“Writing Tools”
By Roy Peter Clark
Little, Brown and Company, 2006
If you have been engaged in a craft called writing, maybe as far back as high school, you will recall that “English for Filipinos” for Jean Edades was your first introduction to rules of writing. You learned how to avoid literal translations from Filipino, or steer clear of barbarisms. In college, especially when you enrolled in a journalism course, the standard reference book was “Journalism Manual,” by Jose Luna Castro. Imported American books on grammar, syntax and composition were required reading.
Nowadays, high school and college students are introduced to the “Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. It is a thin handy reference book where you can quickly check if you are using the English properly or not. With this book as guide, students can deal with tricky prepositions, know the distinction between transitive and intransitive verb (they will not be caught saying “advocate for” or “seek for”).
Now, there are two books by author Roy Peter Clark that have been off the press: The “Writing Tools” —one published in 2006, and “The Glamour of Grammar” in 2010. Interestingly, this column reviewed the latter book in February 2011 in the Inquirer—earlier than “Writing Tools” which is being reviewed this issue.
Both books are for students and professionals in writing. Even Pulitzer Prize winners, or even Palanca awardees hereabouts, will find both books engaging, intriguing, and liberating.
They are engaging because author Clark has made writing as “easy as carpentry,” he says. His prose is punctuated by narrative—anecdotes, excerpts from novels and late-breaking news.
Intriguing because he challenges some established rules. While he endorses the “active voice” in a sentence, he prescribes the “passive voice” when you want the receiver of the action—like the victim—emphasized. He also challenges short sentences, and suggests that your writing must be like a “melodic flow.”
Liberating because Clark stresses that writing must flow like breathing. He does not believe in the “writer’s block.” With a minimum knowledge of grammar and usage, he says, the writer can write freely—and free from the strictures imposed on us by rigid grammarians.
“If you want to write, here’s a secret: The writer’s struggle is overrated, a con game, a cognitive distortion, a self-fulfilling prophecy, the best excuse for not writing,” Clark declares. He quotes Roger Simon, who rhetorically asked: “Why should I get writer’s block, when my father never got truck driver’s block!”
It is not really as easy as that, when you consider that Clark has included this quote from Red Smith on the supposed writer’s agony: “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
“Writing Tools,” true to its title offers 50 tools for writing—not rules, Clark quickly adds. He reveals that we know most of these “tools”—and he is just giving them names. “You cannot think, speak, write, or read without them But now these tools will have names, so you can talk about them in different ways. As your critical vocabulary grows, your writing will improve.”
These tools are clustered in four “boxes” as he calles them—Nuts and Bolts, Special Effects, Blueprints, and Useful Habits.
The Nuts and Bolts Box shows strategies for making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels. The Special Effects box shows tools of economy, clarity, originality and persuasion. The Blueprints Box explores ways where you can organize and build stories, even reports. And the Useful Habits box suggests day-to-day routines suggested for the writer to achieve “living a life of productive writing.”
“Make meaning early,” he starts off, “then let weaker elements branch to the right.” He explains a “right-branching” sentence. “Subject and verb of the main clause join on the left, while the other elements branch to the right.” He refers to John Steinbeck’s style: “Clarity and narrative energy flow through the passage, as one sentence builds on another,” he points out.
The tools will prove handy in any writing effort. Consider these short takes in the book: “Fear not the long sentence,” avoiding choppy construction. “Prefer the simple over the technical,” so you steer clear of jargon. “Play with words, even in serious stores,” making your prose witty and interesting.
There is a tool titled “Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction.” Many writers are always at the top with ethereal abstraction, and they remain there with their ivory tower.
Since this tool is really for the writing experts or masters, Clark devotes some time to explain it—thus:
“The easiest way to make sense of this tool is to begin with its name: The ladder of abstraction. That name contains two nouns. The first is ladder, a specific tool you can see, hold with your hands, and climb. It involves the senses. You can do things with it. Put it against a tree to rescue your cat Voodoo. The bottom of the ladder rests on concrete language. Concrete is hard, which is why when you fall off the ladder from a high place, you might break your foot.
“The second noun is abstraction. You can’t eat it or smell it, or measure it. It appeals not to the senses, but to the intellect. It is an idea that cries out for exemplification.”
This tool is most useful, not only for stories, but also to reports or essays which must travel up and down—from abstraction—like liberty and integrity to concrete things—like breaking the chain or refusing a bribe.
One more useful tool, rarely taught in writing courses is this box: “Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.”
Clark writes: “Good writers strive for originality, and they can achieve it by standing on a foundation of narrative archetypes, a set of story expectations than can be manipulated, frustrated, or fulfilled in novel ways.”
He gives examples: The journey there and back, winning the prize, loss and restoration, blessing becomes a curse, wasteland restored, rising from the ashes, the emperor has no clothes, descent into the underworld, and winning and losing a loved one.
There are archetypes, prototypes and stereotypes. Clark proposes that writers bring us up to some archetypal themes, and then follow that with concrete anecdotes, narratives and flesh and blood incidents. This separates the masters from the boys.
This book brings us up to the fundamentals, and then takes us down to brass tacks, to the details. With such a formula, you have form and structure, and then you flesh it out with humans and beasts—and even angels.
The song “As Times Goes By” comes as close as possible to this formula, especially with the line: “A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh … the fundamental things apply … It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die . . .” dmv.communications@gmail.com