How Do You Figure?

Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)

The catch?

I hope but can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to a computer to actually post the things. All I’ll need, once the posts are written, is about ten minutes to read, revise as needed, and click the Publish button. But I won’t actually have a computer with me — so will depend on the kindness of strangers or family members or, I don’t know, Internet cafes. Don’t be surprised if you read reports of some guy in Groucho glasses and mustache, stealing laptops in bookstores and then returning them 15 minutes later.

Anyhow, to kick off that series of posts starting which shall start [clarification added 2008-08-29] in a week, let me introduce you to a slender volume (103 pages, with index) called Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)

From Quinn’s preface:

Graduate students in literature eagerly buy little dictionaries so that when a monograph intones about later Shakespeare’s penchant for the anthimeria, they will have a place to look it up. So they look it up, while their own prose often becomes more and more like a monograph’s, a groaning misery to read.

…Learning about the figures of speech should be less like learning about the periodic table of elements than like learning how to model clay. To ask a sentence if it has a zeugma is not like asking a rock if it has silicon. In fact, the very phrase “figures of speech” is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the “figurings of speech” — or, better yet, “figuring speech.”

The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or a least a Shakespeare can. The figures of speech help us to see how he does it, and how we might.

I’ve always been haunted by the possibility that I might be a better writer than storyteller. Discussions about story always have me glancing nervously over my shoulder, as though the ghosts of Homer and Twain and Hemingway are going to materialize and demand my credentials. “Papers, please,” they’ll say. I’ll pat my pockets, frown, slap my forehead, say “Jeez, my other suit–” and while they’re distracted I’ll take off in a broken-field run, heading for the safety of the Prose Mountains.

That said, I do like the process of writing, of phrase- and sentence-making. (I once said something to The Missus which she teases me about to this day: “I think a writing session is wasted unless I’ve written at least one sentence that makes me smile just to read it.”) Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places, but very seldom do we encounter a discussion about “how to write fiction” which stresses the first three words over the final one — from blogs, to writers’ conferences, to writing workshops. Even the word “craft,” which seems to signify the act of placing one thing in juxtaposition to another — like, oh, say, y’know, writing in general — is used in practice as shorthand for plot, character, setting, dialogue: the meat of storytelling, not the bones of language.

(Note a curious fact about “Pantheon” category, bottom of the right-hand menu: they’re all excellent writers, but roughly evenly split between fiction and non-fiction types. While I planned the list, in fact,  the non-fiction names tumbled out easily; I had to stop and think to be sure that the gods of fiction would be satisfied, too.)

I love figures of speech. Yes, they can be overdone. But used properly, they add grace notes to a piece of writing which makes the conventional “craft” elements jump off the page. In Quinn’s preface quoted above, for instance, describing the typical monograph’s prose as “a groaning misery to read” punches the meaning home in ways that simply saying such prose is dull and dry and tedious.

Anyway, to next week:

For the four days I’ll be away from my own computer, I hope to post — somehow — four little caplets of information from Quinn’s book, together with equally brief (I hope *cough*) musings around the subject du jour.