The high threshold implied in the word “invention” explains why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us may fumble through even a simple response.
Sometimes we can be surprised by a word that pulls us up short. We didn’t expect to see it on the page. Such a moment came to me as an undergraduate dutifully slogging through the words of the important Roman rhetorician and statesman, Cicero. He noted that creating a message to be presented to others was an act of “invention.”
That’s it. For 50 years I’ve puzzled over that term. You might suggest that I ‘get a life,’ but my sudden annoyance was triggered by this less-than-obvious word summing up a communicator’s obligations. I wasn’t ready for a term that seemed to scale up a process that seemed like it should be less onerous. Bach or Edison might have been the creators of “inventions.” And give Tesla and Berliner their due. But surely writers and speakers can get by with a lot less. It seemed like overreach.
Bear with me a moment. There’s a useful lesson here.
Most of us think of language and its various forms are already “out there.” I was certain that good lines of argument or amplification came from prior forms that were adapted, borrowed, or recycled from other sources. And there is a sense in which this is true. But the Latin “inventio” implies more. The idea sets the bar higher. Indeed, the original term sits there on the page as something of a taunt: it begs us to believe that an effective speaker or writer is on the hook for engaging in a full-fledged act of creation. It turns a communicator into an originator rather than a user, an active agent rather than a pliable imitator. After all, invention was presented not as a minor idea, but the term that would represent the most important of the traditional five “canons” of rhetoric, along with arrangement, style, delivery and memory.
Are creative word-workers really in the business of innovating their ways through the world, like so many garage tinkerers who have given us gadgets we didn’t know we needed? To be sure, inventio is sometimes translated from the Latin to mean “discovery,” or the process of “devising” a “stratagem” for a suitable verbal response. It turns out that Latin doesn’t a have rich vocabulary in this area. Even so.
Lest you think we’ve drifted into the realm of counting angels on the head of pin, the challenge Cicero laid down is real. We confront acts of invention every time we sit in front of an empty sheet of paper or a blank screen. Some kind of situation requires an appropriate response. It might be a death in the family, a note to explain why we can’t attend an event, or—at the other end of the scale—an explanation of a guiding principle in American foreign policy. Cicero’s point is that the best response to the question “what can I say?” should be more than a paste-up of another’s ideas.
Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us.
This explains a lot. The high-engagement threshold of invention accounts for why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us fumble through a simple response that we wish we could retrieve. The hard truth is that off-the shelf comments usually don’t work very well. Ideas meant for another time and audience often sit dead on the page.
The lesson coming from this single word is hard for my students to grasp. To be a writer means committing to an innovator’s level of engagement. Good writing is work. Knock-offs of written or spoken prose are easily revealed as the counterfeits they are. Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us: a task unsuited to the intellectually lazy.
An only child who had to oversee the passage of his parents through their final “vale of tears,” Christopher Buckley also bore the role of keeper of their legacies.
Many of us who struggle with the task of finding ways to give heat to ideas can usually point to favorites: cases where a writer has put the perfect image together to make his or her point. These passages are moments of rhetorical grace, sometimes represented by economy of style or an evocative image. Writers read partly to experience these moments. They add more fuel for the long slog of putting words on the page.
One personal favorite is from an unlikely source on an unlikely subject. Christopher Buckley’s 2009 memoir of the last year of his celebrity parents is funny and wise on the demands of coping with the inevitable. In Losing Mum and Pup we see the conservative gadfly William F. Buckley Jr. and his socialite wife struggle to the end. An only child who had to oversee their passage through what his father often described as “this vale of tears,” Christopher also bore the role of keeper of the flame for their outsized legacies.
That the book could be characterized as a pleasure to read is a credit to his dry wit and effective storytelling. Humor and melancholy merge seamlessly. Among other things, his dad’s ability to cope with the death of his mother produces the kinds of serio comic episodes that any caregiver with a sense of humor would recognize.
This is not just a memoir about wheelchairs and vacant faces. The younger Buckley has the good sense to understand the end of his parents lives mostly in terms of the consequential work done in their most productive years: Bill in publishing and politics; Pat, in the upper stratosphere of New York museums and philanthropies.
“Great men have too much canvas up.”
Here’s a favorite passage seemingly about his father’s love of sailing, but also much more. It contains a wonderful image.
Pup was an avid sailor. He had learned to sail as a child in upstate Connecticut, on a not very large lake. Now we live on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound and kept a thirty-eight-foot wooden sloop. It was named Panic, a name my mother found all too apt. . . I now get that Pup’s greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take great risks. It’s the timorous soul—souls like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm approaching and look for a snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill why are you trying to kill us?”Great men are also impatient. This particular aspect showed up most vividly in my father’s manner of docking his boats. Most people, when guiding, say a ten or twenty ton vessel toward a dock, approach slowly. Not my old man. His technique was to go straight at it, full speed. Why waste time? This made for memorable episodes.1
“Great men have too much canvas up.” It’s an apt image that seems completely faithful to the person who published the National Review. Anyone who had observed Buckley on his Firing Line broadcasts or his work as a conservative essayist could also see the literal extended to the behavioral. Fearless sailing was typical of who the father was, even when he was heading in the wrong direction.
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1Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup, Emblem Books, 2010., pp. 121-22.