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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Relish every word. Aim deep, but be simple. Take risks. Seek beauty. Find the right pitch.
words not linked to ideas are not worthy of writing—or reading. Once you’ve committed your words to paper (or to the screen), test each term. Does it carry your idea? Does it express, exactly, that once inchoate thought?
Don’t shun slang, especially when it’s vivid and musical and fills a gap in the lexicon.
FOR INSPIRATION, GO ON literary adventures with novelists like Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, or Toni Morrison—none of whom uses lowest-common-denominator diction.
Always think about your reader; hold your audience in your mind. Don’t talk to readers as if they are strangers, or as if they are beneath you.
In writing, pitch might be thought of as tilt, slant, cant, spiel, delivery, or act of persuasion—it has to do with how a writer combines meaning, melody, and tone to touch a reader.
when marketing mavens promote hardware and software to the public, their words are softer than software: implementation, functionality, interoperability, and even ease of use are just a bunch of junk words.
If you want to write eloquently as a professional, you need to do it with good words. Universal words.
Think about how many times you’ve let “house” sit there in your copy. O.K., it’s familiar, it’s short, it’s standard, but is it the most potent word? Riff through the choices, which include cottage, duplex, dacha, shack, bungalow, A-frame, Tudor, Victorian, hacienda, manor, and wickiup. (Don’t even think about colorless words like abode, dwelling, domicile, or residence.)
If you’re not sure which words will get you labeled “pretentious,” check out Pompous Ass Words, a Web site dedicated to identifying words that will make you sound like a pompous ass.
Working with word books strengthens our imaginative muscles, and in turn strengthens our own mental thesauruses, our ability to call up precise words.
SEE, SEEING, SCENE: Reread the scenes early in this chapter—Paul Theroux’s bus ride in Turkey, James Salter’s hall at West Point, Arundhati Roy’s landscape in Ayemenem. Go sit somewhere distinctive—a favorite garden, a cathedral, or even a grungy inner-city laundromat—and notice what is special or evocative about the place. Use concrete, vivid nouns to paint a picture of the scene. Carefully choose a few idea/feeling/abstraction nouns to convey what makes the place unusual. Is it a microcosm of something larger?
TRANSCENDENTAL TIME: Find a historical description of a particular place in your city, town, or county. Retrace the author’s steps. Write your own description of the place as it is today, using the original as a starting point but letting John McPhee inspire you to see the essence of the place today.
Use who when the pronoun is acting as a subject (Who is it?) and whom when it is acting as an object (in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the pronoun is the object of the preposition for).
In certain situations, the first-person point of view comes most naturally and lets the narrator be an integral part of the story. Sometimes you need to loosen your tie and get personal.
The second person pronoun (you) lets the author hook the reader as if in conversation. Call it cozy. Call it confiding. You is a favorite of the Plain English folks, who view it as an antidote to the stiff impersonality of legalese and urge bureaucrats to write as if speaking to the public.
