Delays, de-icing, and a writer de-lighted

By Randy Koch

During the recent holiday season my world seemed on the verge of falling apart. Over Thanksgiving weekend, my daughter Mary and I moved out of our small apartment on Calton and into a new place north of Shiloh . Early in November I submitted the necessary forms to the U.S. Postal Service, and several days later I received a confirmation notice that said, “Your mail will be forwarded to your NEW address, as you requested, on: Nov. 16, 2004.” Because of other occasional problems I've had receiving my mail, I shouldn't have been surprised when almost nothing was delivered to our new address for another six weeks -- not until after Christmas and after I went twice to the Del Mar station to ask where my mail was, particularly the electric and phone bills and a credit card statement. The bills, which I normally receive during the first week of each month, eventually arrived the last week of December, along with a separate notice from Mastercard demanding payment and informing me that a $39 late fee was also due. When I explained that I hadn't received the statement, they rescinded the late fee. But then, I got more late mail: three Christmas cards from friends up north, the postmarks on two dated December 20th and the other the 23rd. They arrived in my mailbox on January 12th.

But more surprises awaited me. On the way to Minnesota for Christmas, I spent over 48 hours stuck in the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Airport because Delta Airlines failed to stock up on de-icer before a huge winter storm plowed through the Northeast. After I spent one night sleeping on the terminal floor and interminable hours standing in line to reschedule flight after cancelled flight, the de-icer finally arrived late on Christmas Eve. I got a ticket to Minneapolis and hurried to Concourse B where the plane sat at Gate 16. It was delayed, and I feared that this one like the other five that I had been booked on over the past two days would also be cancelled. Eventually the ticket agent explained over the tinny intercom the nature of the problem. “The flight attendants are in the terminal,” she reassured us, “but we can't find them.” Two hours later, they finally showed up, we boarded, and during the 90-minute flight I stewed and vowed never to fly Delta again. Late on Christmas Eve, I arrived in Minneapolis still wearing the same clothes I had put on in Laredo nearly three days earlier; my luggage -- now bound for Sioux Falls, SD -- arrived at my brother's house the following Monday.

And then last week came what seemed the last straw. I received an electric bill from CPL for $17.80, but as I read it more closely, I realized the charge was for service at our apartment on Calton for the month after we moved out. I called CPL and explained that we shouldn't be getting billed for the Calton address since we hadn't lived there since before Thanksgiving. The customer service rep said she'd take care of it, that power there would be disconnected and that we'd get billed for service only at our current residence.

Two days later while I was at work, the electricity at our new place, not at our former apartment, was shut off. When I called CPL, the rep on the phone apologized for the inconvenience and assured me that service would be restored.

“How soon?” I asked.

“Reconnection takes 24 to 48 hours,” she replied.

“But it was your mistake,” I protested. “We've got food in the freezer and refrigerator and I have work to do on the computer tonight.”

“I'm sorry, sir. I'll expedite the request, but I can't guarantee that service will be reconnected today,” she said.

And there was more.

“Be aware, sir,” she went on, “that on your next bill there will be a $40 reconnect charge--”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I fumed. “You're gonna charge me for correcting your mistake?”

“Let me explain, sir,” she said. “Simply call Customer Service at the 800 number on your bill and ask them to remove the charge.”

“Since you made the mistake,” I pointed out, “you shouldn't charge me in the first place.” Logic and good sense were on my side, but that was irrelevant to CPL's Customer Service representative.

That evening, after the sun had already set, I left the University, got on the Loop , and arrived home to a dark apartment. I made two angry phone calls to CPL and American Electric Power, heard the same lame apologies again, ate dinner at Pizza Hut, took a cold shower in the morning, and went back to work. Later that afternoon, no less than 30 hours after CPL shut off our power, they turned it back on. Three days later I changed electricity providers.

But as hard as it may be to imagine, something even worse, something more disturbing and ominous transpired during those dark December days. While passing time in a newsstand in the Cincinnati Airport , I picked up a copy of H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights and read several chapters while waiting in line to rebook my flight to Minnesota . During the past few weeks I had seen the trailer for the movie on TV. It reminded me of Hoosiers, but instead of basketball in Indiana this was about football in Odessa , Texas . I had heard that the movie, like most adaptations, took some liberties and failed to adequately develop all the themes in the book, and as I read, I discovered this was, in fact, the case. While its subject is the Permian Panthers' 1988 state semifinal football season, more than half of the book focuses on Odessa's history, racism, sexism, economic struggles, and educational system. They're all connected to the football story, but their implications are important for everyone, sports fan or otherwise. In fact, I agree with the blurb from the Miami Herald: “Bissinger's book moves far beyond sport, in a telling, damning sociological sketch.” It's definitely a worthwhile read.

The tragedy of the book, however, is that the editing is glaringly incomplete. Because the author has won several prestigious prizes for his reporting, including the Pulitzer, he should be among the best journalists writing, but from the first page it's evident that he or the editor at Da Capo Press should have spent more time tightening and polishing. I admit that I'm probably more critical of the quality of published work than most readers. I regularly edit and give feedback not only on my students' papers but also on friends' poems, short stories, and novels. I suppose my criticism of Friday Night Lights results from what Norman Maclean says in “A River Runs through It”: “I would not see a thing unless I thought of it first.” If I didn't think about and see similar problems in my own and others' writing, I wouldn't see them in Bissinger's. But I do, and unfortunately he did not.

From the first page of the book, three common problems plague his writing, all of which result in wordiness and extra work for the reader. First, he constantly begins sentences with “It was,” a flabby construction that can be trimmed without losing any meaning. On the first page of chapter 1, he writes, “It was the very first official day of practice and it marked the start of a new team, a new year, a new season” (3). Notice how simply avoiding “It” (and “very” since there's no difference between the “very first...day” and the “first...day”) eliminates five words from this sentence: “The first official day of practice marked the start of a new team, a new year, a new season.”

The next paragraph begins with a sentence that does the same thing: “It was a little after six in the morning when the coaches started trickling into the Permian High School field house” (3). Cutting three words gets to the same point more quickly: “A little after six in the morning the coaches started trickling into the Permian High School field house” or maybe better yet “Shortly after six a.m. the coaches started trickling into the Permian High School field house.” The author and some readers might argue, “Don't get all bent out of shape. It's just a couple of sentences.” But it's not. In another place he writes, “It was a torrent of sand, looking like a rain cloud, that came in from the northwest” (10) instead of the more compact “A torrent of sand, looking like a rain cloud, came in from the northwest” (10). And on p. 12 instead of “It was incidents such as these that gave Odessa its legacy” (12), he could have written, “Incidents such as these gave Odessa its legacy” (12). In the first chapter's 16 short pages, Bissinger on at least 30 occasions begins sentences or independent clauses with “it was,” a wordy, repetitive, often indefensible stylistic choice that reoccurs throughout the book.

Equally distracting is the frequency with which Bissinger uses “there” followed by a weak verb, such as “are,” “is,” “was,” or “were” to begin sentences. For example, he writes, “Finally, there were those who said the college was burned down simply because it was something the damn Yankees had built the natives of the city when no one had asked for it” (7). Avoiding “there” and “it was” results in a clearer, more compact sentence that says everything the original said: “Finally, some said the college was burned down simply because the damn Yankees had built it for the city's natives when no one had asked for it” (7). Similarly, “There was a small nucleus of people who settled here and worked here and cared about the future of the town” (9) should have been revised to “A small nucleus of people settled and worked here and cared about the future of the town.” We could also shorten “There were many people in Odessa who, after the initial shock, had slowly fallen in love with the town” (14) to “Many people in Odessa, after the initial shock, slowly fell in love with the town.” Similar changes could easily be made to many of the 28 other “there” constructions in Chapter 1, not to mention in the rest of the book.

Third, the author's failure to avoid weak helping and linking verbs in constructions other than those that include “it” or “there” and replace them with more precise, interesting action verbs also makes his prose less vivid and compact than it might be. He points out that “Odessa . . . experienced more growth in a month than it had in ten years, inundated by men who were called simply boomers” (9). A careful editor would recognize “were” as a weak verb and quickly realize that “who were” is unnecessary; as a result, the concluding phrase could be shortened to “inundated by men called simply boomers.” Similarly “could” and “was” are also symptomatic of clutter in this sentence: “[A]ll he could see as he drove into town the first time was the red cast of the clouds from a winter storm” (10). This sentence requires some rearranging to make the changes, but the result is more concise and chronological: “As he drove into town the first time, he only saw the red cast of clouds from a winter storm.” And notice how, in another sentence, being attentive to the weak verb “was” helps a careful reader replace five words with one. Instead of “Odessa was only too eager to embrace the characteristics that distinguished other Texas boom towns of the period” (8-9), we might just as well say, “Odessa eagerly embraced the characteristics that distinguished other Texas boom towns of the period.” Weak verbs are often the most glaring symptom of weak writing -- our own and that of Pulitzer Prize winners.

The changes I recommended may seem small and even insignificant, but consider this: the above ten sentences from Bissinger's Friday Night Lights consisted of 207 words, the revisions only 167. This difference of 40 words means that I cut 19.3 percent of the verbiage without losing details or meaning. The implications of this kind of editing for a book-length manuscript are considerable. Friday Night Lights is 355 pages long. If we could do to the entire manuscript only half of what we just did to those ten sentences, we'd cut nearly 10 percent or about 35 pages. Even doing one-fourth of 19.3 percent means we'd trim about five percent of the book, or nearly 18 pages. The result would be a tighter, more compact book and a more visual, more active, more enjoyable reading experience.

In a world where tens of thousands of people were suddenly swept away by a tsunami, my complaints about Delta, the U.S. Postal Service, CPL, and Bissinger's book obviously shrink by comparison. But something important distinguishes the tsunami from my small, insignificant “tragedies”: people could not stop or prevent the former, but they could -- with sufficient attention, insight, and care -- correct and even prevent the latter.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)