In his book On Writing (now a modern non-fiction classic), Stephen King delivers a simple ultimatum to wannabe authors: If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. It’s as true now as it was in 1999, when the book was published, and it was already true in 1499. But writing hopefuls are also told to find their own style and not to imitate another author’s voice. How, then, are both things possible? How can you apply what you learn through reading without your work becoming an inferior facsimile of another author’s?
It’s tempting to answer this question with an analogy – just because a cabinet maker teaches you how to use a hammer and saw, it doesn’t mean you can’t make a birdhouse, say – but let me instead use an example from my own writing life.
Critics will tell you the late John O’Grady (They’re a Weird Mob, Gone Fishin’) was an inelegant writer, and in some respects they are right. But he was also one of the few writers – that I’ve encountered, anyway – whose books were laugh-out-loud funny. Not just ‘droll’ or ‘amusing’, but sit-on-the-train-turning-red-from-repressed-laughter hilarious. What I noticed while reading his books was that many of the funniest moments, fiction and non-fiction, came from what he didn't write.
When O’Grady began his career in the 1950s, obscenities were still considered obscene – so to write about such things, an author had to skirt around them. Just as not showing the monster in a horror movie is almost always more terrifying than letting it shamble out into the light, so not directly stating the nature of an obscenity can be much funnier than addressing it head on.
O’Grady’s masterpiece in this regard (although it’s not one of his best books on the whole) is his semi-autobiographical novel The Things They Do To You (1963), where he writes about functions and medical procedures related to the human bowel. Some of the alternative descriptions are pure, restrained genius.
Take this example, where O’Grady describes the effects of ‘bacillary dysentery’, which he picked up while in the Pacific Islands: “He was an unpleasant little gentleman who caused considerable pain and considerable leakage from both fore and aft exhausts.” It’s far from the finest sentence ever written in English, but it takes what could be dry (or vile) description and makes it entertaining.
Where appropriate, I now use this approach in my own work. I would argue it is more effective today than it was 50 years ago, since vulgarity has largely lost its shock value. In a recent blog post I wrote about rejection, I took the hackneyed saying “Opinions are like arseholes – everybody has one” and applied the O’Grady Method, transforming it into something else: We all know what opinions are like and who has them.
In addition to not revealing the monster, this sentence adheres to the “show don’t tell” rule, in that it lets the reader fill in the blanks and makes the reading experience more satisfying – and, I hope, funnier.
In other words, I watched O’Grady use his hammer and saw to make a cabinet, then picked up my own tools and made a birdhouse.
Sorry.
