Happy birthday, Boz

A very happy two hundred years to you, Charles Dickens, born February 7, 1812. Quite possibly the greatest novelist ever.

Bleak House gets my nod as the finest of his books. Pace Elmore Leonard—whose Ten Rules of Writing has “Never open a book with weather” as rule number one—Bleak House’s early chapters focus in obsessive detail on some nasty November inclemency that's drenching greater London.

Descriptions of thick mud and a smoke-filled fog set the mood in the first chapter—London and its institutions aren't easy to navigate, both literally and figuratively. 

In chapter two, the metaphor—for one character's aching sense of loss, airless life, and deeply repressed emotion—is rain:

“My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her ‘place’ in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place has been extremely dreary. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a back-ground for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper’s lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been ‘bored to death.’”

* * * * * *

How good is that? (I love "the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat.") You won’t be surprised to discover the next sixty or so chapters present Lady Dedlock a rather hard row indeed. The heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip.

Not that everything is bleak in Bleak House. The sun does shine for many, if not all. Read it for the great characters, for the great twisting plot that eventually ties them all together. 

Read it to raise a toast to Mr. D, a couple of centuries young.

Household names

There are a lot of cute mailboxes in my neighborhood. Snowmen are popular.

You see other seasonal motifs. Chilly birdies!

Even a look forward to spring.

Few people put their name on their mailbox. I don't know why. Oh, wait, here's a name.

What? Someone called The Robb lives here? That's an unusual name.

The Robb is definitely marking his property clearly. Big house for just one guy, but whatever.

If it were actually a whole family of Robbs, that's what the mailbox would say: "The Robbs." No apostrophe when you make a last name into a plural. Or some families might opt for the plural possessive form: "The Robbs'."

That's how you know just The Robb lives here. Maybe he gets together occasionally with The Hulk and The Rock.

If The Edge ever comes over, I'm definitely camping out on the front lawn. Right by the mailbox.

Write like a Mad Man

In 1955, David Ogilvy—widely assumed to be the inspiration for the Don Draper character in Mad Men—wrote a letter outlining his copywriting process.

Everything about his list still rings true. Solid, no-nonsense advice. Okay, it involves more than a few belts of rum. But also an elevating Handel soundtrack!

(By the way, I'm assuming Mr. Ogilvy did know how to spell "conceivable" in step five.)

This just whets my appetite for March 25, and the start of Mad Men season five.

Break dancing

I see a particular maneuver a lot. Can you spot the one I'm talking about?

Hint: It is not chill.

* * * * * *

"When Gene remembers those months in Baltimore, he says he felt like he was floating—in rough seas. He worked three food-service jobs, lived in his parents' unheated basement, and still struggled to make ends meet. Desperate for a change, he made a big decision.

"He moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, an hour's drive from a tiny town called Hatch. If he were going to become a chile expert, he needed to be close to the Holy Land."

* * * * * *

Problem? Anyone?

The paragraph break is in the wrong place.

Look how much cleaner and clearer the flow is if the first paragraph's last sentence becomes the second paragraph's first sentence. Then the first paragraph is all about conflict, and the second paragraph is all about conflict resolution.

Picking the wrong break is an easy mistake to make when you're writing a first draft. You're overeager, straining to hop onto your next point. But it's an easy mistake to see and fix if you're editing yourself or another writer.

Think of your fourth-grade writing teacher and her constant harping on topic sentences. Each paragraph should carry only one main point. So, here, paragraph one = "Times were tough." Paragraph two = "A transformation begins."

Bust a move. Break it down right.

Rules three and four

. . . from Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing:

"3. Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But 'said' is far less intrusive than 'grumbled,' 'gasped,' 'cautioned,' 'lied.' I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated' and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

"4. Never use an adverb to modify the word 'said' . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances 'full of rape and adverbs.'"

* * * * * *

Needless to say, these rules apply to nonfiction writing, too.

Choose wisely

"An essay is like a Manhattan apartment. Every piece of furniture needs to have at least two functions and everything has to fit in a certain amount of space and there's no messing around, there's no room for the snow-globe collection. It's just so compact and efficient."

— Sarah Vowell, Salon interview, April 26, 2005

The corn is as short as a pygmy goat's eye

Cedric (right) is involved in growing corn.

Maxwell (left) grows corn.

* * * * * *

Cedric is responsible for the management of his family's farm stands.

Maxwell manages his family's farm stands.

* * * * * *

Cedric is charged with driving the truck that delivers the produce.

Maxwell drives the truck that delivers the produce.

* * * * * *

One day, Cedric loaded up the truck with too much enormous, genetically engineered corn, and didn't clear an overpass. He crashed.

Moral: Convey with economy.

The end.

Inner space

(Remember when Meg Ryan was cute, instead of a bio-engineering experiment? Actually, this 1987 rendering already makes her look a little bio-engineerish, a portent of Restylane to come. But I digress.)

When your production-editor cap is on, you look for all kinds of spacing problems in your documents. For me, the easiest ones to see lie inside the text block: those random extra spaces between words or sentences.

I see these quickly, a facility a design director I knew once described as "scary." I just glance down, and, before I even look, there they are, like they're circled in fluorescent orange. Big as Ike.

No surprise, then, that I really hate to see these spaces make it through to a final piece. If they were something I struggled to see, I'd be a lot more forgiving, I'm sure.

Last year, I went to a fine-arts gallery at a well-known liberal-arts college. It was my first visit. The exhibitions were pretty interesting. I had heard from someone employed at the college that the curators were very proud of their sensibilities and very resistant to any creative input from elsewhere at the college, including the editorial staff in the communications office.

Therefore, I was surprised, but not surprised, to see the gallery's item labels weren't particularly well-written. Insularity can do that. And the extra spaces . . . oh, the humanity. So numerous, so painful. In big easy-to-read display type, no less.

I left thinking, well, that's a cute collection. Instead of thinking, what a fine collection; it does this college proud.

Professional accomplishment depends on getting detail after detail right, especially where language and editorial design are concerned. Leave unnecessary spaces you can drive a truck through on a bunch of item labels, and your attentiveness to responsibilities less easily "seen"—the thoroughness of your research, your historical analysis—is immediately called into question.

So, whenever possible, just miniaturize me and Dennis Quaid, slap us in a little miniature submarine thingie, and we'll swim through the "body" of your material and zap these inner spaces away. Singing "Twistin' the Night Away."

Or just look for and zap them yourself. ("Twistin' the Night Away" optional.)

Outer space

The next time you look at proof, scan your paragraph indents. At least one of them will have an extra space you'll have to delete.

No, really! Just look.

See? Never fails.

The flabby preposition

If you're an editor, one of your most important tasks is to cut through thickets of unnecessary verbiage, to find ways to ensure coherent concision.

I mean, you keep it short, stupid.

You'll be an effective editor of your own or other people's work if you focus on nothing more than this: Chop words. Tighten everything up. If it can be said in six words, don't let it stretch out to sixteen. Red-pencil away the fat.

Consider the preposition. Removing the ones that aren't absolutely necessary—and so many are not—is a quick, painless way to remove a pound or two. And, trust me, every ounce counts.

my favorite restaurant in Boston / my favorite Boston restaurant

handed the cape to Fritz / handed Fritz the cape

many of the jungles around the world / many of the world's jungles

the shingles on the house / the house's shingles

A huge percentage of your sentences will have one or more of these empty prepositions. Hunt them; weed them out. It's so crazy easy. And the ounces will add up.

Voila. Leaner, more defined prose. Without even breaking a sweat.

Comma chameleon

If commas were teenage girls, they'd be wearing too much eye makeup, listening obsessively to Bon Iver, and writing sad poetry. Certain that no one—no, not a single human being on earth—likes or understands them.

But guess what? They actually do have reasons to slam the bedroom door and mope. They are frequently treated unfairly. Forgotten. Dropped like a red-hot potato.

Just look at salutations ("Hello") and imperatives ("Go"). Commas should be right there with them. But, so often, commas are ignored, left home alone.

(Come to think of it, Salutations and Imperatives would be a good name for an indie band, one a comma would surely want to sing along with. And so Latinate! So "Salve, imperator.")

Anyway, salutations. Anytime you say "Good morning," or "Bye," or "Howdy" to people you call by name, you need to separate the salutation and the name with a comma. For instance: "Hey, Proof Cabinet! How goes it?"

Yet just count how many emails you get today that say "Hi Jack," or "Yo Adrian," or "See you tonight bro," or whatever the greeting/goodbye might be. You will undoubtedly get more salutations that are comma-challenged than comma-appropriate.

Then there are imperatives—suggestions or commands. They provide some wickedly great opportunities for comma-free mayhem. Take a look:

Let's eat, Aunt Betty!
Let's eat Aunt Betty!

These two suggestions point to very different outcomes, don't they? If you want to grab a quick bite and your intended dinner companion is Aunt Betty, stick that comma in as shown.

If you are encouraging others to nosh on your poor aunt, then, by all means, leave the comma out.

Commas affect meaning, big time. Make sure the comma is right where it ought to be, separating the imperative from the person or group you're addressing: "Dream big, baby," "Take five, people," "Look at that, honey." Otherwise, you may be communicating something very different.

Admit it: Commas are cool. One day, you'll be sorry you aren't their friend.