Thurber on Writing

Since reading Jack Hart's Storycraft, I've been obsessing about structure, narrative arcs and diagrams.

I'm fine with outlines. Especially the kind of informal to-do-list "jot outlines" Hart talks about in A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to words that Work. But diagrams of arcs (or the "mind maps" popular with some copywriters) are simply counterintuitive for a guy who flunked finger-painting.

How refreshing it was to come across this quote from James Thurber:

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint.

Thurber on first drafts:

That draft isn't any good; it isn't supposed to be; the whole purpose is to sketch out proportions... I rarely have a very clear idea of where I'm going when I start. Just people and a situation. Then I fool around—writing and rewriting until the stuff gels.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think too clearly—too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System—the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

Still, the act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even rewriting's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

Neither way is right or wrong. There are many paths up the mountain.

Comma Clash

Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, was notorious for carpet bombing the copy with commas. James Thurber fought valiantly for readability over correctness. But Ross was the boss. And the commas continued.

This is not to say that Thurber championed sloppy language. On the contrary, he said,

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Gracie Allen may have put it best, "Never place a period where God has placed a comma."

An ongoing discussion in LinkedIn's LinkEds & writers group: "Commas used in a series; has something changed?" has some members crying for a period. Enough already.

I offered my own humble opinion, but the battle rages on.

While many of us wish the Wicked Wolf would have spared Grandma and eaten Grammar, there is no denying the importance of proper punctuation. It is so important that the great Victor Borge invented a method of making speech as clear as writing by adding visual cues. He called it "Phonetic Punctuation."