F. Scott Fitzgerald once read a book by his friend and fellow Scribner's novelist Thomas Wolfe, and decided that something about the writing rubbed him the wrong way: he disliked Wolfe's tendency to heap sentence upon sentence. Fitzgerald fired off a letter to Wolfe, the kind of feedback every writer hates to receive. Less is more, he scolded his friend, citing French author Gustave Flaubert as an example of a man who understood the value of the "mot precis"--the correct word. Fitzgerald told Wolfe that writers fall into two camps: the "putter-inners" and the "taker-outers." In Fitzgerald's opinion, these were synonymous with "bad" and "good."
Fitzgerald was a taker-outer. Wolfe, on the other hand, was a definite putter-inner. Since Fitzgerald had already published The Great Gatsby to wild acclaim, you can imagine how irked poor Wolfe must have felt. He didn't even have the satisfaction of being able to say, "What does this idiot know?"
As for Fitzgerald's pronouncements on style, however, the jury is still out. Is it better to be a taker-outer than a putter-inner? Is less more, or is less just less?
I have to admit here and now that I have my own bias. I am, and have always been, a taker-outer. Getting me to write description is like pulling teeth. When I want to add sensory detail, I'm positively constipated. I would much rather try to evoke emotions through action and dialogue than write about the emotions themselves.
Ernest Hemingway, probably the greatest taker-outer who ever lived, apparently felt the same way. He wrote:
I was trying to write then--and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced...the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
I think that's the goal of every taker-outer: to get down to the essence of human experience, and to state it purely.
Now, does being a taker-outer mean I'm a better writer than a putter-inner? Does using a stripped-down style make me another Hemingway, another Fitzgerald? Hell, no. I only wish it did. Being a taker-outer has its own set of pitfalls, and I'll get to those in a minute. First, however, I'm going to seize the opportunity to point out the pitfalls of the putter-inners, since this is my big chance to be didactic.
The work of a certain fan fiction writer epitomizes the putter-inner style for me. This writer shall go nameless because I'm certain she's a vastly better person than I am, and I would sooner walk on hot coals than hurt her feelings. (And no, don't be paranoid; I can almost guarantee I'm not talking about you.)
Whenever this writer posts a story, I have to force myself to slog through it, because she never met a word she didn't like. Why use one adjective, I can almost hear her thinking, when I can use three? Why let this poor little verb stand here, all lonely and forlorn, when I can festoon it with adverbs? Everything in her stories must be described, and described to the last detail. If snow is falling, she hastens to assure her readers that it is "purest white," and not only that, but "wintry" and "cold."
Her narrative structure is just as heavily embellished. A good-bye scene that would take most writers five or six paragraphs to relate requires all of ten pages in her stories. Each character's emotions are lavishly described, then probed, dissected, compared to other emotions the character has had on other occasions, and described a second time. As a consequence, her writing drags. I find myself scrolling through her text, desperately searching for some tiny sliver of dialogue or action to keep my interest alive.
Such is the torture when a confirmed taker-outer reads an unabashed putter-inner; it's like matter meeting anti-matter on the original Star Trek. You should have heard me in college, struggling to get through Moby Dick. Every time I'd turn the page and find nothing but another huge expanse of unbroken description, I'd let loose with a particularly choice profanity.
Reading the work of a putter-inner often makes me wish that the author could have known William Strunk, Cornell's late, great Professor of English. Strunk wrote:
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Now, perhaps Strunk went a little far here; no doubt many of you are regretting his omission of the pronoun "her." Still, his advice is essentially sound. Why weigh down a story with words, paragraphs, and even whole scenes that add nothing? Face it, our readers' time is valuable. When we waste it making them labor through cluttered or lifeless writing, we exhaust their patience. As the novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard put it, "I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
Every paragraph in a story needs to serve a purpose. Does it define the characters? Elucidate the theme? Advance the plot? If not, it's dead weight. It needs to go. As writers, we must put our characters, our story, and above all our readers ahead of our love for our own words. That's a tough thing to do, but as writers, we are pure of heart and we have the strength of ten. We can do it.
Let's suppose, then, that we've expunged every scene in our story that failed to pull its weight. Now we need to get down to bare bones, and look at the sentences themselves. In their invaluable book The Elements of Style, Strunk and his former student E. B. White urge, "Write with nouns and verbs." Smart men, those two. If a writer finds the perfect noun, there's usually no need to heap adjectives atop it; if a writer uses a strong verb, an adverb only detracts from its impact.
Lively writing--that's what we all want, isn't it? Writing that keeps our readers on the edge of their seats. Writing that makes them stay up past their bedtimes, makes their coffee grow cold in their cups, makes the dust bunnies collect under their desks, because none of them can find a good stopping point. We want our writing to consist wholly of parts our readers refuse to skip.
Now that I've extolled the virtues of an economical style, it's time to provide a little balance. Unfortunately, we taker-outers do not get the last word. Remember Fitzgerald's letter to Thomas Wolfe, chiding him for piling it on? Here is Wolfe's response to Fitzgerald:
Don't forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners--greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in--remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.
Wolfe has a point. William Faulkner and James Joyce were putter-inners; so were Walt Whitman and the genius who wrote the Song of Solomon. That fan fiction writer whose style drives me crazy, the unabashed putter-inner? She's immensely popular. Immensely!
As much as we taker-outers may hate to admit it, the putter-inners are better than we are at many aspects of writing. Ever read a smut scene that was nothing more than a play-by-play telling which appendage was inserted into which orifice? I certainly have. I've even written a few. I've also written stories that read more like a newspaper article or a how-to manual than a living, breathing work of fiction. Putter-inners never make that mistake. They revel in sensuous detail; they glory in the language of emotion.
Putter-inners often write more lyrically than taker-outers do, because they're not afraid to spend a word here and there for the sheer joy of it, while we taker-outers are much more miserly. If you've ever found yourself caught up in the sheer beauty of someone's writing, chances are you were reading a putter-inner's work. Taker-outers are storytellers; putter-inners paint with words. I often wish I knew how to paint.
I've complained about the way putter-inners overwrite, but we taker-outers have an equally grievous fault, namely failing to write enough. Hemingway believed that stories, like icebergs, should be seven-eighths below the surface. Too often, we taker-outers forget to leave that crucial one-eighth showing. We're so determined to be subtle that we end up being obscure.
I've received plenty of feedback from baffled readers of my stories, asking me to explain what I was trying to say. On the other hand, I've rarely had trouble figuring out what a putter-inner intended.
Whether we're a Fitzgerald or a Wolfe, a taker-outer or a putter-inner, the truth is, we can all learn from the other half. Taker-outers, loosen up a little. Try not to be so anal. Words are your friends. Putter-inners, sometimes you're a little too friendly with words. Sometimes, in fact, you're downright promiscuous. Stop giving it away.
What's best, I believe, is to make situational distinctions, to recognize that in some cases it is better to be a putter-inner, and in some cases it is better to be a taker-outer. Not every character or setting deserves detailed description, but those that are important and unfamiliar to the reader probably do. Action and dialogue speed up the narrative progress of a story, and descriptive passages slow it down. If a fanfic is staggering under its own weight, a writer needs to cut back on description for a while; if the pace is too quick, description provides exhausted readers with a chance to catch their breath.
Putter-inner or taker-outer? Contrary to Fitzgerald's contention, there is no superior style, no inferior style. There's only our own personal style, and making it better than it was before.
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