44. The Time of Their Lives

The Time of Their Lives, Al Silverman
St. Martin's Press, 467 pages, 2008

This history of all the major American publishing houses in the years between World War II and the early 1980s was an impulse buy on Amazon, on a day in L.A. when I had gotten one too many rejection emails from public relations firms I didn't really want to work for anyway, and needed to let myself dream big. (That day I also bought Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, a biography of the legendary Scribner editor.) At the time I had just started to think about book publishing as a career, and didn't really think about the differences between the huge, mostly New York-based mega-publishers covered in the book and the small, independent, boutique San Francisco houses I'd probably be applying to.

The Time of Their Lives is heavily focused on the business of publishing--sales figures, advances, and description after breathless description of bidding wars into the millions for novels by the next Stephen King. (There were a few anecdotes about editors shaping manuscripts into the novels they would become, and even some about publicity tactics, but they were few and far between.) Although I doubt megamillion-dollar auctions figure much into the day-to-day operations at Heyday Books or Seal Press, the book did give me a feel for what publishing is about in a big-picture sense. As someone who can't even name the Big Six (there are six, right?) publishers, much less give an editorial overview, I did spend a lot of the time confused--most of the chapters (each focusing on one company) were non-chronological, jumping back and forth through time, and the author had a maddening tendency to refer to each person sometimes by their first name, sometimes by their last name, and sometimes by a nickname. This probably works if you're already familiar with all the major figures in the New York publishing world, but I constantly had to page back to see who we were talking about. Still, it's a solid (if not 100% applicable to my situation) and engagingly written overview of publishing in America in the 20th century.

38. The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Allyn & Bacon, 95 pages, 2000 (originally published in 1959)

Okay, I have two shocking and embarrassing things to admit here. The first is that I've actually never sat down and read The Elements of Style cover to cover. (Yes, despite the number of times I told you to read it instead of directly critiquing your writing. People who worked with me on [X]Press, feel free to draw and quarter me now.) And the second is that now that I have read it in its entirety, I completely understand why many people think it's outdated.

The trick is in knowing which rules to follow and which to ignore--and if you're the kind of person most desperately in need of this book, you probably don't know the difference. Unfortunately, this makes it useless to tone-deaf writers. The Elements of Style is most useful to teachers and editors who are trying to verbalize principles that come intuitively to them. I've seen so many writers fail to follow even basic principles such as "Keep related words together" (not to mention pretty much all of the ones involving comma placement and usage), and White clearly and simply explains the problem and how to fix it where I could only sputter incoherently and/or drink as I edited. Many of the rules in the "Misused Words and Expressions" chapter have become obsolete by descriptivist standards, if they were indeed ever correct in the first place and not just personal quirks of William Strunk Jr. (as E.B. White's preface seems to indicate). But certain sections of the book are pure gold. It is itself an example of the principles it outlines; it's beautifully written, often funny (though always understated), vivid and fresh. It can improve writing at all levels; some principles ("Write with nouns and verbs") involve a bit of finesse, others ("Be clear") are deceptively simple, but all of them make me realize just how far I still have to go. Reading it makes me want to be a better writer and editor.

Oh, and guess what? This is my blog and I can make a post consisting almost entirely of quotations from The Elements of Style if I want to. Suck it.

"It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color."

Two examples for Principle of Composition #16, "Use definite, specific, concrete language": "He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward." vs. "He grinned as he pocketed the coin."


On parallel construction for related concepts: "The unskilled writer often violates this principle, mistakenly believing in the value of constantly varying the form of expression."


An example of the consequences of not keeping related words together: "New York's first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday with semen samples from eighteen men frozen in a stainless steel tank ... In the lefthand version of the third example, the reader's heart goes out to those eighteen poor fellows frozen in a steel tank."


"Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs but load their attributives with explanatory verbs: 'he consoled,' 'she congratulated.' They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing." (In English classes from elementary school on up through high school, we received a handout of a list of synonyms for "said" to use in our writing. I think Mrs. Hillesland might have even given us one.)


"When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax." 


"Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable."