Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose.
Visiting Writer: Sophie McManus
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Creative Writing: The Craft of Style
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In the third module, having practiced putting words in, we learn to take them out. And why: for humor, for clarity, for cleanliness, and for that fleet quality of wit that makes a style irresistible.
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Salvatore ScibonaFrank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English
We talked about why to cut.
One of the reasons to cut words was for the sake of humor.
A great example of that, I think,
is a new novel called The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus.
This is the section that I'll read to you is from the point of view
of a woman who has just found out that she has dementia.
She's very, very, very well off and
is throwing an elegant party on a boat that she's had catered.
She's catered many, many parties.
She's very, very wealthy, but none of the people on the boat know.
That they know how sick she is.
None of them actually know that anything is wrong.
So what you're going to hear is her giving instructions
to her catering crew about how to address her guests.
Listen to how much punch Sophie McManus gets out of each word and
also how quickly this women moves from one subject to the next subject to the next
subject to the next subject, without any
ligaments, without any rubber bands or ligamentary tissue or anything like that.
She just moves.
She jumps in and she jumps out.
Here we go.
You are all dear to me today and you are to do more than pass around the food and
keep tidy.
You are in control.
Do you know you must be in control of the very mood,
the enjoyment of the guests is yours to bear.
I can see from here, is there mustard somewhere to go with the lamb?
Cold meat?
Mustard?
If I see but one wilting lily draped over the rail with nothing to drink
have these star fruit been sliced neatly enough?
Daisy, is it?
Daisy, go get a knife and tidy them.
If anyone drinks too quickly, you will forget to pour every other time, and
if they look slighted, pour half as much as usual.
We know how to pour for me nothing but air or water,
instead directly in front of the glass so this goes unnoticed.
Those oysters.
That one?
That one.
Look where I am pointing.
Women do not like to swallow oysters as large as these.
Your thumb, no longer than your thumb.
And don't be afraid to give a compliment.
There's a story underneath or behind every hat or broach, or a lady wears.
Dress the greens there only at the last minute but
never speak in a way that forces the guest to indulge your interests.
Bluepoint, Kumamoto,
to indulge the tastes of others you must reveal no tastes of your own.
I hope the eggs over there are under poached to account for
the heat of the sun.
Madam is a forbidden address.
It's old fashioned.
Fruit should not be next to salmon tartar.
Try not to fret if a guest takes out some frustration on you.
It may not be pleasant, but you are a repository, George.
Young miss, please sit yourself to extracting those Brazil nuts from the mix,
no one ever wants a Brazil nut.
Perhaps the cheese is oozing out of the figs and over powering the surrounding
dishes because someone's put that plate in the sunniest spot on the table.
Find and use the shade.
Let's talk to Sophie McManus about writing this novel and
specifically about what she chose to cut out.
Sophie McManus is the author of The Unfortunates, a new novel getting some
very, very nice attention, including this from the New Yorker, which writes,
a wonderfully precise and subtle, not to mention unexpectedly moving
take on the assumptions and beleaguerments that go with great wealth.
Sophie McManus, young as she is, is a truly dexterous writer.
I love that they call you that.
So welcome to Middletown.
>> Thank you for having me, Salvatore.
>> Sophie, I hoped you might share with us some of your wisdom about dexterity.
We had been talking earlier in this module about cutting for cleanliness,
cutting for the sake of humor, and cutting for irresistibly.
That's this, from this observation by W.B. Yates, that you can't that
a lot of what we're trying to do is create something that's irresistible and almost
every extra word is a strike against irresistibly, but why do you cut words?
>> I think those are all wonderful reasons, I would add to irresistibility
inevitability which is that sense a story, or a novel, or
any kind of narrative can only be but itself.
And for me in my editing and revision process at least,
when I take a sentence and try to make it its most concise and
most pleasing and essential self.
What I'm actually doing is asking a much bigger question,
which is what is this about?
What am I trying to say?
What is the deeper meaning here?
And so revision turns into a really, it's a really neat trick we
writers play on ourselves, because we're doing a sort of impossible thing,
which is imagining something we don't yet know.
And so to make that manageable, you look at the sentence and
you ask yourself a technical question.
What is wrong with the aesthetic of this line?
And somehow in answering that question.
We discover our meaning.
So, that's really, for me, the crux of revision.
>> I don't know if you've ever heard this thing that Don DeLillo said that
writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> Right? And
it sounds like what you're saying is that there's a thought in there.
And the thought Is not quite accurate
because the words are not quite the right words yet.
>> Mm-hm. >> And that you can in his judgement of
things, you can actually get at the thought by going at the words.
Which is a funny way of thinking about it.
A lot of people think well the words are just the thing that you use to express
the idea that's in your head and he suggests the other way way around.
That you can make an experiment with the word.
Take the word out and then boy, that changes the meaning but
maybe that's a better meaning.
>> Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
And it is a sort of inversion of what you think we're actually doing.
>> Mm, exactly.
So okay, so now on this subject.
Your novel, The Unfortunates, I read early chapters of it and
then I read, once I read the full manuscript
a few years ago, I read the whole thing with so much happiness.
I really did, Sophie, I loved this novel, seriously.
But you weren't done with it quite at that time, and
we'd talked about cutting words out.
You sent me this email that had a list in it of all these words that
you had gone hunting for and were going to kill.
By this point, your manuscript had been accepted for
publication like two years before.
You were still working on it.
You'd think Jeez, when it gets up, well when the publisher buys it, it's pretty
done, and people keep on working on things for a long time off and on after that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And boy, I just loved how exhaustive this list is.
Look at this list, that.
Seem to.
Seems to.
It seems.
Sort of.
Even. Even still.
Those are little spokenisms.
Even as.
Still.
Or not.
And so.
Just.
Just, I hate that one.
Very, can go almost all the time.
Somewhat mealy mouthed right, somehow mealy mouth.
At all, mealy mouth.
Of course this, okay, so talk about those, talk about putting that list together.
>> Well, I was indeed at the very end of editing a book that I'd been working on
for 10 years, and it was so finished, and so polished,
that I really could not see what else there was to do.
It was somewhat close to me but I knew there was still work to be done and
so I chose a random chapter, I do not remember which one, and
I went through it very slowly looking for any sort of inessential word that
I might lean on, that might be something from my spoken language or
something that I simply use as a crutch in my writing.
Just as you mentioned that is a very common for all writers I know.
Always and still are big contenders.
And so I went through this one random chapter,
and I wrote down every inessential word I found.
And then I simply searched the entire manuscript, word by word,
in its totality for all of these phrases, and I actually ended
up pulling 25 pages, just of those words >> My Lord.
Wow. >> Out of the book.
Which was a surprise.
And I think, in terms of sentences being fleet and
irresistible, it was also a surprise how much leaner the book seemed
after I got rid of this dead weight.
>> How often the word that you think you need for
the sense of some kind of sense of structure is just an apology of some kind.
>> Yeah, and also it's a relic from an earlier draft where you are simply sorting
out your thoughts too.
>> Mm-hm.
Tell me about cutting it from the the beginning of sentences.
>> Well, I think it was usually, speaking of starting sentences with it,
when I was feeling very general and vague and did not yet know my meaning.
So, it was a sunny day is not a particularly revelatory,
or active, or invigorative sentence.
So, when I found a true subject for a sentence.
It's usually be a character in the book.
That would replace the very static it was or it is.
>> How about then?
>> Well, because we're in a narrative and
because narrative is flowing in time the reader already understands that
the sentence that is following has a then built into it.
>> That's it. >> Right?
Yeah. I think- >> And so we don't need it.
>> I think, to the students, this is, it's such a, small things like this are so
important, you wouldn't think there's any problem with it.
But if you're building a narrative that is moving pro-fluently, as we say,
that is, smoothly from cause to effect to cause to effect to cause to effect.
The implication is that the second thing follows the first thing, if then.
What about, I don't know, what about somehow?
>> Well somehow you don't even need it really in spoke language, right.
You know, somehow I knew something terrible was about to happen, right?
Something terrible was about to happen.
That's already a better sentence.
>> Later on, when you do the exercise for this course,
you'll have an occasion to go hammer and tongs at your own work.
I will give you some detail about that later on.
In this module and
I think Sophie's list of words to excise might be of help to you.
Another thing I wanted to talk to you about,
Ron Charles in the Washington post wrote about your characters,
I moved through with a slowly accruing sense of awe as
these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
Bravo or brava.
Well I think that's largely due to the excellent lines you give them to speak,
I mean, there's this book is so
full of dialogue that is just it just crackles on the page.
And, you know for all I know those characters you didn't write the dialogue
or maybe you feel as though the characters were speaking it to you.
People often feel as though, we know certain rules or
certain understandings of how I want my prose to be.
But in dialogue, all the rules are out the window.
Rules for example, like wanting to be concise.
What if I said What if I said, well but Sophie,
I'm sorry, if you've actually wrote down all of the words that people say in order.
There's a lot of ums and uhs.
There are a lot of so's and then's and so on.
What would you say to that person as a creator of expert dialog?
>> Well, dialog is very hard.
I think it's hard in part because it's where we, as the writer,
are lying the most, in a way, is that we're suggestion that this is most like
natural speech as we get in fiction but it's totally artificial,
and I think getting rid of all of those um's and
so's and is almost always right.
And it's almost always right because the reader fills those in,
in a way, in a very sort of quick and sub textual way.
I think there's no benefit to the meaning of the story at hand to
have those so's and those um's.
I think unlike life where we may be having a conversation that doesn't really
have a point, but its wonderful because we are enjoying each others company.
A conversation in a book has some point.
>> It takes a lot of work to get characters to sound as casually
malicious as your characters are sometimes.
And then how they're often casually very, very tender with each other but
it all happens in these very, very sharp moves on the page.
>> Yeah. Thank you.
>> Sophie McMannis, the author of The Unfortunates.
She was published in 2015 in the novel by for stess and truth.
Thanks for coming to Middletown and talking to us.
>> Thank you so much, Salvatore.
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