A Grammar Coach Works with a Recalcitrant Verb

It’s easy to tire of the exhausted sports metaphor: “He dropped the ball; it’s in your court; that was a slam dunk; we had to punt.” Most clichés have altogether lost their pepper, but ones involving sporting feats—employed with particularly ruthless disregard for their applicability in the business world—seem to have withered before they even rounded second base. So for me to drag you, punting and dunking, into an arena where basketball is used as a metaphorical muse for writing might cause you to think this is an exercise in sweaty nonsense.

And yet. This past weekend I went to a professional basketball game in Santa Cruz, where the Oakland Warriors have their D (developmental) League team. If you’ve watched (or even played) much basketball, it can look like a manic maelstrom of movement, the ball whipping from player to player, defenders darting, many a feint and many a collision of shoulders and legs. And that’s just on one possession of the ball. It begins all over again when the ball changes hands.

But when a team is running the court in high gear, when passes are crisp, cuts away from or to the basket are sharp, when a jump shot floats off the fingers of the shooter like a soft fluttering dove to nestle in the net, it’s a thing of beauty. That’s how it is when words, sentences, paragraphs are working right. There is motion in language, there is exchange of motion, there is anticipation and delivery. The smooth pause can lead to an explosive conclusion; a quiet turn of phrase can open up a delicate cat and mouse communication, one that can lead to a ferocious end or a finessed bit of finery.

Words Work in Teams

While I watched the action on the court, word weirdo that I am, I thought how words work in teams, how there is an energy exchange between words, and how when you move them around in different ways, their meaning is recast. So it is with the movement on the court. Of course, the court movement can have a slapdash, arrhythmic outcome, as can a poorly rendered sentence or paragraph. Use the wrong verb and your sentence sags. Put your center out on top of your offense in place of your point guard, and watch your offense go to sleep.

I also started thinking of how your first-string team (your conflicted protagonist, the opening lines of your blog post, the value prop of your business) is supported by the structural material of your second string team (the backstory, the summary section of the blog, the features/benefits box), and how your bench material can hold the dam together while the prime design shines. But then I realized I was mixing sports metaphors with other writing clichés, kind of like making a meal of old boxing gloves and thumbtacks, and nobody’s hungry for that. Slam dunk!

Addendum: Awesome Engagement (and Comment for Cash)

I am a finalist in Firepole Marketing’s Awesome Engagement Strategies guest-posting contest. My post, which is about how being a human being in your dealings with clients or with your audience is so much more helpful than being a crazed-for-sales wolverine, is running now. I’d greatly appreciate it you’d stop by and agree, disagree or leave an epic poem in the comments section. The five best commenters throughout the contest get $100. If I win the contest, I get to do some kind of go-go dancing with Danny Iny, the site’s head honcho, so go out and buy some thigh-high white boots for me in anticipation.

A while back, I wrote The Write Word Easy Editing and Spiffy Style Guide,the charming creature just a bit below and off to your right in the sidebar. Thousands of energetic, elvish electrons rushed out to peddle my modestly priced guide, feverish in their quest to lop off dangling participles (dang them) and comma splices (much worse than comatose spices) and make the world safe for the semicolon.

But this being Christmas Eve and all, it’s a time for giving. Since I don’t want to give away my only other prized possession, a basketball signed by Elgin Baylor, I’m making the easy, spiffy guide a gift to the world. Just click on that beaming baby in the sidebar, give me your email address (no Sir Spamalot am I), and it’s yours. Find a typo in there and I will make you a perfect Manhattan the next time you venture to my doorstep. (We can drink them inside, though.)

Don’t Pick These People Up If You See Them Hitchhiking
The other item with which I want to scorch your eyeballs is my novel, All Roads Are Circles, pictured above. I recently released it as an ebook on Amazon. Of course it is the Great American Novel, which is why I set it in Canada in the 1970s. Picture two post—high school best friends on a lunatic hitchhiking trip, picked up by the crazed, the cuckoo and the calamitous. It’s kind of like On the Road meets Huck Finn, but I don’t have those guys’ press agents. Oh, the two leads fall in love with the same gal on their odyssey, and they get a bit testy. And messy.

If you don’t feel you can risk the .99, think of it this way: you can download the free editing guide, use its pointed prescriptives to detect any places in my novel where the plot’s socks get soggy, and we can rewrite the thing together, and with the second edition’s proceeds, I will have enough money to make you another Manhattan. Your call.

PS I will make you three Manhattans (with brandied cherries, not those crappy Maraschinos) if you review the durn thing on Amazon.

My sweet two-tone '62, many moons ago

There are more than a million Priuses in the U.S. And if you live here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it might appear that 995,000 of the quietly efficient hybrids are here, doing their concerted part to combat the carbon demon. I have to applaud the mighty miles-per-gallon, the hearty hybrid powerplant, the eco-engagement of ownership—but frankly, the cars themselves leave me cold.

You see, I am guilty of forbidden love. I love the cars of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and lament the thought that they are reviled because of their drunken-carburetor consumption. For me, a car must be seasoned; like a good cigar, its oils must be developed. Naturally, in the course of that development, some of those oils might end up in your driveway, but that’s part of the romance of used car ownership: it’s a little like the affection you felt for your first girlfriend because she had a bit of a temper or crooked teeth. You have a relationship with your used car, you must negotiate—this can’t take place with these new robotic machines that go 100,000 miles before they need a tune-up. Where’s the challenge, where’s the evolution of your relationship with your car in that?

So, the flourishing of the Prius, the jolt of the Volt, the turning of the Leaf are all planetary plusses. But I fear the flare of a fin will no longer excite the eye, the capaciousness of a titanic trunk will no longer bewilder and thrill. Gas prices are once again fluctuating near their $4.00-and-climbing crime, and that pulsing of petrol sticks a sharpened fuel needle into the veins of classic car lovers. The carbon footprint of most 8-cylinder behemoths is Godzilla-like. But tally up cookie-cutter hybrids on the cool scale: zip, nada, nuttin’.

Gin-Dripping Rides and Fluid Drive
Some cars were engineered to leave those telltale deposits on your driveway, or so it seems. I had an ‘81 Jaguar that leaked everything: oil, power-steering fluid, transmission fluid, antifreeze—I’m pretty sure it was leaking gin before I sold it. My mechanic seemed to think it was perfectly normal. Of course I’ve had a guilt quiver or ten about the un-ecological consequences of owning these old gas guzzlers and oil drippers, but you have to look at the big picture: sure, I recycle, yes, I ride my bike when I could drive, I admit to once belonging to the Sierra Club and contributing to other Commie organizations—I’ve got to balance that with some forbidden pleasure, the delight of Detroit sin. Even an éminence grise of the environmental movement, Edward Abbey, had an abiding love for old Caddies, the ones that approach the length of the QE2, and he’s practically a saint.

My second car was a ’48 Dodge, a long, black voluptuous thing with suicide doors and a massive steering wheel. In that marvelous marketing vernacular, it possessed something called fluid drive, which allowed you to either drive away from a dead stop in high gear without using the clutch, or manually go clickety-clacking through the three gears on your way to its ponderous but satisfying top speed. That Dodge infused in me a need to find substance in a car, substance of look, of mass. Many of today’s cars seem to drive themselves; they are polite and transparent and subservient under the slight wiggling of your fingers at the wheel. That’s not a car, that’s a trained terrier. Give me a car like the ’62 Caddy I owned, a vast expanse of carchitecture, a car whose rear end was in another time zone.

Edvard Munch Express
Of course, they don’t all have to be as big as a 747 to be intriguing. I owned a ’58 VW bug (with a decayed rendering of Tweety Bird, possibly done by Edvard Munch, on the driver’s-side door) that was a mottled rainbow of colors, a car that wept at the sight of an upcoming hill. It was so small and I am so stringy-legged that I could sit my rear on the top of the driver’s seat and still be able to operate the pedals—with my head and shoulders out of the sunroof—so that summer driving was the pleasure it’s meant to be.

One of the sweetest vehicles I owned was a ’65 Galaxie 500, for which I paid less than $200. After I had some cheap valve work done, the fire-engine red Galaxie became a fire-breather: a charmer with the perfect V-8 purr, something that no computer-tuned lithium-ion-battery-pack buzzer will ever have. OK, OK, so 15 miles to the gallon isn’t truly economizing—knowing that when I leaned on the gas pedal I’d get that soulful sound and satisfying surge wasn’t something I put a price on anyway.

Strippers and Stolen Cars, Oh My!
There are a few other cars I’ve paid less than $300 for—and some of them even moved under their own power. However, one of the more interesting cars I’ve owned didn’t cost me a dime—until later. It was given to me and my Las Vegas housemate on the freeway spot where we picked up its frustrated driver. He’d left it for dead—a serviceable ’65 VW bug that simply had some problem with its coil wire. I was later able to legally register it (under something like an “abandoned vehicle” statute) as mine. Later, I drove it to Northern California, where I began college. I used it there for several months, so that I no longer even considered how oddly it had been acquired; it was my car.

Even when a uniformed police officer came to my English class and asked if there was a Tom Bentley there, I figured that it was my hair that had probably broken some law (my 1976 hairdo was very expressive). No, it seems I was in possession of a stolen car, of all things, and that I’d have to come to the station and straighten it out. It was easily straightened out: the car was owned by a woman in Vegas that had just loaned the car to our freeway cluck, and she’d discovered his poor stewardship upon her return from Japan, where she’d been touring with an entertainment group.

Her particular talent was removing clothing from the profound grounds of her architecture. (I found some black and white glossies of her in/out of costume in the trunk; she might put you in mind of Elly May Clampett after five vodka tonics, wearing a mail-order Lady Godiva wig).

Her name was (and might still be) Angel Blue. Under her name, the tag line on the glossies read: The Heavenly Body. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. And neither were the cops, who despite my protestations (and my registrations), took the car and gave it to Ms. Blue’s lawyer, who had tracked me to my academic lair. The real question I wanted answered was this: what was a stripper of Lady Blue’s talents doing with a ‘65 Volkswagen? Ah, America, where Flannery O’Connor could have one of her unforgettable characters, Hazel Motes, say, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

Atomic-Bomb Toasters and Eye-Popping Brassieres
I have to agree with that, and that’s why I once bought a ’64 Studebaker, long years after the company went out of business. Hey, it had a beautiful rear end (yes, absolutely true, every sexual association made about men and their cars), and some lovely instrumentation. And, since Studebaker parts are about as numerous as King Tut’s first digital recordings, I got to meet some of the upholders of the Studebaker’s tradition of independence, the parts suppliers I had to drive an hour and a half to get to. Just a poke to the right of Karl Rove, they provided me with intriguing NRA slogans on every repair receipt.

Of course, Mother Earth cringes a bit when pedals like that hit metal, so that today it’s almost embarrassing to drive some Detroit pride from the Mad Men era. But much as I admire the concept of today’s hybrids and electrics, I just can’t dig the feel. Old cars have such a different texture, being of an era when toasters were shaped like atomic bombs, and brassieres could poke out an eye. I had a ’63 Mercury Monterey that had such a nice heft in the wheel and an appealing “floating roll” when I swung it wide at speed. It had enough chrome on its long, wide bumper to blind drivers behind me, or at least melt their ice cream. The grandmothers of everyone I know could have played bingo in the trunk.

And some old wheels have such distinctive irregularities: My ‘64 Dodge Dart had a perfectly operating 8-track player. (For those of you too callow to remember the 8-track, it was an audio device used by Nero to play back his first recorded efforts on the fiddle.) But who am I kidding? Those cars really are beasts of another, more profligate time. I raise my mad martini to yesterday’s steel, and martini #2 to the Tesla, which at least has some style. The fin is dead; long live the lithium battery.

And who knows—maybe I can convert a ’64 Lincoln to run on vegetable oil….

I love this photo of Kate Hepburn. Even though her both-feet-athwart stance seems to presage a butt-tumble to come, the fact that she’s cranking the angle shows she’s not just rolling a flat-foot-dead-ahead-I’m-terrified skate, but she’s going for it. Maybe it’s the only time Kate skated, maybe it’s just a publicity photo, but implicit in it is the kind of attitude confirmed by Hepburn’s bio: a brash kind of what-the-hell brio that was disarming and refreshing.

That’s what I think writers should do: push the angle a little, crank off some language that’s bolder or brighter, be willing to take a bone bruise to your writer’s elbows. I like to imagine Kate grinding on a curb in the Safeway parking lot, the security guard saying, “Hey lady, give it a rest!” From reading of her history, she rarely gave it a rest: she was opinionated, strong-willed and emotional, and it came out in her acting and her personal life. Whether you write for business, pleasure or both, writing doesn’t have any flavor unless you add some cayenne now and then.

The Long Hangover from a Word-Bender
When I was ten or eleven, I became slap-happy with words. I’d read the dictionary in chunks of pages, getting into the brief etymologies, mouthing the pronunciations. I remember running down to my best friend’s house, having memorized a line about a nice, old Volkswagen bus his highly educated parents had bought, so that I could spring on them something like “Congratulations on purchasing a well-restored vintage mode of transportation,” or some such gobbledygook. My friend’s dad just looked at me and laughed, though in a kindly way.

Despite regularly getting those kind of skeptical responses, I continued being a word-dweeb for years. The editor of my college paper was a guy who liked me and my writing, but one who accurately judged that my polysyllables-per-sentence count was choking many readers. He once titled an article of mine about an unconventional housing design near the college, “A Lot of Big Words About Housing.”

I’ve calmed down some from those days. I’m no longer so insecure about my writing that I have to forcibly lard it with fifty-cent words to make it seem worth something. But I’m still thrilled by language, still rifling through the dictionary, still wanting to goose a sentence with word-grease that makes it jump. So, take some chances with your writing: think of Kate Hepburn shredding in a half-pipe, no knee pads.

Bonus Celebrity “No Way!” Sighting
Agatha Christie was a surfer. I knew that Mark Twain did it in Hawaii (look for his tales of “surf bathing” in the Sandwich Islands), but Dame Agatha? Yes! I am hoping that one of you can find out whether Yogi Berra was a knitter.

Image via Wikipedia

Famed adman Charles Dickens (Oglivy stole everything from Charlie) started out as a struggling copywriter in London, at one point so desperate for work he scribbled his business address—he was also the first graffiti artist—on the legs of local trollops working the district.

But then Dickens had a revelation: he did a little fiction writing on the side, and wondered whether his attempts to sell buyers on the chewy goodness of hardtack biscuits would work if he tossed in some storytelling. Stories might deliver the needed ROB (Return on Bamboozling).

Bingo!

So he formulated his Five Rules of Compelling Copywriting, which sleazy scribes have cribbed from for more than a century. To wit:

Hit ‘Em with Headlines
Charlie dug that the headline is the hook. He landed big ones with whoppers like these:
A Whale of a Deal!
Call me (but call me Ishmael)

Finagle Your First Lines
Dickens doctored all the first lines of his marketing pieces with winning words:
For fresh fruit: “These were the best of limes, these were the worst of limes.”
For sandwiches: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero sandwich of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Never Short Your Sales Letters
You knew that Charlie pioneered the use of yellow highlighting in his sales letters, but you probably didn’t know that he perfected the use of the interminable sentence:

There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason.

Charlie highlighted it all, of course.

Use Tongue-Torquing Character Names
For every vanilla “Bob” you’ve got selling your sparks, Dickens will give you a Wopsle, a Wackford Squeers or a Pumblechook.

Calls to Action that Crackle
Use tactics like pathetic, big-eyed urchins whimpering things like “Please sir, I want some more.” Dickens really knew how to yank hankies. (Hankies are always followed by wallets.)

Bonuses
And don’t forget his exemplary use of Random Capitalization and Emotional Outrage. They don’t call the guy “Mr. Gutbucket Sales” for nothing.

Next week, we’ll examine how Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People started out as a how-to book on trimming hedges.