What Ken Dodd and Kate Moss can teach us about great writing...
Asurprising number of bad writers have written books on how to write well. Most of them are members of the Writerly Neighbourhood Watch, on the lookout for grammatical infringements, obsessed with the need to not split infinitives, or, as they would say, the need not to split infinitives.
But there are also good writers who have published works of advice. Patricia Highsmith wrote Plotting And Writing Suspense Fiction, Elmore Leonard wrote 10 Rules Of Writing and Alan Ayckbourn wrote The Crafty Art Of Playmaking. Their only fault lay in not acknowledging their own inimitable talents. Craft may be taught, but everything else comes from within. Just think of all the professional authors who, in trying to imitate P G Wodehouse, have mistaken verbosity for humour and fallen flat on their faces.
Joe Moran is a wonderfully sharp writer, calm, precise and quietly comical. He also happens to be Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, and so a veteran of marking essays and dissertations, and of ploughing through works by his fellow academics.
He drops hints that this new book is a reaction to the solemn ethos of obscurity that prevails in academia. Unlike most of the others, he writes with a playful clarity that makes First You Write A Sentence a joy. It is, I think, a book for undergraduates, to lure them away from the soggy marshlands of waffle. In his advice to the writer, he takes the side of the reader. Everything should be done to reduce a sense of slog. ‘Even if you get words in their basic order,’ he writes, ‘you still have to put them in a way that moves, interests and charms the reader.’
So he argues for short words over long words – use not utilise, about not approximately, thing not phenomenon – and abhors meaningless adjectives such as seminal, prestigious and iconic. To these, I would add my own bugbear, insightful.
Fluffing up sentences to make them sound grander serves only to make them worse. If you have something to say, just say it. ‘Scared of sounding banal, we muddy our prose and it ends up sounding muddy and banal.’
He argues that scholarly writing ‘and the schools that mimic it, such as the school and student essay’ use too many words that ‘are there to inoculate the writer against the shameful disease of naivety’. Here, he is talking about nervy words and phrases such as ‘admittedly’, ‘indeed’ and ‘to be sure’, and long-winded fillers like ‘in this study I want to argue that’ and ‘suffice it to conclude that’. He condemns this sort of prose as ‘too watertight, too neurotic about purging itself of inconsistencies. Rather like sealing a boat’s hull with black tar, making prose unsinkable makes it ugly. It has sold its life and voice in return for the dubious virtue, invulnerability’.
As you can tell from that little extract, Moran’s own sentences are perfect advertisements for the aims they espouse. He uses a wide, unsnobbish range of cultural references, from high to low. At one point, he quotes a beautiful sentence from a sermon delivered by the poet and cleric John Donne in 1627. He goes on to compare its phrasing to ‘a dizzy riff like a jazz musician. It is as if he is always scrabbling his way towards a beautiful truth just beyond reach’.
Analysing what he calls ‘the high-wire’ act of the successful long sentence, he quotes this amazing sentence, from the autobiography of the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan: ‘The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.’
On the very next page, he moves from Trevelyan to Dodd. ‘I once heard Ken Dodd say that the secret of a great comedian is that he makes the audience feel simultaneously safe and slightly on edge. He has about half a minute from coming on stage to establish that he is harmless… But he must also create a sense of unpredictability that makes them lean forward. A good sentence has that same tension.’
Many of his best examples come from similarly unexpected sources. Though he is iffy about the message behind Kate Moss’s ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, he admires its precision, and the original way it turns ‘skinny’ from an adjective into an abstract noun. At another point, he comm ends the suicide note left by the Hollywood star George Sanders. ‘Dear World: I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.’
‘In under 30 words,’ says Moran, ‘Sanders managed to sound like an authentic voice speaking to an audience. His full stops were as clean as bullet holes… his suicide note was as impeccable as his film persona – elegantly mannered, smoothly cynical and, in its own way, generous.’
It is hard to classify First You Write A Sentence. It is, Moran insists, ‘not a style guide, if that means a series of prescriptions and proscriptions’.
But if it’s not a style guide, then what is it? Moran suggests that ‘perhaps it is a style guide by stealth: one that tries to show what it wants to teach, or to show instead of teaching’.
On the other hand, Moran’s own sentences are so stylish that many writers may well feel not so much encouraged as intimidated.
After reading this maestro’s manual, I’m sorry to say I found the act of writing that much harder, a bit like trying to dance on soft clay in wellington boots.
‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ is an iffy message but admirably precise