Empty Words

  Used to be, in the old days, I had to prepare witnesses for hearings. Not everyone does this, even though they should. I was a witness in a case back in 1982 where the attorney did not tell me what was needed from me, he did not even ask me what I knew. It was not a pleasant experience. He also the lost the case, a custody case. From that experience, I talked to my witnesses.

One thing was getting witnesses to get past empty words. When the issue is the best interests of a child in a custody case, having a witness say one's client is a good parent is a null phrase, meaningless. How are (or not) a good parent? What is their relationship with the child? 

George Saunders raises this topic in the context of writing (and conversation) in his latest Office Hours:

So, reading with specificity in mind can break broad, judging, generalizations down into smaller, more accurate, truthful, and workable sub-observations.  There’s a movement from the abstract to the concrete. 

Reading this way can have the effect of converting or eliminating non-relevant questions for the writer. 

“Why am I so boring?” simply becomes “I wonder if that bit on page 4 wants to say something more, that will feel like escalation?” (He’s not generally, terminally boring, as a person; it’s just that his text has temporarily lapsed into that which produces stasis, let’s say.  And a person can, you know, recover from that.)

Martin Dolan's interview Ann Beattie’s Characters Live in “Uneasy Coexistence” touches on this idea from a different perspective:

MD: You keep coming back to the language of “the bubble” to describe Charlottesville. All of your characters, from all their different perspectives, are alike in that they’re bemoaning that “the bubble” is about to burst (or has already).  So, do you think that these bubbles are always doomed to pop? And is that even such a bad thing?

AB: I don’t look at things so directly. I don’t think that was the point of the book, per say, but by definition everything that is a bubble is vulnerable. At a literal level at least. We understand what the term means, but the characters in these stories don’t want to think that way.

What I liked about the image of the bubble is that it was a perfect metaphor. There’s a conflation of a bubble being both constricting yet impossible to not notice. It also resonates with the other image of the hot air balloon taking off. In fact, that’s exactly the image that comes back at the end—people looking down at the earth from the height of a balloon. I was trying to do something, in a literary way, in which two images superimposed over each other kind of jangle, rather than perfectly match. The idea is that you can think about having a different perspective, but then there is a totally different phenomenon of actually having that perspective. At the same time, the metaphor seems to me to be a uniting factor between two seemingly unrelating things—the hot air balloon and the person who has got a protective coating from living in their liberal town.

I thought my witnesses suffered from a mental laziness we all have: of using shorthand instead of clearly expressing ideas. Our social/political bubbles provide a shorthand. I have a sister who keeps saying she is a conservative, and I have no idea what she is conserving. What I really hate to see in my own writing is when I find bland, empty words in my prose. That is when I start ripping it out. Lazy, that's what I am.

sch 8/5