No other art form is so infinitely mutable. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details.
Writers want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty.
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the book or article appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Much overstuffed prose reflects a desire to bully, to impress, or to hide.
It has taken, on average, about three years for me to research and write a book, long enough for each to seem like an occupation in itself.
Every piece of writing, even classic works, can be ridiculed.
Whatever art any book achieves may or may not be rewarded in the marketplace, but art isn’t generally achieved with the market in mind. Every book has to be in part its own reward. In happy moments one realizes that the best work is done when one’s eye is simply on the work, not on its consequences, or on oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde’s term, a gift.
I always wince when a reviewer says, “This book needed an editor.” Often it had an editor, but the writer prevailed.
- Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details.
Writers want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty.
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the book or article appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Much overstuffed prose reflects a desire to bully, to impress, or to hide.
It has taken, on average, about three years for me to research and write a book, long enough for each to seem like an occupation in itself.
Every piece of writing, even classic works, can be ridiculed.
Whatever art any book achieves may or may not be rewarded in the marketplace, but art isn’t generally achieved with the market in mind. Every book has to be in part its own reward. In happy moments one realizes that the best work is done when one’s eye is simply on the work, not on its consequences, or on oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde’s term, a gift.
I always wince when a reviewer says, “This book needed an editor.” Often it had an editor, but the writer prevailed.
- Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
No comments:
Post a Comment