Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Books

For serious Writers - and everyone else

No matter what you write - a blog, a love letter, the next great American novel - Writing Tools offers practical advice that is a pleasure to read.

By JANET BURROWAY
Published September 15, 2006

What you want from a tool is that it be practical and well-designed and suited to the job. You want the hammer to have heft, the chisel to chip clean, the plum bob to fall straight from the line. You may also fairly ask that these implements be a pleasure to use.

Roy Peter Clark's 50 Writing Tools make up a superlative kit. He divides his strategies into four: "Nuts and Bolts," dealing with words and sentences; "Special Effects," in aid of interest and originality; "Blueprints," focusing on structure; and "Useful Habits," for the writing life. The advice is practical, sharp and hefty. What makes it a pleasure to read is that the prose proves and demonstrates the principles as it goes, morphing a list-shaped book into a page turner with some out-loud laughs.

When Clark designates every writer in his subtitle, he means every writer. For although he is primarily a journalist (and vice president of the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times), his essential strategies apply to any form or genre. His examples come from fiction, poetry and drama more often than from the news. When he demonstrates the tool for emphasis, the illustration is from Shakespeare. When he needs a quotation about backing off, he turns to Elmore Leonard. He takes one snippet from Sir Thomas Browne and another from Red Smith, this one from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that one from J.K. Rowling. He makes good use of Alice Sebold and W.G. Sebald. He quotes from Carol Shields, Azar Nafisi, G.G. Marquez, G.K. Chesterton, Donald Hall, Albert Camus, Amy Tan, George Orwell, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Roth, not necessarily in that order. Various sources yield writerly admonishment or solace, from the National Commission On Writing to the OED, from the staid Fowler's Modern English Usage to the terse Elements of Style to Anne Lamott's super-hip Bird by Bird.

This cluster of references signals the standard to which Clark holds journalism (although he also quotes William Stafford to the effect that every writer may need to lower standards in order to get something down on the page in the first place). In fact, he says, journalism might as well rise to the level of poetry, including wordplay, image, alliteration and repetition, as in the news story Clark deconstructs about a "yellow Buick Skylark" on the "Sunshine Skyway Bridge."

He teaches how to move past cliche. He explicates devices he calls the name of the dog, Hitchcock's leg of lamb, verbal cinema, the broken line, the nut paragraph and X-ray reading. He shows how to go "up and down the ladder of abstraction" to engage readers' senses and expand their scope, and how to avoid the middle rungs where jargon, psychobabble and demagoguery deaden us to meaning.

For my money the "Workshop" exercises at the end of each chapter have less pith than the counsel they follow, being couched in imperatives that look like work: study, review, make a list, do an Internet search, pay attention.

Nevertheless, it's worth paying attention on every page, never more so than when Clark inveighs against the romantic and egotistical image of the author as a loner.

Writing, he insists, "is a social activity," for which every writer seeks a support system among teachers, readers, family and friends. The community of craftsmen also deserves credit - editors, printers, binders, distributors, salesmen that usher the work into the world; and Clark pleads for much-maligned copy editors: "Feed them chocolate." Only after this industrious industry has done its job does the writing reach the audience that is its aim and purpose. Then, unless it interests, informs and enlarges the reader, it still falls short of its defining journey.

Clark notes that the reading vocabulary of all citizens is larger than they use when writing, so the professional has an obligation to that larger capacity - "No dumbing down!" And readers are, in any case, inevitably writers.

"We teach and learn reading as a democratic craft - necessary for education, vocation and citizenship - but writing as a fine art. Every one should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write."

This attitude is illogical and unsuited to our world. When Clark speaks of "a nation of writers" he intends it literally. Throughout Writing Tools he argues with force that the quality of our writing is not separate from the quality of our thought, so that how we write determines the nature of our education, our culture and our politics.

This book will mainly attract those who identify themselves as Writers with a capital W, which is a pity because, although for the most part Clark addresses technique, he has a good deal to teach about how to tell workmanship from hokum, and how to produce truer, more interesting and more effective reports, reviews, minutes, mission statements, e-mails, diaries, journals, love notes, blogs and letters home. The modest goal is to become "a better student, a better teacher, a better worker, a better parent, a better citizen, a better person."

Some writing books err on the side of rigidity and rule, some merely cheer the writer on and some serve as pedestals for self-aggrandizing memoir. Writing Tools avoids all these in a voice that is colloquial without folksiness, precise without pedantry and eloquent without fustian. It reminds me of a conversation I overheard at a conference not long ago, where two young writers were praising Mr. Jones at the expense of Mr. Smith, an author-teacher of equal stature. I butted in. "What's the difference between them?"

"Oh, they both know everything," said one, "but Mr. Jones is on our side."

Mr. Clark is on our side too.

Reviewer Janet Burroway is an essayist, novelist and playwright at Florida State University.

BOOK REVIEW

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, by Roy Peter Clark (253 pages, Little, Brown, New York, $19.99).

[Last modified September 14, 2006, 10:14:25]