Freddie deBoer, a brilliant prose stylist himself, in 2013 highlighted non-fiction essayists and bloggers who “throw heat.” His explanation for why he admires these writers, at the sentence level, contain some gems. Below I excerpt the best descriptions from deBoer on what he loves about other writers. The bolding is mine, not Freddie’s.
First, from Freddie, on the rarity of gorgeous prose styling in the realm of ideas-driven nonfiction writing:
Prose style is typically besides the point in professionally published nonfiction. When people say they want to be writers, in the sense that they want to write for websites and magazines rather than to write a novel, usually it means they want their ideas to be their currency, not their words. Attention to style and voice is more often found in creative writing than in the kind of writing that is referred to, unfortunately, as “content.”
But prose matters. Ideas matter too, but ideas are cheap and easy to find, and good prose certainly isn’t.
On Ta-Nehisi Coates:
I have complained, in the past, about the way that some of Coates’s fans have treated him as the Wise Black Sage. This is a political complaint, of course, one about white guilt and white condescension and the role they still play in defining the reputations of black writers. But it’s also a statement about the shame of reducing writing of this quality to empty piety. Nothing drains writing of its life more surely than treating it like church. Coates is a far more playful, more unpredictable writer than that, and a far more radical one…
“And it’s that way that I want to understand his writing— appropriate to its mission, defined in its scope, and lit always by history and also by fire.”
On Choire Sicha:
The endless, stupid debate about irony has always been predicated on misunderstanding. Irony is a neutral quality; there is no such thing as too much or too little in the world. What people fear, and rightfully so, is the blank, unearned sarcasm that wallpapers the internet. The failure is not of attitude but of experience. 13 year old boys have no right to wax cynical, and so many of the people who operate in an idiom of showy disinterest have neither the experience nor the discrimination to have earned such a stance, which like all weapons must be distributed with discretion. Sicha, on the other hand, has earned his default posture, however you’d like to define that, through understanding: all cynicism comes first through kindness. Sicha wants enough for people to wish that they do their best but is wise enough to know that they won’t…
Weariness in writing is dangerous territory. Deployed clumsily, it risks degrading your work and insulting your audience. Take, for example, film critics who spend every review letting you know how terribly tiring they find it to write about movies. You can always just quit. But, in spite of that danger, when you find the genuine article— when you find someone whose exhaustion is not an affect, but a profound moral conviction— there’s something lovely about it. Sicha is a writer who knows not just how to write like a tired man, but why.
On Caity Weaver:
People say Caity Weaver is funny, and yeah— she’s hilarious. But what I more value in her writing is something that’s much rarer for someone who writes multiple pieces a day: the capacity to surprise. She is, as they say, effectively wild.
On Yasmin Nair:
Don’t get me wrong: Nair is not some “kids these days” scold. I like those best who articulate their beliefs with strength and resolve but without certitude. It’s a tricky line to walk, to remain alive to the limitations of your own understanding without descending into an affected, “look at how open minded I am” pose. To be corrigible, but not manipulable; to listen to advice but to follow your own. On a typical day I feel like doing both is impossible. When I read Nair I feel not only that it’s possible but that I should have already gotten it together to get there, a long while ago. There’s little more to ask of a political writer: when I read Yasmin Nair I whisper to myself, “Be smarter; be better.”
On Jacob Bacharach:
Plenty of people try to squeeze too much into their sentences, but Bacharach can stuff them in, then stretch his arms out so the sentences expand like an accordion, and like an accordion, they make sweet music. The man can pack a suitcase. Same with his references: many try what he tries, few succeed. If you’re going to weave obscure references through your writing, for god’s sakes, you better know what you’re doing. If you aren’t careful you can end up sounding like Dennis Miller trying out his new Toshiro Mifune joke on Dan Fouts when its 31-6 midway through the third quarter. I’ve never read a reference from Bacharach that didn’t precisely land, whether I got it or not; if not, the fault was me, not him. It’s like when someone mumbles and you apologize to them for not understanding.
On Edith Zimmerman:
Self-deprecation is a seductive quality, in writing and in life, and it’s essentially always a mistake. Tell the world that you’re a loser and the world will believe you. What was amazing about Zimmerman’s work at The Hairpin was how she could demonstrate her value in a way that conveyed how she was barely holding it together. It wasn’t “sometimes I feel confident, sometimes I feel insecure!,” which is an angle that should be packed into a rocket and sent into the sun. It was “there’s really no space between the feeling like I’m a pretty cool person and the fact that I just lost a shoe between the subway car and the platform.” For me, personally, it’s not at all that there are times when I feel cool and times when I feel shitty about myself. It’s that the personal momentum that creates the former ensures the latter. Self-confidence is like Mario Kart, where no matter how fucking far ahead you get, the game is rubber banded so that some a-hole who kept hitting the penguin always gets the blue shell at just the wrong time. But sometimes, you’re the one who’s behind, you get the blue shell, and it feels pretty good, because fuck Donkey Kong, anyway. Edith Z really knows how to write about those feels.
If the nadir of our condescending “single lady writer livin’ the dream in NYC” fantasy is Carrie from Sex and the City doing her “I’m a klutzy self-doubting person but I got the shooooooooooes and also I’m horrid and really I get feminism and all but sluts are a thing,” then the flipside is Zimmerman, who writes like someone who is brilliant and funny and really put together but also spends a lot of her time with lipstick on her cheek. I never got swagger, never thought it was real, and don’t know why people want it. To humanize success in the aspirational lifestyle that so many people crave— to make it seem ridiculous without ever ridiculing anybody— that’s a beautiful thing.
On Maureen Tkacik:
Derision is a mode that people think is easy, but it couldn’t be harder. You can’t sell it; by its nature, contempt must indicate effortlessness on the part of the person feeling it. I could write a 3,000 word essay and not approximate the deserved scorn or inherent feminism in the five words “Crap Emails from a Dude.” The woman can just sling it, funny as fuck and so wonderfully mean it can cause the screen on your laptop to bubble. I was Facebook friends with her but I ended up clicking unfriend because I was afraid I would post something stupid and she would write a comment so cutting I’d jump out a window. Is my name on this thing? I’m a little worried. That’s the kind of heat I’m talking about here. And I’m no hothouse flower.
On Wesley Morris:
I don’t share his taste for movies. But his writing reminds me that admiration is better than agreement. He’s got all the tools: precision, ambiguity, concision, expansiveness, minimalism, maximalism, reverence, mockery. Heat. Always, throwing heat.
Morris’s style is conversational except when it’s soaring, playful when not reflective, unfussy except when fussy is perfect. I know that can be true of any writer, but Morris can cycle through each and all within a single sentence. That might sound like stylistic schizophrenia, and it would be if Morris weren’t up for it. He makes it seem effortless, juggling registers and syntax, making the next mental turn seem inevitable even as your marvel at how unexpected it is. The digressive and allusive thing is a common style, and though I am inclined to love it, I’ve come to find it predictable and stale. But Morris makes it inimitable and fresh; his references don’t push, like so many of ours do, trying to uncomfortably occupy an argumentative space where they don’t quite belong. His digressions meander without distracting. In all of it, he trusts the interior logic of his style, a kind of DNA internal to his prose, a self-replicating design that spools out beautifully into complex patterns in all directions.
I am reminded, when I read good prose, that all complicated things can masquerade as simple, if only they achieve true beauty. American prose style has been strangled, for forever, by the serial killer called minimalism, a dimwitted ghost of somebody’s misunderstanding of Raymond Chandler’s parody of Ernest Hemingway’s homage to a Sherwood Anderson who never actually existed. I have read writer after writer ruining themselves, under the profoundly mistaken notion that a sentence of five words has twice the power of a sentence of ten. The advice to “write less,” always expressed as some sort of rare, sage wisdom, now has the character of your grandad looking around your new Kia for the choke. It’s bad advice that has been left on the stove for ages and has become tough and stringy. But so many people still want to chew.
Morris, right now, is my go-to for the refutation: with words, there is no such thing as too few or too many. There is only wrong and just enough. If you are in the habit of giving advice to young writers, and you pull out the same tired advice about adverbs or using no alternatives to “said”— as if that were the root of the problem— I’d ask you to consider that every bad writer has already heard that advice. No one who has contemplated writing for more than a half hour could have possibly missed the appeal to minimalism. If that advice solved the problem, we wouldn’t be surrounded by shitty prose.
