The Perfect Words (Part 2)

All writing is for the ear.

That’s obvious to one laboring over a script or a speech, but approximately 99.999713% of authorship is doomed for eternity to ink on paper (or pixels on screen).

No matter. Every written word or phrase is judged by the ear, even (alas) if it’s only the inner ear attached to the mind’s eye. (It gets lonely in there: Tell the truth – are you voicing these words, internally, at this very moment as you read them? Don’t let anyone catch your lips moving.)

So, the trick to superior writing is not necessarily wrapped up in reading the great works of literature and learning from them. It’s good advice – to devour the classics – but it’s not the be-all and end-all.

Want to learn “tight” writing? Charles Dickens, perhaps the greatest writer of all time, was also the most prolific. Why? Chuckie was a combo journalist / pulp-fiction writer; he was paid by the word, writing under deadline. Great stuff. Not terse.

I wonder, frequently, how Clancy, King, Grisham, Wouk, Lennon, Rowling, Conroy, Michener, Follett, Steele, Seuss and Simon will stack up two hundred years hence against Poe, Dumas, Hemingway, Twain, Du Bois, Joyce, Grey, Tolkien, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Fitzgerald and Shakespeare. (I know: I need a life.)

Well, in Shakespeare’s day, “The Theatre” was a shameful vice of the unwashed – akin to “Reality TV.” Hemingway was an “emigré” – a card-carrying member of Une Generation Perdue – a hippie long before geodesic domes were fashionable. It’s hard to know from which cubbyholes the literary geniuses of the 20th and 21st centuries will emerge.

To the point, today’s “Perfect Words” emerge from the screenplay of “Shall We Dance,” a 2004 movie starring Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez. Sarandon’s character, Beverly Clark, offers up a gut-wrenching answer to a seemingly rhetorical question: “Why is it, do you think, that people get married?”

BEVERLY: We need a witness to our lives.  There's a billion
                  people on the planet.  I mean, what does any
                  one life really mean?

                  But in a marriage, you're promising to care
                  about everything – the good things, the bad
                  things, the terrible things, the mundane things
                  – all of it, all of the time, every day.

                  You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed
                  because I will notice it.  Your life will not go
                  unwitnessed because I will be your witness'."

Consider what a curmudgeonly City Editor might do to that stunning soliloquy. It’s obviously wordy. Awkward. Not fit to print, certainly, these 79 words on a page. Just the facts, ma’am … Oughta cut that back by half, at least:

EDITOR: Marriage exists because the world’s 6.8 billion
                lives need witnessing. What’s one life?

                But spouses promise to care – constantly, daily –
                about all good, bad, terrible and mundane things.
                Each spouse witnesses the other’s life.

Screenwriter Audrey Wells captured the essence of emotion, setting, plot movement and character. But our imaginary editor trashed her eloquence for the sake of expunging 45 words – even though he might … might have communicated the same set of facts.

But the ear tells the gut different. Great writers let the ear inform the gut – and, ultimately, the rest of our anatomy. And if the writer fails to move the heart, gut, lips and brain … the writer fails.

Next: The Perfect Words (Part 3)

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