Richard Russo on Words and Their Arrangement

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Is it possible for a writer to be careless with language, or just not terribly interested in words, and still be a successful storyteller? Absolutely. In fact, I’d argue the majority of commercially successful writers are less than meticulous in their use of language, perhaps because they believe such “fine-tuning” is what editors and copy editors are for, or maybe because they’re more concerned with other elements of storytelling. Genre writing in particular—romance, sci-fi, detective, horror, historical, thriller, etc.—comes with its own set of rules and expectations, and those who toil in these fields often place more of a premium on plot and narrative pacing than beautiful sentence-to-sentence writing. Of course, writers who transcend their genres—Jane Austen, Ursula Le Guin, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane—are often superb stylists who care as much about language as more “literary” writers, though they’re more likely to be wary (and they’re right to be) of language that calls attention to itself (Wow! Just look at me write!) or whose beauty is intended to distract readers from their story’s lack of dramatic momentum. To be frank, literary writers are far more likely to polish a turd than their often less-pretentious genre brethren. Having said that, though, allow me to sound pretentious for a moment and assert my conviction that while it’s possible to be careless with language and be a successful writer, it’s not possible to be a great one, for the simple reason that words matter.

One of my own early writing teachers used to argue that the best way for aspiring writers to learn the power of words is to study simple stories that are told without much in the way of stylistic artifice. Such advice can appear counterintuitive, since it’s often the great stylists—the ones with powerful, idiosyncratic voices—who attract aspiring writers to literature in the first place. Nor are they wrong to put writers like Faulkner and Joyce on pedestals. Unfortunately, their verbal gymnastics can obscure or even belie how much power can be achieved in the absence of such stylistic flourishes. To illustrate, let’s look at the lyrics to “Pancho and Lefty,” by the great Townes Van Zandt. It’s the story of Pancho Villa and his friend Lefty, who, the song implies, betrayed him to the federales. The two opening stanzas introduce us to Pancho:

Living on the road, my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath’s as hard as kerosene
Your weren’t your mama’s only boy
But her favorite one, it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams.

Pancho was a bandit, boys
His horse was fast as polished steel
Wore his gun outside his pants

For all the honest world to feel
But Pancho met his match, you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
And nobody heard his dying words
Ah, but that’s the way it goes.

Notice that in the first stanza Pancho is referred to as “you” and “my friend.” Is the speaker Van Zandt himself? Lefty? It’s impossible to know for certain, but whoever is speaking appears to be on intimate terms, someone who knows not only Pancho and what he has done but also why. Living on the road was supposed to keep him “free and clean,” but the result has been the exact opposite. No longer the boy who left his grieving mother, Pancho has learned to wear his skin “like iron,” and his breath is “hard as kerosene.” Once on his own, we’re informed, he “sank into” his dreams. Sank is a surprising word choice. Normally we would slip or maybe slide or drift into a dream, all words that suggest how gentle, graceful and pleasurable the process can be. They also sound voluntary. By contrast, Pancho’s sinking feels more violent and implies a loss of control. It’s not like he woke up one morning and decided that maybe law school wasn’t for him. His decision to become an outlaw, once made, is irreversible.

It’s worth noting that though the task of introducing Pancho remains the same in the second stanza, its implied audience has changed. Gone now are both the you and my friend of the first stanza, replaced here with boys. So who are they? A group of journalists? Historians? All we can say for sure is that they’ve already heard of Pancho (who “met his match, you know / On the deserts down in Mexico”). They already know the broad strokes of his story, which means that whoever is speaking to them (again, maybe Lefty?) is offering insider—perhaps even eyewitness—information. He tells them that Pancho’s horse “was fast as polished steel,” and that he wore his gun “outside his pants / For all the honest world to feel.” Outside his pants (as opposed to, say, holstered) is an unusual phrase that calls attention to Pancho’s lack of interest in concealment; he’s an open-carry kind of guy. But it’s the second part of the sentence—for all the honest world to feel—that contains the real surprise. Given what the sentence is about (Pancho’s refusal to conceal his gun), we expect the final word to be see. Feel momentarily wrong-foots us, and we go looking for an explanation. Noticing that see doesn’t rhyme with steel, we conclude that Van Zandt must’ve really wanted the rhyme, because, given the choice, he opted for sound over sense. It’s possible.

On the other hand, what if feel really is the word Van Zandt both wanted and meant? What’s the difference between seeing Pancho’s gun and feeling it? What if the whole point is for people to feel the gun he carries, its potential to maim or even kill? What if it’s the gun that allows people to notice Pancho himself, which they might not otherwise do? What if it’s the gun that makes him somebody? What if his need to be somebody important is the dream he sank into? If so, then you have to wonder: Did Van Zandt choose the word feel because it rhymes with steel? Or did he choose steel so that he could later deploy feel at the end of the line? To me, this second explanation makes more sense because the resulting meaning is richer, less literal. It also squares better with my experience of telling stories. People who aren’t storytellers are inclined to believe that the words sit on the page in the order that they first occurred to the writer. If Van Zandt thought of the word steel first, then he must’ve been looking for a word to rhyme with it (and feel does). But this assumes that writers don’t revise, and of course they do. The sequence of words in the first draft may have little to do with their arrangement in the final draft, which might be written a month or even a year later. Each draft clarifies not only which words are the right ones but also that they’ve been arranged in the best possible order for optimal effect. The word feel might be the last word in the stanza, but Van Zandt may have become convinced of its importance early on. For all we know, he constructed the entire stanza with that word in mind. To the uninitiated, that might seem like starting out with a radiator cap and installing a whole car around it, but sometimes that’s the way art works.

Only after Pancho has “met his match” in the desert, halfway through the song, do we meet Lefty (unless it’s his voice we’ve been listening to all along, to me an attractive interpretation).

And Lefty, he can’t sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south
Ended up in Lefty’s mouth
The day they laid poor Pancho low
Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go
Oh, there ain’t nobody knows.

“The dust that Pancho bit down south” is, for my money, the best wordplay in the song. We’re all familiar with “bite the dust” as a figure of speech, but here Van Zandt turns the cliché on its head by altering the syntax. The phrasing we would expect is “Pancho bit the dust down south”—the subject of the sentence being Pancho, and dust its direct object. By making dust the subject and locating “Pancho bit” in a subordinate structure, we’re again wrong-footed, this time in a truly wonderful way. Now “bite the dust” isn’t so recognizable as a cliché, and the sentence’s new subject dust becomes more shocking by ending up in Lefty’s mouth. Lefty not only hasn’t forgotten Pancho, his old friend has become the centerpiece of Lefty’s own, equally tragic life. We’re urged not to judge Lefty too harshly, because “he only did what he had to do.” But apparently Lefty himself doesn’t agree. He’s not only kept Pancho alive but amplified his own betrayal, thereby increasing his guilt and suffering. Pancho’s sins were punishable by death; Lefty’s, ironically, by a long life.

There’s plenty of word magic in the song’s chorus, too:

And all the federales say
They could’ve had him any day
They only let him hang around
Out of kindness, I suppose.

The first time you hear the song, you may well miss the subtle changes in the third line. True, the chorus contains the same insistence each time it repeats: that the federales could have dispensed with Pancho at any point. The second time through, however, hang around becomes slip away. The third time through they admit to letting him go so wrong. The pattern that emerges may be subtle, but it’s also significant. Hang around and slip away both suggest that Pancho was merely an annoyance. But when the federales admit they let him go so wrong, they’re acknowledging not only that he was always more than an annoyance, but also their complicity in what ultimately happened to him. It’s also worth noting that if the way we see Pancho changes each time the chorus repeats, the same is true of the federales themselves. The first time through we’re told what all the federales say. If they all say the same thing, it must be true, right? Except that the claim begs an obvious question. If they could’ve put an end to his banditry earlier, why on earth didn’t they? The motive we’re asked to entertain could not be more ridiculous: they’ve let Pancho go “out of kindness, I suppose.” Each time the chorus repeats, the claim becomes more ludicrous, especially the final time, when Van Zandt alters it slightly. Now, instead of all the federales say, it’s a few gray federales say, and the new message is clear: lies become more transparent over time. The first draft of history may be written by the victors, but first drafts exist—like poems and songs—to be revised, as many times as it takes, until the story makes sense, until it squares with our experience of how the world works. In the end Van Zandt seems less interested in Pancho and Lefty themselves than that we understand how history operates, that we should be skeptical of both its facts and its lessons. The phrase that’s left ringing in our ears is that final “I suppose.” How marvelously cagey those two words are, the way they force us to revisit everything “we’re told” to arrive at the truth. “Ain’t nobody knows” where Lefty got the money to go to Ohio actually means that everybody does. In truth, nobody supposes that the federales were motivated by kindness. And only a damned fool believes what he’s told when the facts don’t add up.

Okay, but why spend so much time analyzing such a simple, seemingly straightforward song? Well, for one thing, to demonstrate that a good story’s best trick is to make the telling look easy, natural and inevitable, as if anybody could do it. But that’s after-the-fact, federale logic. If they could’ve had Pancho any day, they would’ve. And not everybody could pull off what Van Zandt does in “Pancho and Lefty”; if they could, they would. Even more important is that aspiring writers too often worry about all the wrong things. Is their vocabulary sufficient to their ambitions? Are they sophisticated enough?

Is the language flashy enough to get noticed by agents or editors? (Should you, like Pancho, wear your gun outside your pants?) A song like “Pancho and Lefty” is important to study precisely because Van Zandt is worried about the right things. There isn’t an ounce of self-consciousness anywhere. His diction couldn’t be less pretentious: only two words in the entire song—federales and kerosene—contain more than two syllables. Great art, it seems, can be made of humble materials.

Good to know.

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Life and Art by Richard Russo is available via Knopf.