What’s in your wallet?

This week, my audiobook is Dreyer’s English, by Random House copy chief, now NYT best-seller, Benjamin Dreyer. I listen to it at the gym, in the car, and walking the dog. It’s funny, insightful, and authoritative. I want a hardcopy for my desk.

My tired but trusted 3rd ed.

One thing I enjoy most about the work is Dreyer’s early mention of the style books he has on his desk.

This got me thinking . . .

Every writer keeps their favorite style books –– those broken-spined, annotated, dog-eared copies they return to over and again –– on their desk. I’m going to offer an I’ll show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours look at my desk copies.

For me, the book I have toted in my laptop bag on vacations, brought with me on business trips when I know I’ll have time to write, and rests on my desk when I’m at home is The Elements of Style –– timeless, brief, easy. If I’m being honest with you –– and I am –– I must confess to double-checking the difference between and Lay/Lie so often that my 1979 edition of the book practically falls open to page 51.

When I published my first novel, my editor told me the publishing house used Chicago Style, so I ran out and spent close to $75 on the The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers (14th Edition). (That edition now lists for $18.99 on Amazon, if you’re interested.) It’s easy to use, and everything you could possibly need is in there.

As a former newspaperman, the AP Stylebook is always nearby. It’s handy for checking abbreviations and capitalization rules. On a related note, The Word: An Associated Press Guide to News Writing, by Rene Cappon, is one of the best style guides –– and just a really interesting read –– that you will come across. (It’s $3 used on Amazon.) I often share the section about syntax and sentences length with students.

These are my top style books, guides I turn to when the prose waters get choppy, companions I find it reassuring to have on my desk. I’d love to hear what style books you have on your desk.

Passion and Widgets

Life has a habit of getting the best of me, and I often find myself falling behind in one aspect of life or another. There are days, admittedly, when I do not make it over to Type M for Murder to read the daily post. So I find myself sitting down later and reading posts in bunches. Today was one of those days.

As we know, writers inspire other writers. And after my binge-reading, I’m thinking a lot about my Type M colleagues Frankie Baily’s recent post and Tom Kies’ column, which preceded hers. Frankie wrote about the summer coming to an end and our respective academic lives beginning once again. Tom wrote about the different “personalities” writers have –– the artist at home, the widget-maker when we close the front door behind us each morning. Both of my colleagues seem to be speaking about the parallel lives writers lead.

I'm at a place, personally and professionally, sitting here in western Massachusetts in late August, that falls somewhere between the situations both Frankie and Tom wrote about. I am preparing for the school year at Northfield Mount Hermon school and, like Frankie, will spend the fall trying to carve out time to write among many other commitments. Similarly, as Tom mentioned in his post, I don't believe there is ever a time when I’m not a writer –– even when I'm making widgets.

As the father of a college senior, I find myself giving career advice. (My three daughters would probably tell you I have a habit of giving a lot of advice.) Part of the advice I give to my oldest is certainly nothing groundbreaking: find a job you enjoy leaving the house to go to every morning. Most writers I know would give their left arm to write full-time. For most of us, that's not an option. I feel like I have found the best combination there is: I get paid to talk about great books with insightful and motivated kids and with the adults who inspire them. I get to choose the curriculum and, as well as other classes, get to teach a course I've designed, Crime Literature. So when I close the front door behind me and go off to make widgets, often, these widgets are useful to my creative pursuits as well. Case in point: I’m making my way through Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in order to teach it this fall, and I am more awed and inspired by Chabon’s prose with every passing page.

I'm currently working on a novel that is written in multiple points of view. Chabon’s control certainly won’t be lost on me when I leave the classroom. I think writers read as writers. Yes, we love reading books. We are fans of books. And when I'm reading in an airport, I'm not highlighting. But I also believe writers read books differently than people who don’t write. There’s the oft-quoted T.S. Eliot line, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal” that speaks to the writer’s desire to find inspiration and ideas from –– and have genuine admiration for –– those who came before them. I, for one, admit to learning much of what I know about punctuation through straight osmosis. Strunk and White‘s “Rules” got me through my journalism career. I couldn't diagram a sentence until I started teaching how to do so.

So as summer fades into fall, I am grateful that my passion is connected to my widgets.

Syntax: can't live with it; can't live without it

I'm several chapters into a book that will feature multiple points of view. Within those points of view there exists a commonality – a voice. My voice.

It's a voice I want readers to at once trust and hear and even find authoritative. Yet it's also a voice I never want the reader to be aware of. In fact, my goal is total anonymity. There is no writer. You're not reading. Just turning pages, lost in a story you (hopefully) don't want to put down.

I'm sure I don't bat a thousand. But I spend a lot of time revising, reading aloud, listening to the text, and revising again. I'm listening for flow, pace, characterization, and tension. What I'm not listening for is grammar and syntactical correctness, if such a clunky phrase exists.

I do, though, teach grammar. (My students, God bless them, are taking a test on chapter two of The Elements of Style this week.)

And I'm something of a stickler about it, insisting that you need to know the rules well in order to break them effectively. But I also reward the papers and narratives that can use punctuation and syntax in a sophisticated way.

Here's the start of a chapter from my work-in-progress:

Majd Awaad reached out to touch his sleeping brother's arm. Wanted to wake him. Then pulled back. Halil, even at twenty-four, was still his little brother. Probably needed his sleep. In any case, Majd would see that Halil got rest.

Majd leaned his head against the headrest but didn't close his eyes. He wanted sleep. Probably needed it. But he was restless – torn emotionally about the life he was leaving and the one a Boeing 767 was hurtling him 550 miles an hour toward.

Years ago, when I was writing first-person novels, I might utilize three sentence fragments in an entire book. Here, I have four in two short paragraphs. In fact, as I revised, I pulled the subjects out of the sentences here. Pace and narrative tension over grammatical correctness.

E.B. White is one of my favorite authors (hence The Elements of Style in my classes), and I don't know another writer who wrote clearer, more precise sentences. Mr. White's Rule #6 is Do Not Break Sentences in Two.

Yet, if I may disagree, I think Rule #11 trumps all: Use Active Voice. It's a mantra to live by. Right up there with Stephen King's "The road the Hell is paved with adverbs." If you live by Rule 11, the reader won't notice you.

Probably won't even realize she's holding a book.