A World of Pizzazz

According to Annie Dillard, “the creator loves pizzazz” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 139). In context, the phrase refers to whatever deity Dillard imagines created the physical world. But out of context, I think her words can be used to make another significant point: the creators of text should love pizzazz since the audience is drawn to it.

The synonyms of “pizzazz” include style, glamour, zest, flair, interest, and excitement. But really, I think the word “pizzazz” is highly abstract, depending less on actual definition than the sort of reaction experienced by the hearer/reader. When I hear or read “pizzazz,” I think of oil paintings by Leonid Afremov. One of the most noticeable differences between his paintings and others is the presence of such bright colors—but then again, some other painters also use similar vivid hues. Since I don’t know much about art technique, all I can say is that Afremov’s paintings are set apart because of his…pizzazz.

So how does one write with pizzazz if we can’t even fully describe what it means? Dillard, Hancock, Kunzig, and Shreeve all offer us clues. “Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy” states Dillard. Similarly, the “landscape” of our writing is composed of all sorts of textures, or intricate details. This type of texture is exactly what Hancock refers to when she advises writers to “put in all your raisins (i.e., fun facts, great quotes, and interesting comparisons)” (97). The raisins are borrowed glimmers of brilliance; “you may not be able to turn a brilliant phrase yourself, but if you can recognize brilliant material when you see it, you can come close to a brilliant effect” (97). These raisins—borrowed, brilliant quotations, facts, and the like—create part of the texture. And according to Hancock, just as you can’t mess up the texture of bread pudding by adding too many raisins, so also you can’t mess up your writing by adding too much “texture.” Perhaps we may then infer that the “texture” of our writing has something to do with “pizzazz.”

According to Shreve, coupling intricate details with narrative structure is “essential” (140). Details are meant to show rather than to tell. For example, Shreve claims that “Gawande’s cool, unadorned style conveys the horror and intensity of the fire that night much better than if he were to start throwing around words like ‘horror’ and ‘intensity’” (141). Suppose I were a medical student writing about my mother, who inspired me to pursue the medical field. Rather than writing something like “My mom was very passionate about her work and enjoyed it immensely,” I would describe “Even after a full day of long hours at the hospital, I could ask my mom about her patients and still her face would light up; all the weariness seemed to fall off her as she talked about her various clients. She was like a little kid bubbling with all the news of the school day and hardly able to express it in an intelligible manner.” Again, details should show rather than tell; what does an exciting, breaking science discovery look like? “It’s a challenge, but you can construct narratives that are based almost entirely on ideas and how they developed” writes Kunzig (129). We have no excuse—we can use detailed, textural, narrative structure in our science writing for that little bit of “pizzazz” that will cause readers to exclaim, “Gee whiz!” (127).

At any rate, these texts definitely got me thinking about the strange, indescribable quality of “pizzazz” and how I might attain it in my own writing. But at least their suggestions seem especially fitted for a science feature. Perhaps the hardest part is simply opening our eyes and seeing the pizzazz already in the world—then we’d have only to transcribe that pizzazz rather than inscribe it. Dillard appropriately says, “This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz” (148).

Searching for innocence in color-patches

*Note: Sorry this post is a day late. I was really sick yesterday and was unable to finish it.

“How can an old world be so innocent?” asks Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 43). Read out of context, one would have strong grounds to argue with her. “Haven’t you glanced at a newspaper headline or flipped on a news station lately? You don’t have to look far to conclude that the world is very much not an innocent place.” And yet, Dillard asks this question after perusing the newspaper and noting the annual photographs of cute animals, the cliché Valentine or proposal, and child waiting for a push down the hill on a sled. Perhaps Dillard means that the world is not so much “innocent” as that it looks for innocence, or a fresh take and angle on something that would give respite from all the drudgery and gloom.

One of my favorite bands is Switchfoot, and they wrote a song called “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine.” (The chorus is basically the title, ha). But after watching this music video that some of Switchfoot’s fans created, I was reminded of Dillard’s chapter titled “Seeing” and her mention of the experiences of previously-blind people when they gained their sight. If you watch this video, try to watch it in terms of the “color-patches” that Dillard describes. At least for me, the video really did seem to illustrate a confusing mass of color-patches and disorienting lack of spatial reference points—which helped me better sympathize with those people who newly received their sight.

 

I promise I’m not mindlessly rambling; here’s my point: we can interpret Dillard’s story of the “color-patches” and “seeing” as a metaphor for people’s search for innocence. If shadows prove the sunshine, then perhaps we can seek hope behind the seemingly unending scenes of hopelessness. Dillard writes, “But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them” (32). We’re so used to encountering articles which are swelled with “meaning”—with agendas of all sorts. What is more agenda-less than a picture of “an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill” and captioned “‘Needs a Push’”? At first glance, maybe not much. But then again, what if the photographer means to spread awareness about parental abandonment or to promote familial values? How might we interpret the photo as a symbol for a political statement or issue? What if the photo implies the changing trends of technology and how most children entertain themselves nowadays?

And so we search for the sunshine casting the shadows, for the color-patches free from agenda, for a reversion back to our nostalgic idea of idyllic, childhood “happiness.”  But “[y]ou have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it” (C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain). We search anyway. I think perhaps this is why science features on animals are so popular. Yes, these animals are fascinating, but the features don’t often have a “so what” in terms of how this information affects people personally. Case in point: when trying to YouTube a video of the “giant water bug” Dillard writes about (8), I discovered a video on the sidebar called “Biggest Snakes in the World! SnakeBytes TV.” Upon finishing that video, I seriously watched probably four or five other videos from the same channel (this is why I typically don’t go on YouTube). The entire time I was thinking, “What am I doing? I am wasting so much time! All these videos are basically about the same thing: showing the viewer different snakes and explaining the genetics behind each. And besides, I’m scared of snakes!” But I kept watching. Why? Well…the snakes were pretty cool-looking. And maybe I was drawn to the color-patches which weren’t really color-patches at all. At any rate, I thought the “search for innocence” might be yet another reason (among the myriads) why people are drawn to science writing.