Writers are entertainers. The less useful your disclosures, the more enticing must be your manner. Lawyers, doctors, and professors are freer to discourse insufferably, knowing their readers must decode them, like it or not. Poets and essayists are tap-dancers, whose style must beguile.
No one taught me this when I was starting. Writing was mechanical. You repaired a sentence as you might a bike. In English, subject-verb-object was the expected order; clauses, tenses, vocabulary one deployed efficiently. Euphony, resonances, and winking were not discussed. No one told me sound writing must sound pretty, that our ears read before our eyes. Correct writing was like correct cooking – no butter, sugar, spice. Nutritious. Yuk.
The first question for a writer is who’s listening – and what might they like – and be able – to hear. Miss that mark and technique doesn’t matter: you’ll be speaking to empty chairs. One speaks differently to toddlers, lovers, multitudes. To each their attractive tone.
The best writers never take their eyes off us, like anxious chefs watching you sip their soup. Are we enjoying our first nibble, then bigger bites? Are we reacting to the flavors, textures, presentation, or just being polite? Food is never just food: it’s an experience, relationship, occurrence with meaning. Words should never be just words. “Good enough” is not good enough.
Shakespeare, of all writers in English, is the showbiz guy sans pareil. His music is his magic, his secret sauce. It had to be to arrest the attention of both illiterate groundlings and seated swells. No one had read his plays before attending – they hadn’t been printed; no critic had advised ticket-buyers what to think. No scenic or sonic effects took the pressure off the word guy. Vox populi, vox dei: entertain or starve.
Open your dog-eared one-volume Shakespeare (which, I don’t doubt, you always keep within easy reach) and read almost at random. How about –
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown:
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
Read it again. And again. I blush to share the page with such mastery. Every word tells, brimming with insight, moral urgency, vividness, and hypnotic melody. That these words present an achingly exact and emotionally complex dramatic climax only deepens our amazement. How on earth? Yet a person made this, a mere person, self-taught, not even a university graduate, which means a person might, which means we might!
For words, these are not halcyon days. Words have been outdazzled by electronics, outshouted by loudspeakers, demoted by AI to the status of “content” (emphasis on the first syllable), nudged aside by emojis… Who loves them as they deserve to be loved? Who coaxes, cuddles, coddles them? Who genuflects before their might, shivering with awe?
Machines will never comprehend the music of words. Machines must obey rules. But the most beautiful word, the mot juste for our moment, has yet to be imagined, for it and it alone peculiarly, precisely reflects our hour. It entertains, that is, catches us up, and hurtles us with Helios across the morning sky.
Do I overstate? No doubt. Lovers are known to.