Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose.
The Pyramid of Language
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Creative Writing: The Craft of Style
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From the lesson
Meaning, Sense, and Clarity
Here in the first module we focus on putting pressure on your words so that they mean what you intend. We balance abstraction with the need to make good sense. And we discuss the first and last stylistic difficulty of any prose writer, being clear.
Meet the Instructors
Salvatore ScibonaFrank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English
Okay this segment is going to help us put some meat on the bones in
the sense of having a visual diagram of what some of this means.
And the diagram comes from the late, great Frank Conroy.
Frank Conroy was the director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the first and
oldest graduate program in creative writing in the United States.
He was the director from 1987 to 2005.
He was also my teacher, as well as Amity Gaige's teacher and
later on in this module, we'll sit down and
talk about Frank Conroy a little bit, and his influence on writers.
And also the way he focused our minds.
He was an absolutely merciless teacher.
When we died, the student paper at the University
of Iowa ran an obituary with the headline, The End of Tough Love.
He wanted you to make absolutely every word pay.
But he was also an extremely coachent teacher and he had a way of describing
what he demanded of word choice, and I'll show you in a little bit.
Now, bare in mind this diagram is his idea with some of my changes.
So everybody that I know who's talked about Conroy pyramid,
heard him give it in a different way.
You'll get one version of it in any case.
After my first day in class with him, which was an utterly
clarifying experience, I wanted to go home and rewrite everything I'd ever written.
All right, so, let's go to the diagram.
Okay, this was Frank Conroy's diagram from the first day of school.
Here we have a pyramid.
At the bottom of this pyramid,
he put meaning, sense, and clarity.
I often add here the word denotation.
What is denotation?
It's literally what the word means.
The next level up he put senses evoked.
The next level up from here was voice, mood.
And I'll go over what all of these are in a moment.
I like to add in here the notion of connotation.
Connotation.
Remember what the difference between denotation and connotation is.
Denotation is the literal meaning, connotation,
think of that, con with, it's the meaning that goes along with the literal meaning.
That comes further up the pyramid.
All right, then here, he puts subtext.
Here he puts metaphor.
And here he puts the fancy stuff.
This drove me insane, the idea that this fancy stuff, the beautiful
extra part that was really what made you want to be a writer in the first place.
All of the things that made Virginia Woolf Blow you up
that he put way up here on top of the pyramid.
Now, what I took him to mean in the first place of this pyramid was that
the fancy stuff, the metaphor, was more superfluous and the stuff at the bottom,
meaning, sense and clarity, was what really mattered, as though the only thing
that was really, really important was that you were clear and you were sensible.
So it seemed as if he was preaching a style that was clear but dead.
Or in John Cage's terms perhaps, there was clarity but no grace in it.
Well, it took me several years to calm down.
And then I think I have a clearer sense of what he meant.
It wasn't that this things further up the pyramid were less important.
But you could, in a sense, say that they were less fundamental.
And I think, the thing that really helped me out was thinking of this pyramid being
literally on the ground.
So that if you were only interested as a writer in subtext.
It is all the beautiful things in Hemingway's stories, the beautiful
Hemingway story, Hills Like White Elephants, where everything is unspoken.
Where you love that story for the sake of the subtext.
Right, many of us do.
But the subtext can't work if the language didn't make sense in the first place.
Likewise I often put next to,
in this roughly the same level in here, I often want to put sound.
Boy you love the way that thing that Mark Twain said, sounded.
But it was more fundamental to the actual expression that it made sense.
If it didn't make sense, it wouldn't matter that it sounded nice.
It would be gibberish.
It could be music, maybe, but it wouldn't really be language.
The way we think of the structure of this pyramid then,
is that the things that are on the bottom are more fundamental and
more independent of the things that are above them.
The fancy stuff is not up here, because its superfluous.
It's up here because it needs to have all of the things below it also working.
If the connotation,
if you use a word that is correct in his denotation, and that's all it is.
Fine.
You haven't messed anything up.
But if you've tried to use a word for the sake of its connotation, and
ignored its denotation and actually used a denotation that was incorrect,
then the whole thing fails, the pyramid collapses.
First it has to be meaningful and sensible and clear for
the purposes of us in story-writing mode.
We need to be talking about what these things look like,
what they sound like, what they smell like, what they taste like,
what they feel like, the senses evoked.
Then we can get into mood.
Then we can get into subtext.
Then we can pay attention to trying to get the music of the language,
the sound to sound good.
And only when all of these things work do you have this sense that
the miraculous extra thing has happened.
I also in my own version of this, I often with my students here at Wesleyan
will often want to think of putting a lightbulb up here, right.
And there's a wire that goes down to the power source.
And it's only when all of these things work, that the lightbulb blows up.
And in some sense, you might think of each word as having a structure like this.
So when it's really,
really working, as you'll see in a later segment when we talk about Muriel Spark,
when it's really, really working, one word can make a light Flow come
on that throws itself over all of the rest of the novel just with one word.
You know that power that one word can have to change the meaning of everything that
surrounded it.
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