On the fearsome art of paragraphing
Sometimes I do this exercise in my class, where I take one of the books on our reading list and flip through it with eyes closed, landing my finger on a random page before I’ve flipped all the way to the end. Sometimes I land on a paragraph, and sometimes on a piece of dialogue (which you could make the case for being a series of very small paragraphs but that’s for another day). Anyway, if you do this with a really good book, the result guarantees goosebumps.
Take for example example this paragraph from The Talented Mr Ripley, which I landed on in this random fashion:
Tom had dinner that evening at a restaurant down on the water called Zi’ Teresa, which had been recommended to him by the English-speaking manager of the hotel. He had a difficult time ordering, and he found himself with a first course of miniature octopuses, as virulently purple as if they had been cooked in the ink in which the menu had been written. He tasted the tip of one tentacle and it had a disgusting consistency like cartilage. The second course was also a mistake, a platter of fried fish of various kinds. The third course – which he had been sure was a kind of dessert – was a couple of small reddish fish. Ah Naples! The food didn’t matter. He was feeling mellow on the wine. Far over on his left, a three-quarter moon drifted above the jagged hump of Mount Vesuvius. Tom gazed at it calmly, as if he had seen it a thousand times before. Around the corner of land there, beyond Vesuvius, lay Richard’s village.
Oh my God. This is very early in the story. Tom has only just arrived in Italy. He hasn’t even met Dickie (Richard). He certainly hasn’t yet had the idea of taking Richard’s identity. And here he is, pretending to be Dickie. It’s almost too much, it’s so good. The reader won’t notice that he’s taking on his persona at this point. At least not on first reading. (At least, this reader didn’t.) Not when Tom doesn’t himself even notice what’s happening. But this is definitely what’s suggested.
First there’s that ‘Ah Naples!’ comment (it’s third person, but we’re very closely in Tom’s mind). No one surely gets to say ‘Ah Naples!’ like that unless they’ve lived there. Yet this is Tom’s first day not only in Naples, but in Europe. His first day outside of the States. He has not earned his Ah Naples! but he is having it anyway (which is of course so very Tom Ripley of him). And then there’s that deliciously creepy way he gazes calmly at Vesuvius ‘as if he had seen it a thousand times before’. And straight after that, we have the information, that around the corner lies Richard’s village. The suggestive power of this is incredible. It’s basically a microcosm of the entire novel.
I don’t imagine Patricia Highsmith worked out all this in advance. I think she just had that quality of writerly courage if we might call it that – the ability to not only stay with something, but go into it. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to attend a handful of brilliant writing workshops with Claire Keegan. Once she said, about a piece of my writing, that I was like a child on a beach – picking up a thing, then almost straight away dropping it in favour of something else. It was a great lesson in how good writing isn’t only about knowing – somehow – what to ‘pick up’; it’s also having the guts to stay with it. If you bring a reader to a place in time and space, it better somehow hum with the energy of story. It better be part of the story.
You can’t bring the character (and therefore the reader) somewhere only to tear off someplace else. (Maybe if you’re doing that in a draft of something you’re working on, it’s a sign there’s something going on there, something good, but going in means discomfort for you as a writer? So off you run?) For instance, in this Ripley paragraph, Highsmith could have told us about his not-very-nice meal and left it at that. But she trusted her instinct, and so there she sat inside Tom not eating the cartilage-octopuses, and look at the lovely suggestive magic she got out of it.
Strunk and White’s stern description of what a paragraph ought to do is humbling for the fiction reader. You might think what they say has no relevance to fiction, fiction being an art and all of that. But in fact, following what they say might help you keep you on the straight and narrow when your unenviable task is after all to step into the shoes of another human, and then breathe life into them via the paragraph. You need the feeling, but then you need the logic.
Strunk and White take it so seriously, they even make a verb of it. Paragraphing, they call it.
Paragraphing, they say, calls for a good eye as well as a logical mind. Enormous blocks of print look formidable to readers, who are often reluctant to tackle them.
Tackle them. I love it. Highsmith never makes her readers tackle walls of text like that.
Another thing Strunk and White focus on is the opening sentence, which ‘indicates by its subject the direction the paragraph is going to take’. That’s certainly what happens in the quiet, clear first sentence of our Ripley paragraph: ‘Tom had dinner that evening at a restaurant down on the water called Zi’ Teresa, which had been recommended to him by the English-speaking manager of the hotel.’ She takes us here, and then she keeps us here, and she goes into that perfectly chosen moment (at night, by the dark waters, jagged Vesuvius and a moon), and the whole thing hums with the tension of Tom already not being quite himself, of wanting something that lies beyond.