Toolbox for Writing
By Marc De Lima
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About this ebook
This guide sets a fresh approach to the writing of riveting prose; an approach that isn't found in any of the traditional books published by theorists, successful and unsuccessful writers, as well as writers' workshops and writers' conferences.
So, don't—for a minute—expect a "How to" traditional guide to writing prose. You won't find the quaint ideas and easy classes that theorists have compiled over the years: voice, dialogue, setting, theme, genre, plot, climax, dénouement, character, motivation, flashbacks, point of view, essays, précis (summaries), etc.
The techniques shown here, in time, will become valuable tools for the writer who wants to write acrobatic, galloping, and riveting prose.
So, if you wish to succeed at writing no-doze prose, study this humble book.
Marc De Lima
Marc De Lima, a graduate of Columbia University, is a decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran, retired business executive, college professor, editor, translator, and author of over 105 books. He lives in NYC with his wife Mary Duffy and Mister Darcy—a Shih-Tzu.
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Toolbox for Writing - Marc De Lima
Prologue
This guide sets a fresh approach to the writing of riveting prose; an approach that isn’t found in any of the traditional books published by theorists, successful and unsuccessful writers, as well as writers’ workshops, and writers’ conferences.
So, don’t—for a minute—expect a How to
traditional guide to writing prose. You won’t find the quaint ideas and easy classes that theorists have compiled over the years: voice, dialogue, setting, theme, genre, plot, climax, dénouement, character, motivation, flashbacks, point of view, essays, précis (summaries), etc.
Nor will you find grammar and syntax rules or a treatise in style. Instead you will find in this work a clear discussion of ideas of what takes to write agile prose. Ideas that great writers use to their advantage. That is what makes them great writers.
But try as hard as you might, you will not find all these techniques being used by other writers, whether they are competent but somewhat unskilled writers.
Take a competent—but raw—writer struggling to depict a scene in which a character is pondering suicide:
Overwhelmed by the horrifying thought, she sank in the sofa.
That is a perfect and acceptable sentence, but by adding a few Absolute phrases—in the right places—the writer could give his sentence more punch, and more emotion, by filling the reader’s mind with a sense of simultaneous action:
Overwhelmed by the horrifying thought, teeth clenched, the box cutter tightly gripped in her hand, she sank in the sofa, tears coursing down her cheeks.
Not only are we sure, but we are quite convinced that the techniques shown here, in time, will become valuable tools for the writer who wants to write acrobatic, galloping, and riveting prose.
To make our task easier (and the reader’s) we will explain in easy language all these techniques, and we will also supply lots of examples culled from great books of fiction and non-fiction. We’ve chosen these books not because they are bestsellers, but because they are well written, and never boring.
What makes prose agile, fresh, and riveting are two groups of techniques. First, the skillful handling of five grammatical and syntactical features:
Sentence Openers
Absolute Phrases
Appositives
Sentence Openers
Reversals or Inversions
Next, what accounts for exciting writing is the use of rhetorical elements—so much ignored by many of our contemporary writers:
Alliteration
Antithesis
Oxymoron
Zeugma
Enumeration
Indirect Free Speech
Although today writers focus on the use of short, declarative sentences, metaphors, and similes, what really makes writing agile and breathless is the wise use of the eleven above listed techniques. If you have the desire to write prose that is quick, fast-paced, and never dull or boring— this book is for you! There are no royal roads to learning, so learn you must by making the time to learn and use these tools.
The great teacher of literary composition and rhetoric, Dionysius of Halicarnassus,[1] in his essay On Literary Composition
said:
Prose enjoys complete freedom and license to vary composition by whatever changes it pleases. The finest style of all is that which contains the greatest amount of relief from monotony and change of structure.
Sameness and monotony are the writer’s enemy, variation his friend. Dionysius continues: in discourse, variation is a most attractive and beautiful quality.
Whether you believe in the platonic muse —to inspire you— or, in the labored act of writing that Edgar Allan Poe preferred you still must do the writing and do it well and in such a way that is never wooden, dull, or tedious. Our eleven tools will help you achieve that.
In addition, we recommend that as you write you keep in mind: Saint Thomas Aquinas[2] elements of his Model of Beauty: wholeness, balance, and radiance.[3] Only after you read, study, employ our techniques and within the Aquinas model, will you be able to write with poise, and artistry—and without second guessing yourself.
We all have the urge to create and make our world better. And though some may believe that the world Thomas Hobbes[4] described —a world without art, and in which the life of man and woman was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short— has been left behind, it isn’t that far in history. So, why not create our own literary worlds with artistry?
And if artistry eludes us, the least we can say is that our prose will be well-paced, strong, and lively—never boring or feeble. We have ordered this writing manual in a way that isn’t tedious but enticing. Most grammatical and rhetorical lectures are cumbersome and full of fill-in exercises, or end-chapter questions and assignments.
You won’t find such speed bumps here; we expect you to fly through the chapters as you learn them. We highlight the techniques that great writers use so that you can make them yours!
Soon, your writing will take off, fly, soar, and glide for the years to come.
Writing and learning by precepts is useless; that is why, though millions of aspiring writers buy Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, they rarely open it. Who wants to learn all those impossible precepts, also called maxims or rules of grammar and usage?
In his book The Sense of Style, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker mocks the Elements of Style’s authors for their lack of knowledge of basic grammar:
Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar. They mis-defined terms such as phrase, participle, and relative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active transitive ones, they botched their examples of both.
And for the ‘cockamamie’ peeves:
Strunk and White writing in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, condemned then-new verbs like personalize, finalize, host, chair, and debut, and warned writers never to use fix for repair
or claim for declare.
Worse, they justified their peeves with cockamamie rationalizations.
So, let’s abandon those rules and accept that learning to write is best done by learning from prominent writers. And we have this on good authority, for Saint Augustine, [5] a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, says:
Therefore, since infants are not taught to speak except by learning the expressions of speakers, why can men not be made eloquent, not by teaching them the rules of eloquence, but by having them read and hear the expressions of the eloquent and imitate them as far as they are able to follow them (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 120).
What are you waiting for? Go on to Chapter 1 and learn all about making your writing come alive with th3e first technique we’ll discuss: Absolute Phrases!
Part I — Grammatical and Syntactical Tools
Chapter 1 — Introduction to Sentence Openers
If the technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that
the writer is an artist.
-Marianne Moore
The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
-Voltaire
Atticus told me to delete the adjectives, and I’d have the facts.
-Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird:
Americans’ speech, or to be more precise, speech habits that most use from cradle to grave, follow a strong pattern that often impedes them from writing well-crafted sentences. Take this sentence:
Kay shaved her hair.
In the above sentence ‘Kay’ is the subject, ‘shaved’ the verb, and ‘her hair’ the object: S-V-O.
When people write, they bring their speech habits to writing. That is why so much of the English newspaper articles, essays, journals, legal briefs, and fiction that we read today are so boring if not soporific, even though the themes might be interesting. Just imagine your reading a lengthy paragraph full of these S-V-O sentences. How many times have you, as a reader, put a book down, never to pick it up again? Countless times, I’d say. And all because many writers write as they speak. People are unwilling to give up life-time habits, even knowing that they must do it.
Are you a writer that clings to the S-V-O pattern of writing?
If so, you aren’t alone for sure, you are in the company of battalions and brigades of writers who do just that.
The great philosopher Socrates — who by the way never wrote a book—decried writing as a deceptive invention and loved to spend countless hours at the agora (the local market) gabbing, arguing, and speechifying until his wife Xantippe would send someone to fetch him. Being a gabber, Socrates’ fear was that wisdom would ultimate live in books rather than in the mind or in live dialectics. So he preferred speech over writing. In contrast, Plato[6] — Socrates disciple—was a writer, and his Platonic Dialogues are writing at its best.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the god Thoth, the inventor of writing, we find him encouraging mental laziness: ‘a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.’ This is myth lore invented by Socrates and Plato to favor speech over writing, for according to them, only speech and dialectics point to true knowledge.
Because Francis Bacon[7] — the great Elizabethan courtier and scholar—saw speech (Idols of the Cave
) as a barrier to true knowledge, he wrote many books. In the end gossip and false testimony (speech), much to his ill-fortune, gained him a year in the London Tower; an incident that confirmed Bacon’s thesis that speech may come to haunt us.
Today we realize that writing and books have become the warehouses of wisdom. It is with the written word that we create wisdom, preserve it, and expand it in the different levels of human endeavor. Even symbolic logic and mathematics need the written word to lock and secure exact meanings. Scientists use language to put forth their discoveries, their insights, and to falsify or verify them empirically. Philosopher Jacques Derrida[8] sees in writing-in-general an entire system that nourishes humanity—archi-écriture.
Why should we write in the way we speak?
By writing in the same way that we speak, we take the easiest path to writing — the path of least resistance — and end up overusing the soporific pattern John hit the ball.
There’s neither elegance nor eloquence in boring and disrespecting your reader with the S-V-O pattern. Follow this excerpt:
She would not tell me what I wanted to know if she had wanted to. She would not take the time to even verify his date of birth. In her mid-twenties, she was wide-eyed, blond haired and bored at the job. Her friends had nicknamed her ‘Bambi.’ I gathered that much, because she greeted my every request with the haunted look of a deer caught in the headlights. She said no to everything. I finally gave up. I kept thinking that people like that exist only to make my life miserable.
How boring! The S-V-O pattern gets old in no time. Based on this, I’ve concluded that a serious writer should consider opening a sentence with a noun or a pronoun of any kind, be they definite, indefinite, or possessive.
Not that the S-V-O pattern isn’t useful, or that it isn’t proper, or that we should never use it. What we prefer is that writers limit their use in consecutive sentences. To expect objections, I will bring up one counter example: the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Isn’t It
a pronoun and didn’t Jane Austen write that famous sentence opener? My answer is that unless you can prove that you can write better than her and sell more books than her—you shouldn’t do it. Even worse, you shouldn’t even think about opening your sentences with variations of the verb ‘To be,’ such as (It is, It was, or It was not until...).
Although you won’t totally abandon the old pattern, you will see — as you read this manual—that there are more interesting ways to express thoughts. And as you adopt our techniques, you will combine them with the S-V-O pattern to achieve a more rhythmic, graceful style.
Mature writers — those considered literary writers—are aware of the monotony of the S-V-O pattern and watch their sentence openers with deep passion. By mixing their sentence openers with the S-V-O pattern, they add emphasis, variety, and rhythm to their writing.
The secret of fine writing unveiled here!
Let’s recognize that speech and prose are different. Speech is instantaneous, fleeting, and ethereal; prose is lasting, fixed, and earthly. However, our techniques used often enough are apt to improve your speech also, making it livelier and bringing you more rapt attention.
With a quick rearrangement of the S-V-O pattern, prominent fiction writers create an expectation, prodding the reader to move to the next sentence and on to the next paragraph. And you need not