What IS it that makes good writing good?

Ok, this is my last self-indulgent English-teachery pontification about writing for the moment. Oh, how easy it is to criticise and oh, how hard it is to do well!

With Anne Tyler, what I didn’t really mention was the way she turns phrases – because I was writing at work while supervising exams (they didn’t need a close eye…) and I didn’t have the book with me. But now I have.

Here’s the opening of “A Patchwork Planet”:

“I am a man you can trust, is how my customers view me. Or at least, I’m guessing it is. Why else would they hand me their house keys before they leave for vacation? Why else would they depend on me to clear their attics for them, heave their air conditioners into their windows every spring, lug their excess furniture to their basements? “Mind your step, young fellow, that’s Hepplewhite,” Mrs Rodney says, and then she goes into her kitchen to brew a pot of tea. I could get up to anything in that basement. I could unlock the outside door so as to slip back in overnight and rummage through all she owns – her Hepplewhite desk and her Japanese lacquer jewelry box and the six potbellied drawers of her dining-room buffet. Not that I would. But she doesn’t know that. She just assumes it. She takes it for granted that I’m a good person.

Come to think of it, I’m the one who doesn’t take it for granted.”

That first sentence is quite clumsy – deliberately so, I’m sure. It sounds like a man musing, considering the situation. AT could have written, “My customers trust me” or “My customers see me as a man they can trust” – and that would have been okay. But I like the way she’s set up the ambivalence from the start with the declaration followed by the qualification: he is – or is he not? – a man to be trusted. Trust is one of the key themes of the novel.

Then that “Why else…?” repetition shows that he’s keen to be trusted – but perhaps can hardly believe that he is. He examines the evidence: a list of tasks that he’s trusted to do in people’s homes. This also neatly conveys the speaker’s job: he’s a manual worker – look at those verbs: “clear… heave… lug”. His youth is made obvious by Mrs Rodney’s “young fellow”. Then the repetition again: “I could… I could….” – we feel him almost luxuriating in the possibility of that “rummaging” as he lists the items he could look through. Then the paragraph ends with those four short, emphatic sentences: “Not that I would. But she doesn’t know that. She just assumes it. She takes it for granted that I’m a good person.” And we wonder: is he so emphatic because this is true, or because he wants us to think that it’s true, or because he’s trying to convince himself that it’s true? I also like that rather naïve wording – “a good person”, as if it were an absolute; as if everyone fell into one or other category, good or bad.

And then there’s that last, one-sentence paragraph: “Come to think of it, I’m the one who doesn’t take it for granted.” Here AT makes his self-doubt clear and leaves the reader intrigues as to why he’s so concerned about whether or not he’s good.

Ah, what a pedant I am: 313 words to discuss AT’s 169.

Now here’s the beginning of “My Sister’s Keeper”:

“When I was little, the great mystery to me wasn’t how babies were made, but why. The mechanics I understood – my older brother Jesse had filled me in – although at the time I was sure he’d heard half of it wrong. Other kids my age were busy looking up the words p____ and v_____ * in the classroom dictionary when the teacher had her back turned, but I paid attention to different details. Like why some mothers had only one child, while other families seemed to multiply before your eyes. Or how the new girl in school, Sedona, told anyone who’d listen that she was named for the place her parents had been vacationing when they made her. (Good thing they weren’t staying in Jersey City, my father used to say.)”

* JP doesn’t use dashes but I don’t want my blog to attract the wrong sort of comments….

Ach, it really annoys me that I can’t quite analyse what’s wrong with this. Indeed, there’s nothing wrong. She writes well, and I apologise to anyone who really likes JP – I’d love to have as much success as she’s had by writing. (Or any other way, come to that.) She’s good. This first paragraph does the job. It sounds reasonably like a young person talking (though not, in my opinion, a 13-year-old as it’s supposed to be), the rhythm is fine, it sets the situation up all right. There’s a bit of humour, though it’s the joke we’ve probably all made about the Parises of this world.

But it’s a bit… ordinary. Workmanlike – workwomanlike. Clear. Fluent. But it doesn’t make my heart sing.

Anyway. I’ll shut up now and get back to posting about cats.