'You Must Start Rewriting in Your Head'

“Rhythm is never effortless. To achieve it, you must start rewriting in your head and then continue rewriting on the page. The hallmark of a seductive style is to extend natural speech rhythm over the distance of a complex sentence.”

When I applied for my first job on a newspaper, I had no résumé, no college degree, no samples of news writing to share with the publisher. I had a stack of photocopied book reviews and a desperate need for a job. It worked, and to this day I remain grateful to the guy who took a chance, my late publisher Jack Bryce, who saw something in me besides desperation.

 

My first task was learning to write for a weekly newspaper in a small rural town in Northwestern Ohio. I had to identify my audience. I wasn’t writing for Nabokov aficionados. My overriding aim, I knew, was clarity, not “a seductive style.” But doesn’t clarity itself possess a certain seductiveness? Certainly more than clotted, self-indulgent incoherence. Writing well is rooted in respect for readers, not showing off or telling them what to think.

 

Clive James’ writing advice at the top, from the William Hazlitt chapter in Cultural Amnesia (2007), seems applicable to any form of prose. Rhythm is seldom acknowledged as a virtue in writing, but a good sentence can be spoken without stuttering. I learned to read every sentence I had written “aloud” – mentally or under my breath. I learned to start writing in my head in the car, on the way back to the office, getting the facts in order, pruning the irrelevant. Rewriting doesn’t stop until the story is filed, and then the editor takes his turn. The implied template is always the spoken word.

 

No one speaks like Hemingway’s prose. Clarity? Sure, but too often his sentences read like a mannered stammer. A lot of staccato repetition, too many and's. What Clive James describes sounds more like mid- or even late-period Henry James than Hemingway. Try crafting a long, multi-phrased sentence without losing your reader. Hazlitt was a master of this and had one of the most seductive prose styles in the language. Here is the conclusion to Chap. VIII in his “Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth” (1820):

 

“In youth we borrow patience from our future years: the spring of hope gives us courage to act and suffer. A cloud is upon our onward path, and we fancy that all is sunshine beyond it. The prospect seems endless, because we do not know the end of it. We think that life is long, because art is so, and that, because we have much to do, it is well worth doing: or that no exertions can be too great, no sacrifices too painful, to overcome the difficulties we have to encounter. Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot. But as we approach the goal, we draw in the reins; the impulse is less, as we have not so far to go; as we see objects nearer, we become less sanguine in the pursuit: it is not the despair of not attaining, so much as knowing there is nothing worth obtaining, and the fear of having nothing left even to wish for, that damps our ardour, and relaxes our efforts; and if the mechanical habit did not increase the facility, would, I believe, take away all inclination or power to do any thing. We stagger on the few remaining paces to the end of our journey; make perhaps one final effort; and are glad when our task is done!”