he seemed to be rocking, swaying from side to side like Charlie Chaplin.

Your choices are several. You could remove “rocking” or “swaying” or “swaying from side to side.” In this case, whether you remove “rocking” or “swaying,” it might be advisable to keep “from side to side” because it is visual, even though it is implied by either “rocking” or “swaying.” In cutting excess verbiage, keep words that help the reader visualize the precise image you are trying to fashion.

Here’s a two-adjective sentence that needs improvement:

What a lovely, colorful garden!

Which of those two adjectives, “lovely” and “colorful,” would you eliminate?

You would be better off with the elimination of
either
adjective. However, if you take out “colorful” and keep “lovely,” you would not be making the best choice because “lovely” is vague and “colorful” is specific and therefore gives the reader a more concrete image to visualize.

Examining your adjectives provides an opportunity to see if you could possibly invoke the reader’s curiosity with an adjective that is better than either one you now have. What adjective could you use instead of both “lovely” and “colorful”?

There are several curiosity-provoking adjectives you might have chosen:

What a curious garden!

What a strange garden!

What an eerie garden!

What a remarkable garden!

What a bizarre garden!

“Lovely” and “colorful” don’t draw us in because we expect a garden to be lovely or colorful. If we hear that a garden is curious, strange, eerie, remarkable, or bizarre, we want to know why. An adjective that piques the reader’s curiosity helps move a story along.

Of course it needn’t be an adjective that provokes the reader’s interest. For instance, consider:

She’d never seen a garden quite like this one.

Any word or group of words that makes the reader ask “Why?” or “How?” also serves as an inducement for the reader to go on.

Like any good rule, using one adjective in place of two has exceptions. Sometimes two adjectives or an adverb modifying the adjective are necessary to create a specific image:

Meryl Streep stood the way a heavily pregnant woman will, in two motions, out of the chair and then up.

“Pregnant” alone wouldn’t give you the same image.

There are several rules for determining which adjectives to keep:

• An adjective that is a necessity. Example: “His right eye kept blinking.” If you didn’t keep “right,” it might sound as if you were talking about a one-eyed man.
  
• An adjective that stimulates the reader’s curiosity and thereby helps move a story along. Example: “He had a pursued look” wouldn’t work without the adjective. Moreover, the adjective raises curiosity about why he had that pursued look.
  
• An adjective that helps the reader visualize the precise image you want to project. “The spoon left a line of froth on his sad mustache.” Without “sad,” the line is merely descriptive. With “sad” it characterizes both the person described and, by inference, the speaker.
  

An adjective, of course, modifies a noun. An adverb modifies a verb. Most adverbs require the same tough surgery as adjectives:

Leona wished he would call soon.

The meaning of “soon” is implied. The adverb is unnecessary. The sentence is stronger without it.

A frequent error is the use of two adverbs. Which of the two adverbs in the following sentence would you eliminate?

She really, truly cared for him.

Would you eliminate “really” or “truly”? You could take out either. “She really cared for him” is okay. “She truly cared for him” is okay too. But best of all is “She cared for him.” It is direct, and picks up the pace.

Small as these changes seem, cumulatively they have a powerful effect on prose.

Using more than one adverb is a common fault. Here’s an example from a current bestselling author:

John got up quickly and walked restlessly to the window. He turned suddenly, smiling confidently. Then he sat down slowly, heavily.

That makes six adverbs in two sentences! Watch what happens when you eliminate five of them:

John got up and walked to the window. He turned suddenly, smiling. Then he sat down.

The pace is improved not only by eliminating five adverbs, but also by shortening the sentences.

Before you begin eliminating all adverbs by rote, keep in mind that sometimes adverbs can be helpful. There are two adverbs in the following short sentence. Each conveys something different:

He ate heartily, happily.

“Heartily” connotes eating a lot, “happily” connotes taking pleasure. If it is the author’s intention to convey both meanings, the adverbs should be retained. “He ate” without either adverb tells us little.

I hurriedly scribbled the number down on the pad.

Why get rid of “hurriedly”? Because scribbling connotes hurry.

If not all adverbs should be cut, what is the purpose of this exercise? It’s to get you to pay close attention to whether each word is helping or hurting your intention. Most of the time two adverbs slow down the pace and weaken the sentence they’re in. But changes should not be made mechanically.

I have two rules for testing adverbs to see if they are worth keeping:

• Keep an adverb that supplies necessary information. Example: “He tried running faster and fell.” If he’s already running, you must keep “faster.” If you remove the adverb the sentence means that he fell as soon as he started running.
  
• Keep an adverb that helps the reader visualize the precise image you want to project. Example: “She drove crazily, frightening the oncoming traffic.”
  

Don’t let these exceptions make you lose sight of the fact that most adverbs can be eliminated.

Verbs can also get in the way of pace. Here’s one example:

He was huffing and puffing as he climbed the steep street.

The one adjective in the sentence, “steep,” shouldn’t be removed because if the street isn’t steep, why the huffing and puffing? It’s the “huffing and puffing” that spoils the sentence because that phrase is a cliché, a tired, overused, familiar conjunction of words. It would be perfectly acceptable to say:

He was puffing as he climbed the steep street.

Can you detect the flab in the following sentence? Two of the six words are unnecessary:

This idea is an interesting one.

Do you find the following sentence stronger?

This idea is interesting.

The flab words are “an” and “one.”

Removing flab may seem a simple procedure, and in fact it is once a writer gets the habit of looking for the waste words as if he were
an editor. Which words would you remove from the following sentence?

There is nothing I would like better than to meet an interesting person who could become a new friend.

Here’s a clue. To quicken the pace, delete ten of the nineteen words. Don’t go on until you’ve found all ten words. Be as tough on yourself in eliminating unnecessary words as you think I might be if I were editing your manuscript. The best writers of the hundreds I’ve dealt with over the years were also the toughest on themselves. If you don’t find all ten dispensable words, try again until you do.

I’ve bracketed the words that could be deleted:

[There is nothing] I would like [better than] to meet an interesting [person who could become a] new friend.

More than half the words have been eliminated!

Certain words frequently constitute flab and can be eliminated: “however,” “almost,” “entire,” “successive,” “respective,” “perhaps,” “always,” “there is.” Each writer can compile a list of his own, words he uses from time to time that contribute nothing but flab to a text. Your own made-to-order list will serve as the best guide.

You’ve undoubtedly heard it said that the best writers make every word count. Not always. They, like us, sometimes slip up. Here’s an example from Pete Dexter’s excellent novel
Paris Trout,
which won the 1988 National Book Award for fiction:

In the moment of illumination, though, he saw him. Buster Devonne was counting his money.