Voices on Writing: Arthur Plotnik: The Guru of Grammar

by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Arthur Plotnik has been writing about writing since he started writing. Two of his books, The Elements of Editing (Macmillan/Longman) and The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts into Words (Henry Holt/Barnes & Noble), have been featured selections of the Book of the Month Club. His latest book, Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language & Style, was published in November 2005 by Random House Reference. Poet Billy Collins called it, "A must for every writer's desk." A trade paperback edition (with new study guide) was published in May 2007 with the subtitle, A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style.

Plotnik also is a tree lover; with his wife, the artist Mary Phelan, he co-authored The Urban Tree Book: An Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town (Crown/Random House, 2000).

As a publisher, Plotnik brought five national awards (1993-1997) to the American Library Association's book imprint, winning honors also as editor of ALA's flagship magazine, American Libraries. Plotnik has written scores of magazine articles and columns, five nonfiction books, and numerous paperback novels. His work has appeared in publications ranging from La Prensa (Bolivia) to The New York Times. Presently a contributing editor to The Writer magazine, he previously contributed to Britannica Book of English Usage and the "American English" column of American Way in-flight magazine. He has lived in Chicago since 1975.

BDB: How did your focus on writing about writing develop?

AP: Youthful writing skills got me into editing, and as I crept up the editorial mastheads I found myself advising writers and other editors as if I were Jacques Barzun. Eventually I figured out enough to begin The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (Macmillan) -- and, as it usually works, I wised up as I wrote. Various types of writers responded to the book's editing advice -- how to judge a manuscript, for example, or the relationship between writer and editor -- and when the book hit the jackpot (paired with The Elements of Style as a Book-of-the-Month Club offering), I fancied myself quite the explainer. So why not explain the near-inexplicable thing I'd been wrestling with for two decades: writing?

BDB: Were you a writer/reader as a kid?

AP: Like you, Barbara, I grew up in a "non-literary" house, though my father read the Daily Racing Form religiously. Having been somewhat of a runt among my playmates, I can identify with Mickey Sabbath (of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater) when he says, "I learned early on that people seem more easily to pass over how short I am when I am linguistically large." But "large" comes in many shapes. My first linguistic triumph was The Little Handybook of Drags, a pre-pubescent compilation of cool insults ("signifying"), hand-bound in silver foil and critically acclaimed in the schoolyard.

BDB: Speaking of Philip Roth, you studied under him at the Iowa Writers Workshop. How was that?

AP: Ever take a class with God? He was it, of course, the 26-year-old, nationally acclaimed author of Goodbye, Columbus. That first day, when he sat on the edge of a desk, snapped the crease of one pant leg, and announced, "I'm Philip Roth," was an apotheosis for all us would-be's, even if many of us fell to earth in a semester. He was a demanding if witty instructor, somehow accepting the gap between our prose and that of the Eastern European authors that inspired him. And like other celebrity authors that year, he was approachable, whether after class, at a party, or when the fiction and poetry workshops tangled at weekend softball games.

BDB: Your most recent book, Spunk and Bite, just came out in paperback. I recommend it to my students and to writers I know who love language and who want to improve their writing. Talk about how this book came about.

AP: It grew out of an article I did called "E. B. Whitewashed," in which I mewled about E. B. White's conservative advice to writers in The Elements of Style -- that toast-sized icon of composition known as [William] Strunk & White.

White, one of the friskiest swimmers in the stream of English, advised other writers not to "thrash about." Fine: He calmed generations of hyperactive student writers, and his advice on clarity and concision still helps us fashion the well-tempered essay. But today, a writer swims not only against HDTV, iPhones, and Xboxes, but thousands of voracious literary salmon Michael-Phelpsing their way upstream. No thrashing? How could the author of The Little Handybook of Dragsremain silent?

BDB: The book is freeing and inspiring and so much of the advice sort of flies in the face of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. In a funny way, of course. Did you use the Elements of Style, ever, as a style book?

AP: Yes -- I was drunk on Strunk & White when it came out. Paradoxically, its discipline -- in the wake of Beat-Generation spew -- was intoxicating. Who could argue with dictums like "Omit needless words"? Even now, when my syntax gets weak in the knees, I'll down a stiff ounce of advice from The Elements -- say, Rule 22: "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end." When I do fly in the genial visage of Strunk/White, it's for such advice as "Do not inject opinion" and "Prefer the standard to the offbeat," which can tighten the reins on already inhibited writers.

BDB: Do you ever use style guides, and if so, which ones:

AP: Oh, I'm a user. Why would I want to be up that infamous creek with no paddles? The oars that guide us include mechanical style -- the conventions that various editing and publishing communities apply for consistency -- and expressive style, what Thomas Kane [The New Oxford Guide to Writing] calls "the deep essence of writing" or "the total of all the choices a writer makes concerning words and their arrangements."

Thus do my shelves bulge with pure usage guides, which inform expressive style, as well as the Chicago Manual of Style and such hybrids as the friendly New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage and the practical New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. I like R. W. Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage more than do some reactionaries; but the guide I reach for first and with a frisson of anticipated reading pleasure is Garner's Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner. Its authority, backed by contemporary examples, is peerless, its bright discourse almost spunky and bitey.

BDB: What comes across in your book is your love of language. You sound like you're having such fun! Talk about the process of writing, and selling, the book. Did you do a traditional book proposal, etc.?

AP: As a lover of language, I can't bear the dissonance of "fun" juxtaposed with "proposal" and "selling." True, nothing is odder than a writer's notion of fun; i.e., holing up to make beauty and truth out of mud while the rest of the world cavorts. Yet somewhere within the process comes pleasure -- for me, nailing the right word or deft locution. But fun-wise, writing proposals (or fiction synopses) ranks with chewing off a limb to escape a hunting trap. Make that two limbs when it comes to pimping your product -- unless you're a Donald Trump by nature.

On http://spunkandbite.com/wst_page4.html, writers can view a successful proposal (for Spunk & Bite), but not the gnashing of brain cells that went into it.

BDB: Certain writers profess to never use a thesaurus and advise others never to use one. You encourage such use.

AP: As I say in Spunk, "a writer would have to be mad, unhinged, moonstruck" to shun the wonderland of a good thesaurus. Author Simon Winchester argues that "ill-versed" users are seduced into choosing false synonyms -- words with their own nuances. But writers have a secret weapon by which they can check out a juicy-looking word: it is called the dictionary.

I recommend thesauruses arranged by categories (classified) rather than alphabetical lists, because whole families of related words can be explored rather than a single entry. A favorite tip: look outside the family. Seeking a stronger adjective than "bright," I abandoned the "light" category and flipped randomly to "violence," where I found "savage," "barbarous," and "scorching," with their figurative might.

BDB: Likewise with adjectives and adverbs. Certain writing gurus advise writers to kill each and every one while you praise their use. Talk about this.

AP: Well aren't those gurus yawningly brilliant? Oops -- pardon the adverb. It's just that modifiers, basic to the language, get a bad name from poor or needless use. Strong nouns like "mojo" need no support, and no one favors cliché or redundant adjectives and adverbs -- "sunny" smile, whispered "softly." But as our best writers know, fresh and inventive modifiers intensify expression: "caramelized air," "a throat-cut silence," "defiantly limp," "incandescently stupid."

BDB: What about poetry? Do you read poetry and would you encourage writers, no matter what they're writing, to read it?

AP: I do encourage all writers to write some poetry, and to write poetry without reading a mix of it would be achingly pointless. You will doubtless write second-rate poems, but who's judging -- unless you've got the moxie to start submitting them? As a non-poet, you write (and read) poetry to discover fresh imagery, to sharpen or awaken your feel for rhythm and sound, and to study what needn't be spelled out. Whom to read? My list of contemporaries includes the hospitable and masterly Billy Collins, the incomprehensible (to me) but electrifying imagist Elena Karina Byrne and Seamus Heaney, who will make you fall in love all over again with English.

BDB: You wrote pulp novels for the Scott-Meredith Literary Agency while completing work on the second of two master's degrees (English, library service).

AP: Yes, 22 "potboilers," to describe euphemistically these carnal (but legal) paperbacks with titles like "Lust" this or "Stud" that. Joining a stable of pseudonymous authors including Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, I ground out a book a month for two years to pay for that second masters -- and for the shrink who repaired the damage of hack writing. You don't want to think about any one thing twelve hours a day, not even tawdry sex.

Did I gain anything as a writer? Yes, I got rid of some bad plots, learned to manage massive output, and discovered hundreds of metaphors for buttocks.

BDB: What's on your nightstand right now -- books, that is?

AP: A mish-mash, to be honest: Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch, Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, a paperback dictionary, and Defying the Flat Surface, a chapbook by poet Lynne Knight.

BDB: Anything we should have talked about but didn't?

AP: Two things I've been telling writers: First, that their mission is to refresh readers from the fug -- the stale air -- the ordinary, the numbing, and the safe and sterile. And second, that language matters, even in this supposedly dumbed-down world. It will matter until people stop using it to symbolize everything they care about. And if you want your language to matter, the secret is freshness -- the power of novel, inventive expression achieved by moiling in the muck of words.

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Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of The ASJA Monthly and author of the award-winning book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt, 2004). She hosts Writers on Writing, a weekly show on KUCI-FM, which streams live and podcasts at http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com. More at www.penonfire.com.