Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by John Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kidder, Tracy.

  Good prose : the art of nonfiction / Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60472-3

  1. Authorship. 2. Prose literature—Authorship. 3. Creative nonfiction—Authorship. I. Todd, Richard. II. Title.

  PN145.K466 2013

  808.02—dc23 2012021165

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Front-jacket photograph: Blake Fitch/Glasshouse Images

  Back-jacket photograph: Matthew Jacques/Shutterstock

  v3.1

  Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other.

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. BEGINNINGS

  2. NARRATIVES

  Story

  Point of View

  Characters

  Structure

  3. MEMOIRS

  4. ESSAYS

  5. BEYOND ACCURACY

  Fact

  Beyond Fact

  6. THE PROBLEM OF STYLE

  Journalese

  The New Vernacular

  Institutionalese

  Propaganda

  7. ART AND COMMERCE

  8. BEING EDITED AND EDITING

  Being Edited

  Editing

  Notes on Usage

  Writing Guides and References

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION

  We met in Boston, at the offices of The Atlantic Monthly. Neither of us can remember the date, but it must have been around the time our first joint effort as writer and editor was published, in July 1973.

  By then The Atlantic was 117 years old. You sensed lineage when you walked up to its headquarters, an old brownstone on the corner of Arlington and Marlborough streets, facing the Public Garden. It was prime real estate, but it was also in Boston, not New York or Los Angeles. This was a magazine headquarters that seemed to say it was untouched by commerce, like the wealthy Boston matron who, in an old joke, says, “We don’t buy our hats, we have our hats.” A boiler room clamor faintly tolled in the offices upstairs, which had achieved High Shabbiness: faded mementos on the walls, layers of discolored paint on the ornate moldings, threadbare carpeting. The building once, in the era of Silas Lapham, had been a single-family mansion, and much of the floor plan had survived—many small rooms in back, in what must have been the servants’ quarters, and in front, offices with fireplaces that editors used now and then when the Boston winter outperformed the heating plant.

  It was an era that in memory seems closer to The Atlantic’s distant past than to our present, an era of typewriters and secretaries—mostly young, wry women with first-class educations trying to find their way into publishing careers. There were a few older women, two of them editors; one wore a hat at her desk. The women of both ranks kept regular hours. The men arrived midmorning and not long afterward went to lunch. “I’m going to grab a sandwich,” the editor-in-chief, Bob Manning, would tell his assistant, as he headed for the all-male sanctuary and full luncheon menu of the Tavern Club. The more junior men stepped out soon afterward, and often ended up at the Ritz Bar, a block away on Arlington Street. An editor with a writer in tow could charge his lunch to the magazine. Eggs Benedict, a couple of small carafes of white wine, and back to work, rarely later than two thirty. Many afternoons were cheery.

  The Atlantic was more or less broke by then, just barely paying its expenses and about to become an exercise in cultural deficit spending for its owner. Editors didn’t earn much, less than twenty thousand a year (which bought more then than now, of course, in part because there weren’t as many things to buy). A young writer was paid by the piece, two or three thousand dollars at most for a long article that might take four months to complete.

  The Atlantic’s archives held a trove of articles and stories and poems by just about every major American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The magazine was still one of America’s preeminent cultural arbiters, but the role was increasingly hard to play. In politics, The Atlantic had long stood for liberal thought. Now its editors stared out their windows onto a world in which liberalism was under attack from both sides, from the Weathermen as well as the Nixon White House. Every month the staff argued over the magazine’s cover and usually ended up with something colorful and overstated, in the vain hope that a touch of sensation would improve newsstand sales. But the covers threatened the magazine’s cultural legitimacy, the real attraction for its true audience and for many who worked there.

  •

  Nearly forty years is long enough to make the “us” of back then feel like “they.” We were young—Kidder twenty-seven, Todd thirty-two—and each of us was trying to stake out a literary future. To Todd, editing at The Atlantic granted prestige, like owning a fine antique. If he’d been in charge, the magazine would have reverted to the monochrome covers of its heyday.

  As for Kidder, the idea of publishing articles at The Atlantic was more than exciting enough, since he would have been grateful to be published anywhere. Phone calls were expensive back then and allowances for research miserly. For a young writer short of funds, it was convenient to spend time in the building, camping out as it were in one of its many vacant back offices and using the magazine’s phones for long-distance calls to sources for articles. Kidder spent many days and quite a few nights in the building, and many hours working with Todd, whose office had a fireplace and a view. After-hours provisions could be found in the bar in Manning’s office down the hall.

  We called each other by our surnames, as our sergeants had in army basic training. To Kidder, a childhood for Todd seemed improbable—he must have been born old, and probably born ironic to boot. To Todd, and practically everyone else, Kidder was young beyond his years. He was plainly ambitious, but his self-esteem ranged from abject to grandiose. Once, at a Christmas party that went on too long, he confronted Bob Manning and announced, “I’m the best damn journalist in the Western Hemisphere.” Hung over and contrite the next morning, he was comforted by Todd, who said, “At least you didn’t claim the whole world.” Each imagined himself forbearing of the other.

  Kidder wrote and rewrote many versions of his first Atlantic article, about a mass murder case in California. He had imagined the piece as a sequel to In Cold Blood. At some point Bob Manning sent the manuscript back to Todd, having scrawled on it, “Let’s face it, this fellow can’t write.” Todd kept this comment to himself and merely told Kidder that the piece still needed fixing, and the rewriting continued.

  A long association had begun. Todd knew only that he had a writer of boundless energy. For Kidder, to be allowed not just to rewrite but to rewrite ad infinitum was a privilege, preferable in every way to rejection slips. And for Todd, it was possible to imagine that a writer willing to rewrite might turn out to be useful. Todd once remarked to a group of students, never expecting he would be quoted, “Kidder’s great strength is that he’s not
afraid of writing badly.” The truth was that Kidder was afraid of writing badly in public, but not in front of Todd. Kidder would give him pieces of unfinished drafts. He would even read Todd passages of unfinished drafts, uninvited, over the phone. Very soon Todd understood when he was being asked for reassurance, not criticism, and would say, “It’s fine. Keep going.” When a draft was done, Todd would point out “some problems,” and another rewrite would begin.

  That ritual established itself early on and persisted through many articles and Kidder’s first two books. A time came—midway through the writing of Among Schoolchildren, about a fifth-grade teacher—when Kidder began revising pages before Todd had a chance to read them. This was a means of delaying criticism forever. No doubt that was Kidder’s goal, and he could remain happily unaware of it as long as he kept on rewriting. Things went on that way for a while, until Todd said, in the most serious tone he could muster, “Kidder, if you rewrite this book again before I have time to read it, I’m not working on it anymore.” Kidder restrained himself, and the former routine was reestablished.

  Eventually The Atlantic changed hands. Its book publishing arm was sold off, its headquarters relocated, its old building renovated into a corporate office. We lingered for a time, working under a new head editor, William Whitworth, who was to both of us exemplary. He once told Kidder, “Every writer needs another set of eyes.” When Todd moved on to do his own writing and to edit books, Kidder followed him.

  This book is in part an account of lessons learned, learned by a writer and an editor working together over nearly forty years. Good Prose is addressed to readers and writers, to people who care about writing, about how it gets done, about how to do it better. That you can learn to write better is one of our fundamental assumptions. No sensible person would deny the mystery of talent, or for that matter the mystery of inspiration. But if it is vain to deny these mysteries, it is useless to depend on them. No other art form is so infinitely mutable. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

  We should acknowledge some other predispositions. We’re sticklers on fact. Nonfiction means much more than accuracy, but it begins with not making things up. If it happened on Tuesday, that’s when it happened, even if Thursday would make for a tidier story. (And in our experience, at least, Tuesday usually turns out to make for a more interesting story.) This is not to confuse facts with the truth, a subject we will deal with.

  We also believe in the power of story and character. We think that the techniques of fiction never belonged exclusively to fiction, and that no techniques of storytelling are prohibited to the nonfiction writer, only the attempt to pass off inventions as facts. We think that the obscure person or setting can be a legitimate subject for the serious nonfiction writer. And we think that every piece of writing—whether story or argument or rumination, book or essay or letter home—requires the freshness and precision that convey a distinct human presence.

  During the past three decades American culture has become louder, faster, more disjointed. For immediacy of effect, writers can’t compete with popular music or action movies, cable network news or the multiplying forms of instant messaging. We think that writers shouldn’t try, that there is no need to try. Writing remains the best route we know toward clarity of thought and feeling.

  Good Prose is mainly a practical book, the product of years of experiment in three types of prose: writing about the world, writing about ideas, and writing about the self. To put this another way, this book is a product of our attempts to write and to edit narratives, essays, and memoirs. We presume to offer advice, even the occasional rule, remembering that our pronouncements are things we didn’t always know but learned by attempting to solve problems in prose. For us, these things learned are in themselves the story of a collaboration and a friendship.

  1

  BEGINNINGS

  The first time I worked with Todd was over the phone. We talked about the article I was trying to write. The conversation went like this:

  What was wrong with the article? I asked.

  Well, first of all, he said, and he paused, as if perhaps he was sorry to have to say this. Well, first of all, the first sentence.

  I had wanted a spectacular opening. My first sentence read: “In the spring of 1971, someone went mad for blood in the Sacramento Valley.” A fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had praised that sentence. Todd didn’t like it?

  No, he said, it was melodramatic.

  Reminded of this conversation decades later, Todd said with a touch of irony, which I hadn’t heard in his voice back then: “Well, I guess I stand by that judgment.”

  —TK

  To write is to talk to strangers. You want them to trust you. You might well begin by trusting them—by imagining for the reader an intelligence at least equal to the intelligence you imagine for yourself. No doubt you know some things that the reader does not know (why else presume to write?), but it helps to grant that the reader has knowledge unavailable to you. This isn’t generosity; it is realism. Good writing creates a dialogue between writer and reader, with the imagined reader at moments questioning, criticizing, and sometimes, you hope, assenting. What you “know” isn’t something you can pull from a shelf and deliver. What you know in prose is often what you discover in the course of writing it, as in the best of conversations with a friend—as if you and the reader do the discovering together.

  Writers are told that they must “grab” or “hook” or “capture” the reader. But think about these metaphors. Their theme is violence and compulsion. They suggest the relationship you might want to have with a criminal, not a reader. Montaigne writes: “I do not want a man to use his strength to get my attention.”

  Beginnings are an exercise in limits. You can’t make the reader love you in the first sentence or paragraph, but you can lose the reader right away. You don’t expect the doctor to cure you at once, but the doctor can surely alienate you at once, with brusqueness or bravado or indifference or confusion. There is a lot to be said for the quiet beginning.

  The most memorable first line in American literature is “Call me Ishmael.” Three words, four beats. The sentence is so well known that sometimes, cited out of context, it is understood as a magisterial command, a booming voice from the pulpit. It is more properly heard as an invitation, almost casual, and, given the complexity that follows, it is marvelously simple. If you try it aloud, you will probably find yourself saying it rather softly, conversationally.

  Many memorable essays, memoirs, and narratives reach dramatic heights from such calm beginnings. In Cold Blood is remembered for its transfixing and frightening account of two murderers and their victims, and it might have started in any number of dramatic ways. In fact, it starts with a measured descriptive passage:

  The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West.

  Although a bias toward the quiet beginning is only a bias, a predisposition, it can serve as a useful check on overreaching. Some famous beginnings, of course, have been written as grand propositions (“All happy families are alike …”) or sweeping overviews (“It was the best of times …”). These rhetorical gestures display confidence in the extreme, and more than a century of readers have followed in thrall. Expansiveness is not denied to anyone, but it is always prudent to remember that one is not Tolstoy or Dickens and to remember that modesty can resonate, too. Call me Ishmael.

  Meek or bold, a good beginning achieves clarity. A sensible line threads through the prose; things follow one another with literal logic or with the logic of feeling. Clarity isn’t an exciting virtue, but it is a virtue always, and especially at the beginning of a piece of prose. Some writers—some academics and bureaucrats and art critics, for instance—seem to resist clarity, even to write confusingl
y on purpose. Not many would admit to this. One who did was the wonderful-though-not-to-be-imitated Gertrude Stein: “My writing is clear as mud but mud settles and the clear stream runs on and disappears.” Oddly, this is one of the clearest sentences she ever wrote.

  For many other writers, writers in all genres, clarity simply falls victim to a desire to achieve other things, to dazzle with style or to bombard with information. With good writing the reader enjoys a doubleness of experience, succumbing to the story or the ideas while also enjoying the writer’s artfulness. Indeed, one way to know that writing deserves to be called art is the coexistence of these two pleasures in the reader’s mind. But it is one thing for the reader to take pleasure in the writer’s achievements, another when the writer’s own pleasure is apparent. Skill, talent, inventiveness, all can become overbearing and intrusive. And this is especially true at the beginnings of things. The image that calls attention to itself is often the image you can do without. The writer works in service of story and idea, and always in service of the reader.

  Sometimes the writer who overloads an opening passage is simply afraid of boring the reader. A respectable anxiety, but nothing is more boring than confusion. In his introduction to The Elements of Style, E. B. White suggests that the reader is always in danger of confusion. The reader is “a man floundering in a swamp,” and it falls to the writer (whose swamp of course it is) to “drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.”

  Clarity doesn’t always mean brevity, or simplicity. Take, for example, the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory:

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.