Unsteadily

I was reading a bestseller the other day, or rather I was trying to. But I couldn't. I'm going to try to explain why I couldn't by studying only one word of the whole book. This doesn't mean that the word (which came on page 39) was the novel's only fault, but it was a representative fault. So here goes. Here's why I couldn't read the novel. The narrator is on a boat and...

I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

The word that made me wince was unsteadily. Not that I have anything against unsteadily per se. Fine word. It was the placing of unsteadily within the sentence that I couldn't stomach. You see, try as I might, I can't read that sentence aloud.

By that I mean, quite specifically, that if I were chatting in the pub and (for some weird reason) trying to pass off the words of the novel as my own, it wouldn't work. It would sound odd.

When I was learning to drive, my driving instructor had this irritating way of talking. He would say:

I would like you to proceed to the junction where you will turn to the left.

Of course, nobody speaks like that naturally. So when you hear the words coming out of somebody's mouth it sounds odd. You get the same thing when you phone up customer service lines and the chap says "In order to redirect your call more efficiently I'd like to ask you three questions." It's hard to identify what's wrong with that sentence, but you know that he's reading from a script, which is infuriating because, when you start to make your complaint, instead of helping he just keeps reading from the damned script until you want to strangle the little waste of skin and bury his body at sea.

The same thing happens with novelists.

... and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

I could say:

And crossed to the starboard side unsteadily.

I would be happier with:

And crossed to the starboard side - unsteadily.

You see, an adverb like that needs to be set off. In spoken English it never just qualifies a verb in the way that a standard adjective does (I saw a brown dog). If you use an adverb like unsteadily at all you put emphasis on it. So I would be happy as Larry with:

And crossed (unsteadily) to the starboard side.

I wouldn't have to use parentheses, commas might do, but parentheses give you a far firmer idea of how, in the middle of the sentence, I pause for a split second and then raise my eyebrows as I say unsteadily. There's a change in the tone of my voice, and in the pitch. Try it.

And crossed [pull face, look up, make hand gesture] unsteadily [resume normal tone of voice] to the starboard side.

That works.

In the end, though, I'd be much more likely to say staggered.

Some writers say that they never use adverbs. However, never is an adverb. I'm not objecting to adverbs by themselves. Just this one right here.

Nor am I merely being snobby about a bestseller. I read all seven Harry Potter novels without ever coming across an unnatural sentence like this. You see, it's very easy to avoid writing unnatural English: just say the words quietly as you type them. That's what I'm doing right now, and though I probably look a trifle insane, it keeps my prose natural and therefore convincing. This is how I talk. This is my voice.

(Incidentally, Raymond Chandler once said: "I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.")

Now, there's a premise underlying all this that you may object to: does all prose have to correspond to spoken English? No. But it has to correspond to something. You might, for example, want to sound biblical. In that case you can write:

I did cross the boat: yea even unto the starboard side did I cross unsteadily.

Or you could do Shakespeare, or romantic poetry, or Dickensian/Brownian intricacy:

I attempted to cross to the starboard side of the craft, an exericse which, due to the obstinate periconfluctuations of the ocean, could be accomplished only in a manner that, had it been witnessed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa itself, would have been scorned for the wild and omnidirectional tiltings of my gait.

I'm fine with that. There's a voice there. It's not a voice in which anybody on earth has ever spoken, but it's a fully conceived and consistent voice that I can hear in my head, but...

And crossed unsteadily to the starboard side.

Who? What? The narrator is an Englishman, so this isn't some twist of the American or Australian English that I don't get. It's just unnatural. It's like saying:

Proceed to the crossroads and, when instructed, take the second turning to the right.

Me, writing this post.

Eliot on Typewriters

In August 1916 T.S. Eliot was working as a book reviewer and wrote this in a letter to Conrad Aiken:

I have reviewed some good books and much trash. It is good practice in writing and teaches on speed both in reading and writing. It is bad in this way, that one acquires an extraordinary appetite for volumes, and exults at the mass of printed matter which one has devoured and evacuated. . . . Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

I'm always interested in how external, physical circumstance affects writing. Oddly, I think the reverse would be true of me. I type much faster that I can write and this leads to a voluptuous superfluity of words. Were I to take up my old fountain pen, I would probably become much more stern and efficient.

Eliot's words are more appropriate to the lapidary style of my text messages, of which I have already written here.

And here, because life needs a spoonful of poetry, is Eliot on the subject of a typist

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

A peek behind the scenes at Inky Fool

Constrained Crime Writing

There's a great little article on writing here. It's about police reports. Police reports are, of course, governed by a million rules about objectivity, reporting only facts, omitting adverbs and the like. This piece is about how, even within those constraints, one can make a story emotional or dull, gripping or flat.

Read it. It's here.

An Exercise in Language

An interesting little line from Evelyn Waugh:

I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.

I don't know if this is entirely ingenuous. A far simpler truth would be that though the emotions are doled out pretty equally to all members of the species, the ability to express them is catastrophically variable. It would be impossible to live on earth for long without wondering just a little about your fellow man, and whether he's as unhappy as you; but pen and paper are extra.

Anyway, a little example of Waugh's language. This from Decline and Fall:

'Old boy,' said Grimes, 'you're in love.'
'Nonsense!'
'Smitten?' said Grimes.
'No, no.'
'The tender passion?'
'No.'
'Cupid's jolly little darts?'
'No.'
'Spring fancies, love's young dream?'
'Nonsense!'
'Not even a quickening of the pulse?'
'No.'
'A sweet despair?'
'Certainly not.'
'A trembling hope?'
'No.'
'A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi?'
'Nothing of the sort.'
'Liar!' said Grimes.

Technically, a linguistic exercise.

Another Reason to Love De Quincey

You've got to love De Quincey; and, if you haven't read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you've denied yourself one of the central luxuries of life. The following from the second edition.

At present, after exchanging a few parting words, and a few final or farewell farewells with my faithful female agent...

But there's a footnote to this half-sentence. The footnote reads:

Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account, let me say, that, although there are here eight separate f's in less that half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f's in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted female agent for female friend.


I always attempt to add as many alliterations as I am able to without awkwardness. For example, the luxuries of life above was originally the pleasures of life. Mind you, nine in a row is pushing it. Alliteration is like picking pockets: very profitable so long as it's not noticed. Have a look at the Fs and Ss in this bit of Keats.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.


But I wager that you wouldn't have noticed them, had I not warned you.

For further effy alliteration, see this ancient post.

Eyes suspiciously unfocused.

Minimal or Maximal

I have been having fun today. I have been rewriting, improving and cutting. Here are the first ten pages of Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P.G. Wodehouse, but I've altered them slightly. I've cut out the unnecessary verbiage and rewritten them in the style of Ernest Hemingway. It is, I think you'll agree, a great improvement. I've also retitled it.

A Farewell to the Old Man without Women 


Chapter One

I was in the bath. My Aunt had written asking me to meet some people called Trotter. I didn't want to go, but I would. It was business. 


I heard footsteps and sat up, alert. My valet was back. He told me that another letter had arrived by special courier asking me to invest a thousand pounds in a play. I refused. I had the money, and the play was written by my cousin. But I didn't care.

Here, on the other hand, is the first paragraph of L'Etranger by Camus, rewritten in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. I've also retitled it.

Hang It All!


Chapter One

Usually, you know, I like to begin these memoirs of mine with something cheery. A good book, in my opinion, should brighten up the world, put a spring in the reader's step and a merry song on his lips. Some fellows love to be sombre and I suppose that they've got a right to it. There are those who don't consider a book worth reading unless they're sobbing their eyes out by the end of the first page. I've never understood that line myself and have always tried to start with something to rouse the sagging spirit and bend the corners of the mouth in an upward direction; but today I really can't. You see, I've had a bit of a blow. Today my dear old mother, the lady to whose tender dandling I owe my all, has kicked the proverbial bucket. 


I mean, I say today, but it could have been yesterday. All I got was a bare and bleak telegram with one sentence on it. Wallop! Well, you can imagine that I didn't take it too well. Really, these telegram chaps have all the compassion of an angry tigress. You'd think, wouldn't you, that when you're telling a fellow news like that you would at least give the chap some warning? Blows should be softened and pills sugared. They could begin:


Dear Meursault, Poor yourself a triple snifter and sit down somewhere where you won't fall off, we've got some dark and drearies to impart.


Then they could slip in some stuff about splendid innings and God gathering up his sunbeams and I wouldn't be sitting here foisting all this unpleasantness on you like a whining willow. 


I suppose I ought to catch the bus to Marengo.

Why have I been making these improvements? Well, it's all to do with George Orwell.

You see, I used to have a link up on the right of the blog to Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language. It's one of the classic essays on English prose and its general drift is that the words you use tend to fuddle your thoughts and those of the reader. Therefore, says Orwell, you ought to prune, prune, prune until you are left with the bare minimum needed to convey meaning.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I noticed that there were far too many links up on the right and it was all getting rather cluttered. I had to take something down. I looked at the links and felt rather like the chap operating the lifeboat concession on the Titanic. But in the end I decided that Orwell could go. He'd had his spot for ages and it was time to make way for new blood etc etc.

Then, last week, I posted a link to an article on prose that suggested the exact opposite. This other article had the idea that you should use as many words as you possibly could.

It has been pointed out that this seems to be an inconsistency. I post one link and then I post another and you dear reader are left dizzy and disappointed by my traitorous tergiversations.

Whose side am I on? Minimalist or maximalist? Am I a prosaic and prosodic Vicar of Bray? Do I have no loyalty, no constancy, no honour?

Well, the truth is that I'm not on either side. I just thought that both arguments were interesting and carefully thought out. Being well dressed for a funeral is quite a different thing to being well dressed for the beach. The occasion is all and you're going to look a bit silly emerging from the sea in a black suit and tie or weeping over the coffin in your speedoes and flip-flops. It's the same with prose. Prose has a place and purpose and though I thought that I was improving Wodehouse and Camus, helping them out of their stylistic rut, sometimes I'm not so sure.

Horses for courses, dear reader, and each to his own.

He Said, She Said

I have become obsessed with a new little toy of Google's. Essentially you can put in phrases, a period (e.g. 1800-2000) and a corpus (e.g. fiction in English) and see how frequently the phrase appears and how the frequency it changes over time. For example, you can put in coffee and tea and you get this (click to enlarge):

Bingo! A cultural history of the popularity of tea against coffee. Since about 1970 the black beans have been outinfusuing the golden leaves.

Anyway, I could probably write posts on this new toy for a year, but for the moment I shall simply give you these two graphs on the way people speak in novels, or more precisely: how novelists write dialogue. I put in he exclaimed, he cried, he screamed, he whispered, he shouted and got:

And then I did the same words but with she instead of he.

Nobody exclaims any more. Women didn't start to scream or shout until 1920, but men had been shouting, at least, all through the Victorian period. 'Nobody cries any more,' cried Mrs Bennett gaily. And why, dear reader, why the sudden, recent rise in whispering. What are we moderns trying to hide?

Now go and read this little gem from How To Write Badly Well.

The Fool's Quotation

In an idle moment, in an idle hour, during an idle life, I picked up a copy of Open Skies, Closed Minds. It's by a civil servant who believes in UFOs. He says:

Like Fox Mulder, I was the rebel, the man from the corridors of power who wouldn't play by the same 'establishment' rules as everyone else.

This blog is not concerned with aliens. I have nothing against aliens. Indeed, if our stony orb is under imminent threat of invasion, I want to be in with winning side. But this blog, and this blog-post, is concerned with the fatuous, imbecilic, snot-struck inverted commas that the author has put around the word 'establishment'.

You put quotation marks, dear reader, around quotations. Is that too bloody complicated? And if you're quoting, I want to know who you're quoting. 'Who', as Hamlet asks, 'calls me villain?' But I read that whole damned preface and there wasn't a sniff of a whiff of a citation.

Here are the 'possibilities':

A) He wants to refer to the idea of the establishment, but at the same time imply that he is too clever to believe in the idea.

B) He wants to refer to the establishment, but feels that the word itself is beneath him. His vocabulary is much better than that.

If A - if the the idea is too simplistic for him - then why the hell is he referring to it? If B - if the word is beneath him - then where's the better one?

If you are clever, be clever. If you are eloquent, be eloquent. Man cannot take a crap in inverted commas. You do, or you don't. If you have a better way of saying it, then say it better. If you have a more subtle understanding, demonstrate it. Do not send a bastard word to wander in this weary world and then deny its parentage.

Using spurious inverted commas is like telling guests that you can cook wonderfully, but you've chosen to serve them swill. It would be rude if it were true, but nobody believes you anyway.

Am I perhaps being too cruel to somebody whose aim was not linguistic felicity, but extra-terrestrial revelation? Okay. Here's the introduction to the Arden edition* of Othello:

The analysis of Shakespeare's 'characters' has become unfashionable....

Are they not characters? If they're not, and I'm prepared to believe that, what are they? If you know the secret, do bloody tell.

This introduction... cannot simply ignore 'character criticism'.

Is it not character criticism? If it's not, what is it? If you don't know the right word, stop writing until you do.

I cannot help feeling [Try harder] that such contrary impressions are meant to intimate Othello's 'otherness'...

Whose word is that? Yours? Why deny your own writing?

A comparison of two other admired Othellos prompted a 'racial' observation...

I read on (wearily), and it was racial. And here is the true fatuous, pretentious, aphasic imbecility of the whole introduction. Here is why it is unpardonable in academic writing:

Bradley and his followers located 'the real Othello' in the first half of the play....

Now I'm stuck, flummoxed and immerded. You see, this is an introduction to a Shakespeare play. It's full of quotations. But I can't tell whether the writer is quoting Bradley here, or simply resorting to his 'turd-brained', 'incoherent', 'semi-literate', 'lack-word' 'tic'.

For that which we would write about, we must find a word: of the rest we must not write.



*The Arden Second Series were the best editions of Shakespeare ever published. The Arden Third Series, or at least the ones I have read, are uniform tosh. Many of the annotations in this copy of Othello end in question marks. Some end in exclamation marks. I hang upon my altar, and I hoist my axe again.

P.S. There is a whole 'blog' devoted to unnecessary quotation marks. It can be found here.

P.P.S. This made me laugh.

Long Sentences and the Sahelian Swahili

Knowledge corrupts prose. You write upon subjects you know. Thus you can write a sentence that seems clear to you. You understand because you understood the ideas as you wrote it. Yet to the uninformed reader for whom you meant it, it is a belligerent mob of subordinated clauses, cavilling caveats and curious connectors.

Take this sentence from an article I was just reading:

As the longtime editor of the Socialist Register, Leys would probably not endorse this view, but a strong case can be made that just as it had been a mistake for supporters of communism who nonetheless opposed the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba to keep saying that not one of these actual communist regimes had lived up to the doctrine's emancipatory potential, so it is time to admit that there is only "actually existing" development, and that it has not worked.

I can make neither head nor tail of that. I could try taking the sentence apart, but I'm not even sure how to. On my fifth reading of it, I decided that he had missed out a not. On my sixth I wasn't so sure. Now, I'm quite sure that the author knows what he means. He seems like a clever chap. But that is the problem. His expertise has got the better of his prose. Because he can understand the sentence he assumes that others will. Because he has a subtle and complex understanding, his prose is subtle and complex and cannot be understood at all.

The simple solution would have been to break the sentence up. Eighty-one words is just too long, unless you're Milton. A full stop after view would be a start. I'm not sure how to continue because I still don't get the gist of the remaining sixty-six words.

The understanding must be subtle, the prose simple: such is the paradox of informative writing.

The article did, though, give me a word that I'd never heard before: sahelian. The Sahel is the strip of Africa immediately to the south of the Sahara. It comes from the Arabic sahil, meaning edge as it is the edge of the desert. The word is therefore terribly useful metaphorically. If I'm feeling pessimistic I could be feeling sahelian, with deserts of misery sweeping away before me. A chap who had just lost his job could receive a sahelian P45. An ambitious and verbose journalist could call today's Comprehensive Spending Review a sahelian moment.

The plural of sahil is, for some reason best known to the Arabs, sawahil. That is why the inhabitants of the edges, or coasts, of East African are called the Swahili, or the coastal people. That does not mean that the Swahili (coastal) live in the Sahel (edge of the desert), only that their names come from the same source. After all, mad Welshmen aren't walnuts.

Whereas the Swahili are opposite Madagascar

Bad Sex With Martin Amis

Martin Amis correctly observes that sex scenes in novels are uniformly terrible. There is a Bad Sex Award given out each year by the Literary Review, but no good one. There is a good reason for this, which can be observed in the simple sentence:

He got into his car and drove off.

That sentence masks a hundred little actions. Were it fully written, it would go something like:

He reached down and grasped the cold metal of the door handle that sat in the bright red paint of the car's side, with one firm tug it moved upwards and with that movement the door came open allowing him to climb into the L-shape of upholstery that was the driver's seat... etc etc etc he pressed his left foot down onto the clutch that gave way and, with his left hand he reached for the gear lever... etc etc etc

'Yes,' thinks the reader, 'I know. That's how you get into a car and drive off.' A standard action requires no narration. It's nothing to do with whether the language is flowery or plain, good or bad. We do not describe the process of breathing in and out, nor the mechanics of opening the fridge. And sex is, unless you're the Marquis De Sade, a pretty standard business.

In fact I should add a caveat at this point that if there is something astonishing about the sex then the novelist should of course describe it. But what is astonishing is never, or rarely, the sex.

He got into his Batman costume and she started reciting A Season In Hell, and they had sex. 

Is enough. The sex itself is going to be a mechanical business. From the reader's point of view, it is everything else that is interesting: the lead-up, the aftermath, the wallpaper in the bedroom, all is going to be more interesting than the actual physical fandango.

They had sex beneath the red patterned wallpaper. She giggled throughout.

Anything but elaborate on that one phrasal verb.

Of course, it's a terribly emotional business, sex, or so I've been told. And when something is terribly emotional it seems important. But I don't think that's the case. People get emotional about all sorts of things. Flags, for example, people get terribly emotional about their country's flag. But that does not mean that the Union Jack requires description. We know what it is, and that is that.

Their mother had told them that if they had dirty thoughts they'd turn to stone, but they didn't listen.

Saint Paul, Cleopatra, Shakespeare and Alliteration

As a little follow up to my previous post on Saint Paul. Saint Paul was born in Tarsus early in the first century. When he popped out into the world there would still have been people in the city who remembered the visit made by Cleopatra in 41 BC. Though, unlike Saint Paul, they would not realise that it was BC.

Cleopatra had been summoned there by Mark Antony who wanted her to support his war against the Parthians who kept winning wars by unsportingly shooting arrows in retreat. These were Parthian shots.

Anyway, the river Cydnus ran through Tarsus and Cleopatra insisted that she meet Antony by boat. Plutarch describes the meeting thus in Thomas North's translation of 1579:

...she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.

Sound familiar? It damned well should do, dear reader. Here's something from c. 1605.

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

It's always great to watch Shakespeare at work, and the thing to notice here is how he cuts and elaborates on the basis of alliteration. The word barge is in the original, and Shakespeare adds that it was burnished and that it burned and that its gold was beaten. The poop and purple are in the original, so Shakespeare invents the idea that the sails were perfumed. Shakespeare picks the flute from among all Plutarch's instruments and then makes the water follow faster.

You see the method?

As I keep saying, Shakespeare was all technique.

The Inky Fool realised he was on the wrong ferry

N.B. Readers of immemorial antiquity will remember that I have blogged about this passage before.

The Twist In The Tail That Wagged The Dog

Anton Chekhov once said:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

It's a fine rule: a rule of efficiency, a rule that says don't waste a detail and don't introduce a detail for no reason. However, it's a tricky rule to do well.

Chekhov, on the whole, wrote serious and inevitable works. The gun that hangs upon the wall works well in such situations. It is a portent, a threat, a sword of Damocles and other clichés. The audience see the gun and guess that it will be fired. They are filled with fearful foreboding and that is just the sort of feeling that Chekhov liked to fill his audiences with.

However, if, as a writer, you want the element of surprise, then the rule of Chekhov's gun is terribly frustrating. You have to have it there. You can't whip a gun out of nowhere in the last act. But tragic inevitability is only the alias of dull predictability. Of course the bloody gun is going to go off. No tension there.

The writer of the story with a twist is caught between two failings. He must set up the twist: he must give the audience all the information that they need: he must indeed make the twist appear retrospectively inevitable. Yet he must make sure that the audience do not see the twist coming.

A gunless first act would make the shooting of the second unsatisfying. A gunfilled first act must make it predictable.

There are, so far as I can tell, three ways around this.

First, you can introduce the gun and then stick it in a drawer. You pray to all the gods of narrative that people will forget about it until the drawer is reopened in the final scene, at which point they say 'Oh, of course!'.

This can be done, but it's unlikely. The only way, I believe, that it can be carried off is if you then add in a bunch of unnecessary detail into the remainder of the first act in order to confuse them. There is a gun. It is put into a drawer. Then out come the dancing girls, the sword swallower, the talking elephant and the perpetual motion machine. When the gun is removed from the drawer the audience remember that they had forgotten it.

However, this system breaks the Chekhov rule insofar as it requires unnecessary detail. Otherwise don't put it there. What are you now going to do with the dancing girls?

The other method, and the neatest, is the double usage. Suppose that the story is about somebody facing bankruptcy. In the first act the blunderbuss is on the wall. In the second we discover that it is a valuable antique blunderbuss and that in its barrel is hidden a treasure map (if I were writing this we would only realise that after he'd shot himself. But that's because I'm a horrid person).

The gun must fire. That much is inevitable and predictable, but guns can do so much else besides and that, dear tortuous reader, can provide the twist.

N.B. You will no doubt have noticed that I have not provided a single example in this little essay. That's because I don't want to ruin anybody else's twists. I think, I hope, I forlornly pray, that my theory stands up on its own.

The Inky Fool commits suicide

Wodehouse's Imaginary Divas

P.G. Wodehouse used to write musicals. Indeed, that's where most of his money came from for a long time. He also did us all a favour by writing about writing. Unfortunately, both books (The Performing Flea and the expanded Wodehouse On Wodehouse) seem to be out of print. But I read them so you don't have to.

Anyway, when writing musicals the problem for Wodehouse was the performers. Actors may be cattle, but they are vicious cattle. Wodehouse had to accommodate the whims, vanities and contracts of the stars, starlets and gas giants of Broadway.

"Why don't I have any good lines in this scene?" they would demand. "I don't even go on in act two." "I demand a huge emotional moment to display my roscian powers."

One would imagine that poor Pelham Grenville would have been happy to get back to his novels and short stories. There, alone with his typewriter and his imagination, he would be free. But this was not the case.

Wodehouse realised how right the actors were. You simply can't leave a character without a good line. You can't drop somebody half way through a story. Everybody needs a personality or tic. So he would make a point of imagining that he was writing for horrid, vain, demanding actors. He would try to foresee and forestall their complaints and vanities.

And the result was the Blandings books and the Jeeves books and the Psmith books and that whole heap of wonderfulness that we read today.

Often, Constraint is the doting mother of Invention, whilst Freedom sits among her squalid brood refusing even to change Drivel's nappy.

Wodehouse arguing with an actor

Conan the Talkative Barbarian

A little lesson on film dialogue.

The tagline to Conan the Barbarian was: He conquered an empire with his sword. She conquered HIM with her bare hands!

Central to the film is the touching and tender romance between Conan and Valeria. However, in the two-hour movie Conan says only five words to the object of his affection, and they're all within thirty seconds of their first meeting.

'You're not a guard.'


'No.'

True love, eh? But it does show the value of brevity. A screenwriter friend of mine once explained that film is a basically visual medium. You should be able to watch a good movie with the sound turned off. I have experimented with this theory and it's thoroughly true. Even a verbose movie like Pulp Fiction is utterly comprehensible without the words. There are two gangsters in a car. They get out. They go to a flat with some teenagers in. They search it. They find a briefcase. They shoot the teenagers.

Because the storytelling is entrusted to the pictures, the dialogue is free to range through such topics as European hamburger restaurants, foot massages and the Bible. In Conan the Barbarian the dialogue is free not to exist at all.

Incidentally, the taciturn script was the work of the young Oliver Stone.

Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak.

Terminator

The terminator is the line that divides the sunlit and night-darkened parts of a planet. That was the original (1770) meaning and it's still used today.

That's because the Latin terminus meant boundary or limit, from which we get bus terminals, terms and conditions, fixed term parliaments and indeed many terms for things (because a term has a limited meaning).

As Tennyson put it:

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life,
The twilight of eternal day.

Anyway, from that you get the idea of terminating somebody's employment. Legally speaking, you can do this two ways: you can terminate without prejudice, meaning that you are open to the idea of re-employing them, or you can terminate with prejudice meaning that you will never hire them again. The latter is for employees who have done something awfully naughty and broken your trust.

The CIA employs agents. If you break the CIA's trust and reveal secrets to the other side, your employment will be terminated. Indeed, it will be terminated with prejudice. Indeed, the CIA may make sure that nobody ever employs you again by the simple expedient of murdering you. This they jokingly refer to as termination with extreme prejudice.

The CIA being awfully secret, it's hard to say exactly when the phrase was invented. It's first recorded of a double agent in 1969. The important thing for us, dear reader, is that it is this usage that took the word terminate away from astronomy, contract law and bus depots and made the word big and tough and scary.

And thus and therefore the T800.

As an interesting point of technique: James Cameron just wanted to have a scene where a lorry explodes and then a robot walks out of the burning wreckage. The rest of the plot was invented to lead up to that one image. So the film was written from the end backwards. Compare Mickey Spillane's system explained here.

The Inky Fool's plans for world domination gather pace

Shakespeare on Greene

There's a good little article by Nicholas Shakespeare on Graham Greene's voice and technique here.

Without wishing to pick too many recondite nits, Shakespeare makes two mistakes. First, in the list of influences it misses out Eric Ambler who pretty much created Greene's world, or at least presented it to the bookish public. The Third Man is essentially a (brilliant) reworking of The Mask of Dimitrios. Greene once said that Ambler was the writer to whom all spy novelists are indebted*.

Second, Greene is eminently parodiable. You need a skeletal style, a sense of physical inferiority, loneliness and an eye for decay.

It was autumn in the late Antibes. I was staying at the second shabbiest hotel at the eastward end of the bay. The green curtains were worn thin and the wind drew chilblains from both my toes.


All the other tourists had left the resort. The Place Des Etrangers was empty and several of the bars had taken the opportunity to close up for the winter. I remained. 


And that's without mentioning Catholics, brothels, diplomats or South America. To prove my point, in May 1980 The Spectator set a competition for parodies of Graham Greene. It was won by Graham's brother, Hugh. Graham's sister, Elisabeth Dennys, came third. Both were writing under pseudonyms. Graham's own entry failed to place, but eight years later he used it as the opening of his last novel, The Captain and the Enemy.

Here it is:

I am a man approaching middle-age, but the only birthday I can distinguish among all the others was my twelfth. It was on that damp misty day in October that I met the Captain for the first time. I remember the wetness of the gravel in the school quad and the blown leaves which made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to a halt and my pursuers went whistling away, for there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat who carried his walking stick over his shoulder at the slope like a rifle. I had no idea of course who he was or that he had won me the previous night at backgammon from my father.


Oh, and Greene's best book was Travels With My Aunt.

*I can't find the exact quotation right now. I may fill it in later.

Improving Shakespeare

This is how Shakespeare worked. In 1599 (or thereabouts) Will wrote Julius Caesar, in which Caesar is murdered by a brute. On the morning of Caesar's assassination his wife warns him not to go out because the weather has been simply dreadful. She says:

Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,

Yet now they fright me. There is one within,

Besides the things that we have heard and seen,

Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets,
And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.

In 1601 (or thereabouts) Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and in the very first scene Horatio describes exactly the same night:

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

That Hamlet's version is shorter is of no great consequence. Of course, Julius Caesar is going to spend more time on Julius Caesar. What's interesting is that Shakespeare is clearly working over his own original, finding the flaws and improving. You can almost hear him muttering "Did shriek and squeal? Did shriek and sqea... Did squeak! Why didn't I think of that in the first place? Squeak and um... gibber."

The grave as mouth was a favourite device of Shakespeare, for example "the grave doth gape/For thee thrice wider than for other men". But here he has consciously cast that aside and turned the tomb into a bijou rental property. The graves stand tenantless, making it a touch more Christian.

You can see Shakespeare fiddling with his words of 1599, dwelling on them, improving them, working them over. And you can see how he worked with the sounds of squeal and shriek. And you can see how he considered and changed his metaphor from grave as mouth to grave as boarding house.
 
It all relates back to Shakespeare as a worker rather than a genius, which I have written about before here and here.
 
For more on Shakespeare's attitude to death, see this old post. For the moment, I shall simply add that Calpurnia's "I never stood on ceremony" was the first time that anybody had ever stood on ceremony. Stand on already meant pay attention to (as in "Stand not upon the order of your going" which means "don't worry about who leaves the room first"), but standing on ceremony, that was Shakespeare.
 

The Inky Fool asking for proof-reading help

Filler Words Part the Third: People

As with the previous filler-word posts (here and here), this post is all about voice. If I write:

Louis Armstrong was the first man on the moon.

The sentence is flat. But if I write:

Louis Armstrong was the first chap on the moon.

You immediately know what my voice is. You know what accent to read in. Chap doesn't say anything new about the great trumpet-playing astronaut, but it says something about me, the writer, and about how I should be read.

Man, woman and person are all dull and give no indication or hint of voice. Here are some alternatives and what I consider to be their implications. (All are British, unless otherwise stated).

Chap = Relaxed, posh
Fellow = Relaxed, middle-class
Bloke = Heading down the social ladder
Gentleman = Not posh at all, I'm probably a waiter in a provincial hotel. I may also be in the closet.
Geezer = Cockney (but nobody actually says this any more)
Guy = So universal as to be almost as insipid as man.
Dude = American, young
Son of a bitch = Welcome to America!
Varmint = Welcome to more frightening parts of America!
American = It's very strange that Americans will use American as a synonym for human. Only Americans do this. So, by identifying Louis Armstrong as American you are also identifying yourself as such.

Lady = Slight delicacy
Bird = Equivalent of bloke
Filly = I have a moustache, gout, and a bad reputation
Lass = I'm terribly healthy and traditional. I may be into folksongs.
Chick = American male
Broad = Do any Americans still say this?
Dame = Ditto
Chappess = Preposterously good fun
Sheila = There has been much discussion in the comments on whether this word exists outside of one farm near Alice Springs

Individual = I'm a prick, or a policeman, or both.
Fucker = Amusing, I suppose. Take a long serious document on Microsoft Word. Go to EDIT, FIND, REPLACE, REPLACE ALL and then change "the" to "the fucking" throughout. It's great.

It annoys me more than I can say that Adam and Eve are always represented with navels

Filler Words: Part the Second: Vocatives

It would be foolish, indeed reckless, to read this post without having first read this one.

Listen, you, I have something to say.

The you is dull and voiceless and could be replaced with many other far more fascinating words. For example:

Listen, dude, I have something to say.

The choice of substitute says nothing about the person being addressed, but an awful lot about the speaker or writer. It therefore gives the sentence a distinctive voice. In writing, where you have no accent or body-language to help you along, that is frightfully important. One well placed vocative can set the authorial tone for a whole book, blog post or ransom note.

Dear = married
Darling = Engaged or theatrical/fashion/overbearing female/gay
My child = Biblical and therefore whimsical
My good man = 1950s, Middle Class and slightly enraged
Dear Reader = Austenish
Gentle Reader = Eighteenth Century. It tells you to read the whole work in a particular, mannered way.
Buddy = American
Chuck = Northern working class
Duck = Ditto
Petal = Working class
Guv = Ditto
Babe [to a man or unknown, unisex reader] = California cool?
Poppet = Wonderfully old fashioned and endearing
Old Bean = Bertie Wooster
My Friend = Sinister mafioso
Dude = American, young. Unlike my friend, dude suggests reciprocity and similarity. I cannot call you dude unless I am a dude myself. (I am not a dude).

Female:

Love = Unshaven
Cherie, Bella, Liebling etc = Effusive female OR gay man
Sweetness = Camper than a row of tents
Hon (or, if she's German, Hun) = Familiar and vaguely American
Baby = Generally cool
Babe = One should remember David Cameron's "I love you, babe" to his wife "caught" on microphone after his conference speech, and Pamela Anderson's respose in the profound and moving film Barbed Wire, where she shoots people.

Male:

Mate = If you are my mate, I am your mate. I am insinuating that I share approximately your views on football, beer and the fairer sex.
Pal = In England always aggressive, but in a weirdly middle-class way
Son = Authoritative, but also threatening
My boy = Healthy, bullish, red-faced
Dear boy = Camp or terribly posh
Chief = Southern working class
Man = This is some good shit we're smoking
Mister = 1930s Chicago Gangster, 1970s cockney, 1990s... in fact there are so many disctinct voices that could be deduced that I should avoid this one until after the voice has been established.
Old chap = Charming in a Terry Thomas sort of way (and if you don't know who that is, click here)

Due to the continuing phallologocentric nature of society (a condition that I do my level best to perpetuate) you can use male vocatives from an unknown reader, but not female ones.

Once, on a train, I was slyly reading a love-letter over the shoulder of the lady next to me, because I am an incorrigible snoop. In it, her beau referred to her as "my little snugglosaurus." There were tears in her eye.

I'm not sure why.

As ever, corrections and additions in the comments please.

Miss Anderson reacting to the Inky Fool's views on vocatives

Bulwer-Lytton or: The Pen is Mightier than The Great Unwashed

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the worst opening of a novel have been announced.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a nineteenth century novelist, poet, playwright, politician, philanderer, debauchee and wife-incarcerator who put four phrases into the English language. Here are the first three:

The pen is mightier than the sword
   - From the play Richelieu, since disproved by experiment.

The Great Unwashed
   - From Paul Clifford, of which more anon.

The Coming Race

   -And if that is an unfamiliar phrase then you don't know nearly enough about Nazi mysticism or the lyrics to David Bowie's Oh You Pretty Things. It comes from a novel Bulwer-Lytton wrote about super-people who live underground, obviously.

However, poor Bulwer-Lytton will be forever remembered not for those sublimities, but for the ridiculous opening lines of Paul Clifford, which was published in 1830:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Apparently those first few words were much quoted in the Peanuts cartoon strip (which I fear I have never read). Anyway, the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" have become a byword for bad opening lines.
Rightly so. That whole paragraph tells you nothing at all about the story that is to follow. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien.

Is this going to be a novel about a serial killer or about an amusing talking cat called Gerald? I don't know and that paragraph gives me not a hint of a whiff of a clue. It is a collection of clichéd images full of rain and darkness and signifying bugger all.

As with a proper cliché it could be cut out and prefixed to almost any novel set in London (and, with the alteration of a word, any city). That is what's wrong with it.

Which leads me inevitably on to the Bulwer-Lytton prize. Contestants have to write the first few lines of an imaginary terrible novel. This year's winner is a lady called Molly Ringle and her paragraph goes:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

But... but... that's not terrible. That's not terrible at all. So far as I'm concerned that's brilliant. I would read on. If I picked up a book in the bookshop and that was the first paragraph I would be leaping for the till, cash in hand and whooping joyously. It's surprising, it's funny, it is utterly different. It is everything that Bulwer Lytton's paragraph is not. There is the suggestion of Ricardo's desperation, of the unhealthiness of the relationship and yet of its comical contemptibility.

Molly Ringle's lines have none of the problems that scar Bulwer-Lytton's immortal drivel. They are original. They are amusing. They could not have been put at the start of any other book. I have a damned fine idea of the kind of (very odd) novel that I'm about to read. The story has already got itself going and I've been introduced to the main characters, their relationship and the animal to which they can best be compared. I care about Ricardo already.

But Felicity's horrid.

For all the winners and honourable mentions follow this link.

P.S. When he was old Kingsley Amis became so depressed with the tedium of contemporary literature that he vowed never to read another novel unless it began with the words "A shot rang out."

P.P.S. This whole post could, perhaps, have been better expressed in the words of a wildly successful screenwriter friend of mine who will tell you, at gun-point if necessary, that you should start a story as late as possible and finish as early as possible.

Such mysteries