Bad writing files
I have a little stack of New Yorkers from a Little Free Library (to which they’ll return once I’ve perused them), and the other day I settled down to read what looked like an interesting article by Jill Lepore about a UK writer fella. But…the longer I read the more irritated I got.
You know how there’s a popular magazine style that involves adding a lot of “color” to reporting via details about decor, clothes, food, yadda yadda, so that it’s not just a parade of facts but more like a short story? And for that matter a popular fiction style that does the same thing? And you know how unskilled people can overdo it to the point where you want to throw whatever it is on the floor and stamp on it?
This was that. There were only tiny little bits of reporting on the writer and what he’s written, immediately interrupted by yet another description of his kitchen or going somewhere in his car or the weather or god knows what. It was 80 or 90 percent color with only a tiny fraction left for actually telling us anything.
It starts like this:
Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.
It’s already too much, in my view. Too novel-y, too precious, too much information. That “pink as a peony” made me cringe, long before I’d read enough of the piece to get furious. The woolen slippers, too. Why not describe his underpants? Enough already! I don’t care about his slippers! Get on with it!
She does get on with it, briefly, just long enough to spark my interest, but then promptly goes back to piling on the gossipy backgroundy crap. She should have skipped the interesting part so that we could all just stop reading after a few paragraphs.
For the longest stretch of Herron’s professional life, he worked in London in the legal department of an employment-issues research firm, copy-editing journal articles, handbooks, and case reports about employment discrimination and wrongful termination. Nights, he wrote detective fiction, and even got some published, but no one bought it. Then he had a breakthrough. “People say write what you know,” Herron says. “So I wrote about people who are failures.” Bob Cratchitting away at job-discrimination case reports, Herron came up with the idea of Slough House, a place where M.I.5 puts bad spies out to pasture. “Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people,” one character explains. “So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers.” James Bond they are not.
There it is, the one interesting paragraph in the whole long piece. Most of what we get after that is chatter like:
“Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London….I took a bus from Heathrow to Oxford, a city of sandcastles. Herron and his partner, Jo Howard, picked me up by the side of the road in her black Volvo. I was two hours late. It was raining.
“I’m so sorry we’ve missed the morning,” I said, climbing into the back seat: black, white topstitching.
“Not to worry,” Howard said, pulling into traffic as zippy-fast as a taxi-driver.
She described the back seat of her subject’s partner’s car.
“We’ll pop over to the house for a bit and then head out?” Herron asked, looking back at me, wonderingly, black bushy eyebrows raised, a pair of commas. I’d barged in on what was meant to be a weekend getaway to the Malvern Hills with Howard’s two grown daughters. They had graciously agreed to let me tag along as far as a book event in Herefordshire, after which Herron and I would take a train back to Oxford, and then he’d turn around and train back out to meet Howard for what was left of the weekend. Howard downshifted for power, weaved left, weaved right, leaned into a turn on rain-soaked streets. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972. Maybe Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.”
Who cares?? What is the point of all this?
We get a description of their house.
We get told who went where in the house.
In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door.
And it goes on like that! For pages and pages! What on earth is the point? It reads like a parody, but Herron is a real person who really writes spy novels, so I guess it isn’t. At one point, three or four or five pages in, she mentions a character name and I don’t recognize it, so I scan the paragraph and then the page for the previous mention, can’t find it, scan again, and again and again and again, getting more and more irritated, and finally go back to page one to find a single brief reference. How were we, the readers, supposed to remember that one name through three or four pages of mind-bogglingly dull detail about the sitting room?
Anyway. It baffles me. Why do the New Yorker editors think this is good stuff? Why does Lepore herself think so? Is the ghost of Tom Wolfe messing with them or what?
This is a staple of celebrity interviews, in which the reader is dutifully informed that Famous Actress X “picked at her salad” during their lunch meeting. The true masters of the genre, of course, go into great detail about the composition of the salad. (However, during the course of the interview there is a good chance that X, who is of course rail-thin, will inform the writer that there is nothing she likes more than a big cheeseburger.)
I know, plus as I mentioned the whole Tom Wolfe slather on the atmosphere move, but there’s such a thing as overkill. There was SO much more atmosphere than substance that it was laughable/maddening.
He “flushes easily”? Has she mistaken him for a lavatory?
Tell me about it! I once did an edit job for someone who wrote a 300 page novel like this…and never managed to get across the idea that her main character (or any of the others) experienced actual emotions. They walk stoically through scenes that describe every last detail of a procedure that has very little relevance to the novel (every step of a pedicure? For god sake, stop already!).
And I struggle to help my English students walk the fine line between boring recitations of endless details and the flowery description of everything.
I suppose that’s why my husband and I always have different ideas of what my characters look like. I might throw something in now and then, like the fact that the character is short, which is usually relevant, or makes them seem like real people. But I would be embarrassed to write something like you quoted above.
There is an art to the careful use of detail, in both fiction and nonfiction–it can be used effectively to express character, or foreshadow the plot (I’ve just finished reading Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit, which primarily uses The Great Gatsby as an example text)–but just writing down random stuff the author happens to notice is completely pointless.
Absolutely. You want and need some of it – an author interview isn’t a news report, so no background detail at all would be weird. But you don’t want 90% detail, most of it boring, and 10% interview.
And you want to carefully and deliberately CHOOSE which details to highlight, and have a clear idea, as an author, what you want those details to communicate. What colour the stitching on the car seats is doesn’t cut it.
But but but… who ears slippers on soft carpeting? Especially woolen slippers? I mean, I could see wearing cotton or a synthetic fiber if the carpet irritates you, but surely wool would just make it worse? Especially if you have eczema or an allergy to wool (been there). There must be more to the story. I WANT TO KNOW!
My conclusion would be that Herron had very little to say but the publisher needed 10k words and the writer needed the commission.
Heh that would make sense except that Lepore is so prolific it’s hair-raising, and she’s a regular in the New Yorker. Along with that the New Yorker used to be famous for its care in editing, its rigorous standards, its systematic avoidance of fluff and filler.
She’s got pad it out this much to avoid being bumped from the pay rate of a story writer to that of a caption writer.
Imagine the build-up of static charge; ZZZT POW!
Yes but to take the joke literally she could have filled the piece up with conversation about and/or discussion of his books as opposed to his cat and partner and slippers and all the rest of it. She’s a historian and a prolific writer so she certainly knows how to do that.
Decided I wanted to brush off my editor’s cap for one of these paragraphs, just to see if I could find a little wheat in the chaff:
Original:
In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door.
My edit:
Herron and I sat down in the sitting room, which opens out onto a lovely garden. The cats pass to and fro through their own private door to play among the geraniums as we watch.
From this, I know that they are sitting comfortably, I’ve learned that he’s an indulgent cat-owner, and that he likes to have a view of the garden. The first just moves things forward, since she’s insisting on this being a narration of “My Time With The Celebrity”, and the other two do give me some insight into the man’s personality, which is at least pertinent to the article’s ostensible subject matter. Everything else is dross. My edits aren’t magical–they can’t insert meaning where there is none–but I think they at least manage to clear out a lot of the fluff that’s obscuring what little is there.
Yup. I would do similar. “Cut to the fucking chase” one might call it.
It’s sheer vanity, all that added fluff. “Look at the fine writing, it’s so poetical.”
“Magical” back garden. “like valentines.” “the cats pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums” – what??? No they don’t! There would have to be several thousand mice infesting the garden for that to be true. The cats don’t “glower at squirrels,” either. “the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence” – jesus christ why are you telling us all this?
Honestly what is the New Yorker thinking?
I dropped in at the library branch this afternoon & they had a Herron novel so I snapped it up.
A television adaptation of the first (and recently the second) of Herron’s “Slough House” series of novels is making a big impression, on Apple TV, under the title “Slow Horses” (also the title of the first novel). I think it’s brilliant!