To say that formal and real-time educations don't tend to overlap all that often would be a drastic understatement. I'm talking some serious litotes here, on the level of "the United States has some debt", or, on the sunnier side of the spectrum, "boy shorts are aesthetically pleasant." So when it does happen that the same quality is venerated both within the gates and behind the counter, inside the bubble and out in the vacuum, it takes on added significance. Among these rare creatures which are valued equally in the realms of academics and
"plastics" is concision in one's choice of words. Everyone's heard this idea in one form or another. Less is more. If you can't write your idea on the back of a business card, you haven't thought it through. Brevity is the soul of wit. My favorite English teacher, a defector from a prestigious Boston legal firm with the quiet, almost frail authority of a beatnik minister and wisdom as abundant as his eyebrows, must have told us a hundred times that we should endevor to write as if we had to pay for every word.
There is an oceanic body of evidence, crossing millennia and media, that supports all these epigrams lauding brevity. It's certainly a vital part of comedy, which is why in 250 years
Mitch Hedberg will still be funnier than Dane Cook. Similarly, the enduring fame of Lincoln's speeches suggest concision was a major part of politics long before American democracy became a comedy of a much darker sort. Sparse dialogue is an integral part of westerns-- think Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy-- and mumblecore, as well as a principle lyrical component a litany of musical genres, including who-gives-a-fuck rock n roll (the Ramones, the Strokes, the Black Lips), melancholy lo-fi (Tim Hardin, Nick Drake, Jose Gonzalez), shoegazing (My Bloody Valentine, the Radio Dept., M83), and that distinctly American gumbo of folk, blues and country the runs from Hank Williams and Johnny Cash straight down to the modern revivalists like Bonnie Prince Billy and Phosphorescent. And finally there's the literary canon, overflowing as it is with the pioneers of the pithy. There's Twain, of course, and that triumvirate of tight lipped--Hemingway, Salinger, and Ray Carver (all of whom tend to feature man-tagonists who drink their feelings). From the realm of verse, there's Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, who is revered and beloved in a way that no American poet ever will be again. But beyond all these aphorisms and examples, what really sold me on the importance of concision was the fact that I simply could not manage to achieve it for myself.
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Short, simple, and so honest.
I've tried, particular in creative formats, to mirror the brevity of some of my literary idols, to draw on the dollar menu of the English language and eschew the casual fine dining of the SAT lexicon. But I overplan, I overthink, I overreach. My final English assignment for 8th grade, a Holocaust "vignette", was thirty-some pages. Sophomore year of high school, my exacerbated European History teacher assigned me to a ration of two commas per page. Many a prof at Vassar has told me that scale and scope my outlines would be more appropriate for a thesis instead of the paper they've assigned. As for my few quantitatively successful
attempts at concision, each came out as brittle as a shell of an idea carrying within a sum of silence instead of an ocean inside. For although there is a fine line between white noise and white surf, my words had none of the inert emotion, the pregnant pauses, the quiet beauty or stoic suffering of the aforementioned authors with their ardor for the subject-verb sentence and their spectacularly miserly vocabularies. What it comes down to is that I don't have the confidence to be concise. To struggle against verbosity is inherently an act of bravery, or at least bravado, like going into a duel with a single bullet-- the success is even more striking if you connect, the failure all the more assured if you miss. Concision demands precision, and I don't trust myself to make that shot. So I abandon myself to the wild, automatic fire of excessive metaphors and infinite tangents as I struggle to spiral in on my main idea, literally "the point of it all." In the best case scenario, these pieces turn out to be beautiful and messy, something like "the Sistine Chapel painted with a Gatling gun," as Neko Case sings in
"Polar Nettles",. But after spending so many shells I wonder if the reader will acquire immunity to them, whether my shots will bounce off their skin or dissolve in the bloodstream like snow into the ocean. The writers who have mastered concision, they are the snipers, the gunslingers. I still have the broken tips of hollow point pencils beneath my skin, one in the heel and one in the palm, from shots fired years before I was born, and even now advance through lines and panels praying to have my lips struck open in stupefied revelry by a shard of truth streaking out of a forest of ink, whereupon, before continuing on my way, I dogtag the page to mark the spot.
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Yet while I believe in the efficacy of brevity, I also vehemently reject the oversimplified view in which it is a primary measure of a work's value. For the tale side, the second edge, the ugly corollary to any orthodox instance on concision is the dismissal of verbose writing as an inherently inferior style. Critics of more effusive works describe them in terms like "meandering" and "flowery", and often belittle the author's efforts as pretentiously misguided or as a camouflage for the shallow and unfeasable narrative and characters . Even the most renowned of today's verbose writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx, have all, at some point in their careers, been charged with sophistry and elitism by the representatives of critical and popular culture alike. Just this past month, popular and established writers like Bill Simmons, Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman drew the scorn of both the more proletarian Deadspin and the prestigious Poynter Insititute of Journalism upon launching “Grantland”, a website intended to proffer longer and more literary articles on sports and culture. Representing Poynter, Kelly McBride writes:
the writers and editors on the site will have to sharpen their focus and develop some self-discipline if they want to keep the audience engaged”… “at its best, Grantland is clever and funny, for smart people who want to be intellectually challenged and entertained at the same time. At its worst, it is a bunch of hyperbole and aimless columns that lack a clear focus.”
Another great example of this is B.R. Meyers' amusingly acrid overview of modern lit-crit,
"A Reader's Manifesto", which culminates with containing the ironically titled "Rules for Serious Writers, some of which follow below
1.
Be Writerly: If your writing is too natural, then there is no way it is scholarly.
2.
Sprawl: Content doesn't matter, it's all about size. Critics are impressed by big books, so brevity should be dismissed.
4.
Mystify: If people think that your writing is smarter than their writing, then they will respect your writing. If you sound smart (and definitely if you are published) then you must possess a brilliant mind.
5.
Keep Sentences Long: If the sentence is not long and boring, then it is definitely not literature.
7.
Pile on the Imagery: Your writerly credentials will bloom to greatness if your ability to tie together multiple similes and metaphors like the wooden pieces of a Lincoln log set, never disintegrate from the fiery visage of the sun. The more literary devices that you can throw together, the better the writing.
Insofar as these rules apply to me, I still pretty much agree. But when it comes to Real authors, I call bullshit. There is definitely a beauty and a potency in saying so much in as few words as possible, but there is no ratio of greatness to concision, adjectives per page, commas per chapter, by which we can measure literature. The same English teacher I spoke of before was consistently moved by
A Tale of Two Cities, a novel which typifies Dickens' penchant for sprawling plot (and ancestral) lines and where the verbose descriptions of landscapes serve as a constant reminder that its author was paid by the word. This was the teacher who spent weeks having us analyze
Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play and the one from which the oft-quoted "brevity is the soul of wit" derives. This is the same teacher who lauded
Moby Dick as "one of the great American novels." (not exactly an original choice, but not a bad one; what I take issue with is the label of “novel”, for it's a work of philosophy and anthropology as well as a myth-tinged narrative). Some of Melville's sentences literally go on for pages.Just imagine those behemoths of syntax before editing, as long and undulating as the slopes of Mount Greylock, beneath which Hermies penned that tome.
Proponents of concision seem to have conveiently forgotten that for every Twain there was a Melville, for every Hemingway a Faulkner, for every Pound an Eliot. They fail to understand that while a writer like Jonathan Franzen may be pretentious, it has nothing to do with his verbiage, as his writing is no more pompous than the minimalist novels of Tao Lin. In a parallel development over in politics, most Americans appear convinced that it takes more words to lie than it does to speak some truth. For example, it was more the quantity than the quality of Kerry oratory expulsions that was responsible for the Hindenburg of a presidential campaign (I remain convinced that a Grover- Elmo ticket would've crushed W. & Cheney in 04). In reality, the "short and sweet" approach is ideal for bullshit, as one can move onto another point before you realize that the previous one hasn't quite gone down right, like a pill chased with a mouthful of saliva instead of a glass of water. As Casablanca director Michael Curtiz said of movies whose scripts and plots were less than air tight: "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices." Brevity survives in today's political scene only in bastardized version-- sound bites and bumper stickers driven by a lack of thought, disclosure and perspective as surely as Lincoln's best lines were prompted by its' abundance.
So why then is it that brevity is consistently lauded and verbosity persecuted when each have their own virtues? Well, just for kicks let me get my Vassar hat on (most likely a beret of some kind; or perhaps a
tricornio if the hipsters catch wind of them) and break out the liberal arts student's most fearsome weapon in critical discourse, the RPG, Race/ Political/ Gender threefer. Difficult to lift, but ideal for breaking down the bastions of the establishment and rattle the chandeliers of whatever straight old white men dwell therein. In terms of race, many of prominent African American writers who jump to my mind (DuBois, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead) do seem to be rather generous with their verbiage. Perhaps this is because their forerunners would have been savagely critiqued for a lack of vocabulary; you can sense Frederick Douglas enjoying his own elegance in
Narrative of the Life of a Slave, knowing how much it would shock his doubters. Or maybe this represents the complex struggle of staking claim to a language which was originally introduced to them by their abductors and abusers. All I really know is that being from Whitewood, Massachusetts, a town so homogeneous that even the neighboring suburbs mocked us for it, I have no authority to take a stance on anything involving race. On the political front though, I can more confidently suggest that a writer's native culture has an impact on their verbosity. Kazuo Ishiguro's reserved and delicate prose is influenced by his Japanese- British upbringing as much as the surreal, feverish tone and the sordid, gorgeous streams of sentences that typify Gabriel Garcia Marquez bear the unmistakable influence of Colombian culture; at some particularly exultant points his writing resembles that of his protagonist, Flroentino Ariza, irrevocably afflicted with love.
When all is read and done though, it's undeniable that gender provides the most fertile grounds for discussion in this debate (Ed note: tee-hee). If you look back to my initial list of concise writers, you'll notice that it is composed entirely of dudes save for Miss Dickinson (whose sexual preferences most likely did not lean towards the first syllable of her surname, thus throwing a confounding variable into the mix). There is a long, ugly history of literature depicting women as idle gossipers, or even worse, as manipulators and conspirators directly descended from Eve. Aside from the canonical evidence, there's also the fact that previously in this post I unthinkingly seized on a words-as-ammo metaphor. Is it that far - fetched to suggest an inverse relationship exists between verbosity and masculinity, a stylistic reflection of the western world's archetype of the strong & silent type who walks softly and carries a big stick (take that last part as you will)? In fact, I could even take it a bridge too far and claim that the blunt and sparing style of bros like Hemingway works better for tee traditional linear narrative, while the more effusive approach to writing is a superior vehicle for what critic Laura Miller describes as " a weblike, 'feminine' alternative"-- "a more circular story supposedly corresponds to the purportedly non-goal-oriented unfolding of women's sexual response." Another way of looking
at the theory holds that each narrative is a reflection of the gender’s archetypal role in society. The male, being single-minded and purpose driven, gives rise to a very basic parabola of emotion and action, while the multi-faceted and cyclical nature of the female narrative reflects their lot as overseers of the family, agriculture and seasons.
I really hope this isn't news to anyone..
It's an interesting theory for sure, and could be propped up for a while with cherry picked examples like
To the Lighthouse or Angela Carter's "Reflections." Yet I could just as easily point to a Flannery O’Connor story or a John Irving novel, so in all fairness I think we have to drop the verbiage-gender correlation theory
like the SAT's did the analogies section. Still, I wouldn’t go quite as far as Miller does in condemning the popularity and usefulness of
that sort of “female” narrative. "This dubious sort of analogy is surprisingly popular among academic critics, despite the fact that the vast majority of women
readers have always exhibited a hearty appetite for linear narratives -- much as most women, when given a choice, would prefer to have that orgasm, thanks very much." It might be that Miller very well prefers linear novels or concise authorship, but not all women come to orgasm by the same route and not every reader connects with writing in the same way.
So while I don’t think it’s as simple as “brevity is to the pussy as verbosity is to the clit” ultimately you need both tools, so to speak, at your disposal.
Verbosity, it seems, is a necessary fuel for ambitions that extend into the dark halo matter, but you need brevity to keep you on track and to keep the audience at least on your tail, if not alongside you. These days, the most important thing about a piece of writing to the both the average and prolific readers (other title and cover) is the number of pages in it, followed by the approximate length of the author’s standard-issue sentence. Writers who use so few words just look so damn confident in what they have to say, a trait which is vital is separating one's self from the mass of aspiring scribblers and drawing in as many readers as you can from that endangered species. And then there is the grace and unsinkable power of well- chosen words that speak more than tracts ten times their size. Art Spiegelman has written that even wordless novels "are filled with language", only "it resides in the reader's head rather than on the page" – the same can be said of the masters of brevity, who can suggest a fully formed body simply by laying its bare bones before the reader. They strip everything-- relationships, settings, emotions-- down to their essence like a math genius who solves complex equations with only a few scant lines of simple work.
By and large, though, it would seem that the genuine Will Huntings are few and far between, amidst a sea of snake oil and Hallmark. In the works of the true greats, you can sense beneath the surface that their writing a deep trust in their insights and experiences. But in a lot of others, the concision smacks of an an "I don't need to ask for directions" type hubris that would be pretty damn irritating if it weren't for the fact that this is not typically due to blind, stupid Draco Malfoy level arrogance, but rather fakers that are close to the realm of the makers as Columbus was to India. Beneath the ice of their sharp sentences, there is no ocean or lake but only a void, the kind of hollowness that propels one to worship at the altar of verbosity, a catholic shrine in every sense of the world.
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"Revolutions", said Trotsky, who knew a thing or two about them," "are always verbose." Sometimes it takes a throng of words to shoot through the trite ideas, grown dry as a desert with time, like the crust in your eyes after too long of a sleep, and break through into the embryos of new truths. As Don Draper shouts to the leader of a focus group in the latest season of
Mad Men, "a new idea is something they don't know yet, so of course it's not going to show up as an option!" This desire for fresh perspective-- which, on the heels of the 1950s, was tantamount to revolution—surfaces consistently in the long, meandering, philosophical monologues which Draper somehow passes off as sales pitches. Writers whose ideas are revolutionary, whether in the political or cultural sense, are trying to put in words something that has never before been expressed as well as a person might, their words a pack of dogs chasing some hare of an epiphany they will never catch. Yet still the blind wild hunt goes on forever, the hounds running in their sleep and dreaming of one day watching the prey’s fur quiver under their hot breath. Sometimes, in order to be volatile and valuable, one must be voluble.
For me, what really gives verbose writing authority and authenticity is its humility, an author’s direct or indirect admission that their trails of words are often meant to show both our pursuit of knowledge and the extent of our ignorance. Often times the writers who are the most loquacious are also the most aware of the failings of language. Check out the river sequences in Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying, where the impenetrable waters coupled with the clumsy stabs at meaning by his various narrators. For me, the line “My mother is a fish” represents the pinnacle of his tremendous abilities represent the depths of the soul that words will never be able to illuminate. Or take Sufjan Stevens, a songwriter whose titles are sometimes longer than other artists' entire songs, puts it brilliantly in the opening track to last year's
Age of Adz as he struggles to express his feelings to an ex-lover. "I won't stay here very long/ But you are life I needed all along/ I think of you as my brother/ Although that sounds dumb/ And words are
futile devices."
A more personal example comes in the form of Molly Nesbit, a professor of Modern Art at Vassar, who is rumored to indulge in psychedelics and well known for giving rambling lectures which can come across as pompous or self-satisfied when in fact they’re the complete opposite; they stem from her belief that it is impossible distill the essences of these masterpieces into bullet points, that to do so would insult the art and fail the students, and therefore than one must embrace chaos as “part of the process." And speaking of modern art…
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Consider Renee Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images." The written sentence "this is not a pipe" is meant to remind the viewer that they are seeing only a representation, and not the thing itself. Even still, the painted representation is much closer to the living object than the series of black brushstrokes which form the word "pipe." When you stop to think that every word is really just an arbitrary code, a symbol, a metaphor for anything we can even imagine existing from consciousness to cosmos, trying to express a vision or feeling through language can feel like a Sisyphean task, one for which words are as poorly suited for as a stuffed animal is for
a demolition
There is an unbridgeable distance between language and reality, between theory and mystery which are wide as the eternal gap between man and the thing we call god for simplicity's sake, and even people like the Dali Lama who reach the highest pinnacles of spirituality are still parsecs away from the force that they vaguely, intrinsically sense at work in the universe, that great clock cranked by deity or circumstance only once, long ago but still ticking. It’s just like the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum physics. The mysteries and questions which all true writers seeks, the most complex and vital to humanity; the quarks of the soul and the electrons collective heart, so abundant and basic, yet so elusively subtle that it is impossible to determine more than one aspect of it at once. Anyone who claims to is a complete fraud, a Promethean with a paper Mache torch (cough*Ayn Rand* cough). Our thoughts will never reach the page, the screen, the napkin with the purity of their spontaneous conception intact, and so all writing is inherently an act of failure. It makes me think of Steven Millhauser’s story
“History of a Disturbance", a nameless narrator’s letter to his wife attempting to explain how he became so distraught with the vast dissonance between spoken words and all they represent and entail that he came to undertake a vow of silence. "I began to wonder whether anything I had written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, try to push its way through".. "It was if some space had opened up, a little rift, between words and whatever they were supposed to be doing. I stumbled in that space, I fell."
Yet it is somewhat heartening to realize that the every writer, perhaps especially the great ones, struggle their whole lives to break on through. Patti Smith’s memoir
Just Kids begins with a recollection of seeing the swans at Humboldt Park while on a walk with her mother; unlike most children, she was not content to merely absorb the new term into her lexicon. “The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words to speak for,”…”
Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning.” A perfectionist like myself can find some comfort and hopefully enough freedom by realizing that every author’s goal is simply to fail as best one can, like a plane coasting on its momentum as it runs out of gas rather than nose-diving straight into the sea.
Low on fuel myself and circling back to where I started, I must admit that part of me still wants to believe that using
copious amounts of vocabulary isn't arrogant, but rather a healthy pride for something which is everyone's life work (you know, besides chasing happiness). Yet I've come to realize that I have no conception of how to ration my images, metaphors, and ideas. I love verbosity. I spend utensils, I bruise keys, leak words. Lately, when dissecting and refiguring my poems or stories, I sometimes imagine that I am dug in the Maginot, facing the innumerable masses of a modern writer's mortal enemy, the OD, Obscurity & Disinterest; that I have only the ink in this pen as plasma to patch my ego up well enough to fight on, only the lead in this pencil for bullets... Writing is a war of attrition, and you have only yourself to supply the necessary energy and morale. Having always lacked at least one of those resources, I don’t feel as though I was built for war, no more than my longtime English teacher, who once painted a picture of himself cowering in a foxhole, holding up the New Heritage American Dictionary—though I was never sure whether he meant as a shield or a rifle.
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Somewhere in my cortex, beneath the flashing storms of anxiety and under a dense forest floor of hops and resin, there is a veritable vault of embarrassing memories reminded me that I suck at the “fake it til you make it” strategy, some of which involve restaurants and other of which involve women. I do not know how to feign prodigiousness; I’m a miserable understudy for my half-dreamt, self-actualized alter. For reasons that have been lost or repressed, I’ve always been terrified of being that arrogant one, maybe because the worst thing I could imagine was not failing, but being oblivious to one’s own failure. Seems in trying to avoid a swell head, I ended up sort of deflated, like a balloon that has reached its brief half-life… I went too far to the opposite pole, like trading anarchy for fascism. I almost feel as though balancing it all out at this point will involve assuming on the attitude of the most brazenly confident person I can think of; a man who manages to be full of both inspiration and bullshit; a man who himself once rapped “me found bravery in my bravado.” (don’t take my word for it—ask
Aziz Ansari) My low cold core of passive aggressive rationalism constantly lecturing me on how such confidence is tantamount to buying into your own delusions, while the optimistic sliver of me calls it willpower. And just because I owe it a million turns, I’ll listen to the sliver. It's certainly better to fake it than do nothing at all, in work, in writing, in love and in even in war, where people play the part of soldier as best they can, until a skilled or lucky shot shoves them off the stage. The only flaw in that metaphor is that a writer doesn’t get shot at until he’s already miles away, leastwise not by anyone besides himself.
