A word about A Word About...

[by way of introduction]

First lines are crucial, they say.

My favorite book opening of all time—this is not news to you if we’re at all acquainted—is that of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. At the risk of repetition:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I’ve written before—incessantly, even—about my enchantment with that paragraph: the trio of semicolons (as I like to say: all you need to know about the wonder of semicolons is that Shirley Jackson liked them); the adverbs (did anyone ever tell you that adverbs are bad? they’re not: they’re glorious); that eerie “not sane”; the ominous comma in “whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Did you know that before she settled on “larks and katydids,” with its wonderful double-k sound, Jackson experimented with “larks and grasshoppers,” “larks and dragonflies,” “larks and butterflies”? (Thank you to Jackson’s magisterial biographer Ruth Franklin for sharing that information with me, and for assuring me that that comma after “whatever walked there”—the comma of doom, as I like to think of it—was in place from the novel’s very first draft.) Did you know that before she settled on Eleanor Vance for her heroine’s name, Jackson had called her Erica? (Another k sound, one notes. I think that the softer, more languid sound of “Eleanor” far better suits Jackson’s doomed—sorry, spoiler alert—heroine.)

These are the things I think about a lot: punctuation, adjectives and adverbs, haunted houses, Shirley Jackson. Also how to effectively wield pronouns. Also why it’s OK to split an infinitive. Also why some writers like “OK” and some writers prefer “okay.” Also the war between Brits and Americans over the word “momentarily.” (We’ll get to that.) Also Irene Dunne and Audrey Hepburn. Lucille Bremer, even. A lot of things, really.

So I’ve decided to grant myself some space—a sort of online scratchpad—to fool around in: to have a thought, to articulate it, to share it with you, without a lot of pressure to find a news hook to hang it from or to Shape It for Posterity, heaven forbid.

I hope you’ll be interested enough, and amused enough, to hang out with me.

Let’s see.