Meditations on Prose Style

Joseph Mitchell in 1952. Photo by Therese Mitchell.

I.

At Lighthaven I overheard Andy Matuschak say,

For writing in general — and for technical writing particular — I feel like the most difficult part is doing research and producing an insight. Once you really have the insight, the prose should flow easily. Don’t get me wrong, I love English and think that the question of good style contains many interesting puzzles. But I’ve found that when writing drafts, I frequently think I’m having an English problem, only to realize after that I had an insight problem.

This seems right. Some aspiring writers fail to improve their prose despite deliberate effort (in the form of going to MFA programs and so on) due, in part, to being perennially shallow and insightless. This is not polite to say — but we have all met people who speak much yet say little. It is convenient and ego-protective to think to yourself that you are working through a language problem, when what is actually happening is that you know nothing.

At the same time, I do think that to have an “insight” is to have a propositional representation of an idea in your head, so it is not clear to me that insight problems and English problems are actually distinct. I can offer two explanations of this thought:

• I am not a researcher, but I do enjoy reading a lot of research and talking about it with friends. When reading a lot of material, something subterranean and nonlinguistic happens. I feel as if I’m pouring water into a lake. The lake has some structure (obviously, it is finite) but it has no beginning and end, and its content is a vast, undifferentiated mass. In this latent way, my mental models grow. But when it comes time to reach for an insight, I need to impose a linear structure on my thoughts, rendering them down into propositions. In this way, reaching an insight feels to be the same thing as resolving a mechanical, sentence-level prose question.

• I do not write often, but I do talk to myself frequently (hosting imaginary debates, play-acting as other people, repeating jokes — just generally a whole lot of babbling). Sometimes for months at a time I stop doing this. During some of these quiet episodes, I stop reading as well. When that happens I become noticeably less human. When people ask how are you?, or what have you been up to?, I should say (if I’m being honest), “really, I don’t know.” In practice, I usually spout off some cached thought I had six months earlier. I am not a zombie (the lights are still on), but something is no longer there. What gets the machinery going again is usually some sort of act of linguistic distillation: maybe I start writing, or I concoct some elaborate image in my mind, and in so doing I manage to titrate out an insight that sustains my imagination — and just like that, I have returned. Myself again.

II.

I watched an editor from a nice literary magazine give a talk on style and editing. She spoke about Judith Thurman’s agonizing editorial process, which Thurman herself described in this talk at Google. When she wrote a piece for the New Yorker on the austere beauty of Japan’s artisanal tofu Thurman went through 28 drafts of the opening paragraph. She discusses a few of the variants, and her reasons for discarding them, here:

I’m always doubling back. I’m always writing in a state of incredible anxiety about my inability to find the subject, to make the subject real. To give the sentences the quality they need to have. Many young writers when I tell them this, they take heart. They don’t quite believe how terrible my own first drafts are. So I thought — just to give you an example — I would read you some of the first paragraphs that I’ve thrown away.

…

When I came back [from Japan], I had about two weeks to turn the piece in. The sense of responsibility to Japan, to the artisans who made the tofu, to the history of the subject, really paralyzed me… I also had taken copious notes, and copious interviews, and I somehow wanted to get everything into the first paragraph… I went through 28 drafts (which is pretty typical)… And what happens is the more drafts you do, your bearings begin to dissolve. Your sense of reality begins to dissolve. It’s like a whiteout, if you ski. You don’t know really even what’s up and what’s down…

“I usually do not begin drinking at eleven in the morning, but when Yoshimasa Kawashima — a celebrate tofu-maker, oenophile, and bon vivant — uncorked a bottle of perfectly chilled 1972 Gevrey-Chambertin in the kitchen of his farmhouse in a hillside outside the city of Karatsu on the west coast of Japan, I couldn’t say no.”

A little pretentious.

Then, I was so bowled over by the beauty of the landscape, and the Japanese watercolors, and also the kimono paintings that depict the landscape, that I wanted to my little landscape number:

“The rainy season started late in Japan this year. For the first three weeks of June, the rice patties simmered under a milky haze. Housewives vain of their pallor when to market wearing hats and gloves, or pedaled their bicycles with one hand, the other hoisting a parasol. Many, perhaps most of them, came home with a package of tofu, which in one form or another is a staple of the national diet.”

And the extreme, prosaic, boring quality of that last sentence, and the overwriting, the sort of lush description of the first sentence — were deathly.

Not willing to give up on the tour-guide, and the sort of wonderful, picturesque notes that I had, I tried this:

“Karatsu is a small port city in the Saga prefecture on the west coast of Japan, famous for its pottery, a fortified samurai castle from the 17th century that dominates the bay, a spectacularly eroded shoreline furrowed with caves and cliffs, an ancient tract of virgin pines that fringes a fine beach, and a rowdy, picturesque Shinto harvest festival that attracts half a million tourists every November. More recently it has also become known for its zaru-dofu, an exquisitely bland and pure form of soybean curd with a meringue-like consistency that is molded in a bamboo basket and served in scoops, a delicacy produced every morning between one and five AM, according to a secret recipe devised by a local artisan, oenophile, bon vivant, organic farmer, restauranteur, exported, and man about town Yoshimasa Kawashima.”

That went on for about ten more drafts…

Then all of this wasn’t working, so I decided I would change tacks completely, try to find another voice, try to find another tone, and I came up with this:

“Writing about tofu, like cooking with it, is a challenge to one’s powers of invention, and I was going to introduce this subject somewhat lacking inherent drama with a story about my ex-mother-in-law, a vagabond of waifish charm, who briefly made a living growing wheatgrass in the back of her VW camper, and selling its juice with missionary ardor at health-food fairs, and who about thirty years ago — concerned that my eating habits and those of her son were poisoning our youth, and helping to despoil the planet — gave us a copy The Book of Tofu, an essential reference work on the history of soybean curd and its cuisine, which is still in print. But having recently spent three weeks in Japan living largely on tofu (I lost three pounds and feel great) and watching it made with equal measures of reverence, gusto, and virtuosity by elderly fisherwomen and monks, rakish oenophiles, and ninth-generation masters of the art, I realized with a guilty pang that tofu is, at least among the unenlightened, the mother-in-law of foodstuffs. Without the slightest twinge of conscience, people feel entitled to make jokes at tofu’s expense, rolling their eyes like Rodney Dangerfield, while it bobs guilelessly in its tray of cloudy water at the salad bar, or gaily regaling their first encounter at some wacky vegan Thanksgiving in the wilds of Marin County, with that tired trope of hippie fundamentalism, the tofu turkey.”

Well that was… um… Somehow Rodney Dangerfield, and zen, and Kyoto temples were not where I wanted to go. The self-conscious cleverness of all of those — this hint of dissipation, this “oenophile”, this showing-off… I have to show off a lot before I slap myself down.

…

This, finally, was the published opening:

“The abbot’s garden at the temple of Daisen-in, in Kyoto, is a rectangle of raked gravel bordered by a white wall on one of its long sides, and by the wooden porch of an old pavilion on the other, where the monks meditate. From behind the wall, a camellia bush throws off its scent. The grooves made by the rake run horizontally, like steady but freehand rulings on a blank page, until they eddy around two conical mounds, each about a foot tall. One evening last June, just after the temple had closed, I joined the sitting meditation, the hour-long zazen, held on the porch and open to the public twice a week. There were five other sitters, all Japanese, one a young mother who had her children in tow, two plump boys and a little girl, and I could hear them squirming at the end of the row (the wood creaks)—once or twice the presiding monk spoke to them in a low voice, breaking the silence. But after a while, with an impressive show of stoicism, they managed to keep still.

I had been to Daisen-in earlier that week, and at my first sight of the mounds I surprised myself by bursting into tears, perhaps because, for all its austerity, the garden is an image of release: of the moment at which, after an intractable struggle, you get permission from yourself to let the inessential go.”

This sequence of torturous auto-criticism really burrowed into my brain. Thurman’s blunt language of evaluation (pretentious, deathly, boring/overwritten, showing-off, self-consciously clever) is hilarious. I think it takes a lot of integrity (and capacity for ironic distance) to do this. Thurman attributes this voice to her mother, who used to thrust nosy, unsolicited editorial advice on her daughter by physically cutting and pasting school assignments to give physical demonstration of the clumsiness of the prose.

Should we all want this voice in our head? Maybe? I find Thurman’s process reassuring in a way. It is diligent and workman-like. It does not involve sitting around waiting for inspiration. And it is plain to me that, in this instance, this vertigo-inducing process did work. The final opening is categorically better than all the rest. Though I suppose the part about bursting into tears is a little precious, the passage’s quietude and geometry sets the terrain for the discussion of tofu that Thurman really wants to have. The other passages are good, but they all unintentionally make it seem like we’re talking around the fact that at heart we all think that tofu is an insipid and boring thing to write and read about. Tofu’s beauty starts in its simplicity, and praising simplicity is not easy to do without sounding pious.

But I’m sure this voice would be fatal for many. I know many people who are the type to, when asked to write 200 words, can’t stop themselves from writing 4000, and who will edit and edit and edit away until their teachers and editors quietly give up on them. You can’t allow yourself to hear this voice if you are like this.

I have become good enough at Brazilian jiu-jitsu that I am now regularly asked to give advice to people much worse than me. Many times I’ll give specific technical advice. Sometimes this is helpful, but sometimes these people’s bodies don’t have enough information to integrate the advice in any useful way. So lately my advice is typically something like: “start training five days per week”, “train twice a day”, “try X, and ask me about it again after you put in 100 hours of mat time.” In other words, to a first approximation, the only thing that matters is to train more. Which is easier said than done. In learning how to train more, you will have to solve a lot of nontrivial problems (for example, how to train ten hours per week without hurting yourself). But your body will have the data, and you can prune and editorialize later.

Maybe this is what matters for writing as well. Write a lot, publish a lot. Don’t be precious. Onboard as much external and internal criticism as is compatible with you also publishing a lot. I suspect that Joseph Mitchell could not have been who he was without first spending a decade as a beat reporter who wrote a lot of utilitarian dreck. Output first, style eventually.

So I suppose my formula for now is:

1. To publish daily

2. Reread what I’ve written with the Thurmanic eye to cultivate taste

And then maybe one day I’ll write something really worth reading.