Stein on Writing (29 page)

When an author successfully builds a wide audience for his work, the “title” for his next and future books is usually his name. After
The Naked and the Dead,
any book of Norman Mailer’s was sold as “Norman Mailer’s new book” rather than under its title.

New York
magazine once had a competition for its readers to turn good titles into bad titles. Someone suggested downgrading Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
to
The Nude and the Deceased.
Though the words mean the same, the latter title for the same novel might have quashed the book’s chances in the marketplace.

An author presumably controls the title of his book, but he is subject to heavy influence from people on the publisher’s staff. They are the money and the power. An author doesn’t always get to exercise his prerogative when it comes to titles.

I lost out once. I had a novel I called
A Stopping Place.
The jacket design included a swastika as a prominent feature. The title, in the presence of a swastika, had exactly the kind of low-key resonance I wanted for the book. However, shortly before press time
Publishers Weekly
carried an announcement of a novel by an author in India who called his
book
A
Stopping Place.
Titles can’t be copyrighted (only motion picture titles can be protected by registration). I wanted to go ahead with my title but the publisher was afraid there might be confusion in the marketplace. Reluctantly, and because everyone was in a hurry for a title change, I okayed the publisher’s suggestion of
The Resort
as a title, though I never liked it. It had no resonance.

The point to remember is that the primary function of a title is not to provide the locus of a story, but to entice the reader. Would you believe
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
was once called
The Mute!
Or that
The Red Badge of Courage
was originally titled
Private Fleming, His Various Battles!
Or that
The Blackboard Jungle
went by the name
To Climb the Wall!

Is there a factor that above all others contributes to making a title intriguing and memorable? I’ve studied the titles that have captured the public imagination during my lifetime. Add to
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Red Badge of Courage,
and
The Blackboard Jungle
the following titles that almost everyone seems to like, and ask yourself what they have in common:

Tender Is the Night

A Moveable Feast

The Catcher in the Rye

The Grapes of Wrath

All seven of those titles are
metaphors.
They put two things together that don’t ordinarily go together. They are intriguing, resonant, and provide exercise for the reader’s imagination.

A beginning writer might say, “Stein, those are all books by famous writers. What can we do?”

A great deal. A good title, as I’ve said, can inspire a writer’s work. One of the students in my advanced fiction seminar had problems with his work until he came up with an intriguing title,
The Passionate Priest.
He backed it up with an excellent first chapter that fit the title. Then, after our discussion about the metaphoric resonance of so many good titles, he came up with an even better one that drew immediate approval from all of his colleagues:
A Heart Is Full of Empty Rooms.

Are there questions you might ask yourself about the title of your work? Yes.

Does it sound fresh and new?

Does it, like a metaphor, bring together two things that haven’t been together before? If not, is there a way of doing that with a variation of your present title? Can you use the name of the principal character in an interesting context?

The point to remember is that the primary function of a title is not to convey meaning as much as to sound enticing and if possible exude resonance.

Sometimes one is tempted to wax cynical about titles. Raymond Chandler once said, “A good title is the title of a successful book.” That is certainly borne out by the book that won the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry. Its title was
Garbage.
Occasionally, a book with an awkward or bad title will somehow make it in the marketplace. Since my aim is to ease the reader’s path to publication, I’ll fall back on my experience as a publisher: a good title is like coming to a house you’ve never been in before and having the owner open the door and say “Welcome.” A good title can make a tremendous difference in the early acceptance of a book.

Nonfiction

Using the Techniques of Fiction to Enhance Nonfiction

I
t is immensely valuable for the journalist, biographer, and other writers of nonfiction to examine the techniques that novelists and short story writers use. In editing many articles and hundreds of nonfiction books over the years, I worked on almost every conceivable kind from child care to philosophy, from books that with hindsight probably should not have been published to works that zoomed high up on the bestseller lists or that became standard works. For our purposes here, I will divide all nonfiction into just two categories: practical and literary. There is some overlap, of course, but the basic distinctions are as follows:

Practical nonfiction is designed to communicate information in circumstances where the quality of the writing is not considered as important as the content. Practical nonfiction appears mainly in popular magazines, newspaper Sunday supplements, feature articles, and in self-help and how-to books. The subjects tend to be instruction, guides, tips, collections of facts, “inside” stories about a particular industry or locale or celebrated personalities, so-called inspirational material, popular psychology, medical and other self-help for the layman. The vocabulary of practical nonfiction is usually as simple as is permitted by the subject matter.

Literary nonfiction puts emphasis on the precise and skilled use of words and tone, and the assumption that the reader is as intelligent as the writer. While information is included, insight about that information, presented with some originality, may predominate. Sometimes the subject of literary nonfiction may not at the outset be of great interest to the reader, but the character of the writing may lure the reader into that subject.

Literary nonfiction appears in books, in some general magazines such as the
New Yorker, Harper’s,
the
Atlantic, Commentary,
the
New York
Review of Books,
in many so-called little or small-circulation magazines, in a few newspapers regularly and in some other newspapers from time to time, occasionally in a Sunday supplement, and in book review media.

It should be no secret to readers of this book that I favor work in which the writer presents his best not his quickest, and where the language used comes not from the top of the head but from a consideration of precision, clarity, euphony, and alternatives.

Reporting in nonfiction can be accurate, like a photograph taken merely to record. The best of nonfiction, however, often sets what it sees in a framework, what has happened elsewhere or in the past. As the recorded events march before the reader, a scrim lifts to convey other dimensions, sight becomes insight, reporting becomes art.

Like fiction, nonfiction accomplishes its purpose better when it evokes emotion in the reader. We might prefer everyone on earth to be rational, but the fact is that people are moved more by what they feel than by what they understand. Great orators as well as great nonfiction writers have always understood that.

Nonfiction concerns itself with people, places, and ideas. Ideas seem to attract readers when developed through anecdotes involving people. Some nonfiction writers say they are jealous of novelists who create their characters; they are stuck with life, the characters in the news, the people they have to interview. No matter, the techniques for rounding the characters and making them come alive are similar.

When the nonfiction writer reports to the reader about a living person, the writer has two options. He can characterize the person the way a layman would or he can strive to give the person life on the page. In biography, the choice is clear. If the characters do not breathe, the exercise of assembling the facts of their lives may be of use to scholars but not to readers. When it comes to making the people we write about in nonfiction spring to life on the page, the techniques are useful for all nonfiction writers, not just biographers and historians. Too often, though, what we get in newspapers and magazines is the person’s name and title and little else, sometimes a photo or drawing. We may know what the person looks like, but we don’t yet know the person. Characterization matters. The reader’s attention to a story and the pleasure he derives from it is often measured by how alive the participants seem, which stems, of course, from the skill with which they are portrayed.

It doesn’t take much to make people come alive on the page. Novelists learn to provide vitality to minor characters in a sentence or two,
usually by selecting one characteristic that is unusual. You will recall the beginning of Budd Schulberg’s
What Makes Sammy Run?,
in which the sixteen-year-old protagonist is described as “a little ferret of a kid.” Our dictionaries are full of animals, fish, birds, and insects that can be used in the characterization of people: the wolf as predator, or someone who wolfs down food; the yearling as innocent; the toucan as beak-nosed; falcons and hawks as high-fliers; the bat whose sonar for staying out of trouble is more effective than the sonar of most politicians. Plants, from the prickly cactus to the abrasive nettle, are also useful to help characterize. Live-forevers, weeds, invasive clover, fast-growing fescue, wild-flowers are among the suggestive names of plants that a writer can use for brief and colorful characterizations.

The best way to make a person come alive is by rendering the person’s appearance with some specific detail. Here are some examples from articles, news stories, and books. See if you can detect the key words or phrases that characterize the person:

The garage attendant’s hat was parked perilously on an excessive amount of hair.

This characterization has a touch of humor in that the verb “parked” is used for the garage attendant’s hat. The visual image is of an ill-fitting cap that might fall off at any moment. It’s enough to enliven this passing character.

How do you enliven an accountant?

His accountant is an owl of a man who keeps one eyelid half shut not because of an affliction but because there is much in this world he is not prepared to see.

Note the key words and phrases. “Owl” characterizes the man physically, the rest of the sentence characterizes him psychologically.

John Updike, who writes much nonfiction in addition to his celebrated novels, can characterize in a sentence:

His face is so clean and rosy it looks skinned.

A layman might describe a man as being dressed all in black. The image is vague, it gets the fact across, but not the feeling. It could have been written by anybody. Here’s what Updike did, again in a nonfiction work:

He sits by the little clubhouse, in a golf cart, wearing black. He is Greek. Where, after all these years in America, does he buy black clothes? His hat is black. His shirt is black. His eyes, though a bit rheumy with age now, are black, as are his shoes and their laces. Small black points exist in his face, like scattered punctuation.

Markers that signal a person’s background can be as useful to writers of nonfiction as to novelists, though few think of markers as a matter of course. Writers of articles, features, and books are more likely to use markers than journalists preparing copy on the run. If reporters try to use markers consciously a few times, it can become a rewarding habit.

As an example of the use of markers in nonfiction, I’ve chosen excerpts from a front-page story about the hapless treasurer of Orange County, California, Robert L. Citron, from the
New York Times
of December 11, 1994:

He was the type to wear, along with patent leather shoes and belts, red polyester pants and a green blazer at Christmas, pastels at Easter, and orange and black on Halloween.

The license plate on Mr. Citron’s car is LOV USC; and, until it broke, the horn was programmed to play the school’s fight song.

These markers—there are more—fit the main point of the story, that the Orange County treasurer who managed and lost billions was not a sophisticated Wall Street type, but a homespun local with unsophisticated tastes. The story focuses on the Santa Ana Elks Club, where Citron came for lunch routinely, arriving at ten past noon and leaving at ten minutes before one. Even the dining room of the Elks Club is described with markers:

The decor is heavy on Formica, Naugahyde and Styrofoam. On the tables, the only centerpieces are Keno coupons and bottles of Heinz Ketchup and McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce.

These markers of Mr. Citron’s private time contrast with his role as “a sophisticated, aggressive and daring investor” whose “high returns ... made him not only a legend in financial circles nationwide but a hero to local politicians desperate to do more with less.” Quick bites of television and the usual news stories told of Orange County’s financial disaster but did not capture the human drama of the man behind the collapse. The memorable account by reporter David Margolick that I am quoting ends with a comment from a man by the name of Fred Prendergast, “a regular at Mr. Citron’s table at the Elks”:

“To go to a man’s home Sunday afternoon, intrude in his personal life, and practically force him to resign, is the most cowardly thing a person could do,” he said bitterly. “All they had to do was wait for eight o’clock in the morning, or seven in Bob’s case, and he’d have been right in his office, where he’s supposed to be. They treated him like an animal.”

With the aid of markers and particularity, Margolick made Robert L. Citron visible the way photographs of the man do not and gave a news story a human face and the ring of tragedy. The nonfiction writer who becomes aware of the emotions elicited by cultural differences can use this power in representing people by well-chosen class markers.

Often the writer’s job is to characterize public figures in depth. I’ve selected an example from a work of history, a classic that has sold far more copies than many bestsellers.

Most people have at least an idea as to what Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, looked like. Paintings, and sculpture, seen in books and on TV, have carried the often romanticized image. Some photographs bring us closer to the truth. But a skilled writer can give us not only exact images but a sense of personality. In the following paragraph, both Lenin and his brother Alexander are characterized:

Alexander’s face was long and brooding; his skin milky white; his hair, thick, turbulent, frizzy, deeply rooted, stood up in all directions from a line far down on his forehead. His eyes, set deep and on a strange angle in a knobby, overhanging brow, seemed to turn their gaze inward. It was the strongly chiseled face of a dreamer, a saint, a devotee, an ascetic. But Vladimir’s head was shaped like an egg, and the thin fringe of reddish hair began to recede from the forehead before he was twenty, leaving him bald, like his father, in young manhood. His complexion was a blend of grayishness and full-bloodedness; his eyes tiny, twinkling, Mongoloid. His whole aspect, except in moments of intense thought or anger, was jovial, humorous, mischievous, self-confident, aggressive. Not knowing him, one might have taken him in later years for a hard-working kulak, a rising provincial official, a shrewd businessman. There
was nothing in his build or appearance or temperament to suggest kinship with his brother Alexander.

The excerpt is from Bertram D. Wolfe’s
Three Who Made a Revolution.
One of the strengths in the description of Lenin is the evocation of what he looked like earlier and later. That’s a technique all writers can employ under appropriate circumstances. Note the liberties taken by the author. Alexander’s hair is turbulent. It is also deeply rooted (how could the author know?), which conveys its permanence as contrasted with Lenin’s baldness. Lenin is compared to three different types: a kulak (a well-off farmer), a provincial official, a businessman.

Is taking risks, as this author has, irresponsible in nonfiction? The dean of American literary critics of this century, Edmund Wilson, referred to the book from which this paragraph was taken as the “best book in its field in any language.”

It’s worth taking risks. If it doesn’t work, it will be apparent when you revise.

What if the subject of an article or a book is well known to at least part of your audience, as would be the case with, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt? What can a nonfiction writer do that is fresh and new in characterization when dealing with someone whose history has been the object of intensive research by many writers? One interview, with Betsey Whitney, is the basis for the extraordinary first paragraph of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book,
No Ordinary Time:

On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep.