CHOICE WORDS

by Steven Steinbock

Not long ago I had the pleasure of reading a paperback original science fiction novel from 1964. The book wasn’t bad. It was a decent story despite numerous fairly deep plot holes. The author was clearly having enough fun writing the book that he didn’t care that it was imperfect. I could ignore those plot holes and inconsistencies. What I couldn’t ignore was his insidious overuse of the word “presently.” The damn word which doesn’t mean much of anything seemed to show up on every single page. When one says “presently” what do they really mean? The dictionaries give two contradictory definitions: “now” and “later.”

The author may have intended it as a joke. (The novel dealt with time travel). But if he was trying to be funny or witty, I didn’t find it such. I think, rather, that the author was using “presently” as a narrative connective word. Just as writers connect clauses and events with words like so, then, next, and and, this particular writer used the word presently, page after page.

This got me thinking about the way writers choose words, both effectively and ineffectively. I was going for a car drive, and decided to give my ears a break from a constant diet of King Crimson. On a whim I grabbed an audiobook of Lawrence Block
reading his how-to book, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. I’d read it years ago, and listened to it several years after that, and I was in the mood for talk but not willing to start listening to an entire novel.

I enjoy Block. In fact, I have never met anyone who has read him and didn’t enjoy him. Larry is unique in that his stories and his style have an appeal the crosses from the coziest of cozy readers all the way to the darkest streets of noir. He writes with an easy, almost conversational tone that flows so easily that one forgets that they are words on a page. As I relistened to Telling Lies, I found myself listening as much to his unusual choice of words as to his sage and unpretentious advice.

Block can get away with using expressions and verbal constructions that no one has seen since Wodehouse, and that would seem gaudy from any other writer’s pen. (Block does, in fact, make reference to a line at the end of Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters, a line that I’ve alluded to in my columns here and elsewhere.) What makes Block’s word choices work is a mixture of using big words unpretentiously, using common words uncommonly, and using all words with a certain amount of well-trained playfulness. Take this passage from Telling Lies:

There are writers who enjoy rewriting. At least they say they do, and a feigned passion for revision would seem as unlikely as a pretended carnal enthusiasm for chickens, so I’m perfectly willing to believe them.

Or this passage from his story “A Bad Night for Burglars” (which, incidentally, is not about Bernie G. Rhodenbarr):

The burglar, a slender and clean-cut chap just past thirty, was rifling a drawer in the bedside table when Archer Trebizand slipped into the bedroom. Trebizand’s approach was as catfooted as if he himself were a burglar, a situation that was manifestly not the case. The burglar never did hear Trebizand, absorbed as he was in his perusal of the drawer’s contents, and at length he sensed the other man’s presence as a jungle beast senses the presence of a predator.

I think that’s a brilliant opening. It is euphonic, funny, and sets up the absurdity of the story that Block is about to unfold. What pulpish writer in 1977 could get away with calling a burglar a “chap”? Yet Block pulls it off. He spins out phrases like “a situation that was manifestly not the case” and “absorbed as he was in his perusal” and the phrases work.

I frequently practice the highest form of flattery but I’m wise enough to know that poor imitations can fall flat. I’ve read stories by experienced authors who were trying to employ Chandleresque similes and not pulling it off very well. It would be easy for me to write in a style that’s a poor imitation of Block’s. My hope is that I can dabble with words with the same enthusiasm and playfulness that I find in Block’s writing without copying his style.

It will take some work. I’ll get down to it presently.