an post

While in Halifax this weekend, after giving a talk at Dalhousie U, I snuck out to see a movie. Just before the trailers, there was an onscreen advertisement for renting the screen space itself. It read,

Do you want to advertise your business to a intelligent audience?

Sigh. There oughta be something like a "Strunk scale", measuring the severity of a writing error, probably based on the speed of the reader's deceleration. If the reader smirks at the dangling modifier out his rear-view mirror, that's a 10. If the reader has to shift down, realizes what the author meant, and moves on, that's a 50. If the reader comes to a full stop, either in bewilderment or to write that down to share with his sister the teacher, that's a 100. "A intelligent audience" is at least in the 80s. A writer's goal is to let the reader open it up. Or if not, to purposely set down pylons that regulate speed. (I swear, I'll close this analogy now.)

It amazes me how many people don't think the little things in writing make a big difference. In preparing my pre-circulating paper for my Halifax talk, I debated how to write the following. My paper was on the 1825 Miramichi Fire, the largest (?) forest fire in Canadian history, and I was writing about the only source of the day that said it wasn't a big deal, a letter from Thomas Baillie, New Brunswick's Commissioner of Crown Lands, to the Colonial Office in London. I was also trying to get across my reaction to that source: here am I, writing on the great fire, only to have it pooh-poohed by the person responsible for New Brunswick forests, just three weeks after the event. I thought my reaction was strongest if underplayed, so I wrote this:

"The great body of Pine remains yet untouched ...." He ends the letter, "The fire has appeared in different parts of the Province, but the injury done to the Timber is so trifling that I will not trouble your Lordship with a further detail." Trifling.

or

"The great body of Pine remains yet untouched ...." He ends the letter, "The fire has appeared in different parts of the Province, but the injury done to the Timber is so trifling that I will not trouble your Lordship with a further detail."

Trifling.

I moved "trifling" back and forth 10 or 20 times. If it was its own paragraph, the point seemed overmade, the subtlety lost. But if it closed the previous paragraph, I was worried that it disappeared into the quote, that it would be lost. All this for a word that, in this incarnation, might be read by 20 people.

But how can we avoid it? When can we stop caring about how we write, & if so, how would we start up again? In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurty writes, "For a novelist to take the work out of work is profoundly self-defeating: keeping the work in work is all-important."