The Various and Wondrous Modes of Wordsmithing

Hoping to better my professional writing and improve my years-long application¹ to the Foreign Service, the other day I attended a writing workshop for cables - the missives that diplomats send to Washington that serve as on-the-ground updates and which, if written well, can inform our decision-makers’ thinking and influence our foreign policy. The big take-away was that people are busy, and that important decision-making people are even more busy, so write a good memo, but summarize at the beginning and at the end, because chances are, only the beginning will be read.

The best part of the workshop was when I was the only attendee who knew the identity of this Great American Author, whose face the cable-writing-instructor projected onto the screen and used as an example of waiting too long to write:

JD Salinger, forever haunted by what he saw and smelled at Dachau

The presenter used J.D. Salinger to illustrate the danger of delaying submitting your cable in an effort to perfect what you’re hoping to say; often, it’s better to submit sooner, because in the world of cables, the what of the message is more important than the how of the message. The presenter brought up Salinger because the presenter did not think Salinger’s last book was worth the wait. Meanwhile, I went from feeling pretty darn proud of myself for being more culturally prepared than my classmates for the Handsome Great American Author Trivia to feeling pretty darn unprepared to assess Salinger’s later work, having only ever read The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.² But I assumed the presenter was correct.

I’m reminded of what the head of the Northwest Booksellers Association told

Chuck Palahniuk

- that if authors didn’t publish a new book every year, the reading public would forget them. Or, as in every review of The Smile’s latest album, the quote by Johnny Greenwood about preferring to “make records 90 % as good that come out twice as often.” Because unless you’re writing for Foreign Affairs, no one wants another Chinese Democracy.

My senior year of undergrad I feared I might fail one of the last courses I needed for my Bachelors’ in English when the professor of my Romantic Literature course wrote on the first of my four papers, “Wil, there’s a difference between writing and speaking - you should learn it.”

Ouch. But necessary. And I finally learned writing shouldn’t sound like talking.³⁴⁵

The next big shift in my understanding of the various modes of writing was when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria and frequently wrote grant proposals for the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds. I learned to write what I called, “Google-Translate English.” Text that avoided colloquialisms and used words with as few meanings as possible, so when it was inevitably cut and pasted into an online translation tool, there would be the least risk of misunderstanding.

Lend me your ears < Hear me out < Listen

Hold your horses < Take a break < Pause

My favorite Bulgarian phrase that didn’t translate to English? Gola Voda. (гола вода). Literally, “naked water.” Meaning, “this is pointless / this is a waste of time / this is ridiculous / this amounts to nothing.”

My first year of graduate school I feared I might fail one of the first courses I needed to continue in my Masters’ in Higher Education and Student Affairs when my Student Identity Development professor wrote on my first of three papers, “Wil, there’s a difference between using the ‘APA Style Guide, 7th edition’ to guide your writing and peppering your paper deliriously with footnotes - you should learn it.⁶⁷

Ouch. But necessary. And I finally learned to refer to a guide for certain kinds of text.

So, when

Craig Clevenger

wrote that he kept a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in his back pocket and pulled it out to read whenever he was standing in line at the grocery or the urinal; I bought myself a pocket-sized copy. If I had any bibles of fiction writing, I guess it’d be Elements of Style and Palahniuk’s Consider This.

Completely complicating the instruction of Elements of Style, around the time I first read Craig Clevenger, I also discovered the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones⁸ One of Jones’ tricks is the conversational style of his writing, which increases the authenticity of his fiction, which trick intensifies the shock when his neighbors turn out to be werewolves or vampires. For a while there, I tried writing in that style. The conversational sentence fragment. The question that you ask in second-person, you know? The playful misdirect before confessing you caused the end of the world.

Most recently, Lauren Groff taught me that men tend to write short, punchy sentences - acquiring authority from their newspaperesque brevity.⁹

For a couple years now, I’ve wanted to revisit Franny and Zooey; well, Zooey - because it shouldn’t work as a story; not much happens; the characters aren’t unpleasant, but they don’t exactly endear; yet in spite of that, Zooey is immensely readable. I suspect it is the musicality of the prose, but I’m not sure.¹⁰

I don’t dare compare myself to Salinger, but my freshman year of undergrad, when I was a TV/Radio major, my History of Media professor wrote on my paper, “Ha!” and when he read what I had written, in his performance he inserted pauses and emphasis to words that I had not intended, and haha, it was funny, especially since I had no idea how I had accomplished it. So, that’s my fantasy about Salinger, that in spite of himself, he just couldn’t help writing amazing sentences. I know it’s not true. But it’s also¹¹ my fantasy about myself. That it’s okay if I don’t write everyday, because some day I will, and my writing will be beautiful on accident, and recognized world-wide, and worth the wait.

1. Meaning I have applied many times and many times had my Department of State candidacy denied.

2. But as my fellow George Saunders’ Story Clubbers know, whom could ever beat Chekhov? красивые авторы объединяйтесь

3. Unless it’s a blog post, but this was pre-blog internet by a couple years; our campus email had only switched from LINUX to HTML the year before.

4. Or a contemporary short story, told in a distinctive voice, conveying authority via authenticity-sounding, abiding by the rules of Minimalism, breaking your heart with its un-writerly truth telling. (See for example, the excellent Strays by Mark Richard).

5. Proto-Substack.

6. Like David Foster Wallace’ (DFW) marvelous essays, where, well, if I could, I would footnote the footnotes, more than I have comma’d this sentence, this example by way of imitation, this footnote on footnotes.

7. If you’re somehow alien to DFW’s essays, here’s one much smarter but thematically similar to what I’m attempting here; it’s long, skip the first page, start after his byline, but notice the difference between the writing of the essay proper and his footnotes. It’s a review of a Usage Guide / Dictionary, and you’ll need one while reading it, but while the main text is magazine style (researched and succinct and growing logically from its beginning), his footnotes - instead of being academic - are counterintuitively conversational, friendly, and digressive.

8. Both those guys, along with Will Christopher Baer, sharing fans with Chuck Palahniuk back in 2008, which is how they got recommended to me.

9. See Hemingway, obviously. But lots of others, too.

10. Hence my desire to revisit, and while I’m at it, to read Nine Stories, too - which I read is somewhat necessary to understand what is happening in Franny and Zooey.

11. I wrote “also,” but I mean, “mostly.”