Category: Writing

Tone is one of the most important and least understood aspects of writing. As discussed in Write Better, the tone of a piece can convey more power, be more effective in communicating content than the bare information of our words.

Usually tone is created over paragraphs and pages. But it can also be achieved in just a few words. Consider one example from Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth.

At the deepest level all hearers of the truth are the same hearer, and when I try to picture him or her, what I picture is the one who is famous for having asked to hear, who took a long drag on his cigarette and through narrowed eyes asked, “What is truth?”*

In this sentence, Buechner imagines Pontius Pilate in a modern-day setting. He has a tough job. Rome has given him a promotion, yes, but it is to oversee a troublesome backwater of the Empire. The locals are constantly causing trouble with their nationalist dreams and zealous, unorthodox spiritual beliefs.

Now he is irritated to have been awakened, early in the morning, by these vexing people to settle some arcane religious dispute. Pilate has seen it all—the deception, the grasping for control, the violence. He is under no illusions that people operate out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. They may talk a good game of morals but ultimately they are self-serving.

Pilate knows just what these leaders are up to when they bring this innocent man to him for judgment, and it isn’t truth. No one wants truth. They just want power.

And how does Buechner convey all this? Through his tone.

And how does he convey his tone? In a sketch drawn with just two telling details—a long drag on a cigarette and narrowed eyes—while asking “What is truth?” In just a dozen words Buechner evokes every scene of every hardened detective in the film noir genre that exposes the dark underside of humanity.

How much more effective this is than saying, “Pilate was a cruel, jaded, Roman administrator,” which merely invokes facts and explanation!

Through memory and emotion, tone can do what every writer wants. It captures readers with a fuller, deeper, more soul-penetrating picture of the truth—in this case a sense that at some level, we are all Pilate.

* * * * * * *

*Thanks to Brian Zahnd for focusing my attention on Buechner’s quote in Zahnd’s powerful chapter on Pontius Pilate in his book, The Wood Between the Worlds. Among Zahnd’s many insights, he writes that when Jesus refuses to answer the governor, Pilate’s “fear gives way to anger: ‘Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?’ (Jn 19:10). And there it is! Pilate has answered his own question. What is truth? For Pilate the truth is nothing but power—especially the power to kill.” (The Wood Between the Worlds, pp. 73, 78)

Creating true art and defining it are both difficult.

One way to understand art is by contrasting it with sentimentalism. For writers, the difference is crucial.

In The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior offers clarity and direction for us.

Sentimentalism is an emotional response in excess of what the situation demands; it’s an indulgence in emotion for its own sake . . . . Emotionalism can also be evoked by external manipulation. This is what sentimental art does: it attempts artificially to create feelings that exceed what the situation warrants. . . .

If the purpose of art is to recreate human experience, the purpose of sentimental art is to create emotional experience. . . .

Sentimentalism can do harm when emotions are evoked apart from or subordinate to other aspects of the human experience (such as intellectual, spiritual, or physical experience) and thus to the totality of what is real. Whether portraying things in terms overly sweet or overly sad, or whether interpreting people (who are complex) as one-dimensional heroes or villains, sentimentality smooths over the rough edges of reality and glosses over hard questions so as to tie things up neatly in a bow.*

Some Christians have a tendency to do just this. We prefer simplistic answers to more truthful but incomplete reflections. We hesitate to show how both heroes and villains are genuine mixtures of faults and virtues. Here are two brief cases.

First, a nonfiction example. The problem of evil is possibly the most intractable difficulty in Christianity (as well as for every religion). Though I have been helped by many discussions of the topic, in all my reading, I have yet to find any completely logical answers that are morally, emotionally, spiritually, and theologically satisfying. In fact, I don’t think any are possible this side of heaven. Even the book of Job offers no explanation for the origin of evil or justification for why evil exists. God does not give any reasons for innocent suffering. We do a disservice to our readers, to reality, and to our faith if we suggest that the problem is completely solvable. Possibly we can see hints, but we must be honest that we cannot answer it fully.

Second, let’s turn to fiction. In Shūsaku Endo’s Silence we have a historical novel set in the 1600s during a period of great persecution of the growing Christian movement in Japan. The protagonist, Father Rodrigues, acts faithfully throughout the book until the end when he is faced with the threat of torture and death for himself and his fellow believers. Ultimately he disavows his faith—yet the book portrays this simultaneously as an act of faith as well as unfaith.

The antihero of the book, Kichijiro, repeatedly betrays Father Rodrigues in the face of threat and persecution. But ironically, in the end it is Kichijiro who is martyred for maintaining his faith.

There are no nice, neat bows in Silence. All we find are gritty reality and lots of questions. Is it right to save the lives of others by recanting our faith? How do we faithfully love Christ and love others? What are the ways we are pressured to compromise our faith in a modern, individualistic, consumerist society?

This is what true art does and what art that is true to faith does. It doesn’t merely affirm what we already believe. It propels us to a deeper life of faith.

—

*Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2023), pp. 126-28 (my emphasis).

In Write Better I critiqued the opening of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink, a book on intuition. Although ultimately the book raises serious questions about snap judgments, the subtitle (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) and its compelling opening story make us think the book is entirely positive about our hunches.

I found this problematic and said so. When my son Dave read Write Better, he wrote to me to say he thought my critique of Blink was convincing. He concluded with this:

Andy Le Peau: 1
Malcolm Gladwell: 5 million copies sold

(Leave it to our children to keep us humble!)

I’m still a fan of Gladwell who is a skilled and insightful journalist. I was therefore interested to hear on a recent episode of his podcast, Revisionist History, that many people were confused about Blink. Gladwell said:

Nor does it surprise me now after thirty years of writing books that people don’t read or listen to the end. . . . My second book Blink was a book that looked critically at, when I say critically, examined both the pros and cons of snap judgments. But you had to keep reading. It started out on the pros and then as I dug deeper, got interested in the cons. The number of people who either supported or loved that book or hated that book because they perceived it as being a book about celebrating snap judgments was limitless. Any time you tell a story with a twist, you’re going to leave some people along the way.

So was I wrong? I don’t think so. Gladwell didn’t address how the subtitle misdirected people. In addition, as I recall, he doesn’t make the point about pros and cons in the book as clearly as he did in the above quote. He doesn’t make it explicit to readers that he starts with one notion and moves to another. He fails to offer necessary signals that there is “a twist,” that things are moving in a different direction than he first thought. Without that, readers will draw the wrong conclusions, and as he says, they did.

It’s ok to write a nonfiction book beginning with one premise and slowly moving away from that to a different conclusion. But if we do, we need to plainly tell readers that is what is happening. We could write: “Here are the pros I found,” and later, “But I also found some cons.”

We could say something like, “But then I began to find evidence that contradicted my initial ideas.” Or, “I was stunned! Could I have been wrong about how beneficial intuition is?”

Or this: “Although this opening story seemed to confirm the universal value of snap judgments, as I pursued the topic I began to question this idea. This book is about how I changed my mind.”

Probably all of these (or ones like them) should be used because in the course of a couple hundred pages, we need to keep reminding readers of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

Reading is hard work. When writing nonfiction, we need to be sympathetic to that. Our job is to keep readers with us. If they don’t, we shouldn’t immediately blame them. We might look at how we could have done a better job.

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*Malcolm Gladwell in “The Bear Was Poked,” November 1, 2023, about minute 10:00 to 10:45, www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-bear-was-poked-with-maria-konnikova.

I am a terrible speller. This has been true from an early age.

I remember having a test in third grade. We had to write out certain sentences, and I kept writing the word has without the h—over and over. I knew it didn’t look quite right, but I just couldn’t figure out what else it could be. Since has was in most sentences, I got a very bad grade. How embarrassing to not be able to remember such a simple word!

Another traumatic event came in fifth grade. The teacher had us all stand around the perimeter of the room for a spelling bee. Somehow I was confident I would be standing a long time. My first word was swimming, and I knew I’d nail it. Only I spelled it with just one m, and in disappointment and shame I was told to sit down. I was stunned. How could that not be the right spelling ? To this day, I still wonder if that extra m is really necessary. Would anyone seriously be tempted to pronounce swiming with a long i?

So many pitfalls. Consider weird. Does it follow the i-before-e rule or is it an exception? I can never remember. Before autocorrect, I had to look it up every time. With autocorrect I get it right, but I still don’t remember how to spell it. The list goes on:

• • • occurrence or occurence
    • occasion or occassion
    • cemetery or cemetary
    • misspell or mispell

You get the idea.

After college, almost fifty years ago, I proudly called my parents to tell them that I had gotten a job as a full-time editor. My mother responded wryly in her southern twang, “Well, Andy, how are you going to know how to spell the words if you don’t call me?” Instead of running up my long-distance phone bill, in that era before spellcheck, I tacked lists of words I couldn’t remember on the cork board in front of me. Otherwise I tended to look up everything, even words I was certain of.

Is there a virtue in being a good speller for its own sake? I’m not sure. Is there value in memorizing the number pi to a hundred digits? Certainly as mental exercise. Perhaps not much more.

We need a love for words and a respect for their power. That means being careful with spelling but much more. Spellcheck won’t help us if we inadvertently write now instead of not—giving the opposite meaning of what we intend if we put down, “I am now a bozo.” Substituting principal for principle or effect for affect can trip our readers. We should pay attention to the meaning and nuances, the rhythm and sound of words. Having some familiarity with their etymology can add depth to our writing. Doing all this enhances effective and beautiful communication.

And when we do, we give space for words to cast their spell.

—

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Many books on writing nonfiction advocate a clean style stripped of unnecessary words and ornate language—mine included! In Write Better I note, “Hemingway pioneered unadorned fiction a century ago. Orwell, Strunk & White, and Zinsser then took up the cause for nonfiction. And happily this approach still holds sway” (160). They rightly complain about the clutter of obscure or officious writing that hides what is being said rather than illuminates it.

But then I add this thought: “Art goes through phases, and I suppose there will come a time when spare prose will fall out of favor and something different will replace it” (161). What might that style look like?

I don’t know. But sometimes the past can give us hints about the future. The Medieval world might, for example, suggest how and why different styles rise and fall. For people in that era, the cosmos was a thing of intricate beauty, ornately crafted by the Master Artisan who wove spiritual realities into his creation. No wonder their very prose and poetic styles reflected this worldview.

And no wonder Hemingway shunned such a style. His world (and ours) is stripped bare of all but what can be seen and touched, measured and analyzed. We live in a complex, intricate universe—yes. But one of lifeless particles guided by the impersonal forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and subatomic energy. Even in our imagination so-called spiritual powers are generated by the material (think the Force of Star Wars) not the other way around.

This flattened perspective nonetheless seeks to fill the gap left by a world without wonder. So often we are beholden to the spell it weaves. As Lewis said eighty years ago, “You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”*

We need new stories and new ideas to break this enchantment, to be sure. But perhaps we also need a new style of writing, a style that itself reflects a universe populated not merely with quarks and quasars, bosons and black holes but also one infused with mystery and meaning, beauty and blessing.

Lewis especially admired how Dante achieved this. He showed “how an artist could cast a ‘counterspell’ in which the good feels weighty and attractive, a spell to overcome the ‘evil enchantment’ cast by modernity.” In Paradiso, instead of picturing an insubstantial existence of clouds and harps, “Dante’s poetry gets more concrete, more sensible, more tangible, with every step closer toward God.” The poet adds another dimension as well. “Dante simultaneously combines ‘weight’ and ‘soaring,’ and thus paradoxically renders sensible that which is beyond language.”**

We can more readily imagine how this might be played out in fiction (as Lewis himself did in The Great Divorce). But what kind of writing style might reflect this re-enchanted world? I don’t think it will or should simply go back to mimic Medieval patterns. We have to move forward in ways that are mindful of the world we have now. If you know of examples to suggest that might achieve this, I’d welcome them.

Style in writing matters. Not only do the ideas we employ communicate meaning and substance, but so does the way in which we write.

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*C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 1980), 31.
** Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 88, 91, 95.