ThomasLitchford

Sometimes, fiction writers take themselves a little too seriously. I’m guilty of it, no doubt. The result is adjective- and adverb-laden prose that sounds pretty to the inner ear (i.e. in your head, not your actual inner ear) but has no concrete meaning.

Good journalists (and some fiction writers!) are really good at writing accurate, concrete prose. Today I stumbled on Jimmy Breslin’s column about JFK’s funeral, and it’s full of great writing:

Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.

Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.

It’s not all concrete, but he earns the phrase ‘terrible strength,’ and you know exactly what he means by it. He knows what things are called, and the only adjectives he uses are the ones necessary to portray the scene (’leafless’).

But Breslin’s writing is not without style. In fact (and maybe this was the going style in the Sixties), his writing reminds me of Kerouac’s.