Evoking«The WOi4is ·not the thing.

Thentapisndt the territory. "--J{OJlZ;Y.slU

Here's another tti(:.:k.Suppose you warn a paragraph to suggest 'something

magical and moedy-e-like the dark center of a forest whereenchantment lurks.

Make a list of all the words that will evoke the feelingofthis forest:

coldsparkling leavesgnarleddarktwisted tree trunksluminousrtlQ.onligJltsilencewhite wolvesgliding

Now try to see how.manyof these words or images youcall use in.a.paragraph. Don't overdo it. Youdon't have touse them all.

The gnarled trees CI''Ouched beneath the luminousnight. Branches. twisted toward the cold sky, likeclutching fingers reaching. fo1.'the first soft flakes ofsnow. In the dearing; the white wolves gathered si-

178

EV0KING

lentlyas ghosts. The moonlit ground glistened withthe frozen breath.. of winter.

Notice there are only fout thaughts io this paragraph.The first ann second sentences set the scene. The third sen-tence tells you what is 'happening, and the fourth senteneeadds one morepiece of description.

Remember your high school English course? Rememberhow your teach-er tried to explain to you that every para-§r~ph has a themescnte1.lce? When you're telling a story,every paeagraphshould have one sentence that advancesthe-story to the next paragraph. In this paragraph the whitewelvesaregarhering. In the next paragraph, the next eventOCcurs:

The leader of the pack lifted his nose to the wind.There was som-ething out rhere-e-scmething imfamil~iar. To the east? ... Memories of pain. Somethingunpleasant in that realm.

And irrrhe next paragraph, the 7/€xfeventoccurs:

Yes, to the east.He had :the scent now ..Whatever the acrid memo-

ries,he was 'stt()nger now. And hU:flgrier. Like awraith, he moved softly out of the glade. The othersfollowed after" their paws light upon the glassy sur-face of the snow.

Notice that every moment of action is,also an epportu-nity to add another sentence of d'escription~an@thetpieceof the ~,yerall picture.

Here's something else to remember. Don't overuse thesame word, in a series of paragraphs. Try to find other

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WQRLDS Gf:WONDER:HQW TO WRITE'S€IENCE FI<iTIONANil FANTA~Y

words, that expand the ,1l,l~,anmg.For instance, Edgar AlbnPee never used the word "room" when {fte-could' .als£)<usechamber$. apart:me.Tlt~4uarters;.lodgi~g, 4ccofflm.ot!at;otl,demicite, ,1u~rth,bill'e~;b()(lrd. bed, stmcture, building. otharbor. t~As well as duttgeoTl.p,risan. t;el1~and h~b;t)l,tioh..

..~IKT1If:"eit' ~iid tl'l! PI!n4'i/lllfl,b,y Edga:rAllan p~,

tKO.

Metri'( ProseIf it's gat a ,goo.d beat, you can dance to it.

Midway through the seventies; Harlan Ellison hostedalecture seiiesaf UCLAealfed "Ten Tuesdays D.own a Rab~bit l:loJe:~Many o[,the·'scien« fiction writerein.Les.Angeleseame in as guest speakers, but even on the nights the}!w~ten't speaking,.·m.any of them attended jlJsiiot the funof participating.$h:e~ote'Sttttgeonwas,oneQf th:ose who show.ed up

far all ten sessions. Afterward,. sev,era:1of us would gathera,t Ship's (a Illodmark coffee srrO,p. Jo:ng since torn dawn,)for mllnl;:bies and eO"rtvets~tioJl.Some of those late nightsessions; became partofJo.caI1legend, (Like the time i triedto strangle Wina because .she wouldn't take the hintandshut up, but that's anotherstory.)

During hishferime, Theo.doteStutgeon became the-mostrepriIited living author in the Errglish Ianguage, His shortstoriesineluded such dassit:s as "The 'Silken~Swi'ft:! ~~ASaucer of Loneliness," "The Comedian's Children," "Poor:Superman," "Affair With a Gteen Monker./"'The World'Well Lost," and UMie.rocosmic God:' His landmark navel;;,More Than U~n.t4n,despite its title, was the most passion-ately bumai)$cience fi~tiOI1lnQVelof the' ~entury. (fie alsowrote the "Shore Leave" arrd "AllieR Tim¢"episodes ofStLlt Trek,but. those were pale: intimat,ions uf what Ire wasreally capable' ot) A new work hy Stwrgeon was alway.s a'cause fOl',¢elebration •

SJiUtg~onwas not on:lya ternarkab1esrylist. he was atift

WORLDS OF WONDER: HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE f!CTION AND FANTASY

remarkable human being with a rare and powerful insightinto the way things worked. He was joyous and candidabout the lessons he'd learned, so one night, without anyembarrassment, I turned rohim and asked himabout style.

What is style, Iasked. How does it work? How do youmaster it? Iadmitted that this was the one part of writingthat still felt like a mystery. How do you write in a style?

Ted was both surprised and delighted, Nobody had everasked him this question before, and this was a diseoverythat he was happy to share.

"Metric prose," he said. He pulled out a pen and starteddrawing on a napkin. "Language has rhythm. If you writea paragraph with a specific poetic rhythm, the reader hearsthat rhythm in his head as he reads, and that rhythm helpscreate the mood of the story. If you suddenly shift therhythm, YQU shift the mood, and it's like sliding from. silkonto sandpaper:' He drew dashes and half-circles to illus-trate the way poets mark the beats of their poems:

---u ---u---udr

-v-~----v-or

---v- --.u- -V-

"If you continue the rhythm from one sentence to thenext without missing a beat, the language flows and carriesthe reader along. Sometimes, to keep to the beat, you haveto find different words or different ways of phrasing whatyou want to say; and this forces you to stretch your writingmuscles:'

Ted shared a few examples, and we talked about "metricprose" for the better part of an hour, oblivious to all the

182

MEmlC f1RDSE

other discussions going on around us. He also said, imp-ishly, that the onetime he'd shared this with Frederik Poh1,his editor at Galaxy Science Piction magazine, Fred hadpooh-poehed it. A few years later, as Ted told it, Fred hadpraised "Bianca's Hands," one of Ted's most famous sto-ries, singling out one particular paragraph as an exampleof great writing. Ted's eyes twinkled as he related. "Ofcourse, that was the paragraph rd written in metric prose:'

I was fascinated. I'd never seen 0T heard of metric prosebefore. (I'd never studied poetry.) Icould hardly wait toget home and start typing. The next day, Iwent to theclosest bookstore and spent a hundred dollars Oft booksabout how to write poetry.

Over the next few years, Iexperimented with metric proseconstantly, in almost everything Iwrote. Sturgeon was right.It was a brilliant and effective way to use language-andthe best part was that it did force me to think outside myusual boundaries.

She worked the soil angrily. Her face was black Withgrime, dark sweat rolled off her brow. The blisterson her hands were raw and would need tending soon.Aching, stretching, straightening in the heat, her backconstricting and complaining, she paused to wipe herforehead. She looked across the fields. A mistake-the deadly trees still loomed. Unbidden anguish camerising out of memory.

She couldn't shut it out. It overwhelmed and top-pled her. She fell. Her knees gave way. Her heart. Hereyes. "Oh, God!" she choked. "This isn't right! Hedidn't deserve it!" Sobbing, she pounded the earth."Why did you take him? Answer me, God-I needan answer, now!"

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WORlDS OF WONDER: t:tOW'TO,WI{ITE SCIENCEFICTIO'N ANJ)FA,NTAS¥

Only the silence of theday ..1i'heheat '(i)£' the sun.And nothing motte. 'No answel7came.

Collapsed .in gdef" sprawledlacross the dirt, 'herhody.:wracked with sobs, She lay upon thebosont ofthe 'earth, urtCc,l)mfoned-slowly, slo:wlyrealizin,gthat'n~ end would come like this-not while she II;l,yunrtroving,

And she krtew the answer anyway. She'd have totake hera~e to the leviathan, theernperor of ,trees,.-and all the rest as welt It woU'ldb"e an ugly job, alls:umfi1.erlong, a week at least for just theking~

The tenants slept in day . They would be torpid.She stood, breatlling with a b.a'rdresolve. l)6 it now!She took the ax from ,the wag(>rt.And headed for thetrees.

She looked up once, then took her stand. Ani now?She swung the mighty ax around! It thunked into theleaden trunk. She jerked it loose and swung agairt.Around around again! Again! Ka·tbunk·t;I·thun'R'!

No moremonsters'har'boredhere, she swore. She'dhave the whole grove flat hefore the autumn came.They'd keep her hearth and soul warn;l' all winterlong-

Can you teUwhere the rhythfi1.<l:hanged?Can you tellwhere it changed again? Again?

OK, I admit it-I wt0te rhisexample a little hea:vy~hand-edly. I wanted the rhythm obvious. :Sut.in your own work,YON will want foex;periment with different rhy,thms fordifferent stylesand.d.i£ferenteffects. Some wilHeel comfort-able to you, and some will fiat. Use what WQl'ks~

Ideally, YQuwant each sentence to pr(i)pelthe reader for-want ee ,the next. M:etricprose accomplishes this by esrab-lishing a rhythm. The 'reader. might not knQW it? but he

1 \t'4

METRfC PROSE

hears the rhythma:s he reads, and his Reed to' haye the:drythm contiitue keeps him reading.

YoudO'n~t need every paragraph to have poetic meter.You should use it for effect. Don't O'verwhelmtbe reader.If everything is high effect, then what will yO'Udo whenyou really need ,to mak;e af),impact ~

185

Memes"Eureka!" is the most dangerous

word in the world.

(This is the bonus chapter. It's intended for advanced stu-dents only. If you aren't interested in digging under thefoundations o{storytelling, you can skip it.)

Suddenly, I was sensitized to language and the way itconveyed not just meaning but mood as well.

In one of the communication workshops I took (alsoas a result of Theodore Sturgeon's advice), the point wasdriven home in a startling way: "You are a creature of Ian-guage. You exist in language. Every experience you willever feel gets conceptualized immediately in language, andevery subsequentexperience gets filtered through the con-cepts you're already carrying around. To the extent thatyou are unconscious of the power of language, it drivesyou-and most of you are comatose." During the sessionsof that course, several of the exercises drove that pointhome like a nuclear-powered jackhammer.

Most of us are willing to agree that language creates andshapes and empowers our perceptions, but that's only thetimid tip of the iceberg. The terrifying truth is that we areour language.

We do not conceptualize except through language. Andnot just spoken and written languages-all languages.Mathematics is a language, musical notation isa language,Ameslan is a language, BASIC is a language. AUof these areconceptualizations to channel specific kinds of thinking.

186

MEMES

Language channels thought so completely that we cannotthink except through language.

We do not exist as ratienal, self-aware entities except aswe can express it through language. Our relationship withthe tool of language is symbiotic-we use it to communi-cate, it uses us. Language is a merameme-e-it is the environ-ment in which all other memes exist.

(A meme is an idea, a way of thinking, that spreadsthrough a society like a virus through a population. Strongmemes drive out weaker memes. For instance, democracy isthe idea that government is accountable to the people. Inthe eighteenth century, that meme challenged the existingparadigm of monarchy. "The consent of the governed" wasa much more powerful meme than "the divine right of kings:'That was the philosophical justification for the AmericanRevolution; it was a meme successful enough to trigger thecreation of a new kind of nation. Other memes include Chris-tianity ~evolution, ecology, science fiction .... )

We are carriers of language. We exist so much in thedomain of language that we become our language. Wecan-not define ourselves except through language-and whenour language-identity is threatened, we jump to defend itmuch quicker than we leap to defend our actual selues.

For instance, if you challenge someone's faith, they arelikely to hold up their holy book as evidence of the wordof God. What is that book? It's language. Language writtendown. A body of conceptualizations-codified, frozen,completed. An unchanging and absolute system ofthought. To the person who regards that meme as the defin-ing ground of being for his identify, that book is the wordof God. There is no other place for that person to go fora sense of identity.

What this means is that if you exist within a system oflogic, if }'ouexist within a system of belief, it is true for

187

WORLDS Of WONOER: I;iOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FIGTION AND FANTASY

you. You cannot know if it is not true. Only if you can setit aside and look at it from a different perspective, a differ-ent way of being, can you recognize it as a superstition.

By the way, such a step outside of oneself is usually rec-ognized as ... a transformation.

This is another way to understand what happens to thehero of your story-he shifts to a different way of being,because he moves toadifferent way of thinking, becausehe shifts to a different set of language.

Example: when the women's movement first began sug-gesting that words like chairman and spokesman weresexist, many people laughed at the outrageousness of theassertion. When the word Ms. was created as an alternativeto Miss, some folks thought that an extreme reaction. Butover time, the idea sunk in, and we started using wordslike chairperson, spokesperson, and congresscritter as sub-stitutes. Ms. very quickly became the appropriate honorificfor addressing women.

Any political effort to shift the language is an acknowl-edgment of the power of language to influence attitude. Inthe case of the women's movement, the shift in languageis part of an ongoing cultural transformation+-not just forwomen who felt oppressed by the inherited sexism of theEnglish language, but also for men who had taken thattradition of privilege for granted.

Any such shift is a transformation. And all transforma-tion is a function of language-it is the shift from "I can'thandle this" to "I can handle this." It occurs in language.

The writer lives in language to a much greater degree thanmost other people. The more the writer works, the morethe writer discovers the power of language. Eventually, awriter's relationship with language can become so profoundthat it transforms the individual. The writer shifts from thedomain of the student to the domain of mastery.

188

MEMES

Oops. There's another meme. Mastery.What is mastery anyway? .To most of us,the concept is alien because we don't

have many areas in our lives where we actually experiencemastery. The movies tell us that a master is infinitely wise-and also a martial arts expert. Of course, we can under-stand the martial arts part-that'S where you learn the criti-cal move of the weeping crane or the £lying buffalo, andyou defeat the bully in the last reel. It's the wisdom partthat eludes us.

And that has to do with the way we are educated.Much of what we call education isn't education at all,

it's memorization. Somebody stands in front of a room andtalks. Yousit in your chair and copy down as much of whatthe instructor says as you can, as fast as you can. At theend of the semester, you reread everything you've written,cramming it back into your brain. Then you go back tothe classroom, pull out a blank piece of paper, and regurgi-tate as much as you can as fast as you can. When you'redone, you walk out of the room and quickly forget every-thing, because the semester is over and you don't need toremember it anymore.

This is not education; this is bulimia.Real education isn't about cramming and vomiting in-

formation. Real education is about distinguishingdistinctions.

What's a distinction?A distinction is a way of relating one thing to another.

The simplest way to understand a distinction is to imagineit as a dividing line that distinguishes this from that. Forinstance, this big plastic container is filled with garbage.But ifwe start sorting through it and pulling out the plastic,the cardboard, the newspaper, the glass, and the metal, it'sno longer garbage at all-now they're recyclables. Wehave

189

WORLDS Of WQNDER'r HOW TO WRITE SC:::IENCE FICTION, AND FANTASY

distinguished each kind of refuse into aspecific category.Here's ano.therexampl"e. Eskimos are said to have 37

different words for snow. There's new snow, old snow,very old snow, wet snow, dry snow,deep snow, snow witha crust, yellow snow. . . and so on. We only have oneword for snow. Of course, an Eskimo needs 37 differentdistinctions by which to distinguish theeneircrrmerrt. Sur-vival depends on it.

Bring an Eskimo to southern Ca:lifornia and he will beequally out of place. We have 37 different words for green.Wehave 137 different words for automobile. We have dic-tionaries full of words for distinguishing parts of the bodyand'things that can go wrong; In fact, the English languagehas mere words and more distinctions than any other lan~guage in the world. That'S why it is the most pewerfirllanguage in the world-because English gives you concep-tualizations. that don't exist in other languages. It therceisno word ina language for something. y.ou can't talk aboutit~at least not until you make up a word and get otherpeople to understand your definirion. That's. how memesare created and spread. Relativity, for instance, was oncea meme that only twelve people iI1 the world understood.Now, it is commonly taught in high schools ..

A meme is an iceberg in the sea of knowledge. Nine-tenths of it is submerged. As it floats into warmer waters,it melts into thesurrounding ocea,n-and the water levelrises correspondingly.

Here's the rneme o.fdistinctiotts. (Let~sdistinguish thedistinction of distinctions. . . ,)

There are £o.al'kindsQ£ distinctions: inclusion, connee-tion, disconnection,andexdusion. It works like this: Imag-ine that the universe consists of A and 8 and candPand E

and F••••190

.1

MEMES

A B E Fc D

The distinction of indusion lets us specify all. Everythingis included. This is the distinction of groups:

8 Ec DA

The dis.tinctiofl of connectien lets IlS specify some. Somethings are connected to each other, This is the distinctionof partnership:

A "->8 •.• C [) •• E F

Thedistinction of disconnection lets us specify not-some. Disconnection specifies boundaries and lets us dis-criminate between this and trot this. This is the distinctionof separation:

A B 8 D FE

The distinction ofexclusion lets us specify none Every-thing is excluded. Obliterated. Removed from conscious-ness, Discarded, This is the distinction of elimination:

A BeD E r

The p.o."t of this e.xcu(siOll into linguistic philo.sQphy191

WORLDS OF WONDER: HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE fiCTION AND FANTASY

is to demonstrate the essential simplicity of relationships.Words are symbols. Sentences are concepts. Concepts arethe levers of distinction.

The more you are in command of your own language,the more distinctions you Can include in your worldview.The more you are conscious of, the more accurate yoursense of existing relationships. The more that you can dis-tinguish, the more effectively you can respond.

To be blunt, the more distinctions you have, the moreyou will be a power in your universe. Why? Because youhave a greater number oftools to use, and the understand-ing of where they're appropriate. Youwill appear to othersas a wise, powerful, and effective individual. The job ofthe master is to learn the distinctions of the craft.

Which brings me back to mastery.What is the true distinction of mastery? And how do

you know when you achieve mastety?My first attempt to distinguish mastery was incomplete.Iwrote this down: "Mastery comes from the willingness

to not know."That sounded good. It was even true-as far as I under-

stood it. But that definition was insufficient. It didn't recog-nize or acknowledge that skill and effectiveness are also apart of mastery.

So I started looking beyond that: "The master is onewho remains a student forever, even after he's surpassedhis teachers:' But then, if he's surpassed his teachers, who.does he learn from? That was the next question to ask-and it was the right question to ask. (Thanks, Ted!) "Themaster generates the lessons himself. He generates fromthe craft. The master creates distinctions." That was therealization!

The master transforms the craft. Mastery transcends192

MEMES

craft to achieve art. And by so doing, the master demon-strates new possibilities to others.

Consider this: In fantasy, language is the access to magic.In the teal world, language is the source of magic. Remem-ber "magical thinking?" Little children, not knowing thatthe word is not the thing, fall into the trap of believing thatthe word and the thing are connected-and therefore if youcan manipulate the word, you can manipulate the thing. Infantasy, this is called knowing the "true name:'

Much of fantasy is based on the idea of magicalthinking-that magic comes from the control of thingsthrough knowing their true names, through knowing theright spells to cast.

Here, in what we call the real world, we don't acknowl-edge the power of language to affect our thinking. We areunconscious to it-therefore we are powerless before it.But language in the hands of a master writer-whether hebe a storyteller or a propagandist-is a tool for transform-ing a person's view of what's possible in the universe.

George Orwell made this point brilliantly in 1984, inwhich the government is systematically obliterating thepossibility of revolution by destroying the language inwhich revolution would be organized. Language is world-view. Jack Vance also explored this idea in The Languagesof Pao. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein suggestedthat the Martians were far more enlightened than humans,specifically because their language was a more accuratemap of the universe.

A writer can also submerge his reader in an alien lan-guage as a way of evoking that way of thinking. In A Clock-work Orange, Anthony Burgess created a new languagefer his ultraviolent narrator. (Alex and his droogs werereal horrorshow.) Through language Burgess submergedthe reader in a nightmare world. In Davy, Edgar Pan,gborn

193

WORLDS Or WONDER: HOW'TQ WRITE SClENCEFldJf)N AND FANTASY

applied the same technique in the opposite direction; hesubmerged the reader in the l'a,rtguageofa rural Americanfantasy.

When yeueontrellanguage, you control the way peoplethink. If you create a new werd=-as Heinlein did with theword "gliok"-you give them a new concept and expandthe reader's world view. If you redefine a word, you changethe reader's worldview. You can even-destroy the validityof a word by demonstrating that it is meaningless-asscreenwriter Lawrence Kasdan did when he gave.Yoda theimmortal line, "Do or do not. There is no try;' When you:change the language, you change the kind of thinking thatis possible.

And this is the point of this whole discourse: If you arecommitted to the craft of writing, committed to it the sameway you are committed to taking your next breath, thenyour tool is language-and you must engage yourself in anever-ending exploration of its power and effectiveness.Every paragraph, every sentence, everyword is an opportu-nity to strive for mastery.

194

'I

To Be orNaught to Be

"Existence or nullity.The question vexesme."-HAMLET

The more you write, the more you become sensitized tolanguage. You start to notice little things that occur aroundyou: accidental puns, mala props, mixed-up phrases. Anydiscussion of linguistics takes on new urgency. Can I[indsomething in this to help my writing?

Many years ago, r read an article in Time magazineabout a scholar named D. David Bourland Jr. who hadeschewed the use of the verb to be. He had removed it fromboth his writing and his speaking.

Bourland felt that the verb functioned asa linguisticttaP"-'a pitfall for the mind. According to the summary inthe article, the use of the verb to be assigns static qualitiesto people, places, and things, despite the fact that people,places, and things change. Therefore, the use of the verbcreates an inherent lie, not just in the linguistic representa-tion of the-mnment, but also in the werldview of the mindthat uses such construcrions.

On a much less profound level, the verb to be seduces theunwary into writing the dreaded passive-voice sentence-aconstruction that troubles the sleep of editors, high schoolEnglish teachers, and those who write grammar-checkingseftwate.

195

WORLDS OF WONDER: HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

Therefore to be is naughtto be."The folks who study general semantics call this linguistic

discipline-the banishment of the existential verb-E-Prime. Many of them have excised the verb from theirwriting and their speaking. They contend that languagedeludes us into believing that the structural relationshipsof language also hold true in the physical world. The ideaof being legitimizes and perpetuates the assumption thatthings stay the same. Abandoning it changes the logicalstructure of language,and therefore the logical structureof thought as well.

Passive statements obscure authorship of an event;E-Prime statements include the participant-observer. Theyexercise the active quality of identity. People and objectsreinvent themselves as authors of their own participation.

I saved the article for future reference; it represented anintriguing exploration of language, although I didn't quiregrasp it at the time. Over the years, the page would occa-sionally float unbidden to the top of the various stacks ofunsorted stuff that populate my office. And every, time itsurfaced, I found myself rereading the article, and everytime it tweaked my interest again.

The question vexed me.This innecent.little verb seemed one of the most essential

parts-of English. How could anyone write anything at allwithout using some form of it? A paragraph? A page? Abook? It seemed impossible. The verb has rooted itself sothoroughly into the language and into the way we thinkthat breaking out would represent a transformative act.

Of course, once I looked at it that way ....So I asked the question again. If I could master this tech-

nique, what would I gain?

"Sorry. J couldn't resist,

196

T0' BE OR NAUGHT TO BE

According to the E-Prime evangelists, language infectedwith being has a flat and unexciting quality. Languagewithout the obnoxious conjugations has a more active andassertive flavor. The various examples make that clear. Theelimination of fixed states creates a more fluid and effectiveform of communication.

Here are some examples:

The stoplight was red.The house is old.I am ugly.They were finished.He isn't coming.

Before you turn the page, fry rewriting these sentencesyourself to avoid the verbs of being.

Here's one way to rewrite the sample sentences:

The stoplight had turned red.The house looked old.I feel ugly.They had finished.I forgot to tell you, Godot called. He can't make it.

Do the latter examples convey more meaning? Do theyfeel more lively and precise? I think they do.

Shakespeare bad it right. The linguistic question of "tobe or not to be" forces a confrontation with the fundamen-tal dilemma of existence. What relationship do we reallyhave with-everything around us? What relationship do wewant to create?

My resistant self wanted to argue for the verb as a neces-sary pa(t of speech~I mean, how else could we discuss

197

WORLDS OF WONDER: HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY TO BE OR NAUGHT TO BE

existence if we have no word for it?20But on the other hand,if the use of the verb did in fact represent a semantic deadend, as the E-Prime advocates claimed, then as an authorcommitted to the expansion of my craft, I had no choicebut to explore the possibility. In fact, my own integritydemanded it. I couldn't stand the not-knowing. I had tolearn this skill.

The first time I tried writing without any form of theverb to be, I gave myself a frustration-tantrum that lastedfour months. I had to put the book aside for two moremonths before I could come back to it. Eventually, I didwrite two long novels in E-Prime: Under the Eye of Godand A Couenant of justice. Despite my practically givingit away at the end of the second book that I had abandonedthe use of the verb to be for these two volumes, nobodynoticed. And when I did point it out to others, nobodyseemed to care. Or perhaps they didn't understand the sizeof the challenge. Nevertheless ... r remain proud of theeffort.

I doubt I would have even attempted the challenge be-fore the age of the word processor, because as carefullyas Iworked, I knew that Iwould still make mistakes andinadvertently or unconsciously use the verboten language.Occasionally, for instance, I fell into metric paragraphsand didn't realize until Iclimbed out the other side that Ihad used one or moreexistential verbs. Fortunately, r coulduse the find function of the word processor; the softwarewould search through my document, looking for placeswhere I had employed the words:

amIS

arewaswerebebeenbeingbecome

Every time the program halted at one of the offendingconjugations, I looked at the sentence to see if Icould findanother way of saying the same thing. Sometimes thethought Iwanted to express resisted all translation-butmore often, I found that recasting the thought to omit theunwanted term would clarify it as well.

E-Prime compels the writer to look for other ways ofsaying things, instead of the immediate and easy construc-tion. I found myself using the thesaurus function of thesoftware a lot-it became my best friend. As an interestingand unintended side effect, my writing vocabulary ex-panded steadily. Indeed, the effort affected every part ofmy writing.

I recommend that any seriously committed writer at-tempt the exercise of writing in E-Prime. At the same time,I will freely acknowledge the difficulty of the task.

Eliminating the verb of static existence makes it impossi-ble for the author to assign arbitrary qualities to things. Itkeeps the writer from immobilizing moments in time. Heor she can no longer use language to create those specificlies of meaning, and must instead work in a more dynamicworld in which things occur because someone or somethingmakes them occur-a world in which things change withthe observer."

198

!lln case you hadn't already noticed, I wrote this entire section in E-Prime.'OJ 1guess it depends on your definition of the word is ....

199

""..

Find Another WayLeave ,the easy iobs for others.Take the hard iobs f'Oryourself.

The exercises with E-Prime confirmed the. lesson Ihad pre-viously learned with metric prose-any trick of style ortechnique wiU force you to find different ways to constructsentences. It will kick you out of the comfort zone of whatyou know into the discomfort zone of what you don'tknow-into the realm where true learning occurs.

Sometimes the word you want to use won't fit therhythm. Sometimes the sentence construction won't work.You have to find another way 'of saying what you want tosay. Sometimes, when you step outside the boundaries, youfind a better way of saying it. Sometimes, you find thatyour origina] intention was insufficient to yourgeals. Andsometimes, you stumble into whole tangents of inventionthat enrich your original purpose.

If your word processor has a thesaurus function, use it.In Microsoft Word for Windows, put the cursor on theword and hit Shift + F7. This will bring up a window thatshows you alternate words. Take a moment to considerthe meanings, and see if.any ofthe alternates provide moreaccuracy.

If you don't have a dictionary installedon your com-puter, go get one now. My current favorite is the AmericanHeritage Dictionary. of the .English L(mguage., third edi-tion, which also pronounces words. If you reallywanr over-kill, go for the 'CD-ROM editl()n of the Oxford: English

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FIND ANOTHER WAY

Dictionary (which isn't a dictionary as much as it's acareer.)

You have words in your vocabulary that you use uncon-sciously. The more unconscious words you have,. the lessaccurately you can write. As you type, as you constructsentences, you.will start to recognize that.some words seemvague er uncertain to you-at such moments, you shouldimmediately bring up your dictionary and take a momentto give yourself precision.

Literacy is your credential. You cannot afford to writeunconsciously and clumsily. The more accurate your dis-tinctions, the more accurate your thinking. The more dis-tinctions you have, the more detailed your view of theworld in which you live-and the more accurate your graspof the controls,

Taking a moment to look for another way to phrase athought gives you access to your source, Why? Because insuch moments, you control the language, not the other wayaround. You become the master of possibility.

As you look for other ways. to convey a concept, you willfind yourself looking more accurately at your intentions, atwhat you want to express. This exercise wakes you up atthe keyboard. It engages you ..You have to activelypartici-pate inrhe observation ofrhe events of YOUf own life-andeven more importantly, you will exercise and train yournatural ability to rook ar things with insight. You will gainin understanding. You might even learn to grok.

Eventually .•this results ina condition we call wisdom. ....

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