My third year of teaching at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism wound up last night, in a place called The Monday Club Bar in Harvard Square. Over tart lemonades, chic pizzas (flatbread with Meyer lemon and arugula) and “hot dates” (almond-stuff dates wrapped in bacon, broiled, and drizzled with balsamic vinegar), we reflected on a year of working together. Several fellows handed me rewrites of their final assignments, which ranged from reflections on 10 years of covering Cuba, to a war photographer’s account of watching the U.S. Marines take a bridge in Iraq, to an article about moms and boys, to a memoir about a swashbuckling dad who was a bush pilot in Lesotho.

We spent the last few weeks looking at the way different writers make their prose musical through the use of rhythm, and playing with the rhythm in our own paragraphs. I lectured these Nieman and Loeb fellows on parataxis and hypotaxis, even writing an essay on the search for rhythm to try to make some sense out of these somewhat obscure terms of lit crit.

I’ve streamlined a semester’s worth of lessons and put them into an online writing course. Try some of the exercises out! And if you’re a teacher, let me know you’re interested, and I’ll add you to a mailing list of like-minded souls trying to encourage good writing in their students.

I’ll end with a riddle: is this passage by Raymond Chandler, in Farewell, My Lovely, an example of parataxis or hypotaxis?

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”

I’m excited to announce that I just sold a proposal for a new book to W. W. Norton. This one will do for verbs what Sin and Syntax does for sentences. Here’s how I described it in the proposal:

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Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

Caesar proclaimed “veni, vidi, vinci.” Matthew reminded, “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” Bellow saw in every face in New York “the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Deadwood’s mayor E. B. Farnum, when he saw the Widow Garret, said, “She enters,” rather than the “There she is” of lesser mortals. And my dog? Well, you’d better believe that Homer understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “fetch.” (He wasn’t so good on “lie down.”)

Verbs have been called everything from “action words” to “the heartbeat of a sentence.” They have even been called The Almighty—by Buckminster Fuller:  “God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.” Verbs make the fulcrum of every sentence, the essence of any story. They put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.

Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a dynamic one, the passive voice and the active one, means knowing how to write purposefully and powerfully. In fact, understanding the verb means understanding English itself, for in English more than in other tongues, verbs enjoy a kind of primacy. Think about it: The word itself comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs, nor can we boast of verbal dexterity!

Yet, for all their primacy and vibrancy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch aims to change the way we think about verbs—and about language itself.

Beginning writers often ask me: “What is the one thing that will improve my work?” Aside from the obvious answer—read more, write more—I tell them to bone up on verbs.

Vex, Hex will take writers from the basics (static and dynamic verbs) to the esoteric (the indicative, the imperative, and the oh so subjunctive). It will set writers straight on objects and why it’s easy to use who and whom correctly. It upends conventional notions of verbs, sentences, and literature itself, marching from Caesar to Sorenson, from Woolf to The Wolfman, from Dickens to Didion, from Hemingway to JFK. And we won’t forget rappers like Dr. Dre, or TV writers like David Milch (Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire).

Vex, Hex also helps writers reinterpret the old rules for the new media landscape. The books show how verbs figure into the 140-character messages of Twitter and how they can elevate blogs into literature. (Or at least something worth reading.) This is a book for every writer trying to figure out how to rise above the digital din by crafting prose that is lean, powerful, and punchy.

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Doesn’t it sound like fun? Look for it in fall 2011. In the meantime, I’ll be creating a page here and inviting you to send in your favorite examples of writers who get verbs and how to use them to perk up their prose.

I am! Well, maybe not afraid. Perhaps cowed.

I’ve just started reading To the Lighthouse for the first time in about 12 years. (I’m reading it for  the class “Consciousness from Austen to Virginia Woolf,” with literary critic James Wood; we are tracking the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers enter the consciousness of characters). In previous reads, I’ve marveled at the giant leap Woolf takes into stream-of-consciousness writing. I love wallowing in Woolf’s metaphors and Mrs. Ramsey’s full-blown inner monologues.

Separately, this week I’ve been thinking about what I call “melody”—the use of sound in sentences, whether alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, or rhyme. (See my lessons for writers for ideas on this.) I have suggested that writers sit near a window when it’s raining, or near the ocean, or near a fountain, and listen to the water, finding words that in some way echo the flow.

Then I read this passage in To the Lighthouse:

The monotonous fall of waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you, and am your support,” but at other times, suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.”

Notice how Woolf uses “monotonous,” “soothing tattoo,” “repeat over and over again,” and “murmured” when she’s referring to the “kindly meaning” of waves on the beach (and, in turn, to calm or calming thoughts) and then “ghostly roll,” “remorselessly beat,” “thundered hollow,” and “impulse of terror” when she’s referring to more ominous forces of nature and of consciousness. The first set of words murmur with soft syllables, soft consonants, soft vowels. The second set gives us an “uh-oh” with ghostly roll,” followed by the syllables that register like the warning beats of a tympanum.

Subtle, but masterful.

Some chewy bits and pieces to offer you this week. First, kudos to David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers was just named the recipient of the Anthony Lukas prize. I’ve long been an admirer of Finkel’s narrative journalism, which came to my attention when I edited the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest. The Good Soldiers offers an interesting counterpoint to The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins.

Both books are examples of masterful war reporting, but they also make a study in contrasts about the role of the narrator in nonfiction storytelling. Finkel choses the third person, zooming on his soldier protagonists. (See this Washington Post excerpt.) Filkins, on the other hand, uses his book to write in a way that is impossible in his New York Times stories, as he explains in “Up Close and Personal in Iraq,” an article by Ankush Khardori in The American Prospect. Just read the first few pages of each, and you’ll notice the difference in point of view.

How will books like these fare in the future, as traditional publishing adapts to new technology? You may have seen the host of recent news articles about e-books, and you may even be considering buying a brand-new iPad. In the Sin and Syntax Salon, Sarah Baker gives you the lowdown on what she calls the “chaotic bazaar” of book publishing.

Motoko Rich also had an interesting (if oddly written—did anyone else think it went in circles?) article about how e-readers kill the fun of looking at what others are reading. Is the Kindle a conversation killer? I once sat next to a handsome guy on a plane who was reading The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. My asking how he liked the book kicked off a conversation that took us to Frankfurt. And it gave me a cool connection in Washington, D.C. (He was a staffer for Congressman John Conyers.)

OK, now back to our conversation about writing. I wanted to share some suggestions from my California colleague Nora Isaacs, who is a terrific journalist as well as a freelance editor.

Nora is good on tips. I appreciated the ones in her book Women in Overdrive. And taking some of those tips to heart, I will stop writing and start assembling some literal bits and pieces for a dinner party tonight.

Do you recognize those words—the last line of a poem? They were cited recently by a poet who came to speak to a gathering of reporters. (Because the event was off the record, I will leave his identity a mystery.)

The poet registered, physically, with a jolt. He looked barely different from the homeless men who, now that spring flirts with us, commandeer the steel benches in Central Square. His face was purplish red, as were his hands, where large bruises bloom. His thinning gray hair, grown four or five inches, scythed in every direction: an exuberant J on the right side of his head, a backward J on the left, preposterous spikes on top. His ankles were thick beneath cream-colored socks; the ties of his black cross-training shoes barely reined in the swollen mounds of his feet.

His pronouncements were as fierce and unruly as his hair: The paramount thing in a poem is the way it sounds, or rather the way it engages the parts of the mouth—tongue, roof, lips. The unfortunate use of “the barn dies” in one of his own poems, because that’s a dead metaphor—a barn can “rot” and it can “fall down” but it can’t “die.” His having no truck with contemporary poets; as one ages, he said (and he is truly aged), one can’t comprehend poets 50 years younger. Instead he reads—he relishes—poets from the seventeeth century. (But he does look forward to Louise Glück’s next book.)

And he devours Thomas Hardy. “The novels are good, but the poems are GREAT,” he says, allowing that last adjective to come out as a growl.

To Hardy we owe the haunting title of this post, the closing lines of “During the Wind and Rain,” with its internal half-rhymes (name and rain), its unruly pentameter, its concentration of hard consonants rolling like stones along the tongue.

In a world that often seems to reward the tamed, the socially gracious, the kempt, the professional, this poet was a reminder of a sensibility that carves deeper meanings.

I’m celebrating spring (which has arrived ahead of schedule, with balmy temperatures and birds chirping) by taking another literature class at Harvard with my favorite book critic. (The identity of class and critic will remain hidden for now.)

I recently cracked a very famous novel and was confounded by this first sentence, which seems to break every rule in my book—and in every other book on writing:

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

I ask you, why did the writer launch his novel this way? Please submit your answers in the Comments, below. In fact, let’s make it a contest! The first person to 1) correctly name the writer and the work of literature from which this passage comes, and 2) explain how and why the passage contradicts the rules of good writing as they are taught today, and then 3) suggest why the author chose to write in such a style, will receive a free, signed copy of Sin and Syntax.

Bonne chance!

Notes from a day with agents and editors

Last Friday I hosted a gathering of two editors, four agents, and about 30 midcareer writers at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The session set out to demystify book publishing and was intended to help journalists understand what role books might play in our careers.

The speakers came from small and large agencies, and small and large publishers, in Boston and New York. The journalists, at Harvard for a year of study and reflection, are considering what part books play in those careers, especially as newspapers shrink, staff jobs disappear, unpaid bloggers proliferate, and book publishing is buffeted by forces as disparate as Apple, Barnes & Noble, and the recession.

Here’s a random sampling of ideas that surfaced:

Editors and agents (at least these ones!) love working with journalists, because they are able to write on deadline and because their areas of knowledge and insight are so diverse.  But, as Helene Atwan of Beacon Press pointed out, journalists need to unlearn the art of the short paragraph and even the gift of quick study. Books, in other words, are a place to go deep, write richly, take the time to be thoughtful, and see the complexities in subjects.

Editors and agents think simultaneously about the quality of the idea and the existence of a market for it. This is why in developing a book proposals it’s important to research and write about the competition—the existence of other successful books in an area shows that people will be willing to plop down $25 for a book on the subject. As Wendy Strothman explained, if she’s going to spend months with an author developing a worthy idea, she wants to make sure that there will be a payoff in eventual sales.

Agent Jill Kneerim described helping authors take an angle that are too narrow and too focused (on, say, a particular event in 1915) and broadening it to encompass a larger sweep of history (a particular country in 1915, for example). This allows the author to tell a more epic story and enlarges the market for the book.

The panelists expressed mixed views on Twitter. (Is it really worth an author’s time? Does it enable one to develop and express strong and interesting ideas?). Agent David Patterson reminded the crowd that an intense focus on writing the book should trump online omnipresence. But all agreed that Web sites are now de rigueur for authors. Laurie Liss pointed out that it’s important for writers to have a place where people can find their work if they do a Google search.

Editor and publicity guru Lissa Warren noted that when a proposal comes before an editorial board, she and others are looking for a reason to say “no.” If an author doesn’t have a platform—i.e. a built-in audience that has already been developed through a career of covering a certain subject, a Web site, or a Twitter following—it may be hard to have faith that word on the book may get out.

Want to learn more? Read Jill Kneerim’s memo on “How to Find an Agent.” Check out Wendy Strothman’s “Suggestions for Writing a Non-Fiction Proposal.” San Francisco agent Ted Weinstein teaches a “Book Proposal Bootcamp,” offering a free audio version of the workshop on his Web site.

Another helpful resource for proposals is Michael Larsen’s book on the subject. Finally, my own primer on advances and royalties is in the Sin and Syntax Salon.

If you have found other useful resources for writers dreaming of publishing a book, please add them in the Comments, below.

“Do you believe in writer’s block?” asked a journalist friend recently at dinner. Her tone made me think she was one of the lucky ones—writers who never hesitate, never doubt themselves, never contemplate scrapping it all and going to law school.

I soon learned that she is no more immune than the rest of us from the ins and outs of starting and stopping, trying and failing, hoping and despairing. She was just curious about my opinion.

Of course I offered it.

The easiest kind of writer’s block to define is just that—a block. That moment of sitting down to page or screen without a shred of an idea about where to start or what to say. The block makes its presence known in front of a deadline, when you have no choice but to sit. The “block” soon turns to agony. I’m not good enough to write this article, goes the voice in the head, or my editor will hate whatever I do, I’m going to be fired (or my article rejected), I am a fraud! I am headed for disaster and humiliation.

Some forms of writer’s block, though, mask themselves. Like procrastination. It sounds like just a bad habit—“I could write if I just put my mind to it, but I let myself wait till the last minute.” The thing is, if procrastination is motivated by fear—if it is the agony of writer’s block that you are putting off—it is writer’s block.

The worst kind of writer’s block is even more specious. This is the kind I suffer from. I often take on minor projects instead of the major ones I really want to do. Or I pitch safe stories over those that excite me but expose me to some risk. Or I write another language book—the book my editor wants—instead of the historical narrative that really makes my heart jump.

So, what do you do when your creative juices freeze up? I like the advice Mark Morris gives, mentioned in the previous post. Just start working, thinking about why you love writing rather than the fearsome task ahead. Just do the thing that reconnects you to the passion for your art.

I have some rituals that help me get started, that get me past those moments of resistance or fear. First, I start my mornings by sweeping my studio floor, or the patio outside my door. I put on some wonderful music—I’m partial to Hawaiian slack key guitar, Mozart, or Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert—and I putter. I give my imagination some room to roam. It needs to be awakened. When it kicks in, starting to write feels like fun rather than a chore.

For some projects I keep a journal, and I write there—some freewriting, or just random thoughts—before I formally begin the assignment at hand. Again, it’s about letting the juices start to flow. And sometimes  a few lines from the journal, or a metaphor, are so good they qualify for the finished piece.

Finally, I recognize that I can’t just be left brain all the time, focusing on projects I’ve been assigned, or work I know I can sell. I have a practice I call “risk writing” (see “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline”). Every few pieces, I let myself write something that I want to write, and I write it the way I want to write it, and the length I want to write it in. Some of my favorite all-time pieces have emerged from the risk writing. (“Souvenirs” traces a complex of relationships between me, my mother, and Paris; “Cutouts” came when I remembered a vision from the past.)

These risky pieces allow me to develop new muscles—maybe a new voice, or the ability to handle certain kinds of material. And in writing them, I am warming up for that other book in me, the one that makes my heart jump. When the time comes to start, I’ll be more confident that I can carry it off.

In my last post, I wrote about seeing a performance of Mozart Dances by the Mark Morris Dance Group. A few days before that performance at the Boston Opera, I listened in on a conversation between Morris and Richard Dyer, a former music critic for the Boston Globe, which took place at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. I reported on that conversation with a group of Tweeting journalists #markmorris. Check it out!

My ears perked up when a dance teacher asked the choreographer whether he ever feared being blocked, and what he did when he “dried up.” Morris described being creatively blocked as a kind of occupational hazard: “Successful artists always have this certain fear of being discovered to be a true charlatan,” he said.

Morris’s advice to those who find themselves blocked: “Just make up a dance a day. Change it. Then make its opposite. Then throw them both away. Watch something else. Make another dance. Read more books and learn more music.

“My courage is bigger than my fear,” Morris added. “But I have big courage.”

We can’t all have courage as big as Morris’s, but we can cultivate it. There are two other important kernels in his advice: First, don’t let your inner critic stop you from making more art. Just keep making things. Second, don’t stop reading and learning—connect with the things about your art that you love, and that set you on fire.

Let me tell you about something I saw last night. Eighteen men and women, all lightly dressed in summer white, lay on a proscenium stage. From the floor, 36 naked hands bent at right angles from 36 wrists and wriggled up, each at a slightly different pace. Let me make sure you’ve got the picture: 36 splayed palms with urgently curled fingertips, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, clockwise and counterclockwise—as if working the lids of enormous and invisible upside-down jars—and at the same time lifting slowly, pushed upwards by long, lithe, tendril-like arms.

Just to give you a sense of the oddness of the image, these naked, floating, turning palms rose from a stage deep in the heart of Boston (in a building with crystal chandeliers, ruby damask walls, curving staircases, and gold-leaf everywhere) and deep in the heart of winter (on a night whose 17-degree cold plummeted to a wind-chill factor in the aughts).

I was watching Mozart Dances, by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and my imagination was being lifted and loosened like those imaginary glass jars.

Upstage, a backdrop was turned into a giant canvas, covered with enormous watercolor brushstrokes—one part mad child making fingerpaintings, one part mad giant making like Motherwell.

The dances were sometimes balletic, sometimes modern, always surprising: pliés, bourées, jetés, and attitudes, but all done barefoot, barelimbed, and with ironic twists: arms floating up all pretty, then squeaking into something angular and awkward; a circle dance suggesting Matisse, then flattening into the Virginia Reel; languid ballerinas freezing into Egyptian vase ornaments, a butterfly morphing into an insect, a bird into a mechanical doll, a corsair into a sailor cruising the street. The lyric vocabulary of ballet devolved into the vernacular, the poetic turned pedestrian.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

As I headed back out into the bitter cold, I thought about Mark Morris’s creative instincts. He never lets himself cross over into cliché, and he plants, plays with, and then supplants our expectations. His language is always surprising, fresh, and funny. I can’t get that one image out of my head, the palms floating up from the floor. They are terribly close to something I’ve seen before, yet remain completely unfamiliar: Sperm, propelled by wriggling tails? Lily pads, levitating out of the swamp and dancing on their stems? Lima beans, sprouting up into the air rather than up through the dirt? Periscopes, pushing up through water and taking a look around?

Images organic, evocative, surreal. And entirely original.

Sitting in the cab of a pickup, waiting to drive up the coast of O‘ahu, I find myself watching a butterfly four feet in front of the windshield. My focus sharpens. The butterfly’s wings are like the iced feuilles of a French pastry—terribly thin slices of tangerine, edged in mocha. They lift and lower, lift and lower, forming two erect parallel planes, then two flat spans. The insect swoops and twitches among clusters of tiny, pansy-shaped blossoms, spears of jade-green leaves, and waxy teardrops of orange berries. I have been looking at this amazing bush of purple, green, and orange every day for a week. But I haven’t seen it.

Our senses are like tender shoots of foliage. They respond to nature, closing down in the cold. And they respond to human nature, curling up in the face of searing criticism, lying in wait when colleagues are wintry, turning to steel under stress. Then, in a place like Hawaii—where I grew up, where I seek creative renewal—they slowly open with light, warmth, the gentleness of tradewinds, and the kindness of old friends.

If the tropics pry open the senses, they humble the writer. It’s one thing to discover the powers of perception, quite another to find powers of description. It can take days for my muscles to let go, longer for my senses to open, and even longer to connect words to images.

Ten days into my most recent trip, and two hours after seeing the butterfly, I hit the Hau‘ula Loop Trail. My hamstrings, my heart, and my breath struggle awkwardly to find a rhythm on the root-strewn hillside. I weave in and out of shade and light, along a corridor of tufting ti plants, past a stand of stately ironwood, into a grove of Cook pines. I crest the hill and raise my eyes. Off to the left, the vertical trunks and horizontal branches of a silk-oak frame the western face of the next ridge, resting in shadow. The late-afternoon sun casts its light on the branches in the foreground—the feathery leaves of the silk-oak shimmer silver, the fronds of a palm arc gold, the lime-green scythes of a koa cut into the sky.

In the background, a hundred greens stitch patterns into the next ridge: the shaggy gray-green of ironwoods, the waxy emerald of African tulips, the dark-teal arrowheads of Cook pines, the olive tufts of wilelaiki, the khaki canopies of eucalyptus.

I am seeing green, as if for the first time.

Didja catch two fascinating articles in last Sunday’s New York Times? In the Op-Ed pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi writes about the heroic—and hidden—work behind great literature, and about the myopia of those infatuated with the idea of e-books.

David Carr, in “Why Twitter Will Endure,” confesses his own infatuation with Twitter, and defies conventional notions about that brand of social media. He sees the possibility of narrative in “short-burst communication” and applauds the economy and precision forced by text messages. But he concedes that “the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

In Talking Story, Shelly Runyon writes about the Twitter feed of Susan Orlean, and what it tells us about Orlean’s particular brand of short-burst communication. For you doubters who snicker at the Morse-Code-like rhythms of Twitter and insist that Tweet feeds are fluff, Orlean may change your mind. The author of The Orchid Thief proves two things about micro-narrative: first, that it is possible to tell stories in 140 characters; second, that it takes a damn good writer to do it.

I just read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle and had myself a snigger.

Tom Torriglia happily proclaims himself part of the grammar police, and he even started a group called NAGG (the National Association of Good Grammar).

But already I don’t trust him. He insists that the “correct” way to say 2010 is “twenty ten,” arguing that we pronounced 1812 “eighteen twelve” and the 1960’s the “nineteen sixties.” Torriglia goes so far as to say “twenty aught nine” for last year. Were the rest of us misled during the aughts—two thousand one and onward—seduced by Arthur C. Clarke and his 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Here’s the thing: the pronunciation of 2010 is not a grammar issue, it’s a usage issue. (See my brief explanations of grammar, style, and usage in Online and on the Shelf.)

I’m with Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who comments that both pronunciations are equally correct—if there is such a thing—though he predicts that twenty ten is going to take over. “It’s shortest,” he explains. “It’s easiest to understand.”

I think Torriglia once played his accordion at a book party I threw. He’s a great guy. But for now I trust his musical notes more than his nagging.

I spent the plane ride home to California correcting grammar exams. What fun! Seriously. This fall an intrepid group of Harvard expository-writing students followed me for 14 weeks on a romp through the nouns & verbs, simple sentences, and—eek!—relative clauses. We wrapped up by sorting through the sentences of Lewis Carroll. (Alice in Wonderland is great for prepositional phrases—all those ins, outs, downs, and throughs.) We also contemplated the comma, the semicolon, and other sundry pieces of punctuation.

See For Writers and Teachers for a sampling of the kind of work we did in the class. If semi-colons still have you stumped, see A Punctuation Primer and Punctuation: Pet Peeves.

I can’t end the year without a little contest for you, my readers. Wanna win a New Year’s present from me? OK, see if you can punctuate the following group of words so that they make sense:

John where Paul had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval.

Enter your guesses in the comments area below. The first and/or most correct answer will win a first edition of Wired Style, the revolutionary book-in-a-box that is now an official collector’s item.

An intriguing collection of unlike things ends up on the New York Times list of 100 notable books each year. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction claims that nonfiction is losing its “frisson.” I hardly agree—see my essay in Talking Story—but if you need further convincing, go no further than the NYT’s top 100.

Here is the Connie Cull:

I draw much inspiration from reading about the lives of writers and artists, and this year offers a good crop of such biographies, including Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka; Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon; and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. (“Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave,” wrote Joy Williams in her review of this short story writer. “O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so.”)

Some question whether memoir counts as journalism—or narrative journalism. I tend to include it in the broader category of nonfiction, and scrutinize the credibility of the authors. These two pass muster: City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, by Edmund White, and Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan.

Then there’s the world of ideas, some of the hardest books to write for a lay audience. Robert Wright succeeded in The Evolution of God, as did the every-interesting Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

For sheer drama—reported tales that read like a novel but tell us something important about our world—my picks are Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (a pal from the early days of Wired and his then-magazine, Might), The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (my newest favorite writer for his mastery of character and suspense), and The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. (I’m cheating on that last one: it’s not on the Times Top 100, but I think it should be.)

And then there’s Columbine, by Dave Cullen, which does make the list. Cullen is a Denver journalist with whom I’ve stayed in touch since we both attended a Niemen Foundation seminar. Reviewer Jennifer Senior commends him for resisting narrative cliché (i.e., starting his tale 48 hours before the notorious killing spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, stopping the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooling back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass). In my book this is reason enough for nomination. But narrative skill takes more than just resisting cliché. About the central surprise of the book Senior writes, “I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the entire school was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism.”

How’s that for frisson?

I’ll bet you’ve had your fill this week of the former beauty queen, former mayor of Wasilla, former governor of Alaska, former vice-presidential candidate. I know I have. So while the pundits talk on and on about Sarah Palin, I space out and listen to their grammar.

I have to admit, I was surprised to hear Gwen Ifill and Bob Woodward, on ABC’s This Week, screw up their pronouns when discussing Going Rogue. It was the pronouns “going rogue” in their exchange:

Ifill: “Women will be drawn to her story—and that’s who she’s speaking to…. These are people who are ignored, who nobody counts into their thinking.”

Woodward: “You can be drawn to somebody’s story—and buy their book and read their book. That doesn’t mean you want them to be President, or that you’re drawn to them to lead.

OK, OK, it’s not fair to expect perfect grammar when people are speaking extemporaneously. But c’mon! These are two of the country’s top journalists!

Gwen, it should be “whom she’s speaking to” and “whom nobody counts into their thinking.”

Bob, please. Isn’t one Sarah sufficient? Somebody is singular, so readers can buy her book and read her book and want her to be president and be drawn to her to lead.

Doesn’t Bob Woodward read this blog? I just wrote about Barak Obama’s rogue pronouns a few weeks ago!

The other day I was trying to impress upon a class of writers how cool it is that every sentence in English can be boiled down to one of four sentence patterns. They were having trouble grasping the second pattern, whose main elements are a subject, a transitive verb, and a direct object. That object thing was giving them heartburn.

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally. The name of the game allegedly derives from the phrase the Surrealists created when they first played the game, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the game: “Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”

OK, I’ll grant you that we didn’t exactly turn 109 Sever Hall at Harvard University into 54 rue du Chateau in Paris. But following the rule Subject/Transitive Verb/Direct Object we gave the Exquisite Corpse a good try, coming up with:

• The coffee beans sautéed the rooster.
• Vampires borrow snow.
• The conductor kicked the can.

Changing the rule to Subject/Static Verb/Complement, we got:

• The Easter Bunny is upset.
• Santa Claus was a worrywart.

Good enough for Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and André Breton? I’d say so.

I mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve so far muscled our way through Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, and Henry Green. Now we are reading Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. It’s an inspiring read in all sorts of ways, but one thing I noticed right away was the Irish-Turk-sort-of-American writer’s use of metaphors.

Take this description, right at the beginning of the book, written in the voice of the Dutch narrator: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

The sky is one of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way. Think of all those “rosy-fingered dawns” and “skies red enough to delight a sailor.”  Yet so many scenes must include a description of the sky! Here are some others that have impressed me:

“More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow flow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.” (From the short story “Friendly Fire,” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2008)

“Overhead, the sky is the color of a peacock’s breast, shimmery, nearly metallic blue. Towards the east, the drape of night is beginning to close over us, highlighting the days’ lingering colors. The blue overhead fades westward into a dramatic periwinkle, which in turn gives way to an intense lavender dissolving into a brilliant fuchsia horizon. A few hundred yards in the distance, the great fountain, already lit by yellow lights, glows, the enormous ancient plane tress that line the Cours Mirabeau, in their stark winter nakedness just two days ago, are covered now with tiny buds, like stars in the fading light.” (From “The Provençal Sky,” by Michele Anna Jordan in Travelers’ Tales Provence.)

“In the early evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses tool on the colors of the sky. A Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue.” (From the opening of Chapter Eight in Atonement, by Ian McEwan, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.)

Three of these four examples are from fiction, but I’d be willing to bet that the authors spent a lot of time looking at real skies and a lot of time figuring out how to put the images into words. Nonfiction writers can do the same attentive looking and the same imaginative reckoning.

Do you have a favorite? Add it here.

Barak Obama may be a damn good rhetoritician, but his politically correct use of pronouns is bugging me. Take this, from the July 22 press conference when he waded into the Henry Louis Gates-Sgt. Crowley brouhaha: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”

While pundits jumped on the President’s case for saying the Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” I muttered under my breath about his use of “they” when “he” or “she” was called for.

It may be the height of pettiness to demand grammatical perfection of presidents speaking off the cuff. But this isn’t the only time Obama has committed this particular gaff. In a pre-election commercial he said, “Every parent in America wants the same thing: good education for their child.”

Doesn’t a good education include grammar?

Now, I had the same English teachers as our president—at Punahou School, in Honolulu—and to be honest I can’t remember what grammar lessons we got there. But I know that somebody is one of those troublesome indefinite pronouns (like anyone, anybody, everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, no one, and nobody) that is always singular.

I also know that I’m wading into one of the subjects that can make word nerds—not the type usually prone to unbridled passions—go apoplectic. Some recite history and a seemingly infinite string of writers (everyone from Spenser to Shakespeare, from Austen to Auden, from Mark Twain to Rudyard Kipling) who use “they” as a singular pronoun. (See this screed at crossmyt.com.)  Others (like Merriam-Webster’s) argue that if this is how people use the pronoun, we should all accept it. And others, like Grammar Girl, advise us to play it safe by recasting sentences.

I’m interested neither in political correctness nor grammatical hypercorrectness. I’m interested in clarity. Using “their” to refer to a single person blurs lines and introduces ambiguity.

So, Mr. President: We know that Gates is a guy. Don’t use grammar stupidly. Go ahead and say the police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that he was in his own home.

In case you haven’t noticed, each week I post some writing and grammar exercises—a  easy, self-guided writing class. Check out For Writers and Teachers, under Resources. I have a growing email list of teachers who receive once-a-week notes on using Sin and Syntax in the classroom. Please feel free to join us.

I try not to be a grammar pedagogue here, using this blog mostly for thoughts on writing. But I’m feeling a pent-up desire to go grammatical. Next post: One of my biggest pet peeves and how I wish our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president didn’t mash his pronouns.

I’m fascinated with writing that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven nonfiction, whether in print, online, over the radio or in documentary films.

Ken Burns is hard to ignore—not just because his The National Parks: America’s Best Idea preempted PBS prime-time programming last week—but also because he has the chops and the resources to do great narrative journalism. I mainly agreed with Mary McNamara’s LA Times review, but while watching endless footage of razorlike mountains and verdant plains, I couldn’t help muttering, “Does it have to be so long?” “Could the writing have more frisson?” “Can Burns do tone that isn’t elegiac?”

As editor of the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest, I once wrote a column called “Narrative” Is Not a Synonym for “Long.” In it I offered examples of some who write tight but still trace a narrative arc:  Charlie LeDuff, in “Frozen in Indifference,” published in The Detroit News, keeps his focus pointed and poignant. Matthew Parker’s “A Student of Intimacy, Step by Step” is one of many examples in the Modern Love column of the Sunday The New York Times. Another Sunday Times short narrative I hate to miss is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, “The Rural Life.”

Touché to Burns for stretching our attention spans, but the dude needs a tough editor. Some of the footage is so familiar as to be predictable (like Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial). Internal repetitions need paring, especially when interviewees echo each other. Then there are the musical schemes, fresh in The Civil War but hackneyed now.

In one voiceover, a park lover comments on the “artistic restraint” of wolves in the wilderness. We all need some of that artistic restraint.

I’ve always had a soft spot for William Safire. Of course, I’m too young to hold against him his swordsmanship as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, especially since the phrases that survived that period—“nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”—seem more laughable than irksome. (Any wordsmith knows that alliteration should never be carried that far.) Even his nastier jabs—calling Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar”—lost their sting in the repartee that followed (a Clinton aide said that the chief of state, “if he were not president,” would have busted Safire’s nose; Safire parried by praising the use of the subjunctive.)

He may have co-opted the Hindu word for “priest” to describe his political commentary, but it was as a language pundit that I came to follow Safire. I first read his syndicated column in the San Francisco Chronicle when I was a young writer. I can’t tell you how many pieces I clipped and copied, forcing them on high-school students and wannabe writers. He was witty on who and whom, tart on tautologies; from Safire I learned that syntax could be sexy, that writing about language could charm.

My true fondness for Safire, though, came in the mid-90s, when I was copy chief at Wired magazine. In a twist on the Oedipal process Harold Bloom describes (in which young writers slay their literary fathers), I made the keyboard my epée, tsk-tsking him for not knowing that zines (from the science-fiction fanzines, which had morphed into webzines and e-zines) were not spelled “zeens.”

That led to my most thrilling Safire moment, in 1996, when Safire recommended my book Wired Style as a Christmas “Gifts for Gab.” I read that particular New York Times magazine column while sitting in a white nightie in my sunny bay window in California. I jumped up, put on a recording of batá drums, and danced to a chant honoring the Afro-Cuban deity Obatala, god of creativity and justice. Not the usual response, surely, to Safire’s “On Language,” but it conveys the power of the moment.

In Safire’s generation (and earlier) the language gods were white, Eastern men—H.W. Fowler, William Strunk, E. B. White, James Kilpatrick, John Simon. There was something subversive about—if not exactly earning a seat at the table—at least having my book in the column.

Friends teasingly dubbed me The Cyber Safire, and the jousting continued. I unchivalrously chided him for insisting that into was the right preposition to follow jacked. No, no, I argued—in is a particle when it follows jack, or log, or for that matter tune, and it needs to retain its terse identity. Safire, or rather his assistants, started calling when questions surfaced about tech terms—coordinates instead of “phone numbers,” blog as a verb. I never talked to the man himself, but every now and then a surprise would arrive by mail: the latest Safire tome, thoughtfully inscribed.

I’m sad that he’s gone. And grateful for his exhilarating example.

If you think I’m obsessed with point of view, you’re right! I am auditing a Harvard class taught by James Wood (also a critic for The New Yorker), who has been discussing point of view in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. And in the first lecture of the class, Postwar American and British Fiction, Woods suggested that we might “want to pick up some Flaubert” and look specifically at point of view. OK, so I devoured all 275 pages of Madame Bovary.

Flaubert pioneered—or at least put on the map—the “free indirect style,” in which an omniscient narrator suddenly evaporates, entering into a character’s consciousness and representing his or her thoughts. (Check out the market scene with Emma and her lover-to-be.)

Of course, in nonfiction, free indirect style works less well. I call a writer who engages in such shape-shifting a “Wobbly Narrator.” Most writers who jump around from “he” to “you” to “I” are novices who haven’t mastered point of view, or who are afraid to pick a stance toward the material—whether the first-person singular of memoir, the second-person singular of colloquial writers reaching out to readers, or the third-person singular of the reporter concerned with credibly and precisely observing others.

Lemme find some examples of The Wobbly Narrator. I’ll post them in comments—and invite you to do the same.

As far as playing with point of view, and not in blogs but in the pages of The New York Times and Rolling Stone, two of my favorite political journalists combine novel points of view with strong attitude and voice. They would be Mark Leibovich and Matt Taibbi.

Check out this story from November 2006 (one of my all-time favorites) by Leibovich. It’s written in the classic reportorial third person, but an awful lot of Leibovich seeps in. My favorite paragraph, describing President Bush after the “thumpin’” Republicans took in the primaries: “He looked worn at his must-see midday news conference, in need of a haircut, good-night’s sleep, better makeup job, hug, vacation in Crawford or some combination thereof. The grooves across his forehead were dark and articulated, his voice slightly hoarse. He wore a maroon tie, the color of blood.”

Then look at a 2007 profile of Mike Huckabee by Taibbi. He starts in the slangy second person (“you”), then writes the rest of the piece in the first.

I’ve been thinking about point of view. After all, what defines a blog if not point of view? A blog brings you one person’s prejudices, insights, and endless opinions. (Of course, the best blogs bring you much more—like new information, credible reporting, and, sometimes, bursts of brilliant writing.)

But a blog often comes alive because of another aspect of point of view, the literary aspect. The writer sets this point of view by his or her choice of pronouns—I, we, you, he, one, they. I’ve pondered what point of view to use here: The soul-bearing I? The inclusive we, which can also verge into the elegant “editorial we” or the arrogant “royal we”? Or the informal you, capable of sliding from authoritative, even bossy, to irreverent and hip?

Joan Didion once wrote about the act of choosing the first person singular point of view: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act… There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.”

As you see, I’m going for I, not because I’m a secret bully, but because I want you, my reader, to know that this is really coming from me. This point of view will, I hope, let me gush about writing, even as the articles on the site may have the much more reasoned third-person perspective of the journalist and critic.

I’ll post more about this soon, but in the meantime, talk to me about point of view. Have you seen blogs that dare to diverge from the first person? Are there journalists who go for something more revealing than the detached third person? Can you think of a nonfiction writer who uses you like the novelist Jay McInerney?

Who out there is playing with point of view?