Our Right to Read

Imagine going into your public library to pick up a copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, only to find that it’s not available. Not because another patron has taken it out: because it’s been removed from the shelves. Permanently.

Maybe you’re not the questioning sort, so you figure what the heck, I’ll just find another classic … how about … F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? But then you discover that’s missing, too. Disappeared from the collection and struck from the catalogue.

The list goes on: John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Even Harry Potter is gone. Hemingways are missing. Nobel prize winners (I’m thinking of Beloved by Toni Morrison, one of my all-time favorite books) are not to be found. Heck, you can’t even find a decent Jodi Picoult novel (although they’re readily available at most airport bookstores.)

If this scenario seems ridiculous and unlikely let me tell you: there are people in our country who are actively working to make this a reality. Every book, and every author I’ve mentioned here, have been targets, numerous times, of book banning. If you don’t believe me, ask the American Library Association. This is National Banned Books Week, and the nation’s librarians have a lot to say about our national right to read.

Just last week this issue raised its ugly head. A fellow named Wesley Scroggins out in Missouri called upon the powers-that-be in the Republic, Missouri schools to ban Laurie Halse Anderson’s young adult novel, Speak. He described it as “soft pornography.” He objected to the novel’s portrayal of dysfunctional families and insensitive teachers. I don’t know … I guess he thinks authors should only write about happy families and classrooms run by the Teacher of the Year?

Speak is a moving, empowering fictional account of a girl who is raped the summer before her freshman year in high school. She is emotionally scarred by this event, to the point where she can barely speak. It’s a story about how she ultimately deals with her attack and finds her voice again.

It’s not easy to read. But it treats, sensitively, an important topic. The author has received countless letters from girls, thanking her for writing this novel, which helped them cope with their own sexual assault traumas. When I read this book it confirmed my own decision to write for teenagers. It’s possible, through fiction, to touch young readers in ways that help them, and move them. Laurie Halse Anderson is one of our best YA authors out there.

Luckily, there is an army of teachers, writers and librarians out there ready to take on the Wesley Scroggins of the world, and while the citizens of the Republic, Missouri school district still haven’t taken any action regarding Speak, they’ve sure heard from a lot of people who strongly approve of the book. Librarians, especially.

And if there’s one thing I know, Wesley, you don’t want to make a librarian mad.

Every day this week, in honor of Banned Books Week, I’m going to recommend a recently banned Young Adult title. Thanks to Wesley, I’ll start with: Speak.

In Praise of Verbs

I can name the author, book, chapter, page number and very sentence responsible for transforming me into an Ardent Believer in Verbs. We’re talking Saul-in-the-Blinding-Light-of-God epiphany here, and my writing has never been the same.

The book was The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Chapter 32, “The Hairy Devil,” page 254.

Up to that point, ie. the preceding 253 pages, I had ridden the delightful waves of her buoyant, unpredictable prose without quite realizing its effect on me. I’d smile when I read her descriptions of a rainy wharf: “Rain sluiced over the upturned [boat] bottom, pattered on the stones. … A man leaning in a doorframe, hands draining into his pockets.” Or a scene inside the offices of the The Shipping News: “Car doors slammed outside, Billy Pretty’s voice seesawed. Nutbeam snapped up alertly.”

Proulx’s rain didn’t fall: it sluiced and pattered. Hands weren’t thrust into pockets: they drained. Voices didn’t get louder and softer: they seesawed.

Assertively and efficiently, the author employed verbs not only to tell me what her characters were doing, but also how things looked and how they sounded. She was also telling me a little about how her characters felt: a man whose hands are draining into his pockets is in a different state of mind from a man whose hands are balled into fists and jammed into his pockets.

Then, at page 254, one of the main characters (Tert Card) approached a deli platter, and my writing life changed:

“He plucked at the plastic wrap, seized a handful of ham, and shoved it into his mouth.”

I stopped. I reread. I counted: plucked, seized, shoved. In three verbs and one line, Proulx told me all about Tert Card’s state of mind and foreshadowed the brutish events to follow. No adjectives, no physical descriptions, no annoying adverbs. Just simple, unequivocal language.

Maybe if I had chanced on the sentence out of context I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But the whole novel had been working on me for 253 pages, and finally, with that single sentence, something clicked.

Verbs rule. Verbs are the bomb. Verbs have got it goin’ on.

Granted, The Shipping News has some pretty rad adjectives, too, and more than 300 pages of take-your-breath-away sentences. One writer friend of mine asserts that the final line in this novel is one of the best final lines of all time … more on that later … but for a Writer Apprentice like me, who reads not only for joy but also to improve my craft, this book taught me an important lesson.

My words don’t approach the richness of Annie Proulx’s language, but I’ve got a few ideas for strengthening my verbs. First, I whip out a red pen, and hunt down every “to be” verb on a page. Any time is, was, are or were occurs, I ask myself “What’s the action here? Can I substitute a better verb which gives the reader more information and enhances the scene without piling on adjectives? Sometimes the answer is no: to be just simply must … be. Other times a wonderful verb will flex its muscles and step into the sentence. Amazingly, the sentence sings.

So, I’m a believer. Better yet: I believe. Drinking that Verb Kool Aid and working toward better and better writing.

Oh, and about that final line? The question circulated on Facebook not long ago, and folks voted for their favorite all-time-best-last-novel-line. I vacillated between the last line in The Great Gatsby and the last line in James Joyce’s short story The Dead. But then my friend reminded me of the final line in The Shipping News and despite the presence of the “to be” verb I had to agree:

“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”