Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Great writing is worth a diddly

By Mary Ann Cook

Brevity is the soul of wit, or so the old saying goes. Dorothy Parker helped establish her fame with an advertising line in Vogue in 1916 that said something like "Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Chemise said to the Petticoat." And Mark Twain said, "Had I more time, I would have written shorter."

Bearing in mind those remarks about brevity, I'd go even further. I'd say brevity is not only the wittiest, but the best writing. Take, for example, those very shortest of lines: the reviews of movies printed in the newspaper TV guide section so we can tell what's going to be on display that week on the telly. I'm filled with awe for the people who write those.

These reviews are sometimes one sentence, for heaven's sake. How can you encapsulate an entire 90-minute movie in one brief sentence? That's quite a feat. I'm beginning to think it may even be an art form.

And that's what writing instructors say about writing a novel. You'll know your work is successfully complete when you can tell what it's all about in one brief sentence. No fudging.

Just imagine being a mini movie reviewer. You have to tell what the flick is about and what makes it unique, all in one fell swoop on the keyboard. The movie itself may be at the boil for two hours or more, and you have to strain all that bubbling down to its very essence.

Not only that, but you also have to rate it, show how it stacks up against other contributions. These people must be required to watch movies night and day and all the way through. I doubt that they can take advantage of fast-forward when they're expected to come up with a solid kernel of the work, and a prioritized ranking at that.

If you're very lucky as a reader of these things, you'll unearth a plum once in a while, a shiny nugget gleaming there. "Watch Gig Young steal a scene from Tracy and Hepburn," it may say. Without that teaser you wouldn't have tuned into that 50-year-old comedy.

But now there's a challenge implicit. You need to find out for yourself if the others do indeed slip out of first place to yield the field to the second banana. You may not agree that it was Gig Young's finest hour, but it's too late. You've already been hooked. If the reviewer thought so, it must be worth looking out for.

Another group I'm gaining more and more admiration for as time goes by is lyricists. Look at all the emotional states they need to get us into by using just a few words, a few phrases: pathos, longing, poignancy, yearning. That's a tall order for a short clutch of words.

And those old-time lyricists did it not just with stardust, shades of night or deep purple fallings, but with an amazing freshness of vision.

By now those words sound clichéd to us because they've been in the national consciousness for generations. But think how new they must have sounded the first time they were beamed straight out of the radio or rendered from sheet music on the piano.

It's an amazing skill, to distill a whole experience, a whole raftload of emotions into as small a vehicle as a piece of popular music.

This paean to those who write short calls to mind an editor I had in New Jersey, one of the finest of the breed. On the front page of his newspaper he carried capsule versions of the week's news -- four to six of them, each one paragraph long. They were a flag, an index to tell the reader what was to be found inside in as brief a form as possible.

He called these things diddlies and usually wrote them himself, not trusting anyone else to make them smooth and encompassing enough. Or short enough. He held the diddlies out like a carrot: Only the most polished among us was allowed to write one.

As you can imagine, it was a brilliant and shiny day at that paper when you were told to write a diddly about one of your own stories. It meant you had passed beyond apprentice: You had finally evoked enough trust to be thought of as an experienced newshawk, a master in your own write.

But even when assigned, your diddlies didn't always make the grade. Looking into his office, you could see your copy paper being crumpled and chucked into the wastebasket. If you were lucky, only small parts needed to be reworked.

This constant striving for diddlydom kept you hopping. It kept you humble. You knew, too often, you had yet to attain the silkiness that Dorothy Parker's lingerie held.

Now, when I get a business letter that is more than one page long, I figure there's a weak or lazy writer behind it. I'm convinced mini movie reviewers and lyricists are the true wordsmiths, eminently qualified to write diddlies.

Los Gatan Mary Ann Cook is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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