Time to be Humble (i.e. when you're published)

Having complained about the failings of other writers, let me confess to some of my own faults. Even in finished, polished, edited writing, I find myself repeating the same words and phrases, often in jarring proximity. I create strained metaphors, and overextend them (not a good idea with something that was strained in the first place).

And I often pronounce with godlike certainty, only to find later that I was simply wrong. Example: I wrote in The First Tycoon that Commodore Vanderbilt's youngest son, George Washington Vanderbilt, never saw a battlefield in the Civil War. Wrong: Though contemporary newspapers and the (purportedly) definitive guide to the careers of West Point graduates told me he never served anywhere near combat, I recently discovered otherwise. In conducting research on George Armstrong Custer in the National Archives, I casually glanced at the primary sources there on G.W. Vanderbilt's military record. The file included some correspondence noting that the aforementioned definitive guide was wrong, and evidence that he transferred to the staff of a general who took part in the Corinth campaign. I doubt young Vanderbilt took a shot at anyone, but he definitely went to the front. I was wrong.

A nonfiction writer can have what seem to be absolutely solid sources, and still make a mistake. It might be because you didn't take that one extra step (as in this example), or because there's a source out there that you haven't heard of, but is waiting to be discovered. In either case, you have to present your findings with humility, and be ready to admit when facts contradict you. And be afraid, because fear of blowing it will motivate you to work harder.

Same with style. You can labor hard, rewrite intensely, and submit your work to multiple readers—and still find something painful in your prose. Often you introduce the blunder in the rewriting process, which means that you just didn't reread enough. One more time—two—three—might have brought that blooper up to your weary eye.

And yet, you have to write with confidence. If you're sure about something, don't equivocate. If you are not sure, don't pretend otherwise—present the uncertainty honestly. Ironically, if you accept that you just won't get everything right, and are willing to frankly admit errors or unknowns, then your work will seem more surehanded. And surehanded is good; weak writing is, well, weak.

One more thing: No matter how good you are, there's almost certainly someone who does it better than you. Yes, winning a major literary award is a dream come true, a real thrill—and it yet instantly makes you aware of how many excellent books did not get the prize, but would have if, say, the jury was different by just one person. And an award gives your career momentum, but it doesn't change you. After all the statues and plaques are handed out and they start to pick juries for next year's prizes, you're back to where you were: just as capable of blundering as ever.

Maybe more so.

In Defense of Elegance

I hope it sounds rather odd to stand up in defense of elegance—not because elegance is unworthy of defense, of course, but because it should be a near-universal value in writing. And yet, it is rare.

It disturbs me how often, when I read a serious book, I must kick my way through piles of clichés and dead expressions. I reviewed one book that eventually earned the Pulitzer Prize, and for very good reason: It was deeply researched, keenly astute in psychological perception, and vivid in its depiction of not only the main character's life but the secondary characters who surrounded him. Yet it was spattered with such phrases as "cool his heels" and "stacked the deck against him." There is no excuse.

My complaint is not with metaphor itself. It can make writing more evocative, probably because there's something in the human brain that leads us to reason by analogy. (Listen to almost any Supreme Court hearing, for example, in which the justices constantly discuss legal points through analogies.) But metaphors are nothing more than the mules that pull the wagon. Overwork them, and they die, at which point they do nothing to draw forward the real meaning. Worse than that, they get in the way.

When you find yourself resorting to clichés, it's better to drop metaphor entirely, and get at the meaning as directly as possible, simply and precisely—that is, elegantly. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is cited by virtually everyone on the question of word selection, and I'm one of them. Orwell notes that, if we write in pre-existing phrases, the phrases do our thinking for us. Good writing must be like a window pane, he tells us, a transparent revelation of thought. This can only be achieved by carefully choosing each word.

Academic writing has its own particular set of clichés, which we call jargon—more generously, professional terminology. Its purpose, I believe, is not to convey meaning, but to demonstrate that the writer belongs to a group, which we might call Serious Scholars. Jargon is a rather lazy method of distinguishing scholarly writing from the popular; it's also a means of signaling that the writer is aware of the latest trends in a particular discipline. Such writing may be necessary to advance one's career within the world of academia, but I argue that there is no meaning that can be expressed only through jargon. There is always a more elegant way to say the same thing. Those more elegant choices convince the reader that the writer actually knows what she or he is saying. Jargon raises doubt.

Academics sometimes overreact to their own constricted writing style by indulging in colloquial expressions, including lame puns and jokes. (Many scholarly titles are now of this type.) Colloquial writing is hardly wrong, in and of itself; but it must be true to the work, emerging naturally from the subject and genre. A novel, a personal essay, a letter, an e-mail message—in these places, casual speech sounds right. But it sounds painfully false in a piece of scholarship.

Elegance is not only a matter of clear, evocative style. It also comes from honesty and authenticity.

Details and Depth

The Washington Post has published my review of Jennet Conant's A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS. You can read that review here (and you'll want to, if you're going to read this post).


The short version is this: It's a light, fun read, a bit misleadingly titled (most of the book is not, in fact, about the Childs), not a scholarly or analytical study—not a "serious" book, as the New York Review of Books crowd might say. I make some criticisms of the book for getting a few things wrong, and possibly mischaracterizing the single most important character, but in the end I think it's unfair to put too much emphasis on these failings. It's not that heavy of a book.


But I do have one serious complaint: The author infuses scenes with abundant, minute detail, without always providing sources for these details. See the review for an example. Am I accusing her of making it up? No—I can't know that at all; I just know that I couldn't find the details in the source provided in the endnotes. She might have drawn on sources not clearly indicated in the endnotes. Even at its worst, is it an egregious act? On one hand, it's not. She clearly did not invent events, settings, or characters, or mess with the chronology; she just described these actual moments far more vividly than the cited sources do.


On the other hand, unsourced detail is a serious problem for any nonfiction writing, serious or not. It undercuts the author's authority, and invites incredulity. And, ironically, it smashes the book flat.


In Aspects of the Novel, one of my favorite books about writing, E.M. Forster notes that "history" (which we can equate with "nonfiction") is limited to the surface—to what can be seen and reported. Fiction, on the other hand, can go beneath the surface; to that extent, fiction is truer than history, he writes, because we all know there is more beneath the surface. Fiction can know a person perfectly, in a way that nonfiction cannot.


Quite true, and yet: We also know that surface indications can strongly suggest what lies beneath. This is the secret of great acting, in which an actor's outward appearance suggests inner emotions and struggles and decisions, even when the raw text of the play provides precious little in the way of explicit wording. Nonfiction cannot allow us to know a person perfectly, but it can speak to the depths; it can contemplate the submerged truth lying behind indicators on the surface, to point to what lies beneath, even if it can't go there.

The details at issue—an expression, a head movement, a moment of conversation—are just such indicators, precious to a nonfiction writer when discovered in research. Our authority, as writers, to speak to the depths of human experience rests upon our authority as honest researchers, presenting fairly the evidence we found in the sources, and fully noting all such source material. Once the reader suspects that telling details were not in the sources, the author's authority is destroyed, and with it any true sense that the reader has glimpsed the interior worlds of the characters.

Nonfiction is always anchored to evidence. A nonfiction author can look and point beyond the evidence, but cannot cut loose and roam freely. And the extent and nature of the evidence must be presented fully in the notes, so we know how long the anchor chain can fairly be.

Proper sourcing is not just a formal exercise; it's part of what gives nonfiction a literary soul.