Tone And Perspective

One of the hardest things for me about writing has always been tone. Remember that Pete Prisco deconstruction I wrote a few weeks ago? Well, to put it mildly, the first draft of that piece was inflamed, inflammatory, and disgusted. The tone of the piece was rhetorical: How dare you sell the athletes you cover down the river? How dare you? Keith Olbermann did an excellent deconstruction along these lines himself, and it was necessary in its own way.

But my initial tone and perspective didn't work. To make my perspective personal by focusing on Prisco's personal biases and hypocrisies missed the point entirely: neither Prisco's sentiment nor his message were unique, and a casual crawl across the megahertz'd revealed that quite a few Internet commenters had taken this "the player knew the risks" argument to heart and in every imaginable direction. The perspective had to be more universal and impersonal. For much the same reasons, an emotional tone didn't work: What do you say to someone that feels that they're being entirely logical in thinking that the players knew the risks? After all, Joe Six-Pack of Peoria, Middle America isn't a shill for the NFL: he just thinks players that signed up for America's version of a gladiatorial battle also signed up for the concussions to an extent (not too unreasonable on its face). So taking an emotional tone wouldn't have worked either. The tone had to be rational and logical.

So in the end, I had to swallow my righteous pride and stifle my immediate sentiments and rewrite the first draft entirely along a far more logical and impersonal vein. My task became simpler and harder: To truly address the strongest possible point that Prisco was making (and, honestly, the only point of substance worth responding to). Now, I really, really like the end result. It worked out, unquestionably. But here's the kind of tragic, difficult thing: when I was writing the piece, I sincerely felt like I was being terribly condescending to every reader. I felt like I had dipped into Vulcan-style logic and was zealously needling an obvious vein of rational argument over and over. It felt monotonous and droning to me. I felt like I was writing with an almost-autistic disregard for Prisco's tone, like I hadn't picked up on the social cues of an odious inkwell of hackery into which Prisco had dipped his fountain pen.


But despite how I felt, in reality, I was doing just fine, and the end result bears that out: I wasn't missing the social cues Prisco was offering... Rather, I was taking the social cues and rejecting them out of hand as irrelevancies. I wasn't being condescending - I was just indirectly disrespecting Prisco by refusing to play his rhetorical games. I wasn't slipping into Vulcan-style logic - I was simply forcing myself to set aside my initial, visceral response to Prisco and focus entirely on the unflinching three-card-montaellis game of Prisco's argument, which used the word "risk"/"the risks" deceptively in order to link "Anything can happen" to "Therefore, no one is ever culpable or liable for misleading anyone because they should have known better". In short: I wasn't playing the game poorly, I was playing the game well by refusing to play the short-sighted, dead-end individual game.

And so to summarize: I first write what feels at the time like righteous, rational indignation and it comes out as condescending bluster. and later (just one hour later), I write what feels at the time like condescending bluster and it comes out as righteous, rational indignation. Upon reflection, this is all obvious, but at the time it really felt insane and frustrating - is the most beautiful, successful piece of my life going to feel like sentimental gibberish when I put it on paper? Worse, will I not write it or follow it up based on my disgust for how maudlin it feels? That's really kind of a crazy, unsettling thought. And, what's even stranger, I actively felt that the stuff that wasn't working in the first draft - the emotional rhetoric - was precisely what my "Vulcan-style logic" needed to salvage its problems. And it goes deeper: I didn't even realize what was working about what was working. Truth be told, I didn't even set my sights on a severely rational argument; rather, I had an almost vindictive sense of not letting this prick get away with that column (sorry for the language, but that was my internal monologue. Heh.). Honestly, I wanted to make Prisco feel like an idiot even on the level of his strongest argument, and it killed me every time I had to strike out an off-hand emotional comment to that effect, feeling like I was doing the piece an injustice. My vindictiveness was, I thought, the best part of what I was doing. So, legitimately, I backed into everything that worked about that piece, fighting it all the way with all sorts of stuff that didn't work and finally striking all of that stuff because it didn't fit the mental model I'd built for the piece.

And that's sometimes how it is: We strive to find the perspective that best serves the purpose of the piece, even if that perspective is quite apart from the perspective that inspires the piece. And we strive to find the tone that best serves the purpose of the piece, and that tone is potentially quite apart from the perspective of the piece. One has to formally innovate sometimes in order to translate the details to a new perspective and to translate the justified part of a sentiment from one tone to another. For me, these miniature problems are among the most difficult I ever run across, and that's when I'm even aware of these problems to start with, which is not as often as I'd like. And often, I'll only find out about a problem of tone or perspective through an editor, and my brilliant, well-written piece is not only not-so-brilliant, but not-so-well-written, either.

And, after all that, maybe the lesson here is that sometimes you just have to write regardless of what you feel about what you're writing. Because there's a good chance that a well-conceived perspective and a well-conceived tone and a goodly amount of evidence will combine to give you something that works, even if it doesn't feel like it works in the moment, even if your personal muse and genius are not 100% there or in alignment. Maybe you just need to be close enough for road work and get something down, because it's at least in the right ballpark. In the Prisco piece, I felt like I was deliberately stifling my expressions of something I'd felt strongly emotional towards. And I felt like crap. But it worked for the purpose of the piece. And, conversely, waiting until a piece does feel right might be precisely the wrong strategy. For after, all, that moment when you want to write something might be precisely the wrong moment to write it: While you might be amped to write that piece? In reality, you're in a rhetorical mood or have some indignation to work off, which completely ill-serves your well-meaning piece. Countless times, I've had an emotional reverie where the words just flew from my hands and I felt like I was directly accessing the truth. I feel like a friggin' prophet in these moments, no lie. I won't go into the casual egoism and narcissism here, egoism which goes well beyond what the Western canon has ever cataloged. And yet, even if I had been accessing the truth directly in these moments, the effect on tone and perspective that it'd produce would make what I'd written functionally unreadable, or, at best, feeling totally unearned. Because that vibe of directness I'd felt was authentic: I had in fact cut the middleman (the constructed reader with which we're always attempting to communicate) out of my mind for a little while. Only problem: Writing that isn't written for a reader tends to read like it.

So build your models, build your characters, build your flash cards, and then stick to them until good evidence comes up to overturn something - and "I have a bad feeling" can't count as evidence on its own. I'd liken model-building to tennis, somewhat - the better players usually win matches against worse players, even on their bad days. Oh, sure, top players - just like any Homo Sapiens - surely have brain-farts and idiotic drop-shots from time to time. They have bad luck on the sequence of their points. And they have unforced errors into the 50s and 60s. But they still usually win. And it's not because they woke up on the right side of the bed every morning (in fact, I'd imagine that all pro tennis players get out of bed with great pain in one or more joints and muscles). No, rather, it's that instead of having an immaculate mood or a much more consistent constitution than their opponents, it's more that elite tennis players simply start that day with innumerable advantages in skill and physique that a bad day can't overcome: that their processes of preparation and conditioning are sounder, that their body is fitter, that their musculature is more suitable to the sport, that their footwork is nimbler, and that their swing mechanics is better than their opponent's. All of this combines to form the dominant factor in the match. The rest - the attitude and bad days - might, sure, randomly swing a match every once in awhile, but have you looked at the majors winners historically? If you're the best tennis player in the world, you'll probably get to the finals and win if you enter a tournament, barring a bad match-up.

The better tennis player usually wins. My point in this analogy: that writing might have an extreme variation in quality from day to day, from mood to mood, from perspective to perspective, and you don't always know where a piece is going to go. But how you feel about a piece in the moment should be low on the list of factors to consider. There's always after-the-fact editing. If you have a pretty good idea, and to that idea you bring the right body, the right mind, and the right perspective? Then you've at least given yourself the best chance of success, even if it makes you sound like a Vulcan from time to time.

And now I'll hit "Publish," fully aware that this piece feels in the moment like over-long and overbearing dreck that completely misses its mark. It wouldn't be the first time.