A grammar guide will never make you a better writer. Nope. Not a little bit. It may, perhaps, help you avoid making what other people have deemed a mistake, but that’s about it. The very best of them may even inspire, but they won’t teach you good writing any more than learning how a basketball is made will help NBA players improve their game; the ball has to start rolling first. Style guides will never instill more beauty, more personality, more human verve into your writing than you can, providing you work at expressing yourself as clearly and freely as only you can. If you want to write well, then write constantly, read rapaciously, and use grammar not to make your writing better but to make it sound more like you. Your editor will do the rest, anyway.
We writers lead a necessarily solitary life – at least, that’s what we like to think. Though the act of writing can involve lots of lonesome glaring at an open Word document (with occasional breaks for coffee and Countdown), the process of turning deathless prose into an actual book involves a lot more people than the name on the cover suggests.
This is why my publisher Trapeze, an imprint of the Hachette company Orion, is starting to put full, movie-style credits at the back of their books. They asked me if I was amenable to this for my forthcoming novel Things Can Only Get Better, after trialling it in Candice Carty-Williams’s hugely successful Queenie. Of course I said yes – not only because I think it’s a brilliant idea but also because whenever I write my acknowledgments, I always fear I’ve missed somebody out. Looking at the two pages of names at the back of Queenie, I realised that I had previously left out lots of people.
It is a peculiar thing to step into someone’s worst day with a camera in hand. There’s no rule book for how best to navigate it. There was no one to tell me when to stay or when to step out on my first end-of-life shoot, where I hovered in a hospital room as a family said goodbye to their 3-year-old girl dying from a rare metabolic disorder.
Often, I am asked why I choose to photograph the end of a child’s life. When I am in those rooms, I am present with the sole goal of finding moments within grief that feel the most gentle and human: watching a mother brush the hair of her dying child, I was able to recognize the love and tenderness that accompanies us even in death. Listening to a child cry over the loss of his sister, and then get back up and start playing again next to her body, reminded me of the resilience we all carry with us, that my family and friends are capable of as well. They will also continue to live on if I die too soon.
In a 1945 essay in which he dismissed most detective and mystery fiction as little better than crossword puzzles, the critic Edmund Wilson asked a question that still rankles readers who enjoy the genre: “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” The answer, over the 75 or so years since, seems to be “millions of people do.” That would include me. I also care who killed Eunetta “Cleo” Sherwood and Tessie Fine. Theirs are the murders investigated by Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz in Laura Lippman’s haunting new novel.
What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell, is after bigger game. The arc of Maddie’s character — her mid-1960s “journey,” if you like — reflects the gulf which then existed between what women were expected to be and what they aspired to be.
The further the author journeys down the river the more she lets her winning idiosyncrasies show, and the greater the reading pleasure. The result is a tender yet argumentative book dressed in a beautiful jacket that someone will panic-buy at Christmas for an in-law who will crack it open expecting fond cliches about The Wind in the Willows only to alight on an ode to mud, in all its varieties “from the silky ochre liquid that holds rills and ripples like frozen water to the gleaming, thick, caramel-brown texture exposed on the shore at low tide”.
And what’s not to like about that?