Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

the word-count of our little scrap of dialogue. The words on the page still read rapidly enough; it's just that there are more of them.

Does this mean the material is padded? Maybe yes, maybe no?the question can't really be answered out of context. Padding is wordage without purpose. If a whole book or story were larded with introspection and cigarette-lighting and the observation of minutiae, then you'd be justified in calling it padding or simple bad writing. But when certain scenes are stretched this way for a purpose, when the information contained in the bare dialogue is secondary in importance to other elements you want to convey to the reader, then the extra words pay their way.

Sometimes a scene exists only to move a story along. At other times it's pivotal and possesses genuine dramatic value, and often in such instances the words your characters speak are of less moment than the changes they are going through while they speak. When you write such a scene, you want to slow the reader down a little?as we have seen?and make the scene take more of his time. You don't want to be a bore, of course, and you don't want padding to be identifiable to anyone as padding, so you make sure those extra unspoken words are interesting, either creating distinct sensory images, or delineating moods, or giving the reader something to think about.

So let's amend Rule #1 accordingly, rendering it in a form that will make it supremely useful to all writers of fiction.

To wit: Dialogue should be allowed to stand alone, pure and simple. Except when it shouldn't.

Is that clear?

CHAPTER 38

Verbs for Vim and Vigor

I MARMALADED a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying Tra-la-la as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning. God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)

The speaker is young Bertram Wooster, the work cited is Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, and the author is P. G. Wodehouse of blessed memory. Wodehouse lived to be ninety-three, and wrote about that many novels, fitting them in between plays, musical-comedy lyrics, screenplays, essays, articles, and, I have no doubt, blurbs for the backs of breakfast cereal boxes and screeds to be tucked into fortune cookies. He did all of this with consummate grace, dovetailing a plot like DiMaggio gathering in a fly ball, making it all look quite effortless.

I have lately discovered Wodehouse, and while I must have read a few of the books before I have never been as appreciative an audience for him as I find myself today. And what a treat it is to uncover a passion for an author who has written nearly a hundred books! Years of uncomplicated reading stretch out before me like an expanse of untrodden lawn. The only f. in the ointment, as the master might put it, is that one tends to go about talking like B. Wooster himself, to the extreme distress of one's companions.

But I digress. Return your attention, if you will, to the passage quoted above. The operative word is marmaladed.

The meaning of the word is by no means elusive. Even the dimmest reader grasps quickly enough that the speaker has spread marmalade on his slice of toast. Yet no dictionary in my ken allows marmalade as a verb. It is a noun, derived via the French from the Portuguese word for quince, and it means a preserve made by boiling fruit with sugar. It may also mean the fruit of Lucuma mammosa, or that tree itself.

When he deploys marmalade as a verb, Wodehouse attracts our attention by using a familiar word in an unfamiliar fashion. We may read it in one of three ways. We can merely breeze along with the breeze, paying no particular attention to this unorthodox use of marmalade. Or we can note it, cock an eye at it, smile at the author's linguistic imagination, and keep going.

Or, finally, we can think about it. We can muse that the language itself affords precedent for what Wodehouse has done here. When one lubricates a slice of toast with butter, for example, the verb to butter is in widespread use. If one can butter a slice of bread, why shouldn't one be permitted to marmalade it? One oils various articles?an engine, a watch, whatever. Could one oil a bowl of salad, preparatory to vinegaring it?

This particular sort of verb play crops up often in Wodehouse. When Bertie picks up something or other and tucks it into his pants pocket, he's apt to describe himself as having trousered the article, whatever it might be. Now one does not as a general rule go about trousering things, but one does pocket them, so why shouldn't one be able to trouser them as well? Might a woman pick up a cigarette lighter and purse it? Or may one only purse one's lips?

This is fun, and I hope it will spark an appetite for Wodehouse while stimulating an interest in what words are and are not permitted to do. But I dug that passage out of Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves for a reason. (Actually I had rather little digging