Moved to Write

Life is movement. It acts, it reacts, it changes, and what appears to remain the same is just that—an appearance. That is why art, which tries to imitate life, must replicate life’s movement in its constructions in order to affect, to move, its viewers or listeners or readers. How to do this is a matter of understanding the techniques of the particular art one is executing.

In the art of writing, those techniques include understanding the classes of words, called the parts of speech, and then knowing how to combine those parts in such a way that action, or at least some approximation toward it, appears to be embedded in the structure of the sentences we compose. Nouns and verbs, of course, are the two principal parts of speech, but there is more going on with each of those classes than what we probably remember from our school days: nouns name things and verbs show action. Yes, but there’s more.

Nouns name things, but in doing so, they’re often freezing an action. If I speak of the removal of an old tree in my backyard, the noun removal is a way to refer from some theoretical distance to the direct action of removing an old tree. Removal is termed an abstract noun, because we don’t apprehend its meaning with one of our five senses, but conceptually with our mind. Removing, on the other hand, is termed a gerund; it refers to the action associated with the verb to remove, and so choosing the gerund in revising a sentence is one way to write toward action. If in my first draft I wrote the removal of that old tree is scheduled for next week, my first revision might be removing that old tree is scheduled for next week.

There’s something clunky in that revision, though, and it has to do with the verb phrase is scheduled. Verbs have voice, and English verbs have two voices, active and passive. If the subject of a verb is an agent, the doer of the action, then the verb is said to be in the active voice. And since we’re trying to write toward action, we should more often than not prefer the active voice. In the sentence removing that old tree is scheduled for next week, the gerund removing is the grammatical subject of the verb is scheduled, and the agent remains unstated: who exactly is going to schedule the removing? Recognizing that, we can now take our original sentence one more step toward depicting action by supplying an agent: I scheduled the removing of that old tree for next week.

That too, though, seems unwieldy, and the reason has to do with the fact (and this is very common) that I am fixating on the wrong action, on scheduling rather than on removing. If I now convert the gerund removing into a transitive verb (a verb which has a direct object) and attach to it an agent-subject, the meaning comes alive: I will remove that old tree next week. This syntactical formula of agent-subject + transitive verb + direct object constitutes the ground level, the foundation, of precise and active English. And if one objects that this version overshoots the mark, that the agent-subject is not, in fact, the person who will literally do the work of removing that old tree, then we have in our toolkit what is called a causative construction, where the agent-subject is bringing about an action which another agent will perform: I will have that old tree removed next week.

Notice that with the word removed, called a passive participle, a remnant of the passive voice has returned to the statement: it suggests that the tree will be removed by that second agent who is not stated as such. But that might be, given context and purpose, as far as we can get toward all-out action in this sentence (though further revisions are possible: I scheduled a landscaper to remove that old tree next week. A landscaper will remove that old tree next week). And such a limitation is important to realize. Our writing toward action is really a counsel of perfection, something we always try to achieve, but an achievement we know cannot always be had, because the art of writing is trying to represent the essentially active world in the essentially passive, linguistic world of rationality, which ultimately can do no more than construct concepts. But therein lies that good tension which constitutes all art and all creation.

Technique stands midway between what we want to say and saying it clearly. The art historian Kenneth Clark, in a collection of essays entitled Moments of Vision, refers to having “at the back of our minds the memory of certain devices by which sentences and paragraphs can be held together.” These devices constitute a basic knowledge of how a language works, and that body of knowledge is available to and understandable by anyone who wishes to write carefully. And we wish to do that when we care enough about the truth of the ideas we find ourselves impassioned to write about. Clark continues: “I do not suggest that we apply these devices consciously; but as the notion of what we want to say begins to form itself in our minds, it will, if we have any sense of style, be accompanied by a feeling that our thoughts must conform to certain sequences of shapes.”

Our conscious study of grammar and composition, in other words, should recede to an unconscious second nature which will intelligently inform the choices we make as we revise our composition. That way we work knowledgeably and reasonably, and what we write will show it.

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