By elevating the mundane and making the old feel new again, writers can capture more readers' attention.

By Peter P. Jacobi

"What's new?" goes the opening gambit so common when acquaintance chances upon acquaintance.

"Oh, not a whole lot," is the likely rejoinder. "How about with you?"

"About the same."

Such an information-less and surprise-less dialogue may be acceptable in a routine street or hallway or grocery store encounter quickly replaced by other events, obligatory or otherwise, that the two people move on to.

But when a reader meets a writer on the page of a publication, the writer better have something more cogent, something more pungent, something more urgent, something more eloquent to say.

Either thematically.

Or rhetorically.

Or both.

Subject Matter That Sells Itself

Sometimes, the subject itself holds import. The past appearance of a comet once had everyone buzzing. So objects in the sky were on everyone's collective mind. Timothy Ferris fed into those thought waves with an "Is this the end?" piece that appeared in the New Yorker:

If the world where to end with what astronomers call "death from above," the first clue might come with the discovery -- late tonight, let's say -- of a distant fuzzball swimming against a field of stars. The observer might be an amateur astronomer, one among the hundreds who patrol the skies with telescopes and giant binoculars, hoping to be the first to see the new comet, which will thereafter bear its discoverer's name. Having spotted the fuzzball and found nothing corresponding to it on the star charts, the observer waits to see if it moves. In this case, that might take a few nights. The comet is big, and therefore bright; it has been spotted farther out than one might expect, and that makes its motion harder to detect. Also, it's headed our way.

Ferris will tell us that the chance of a major comet striking the earth is slim but that scientists are busy plotting ways to head one off, should the unlikely threaten.

The information in the Ferris story holds possible earthshaking importance and considerable fascination. Ferris didn't have to do much selling. The facts sold themselves.

More often these days, however, our publications feed us with topics of lesser natural persuasion. Let's just say these topics are neither fresh nor astonishing. And yet, the writer finds a fresh approach or a new set of details to permeate his story with a vigor that gives the "What's new" / "Not a whole lot" exchange a different outcome. The answer becomes, "Well, really, not a whole lot, but I've been taken by..."

Our job, in preparing an article for publication, is to make the most of that article's subject. Not to make too much of it, mind you, but to make the most of it. And thereby, suddenly, something potentially humdrum becomes actually engrossing. Thank goodness, it happens all the time.

Elevating the Mundane

Edward Tenner once wrote about the "chair" for the Wilson Quarterly, about "How the Chair Conquered the World." In that piece he writes about everyday objects we never much think about, except as something to use almost automatically, unless we happen to be seeking or buying one for a particular purpose. Who cares about chairs as a matter for reading? Tenner makes one care:

Pull up a chair. And take a good look at it. It forms our bodies. It shapes our thinking. It's one of the first technologies an American or European child encounters. No sooner has a child been weaned than it learns to eat in an elevated model. And even before, it is (by law) strapped into a special molded minichair for automobile transportation, and indeed is sometimes carried by hand in the same little seat. At school, that chair is one of the most common objects in the classroom and among the first words a child learns to read and write.

A couple of paragraphs later, Tenner tells us:

Chairs go a long way toward filling a vacuum. They act as our proxies, claim space for us. The New Jersey transit rail line between Princeton Junction and New York passes a large, new, nondescript condominium near the station in downtown Linden; almost half of the apartments have plastic chairs on their balconies, yet I have never seen a soul sitting in them at any hour I passed by. The chairs seemingly are not for human use but rather for filling otherwise empty niches in the building's exterior.

I may never think of a chair the same way. A chair becomes "the" chair or just "chair," an object of status with a touch of the sacred. Everyman's everything.

Making Old New Again

Peter Mayle, whose wordsmithery in A Year in Provence came close to the magic of that region and the pungency of living there, once analyzed other life-forms closer to home for GQ ("The Good Life: A Work in Progress"). "If we are to believe the imagery of advertising," he writes,

the good life comes as a succession of golden moments chaired by young, attractive people with superb dentistry and no weight problems. We have all seen them countless times romping through commercials and across the pages of magazines and catalogs. Indeed, they seem to spend most of their lives romping -- in the snow, on the beach, in the woods, in the small but funky apartments -- or en route to a romp. More often than not, the setting for fun and imminent romance in a new car, which cleans as brightly as the faultless teeth of its passengers. These privileged free spirits are untroubled by thoughts of age or the IRS; immune to hair loss, halitosis and acid indigestion; happy with each other, happy with themselves, happy with life.

Mayle discusses another group that is "traditionally supposed to enjoy every blessing that life can offer," the "terminally rich." Ah, but what about the rest of us? "What about the man burdened with a bank loan," he asks, "a credit-card overload, a gently rusting car, a couple of unwanted inches around the waist and a demanding job? Is there hope for him?"

Not that same old stuff about the beautiful people and false images and the deceptive voice of the advertising? Not that predictable fodder for Ethics 101 or Sociology 202 or Journalism 303? Oh, Sominex.

Well, no. This is Peter Mayle, mind you. Old subject becomes new again. "I believe and hope," Mayle writes and then goes on to prove, optimist and enthusiast that he is. He sells me.

A Way With Words

Florence King is no optimist, but in "The Misanthrope's Corner,” in a past issue of the National Review, she made the most of a subject that had exasperated her, "nice people":

Today, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can hear the words as they must have sounded to me as I lay in my crib: nispeepul. I think of it as a primal sound. Most children raised in crowded apartments hear their parents making love, but I probably heard late-night discussions about nispeepul. I certainly heard plenty in the daytime. "The new tenants in two B are nice people.... I just saw that couple down the hall and they aren't nice people." I remember our door opened on the crack as my grandmother, a human radar gun, peered out at our neighbor's visitors to assess the cut of their jib. "Their friends aren't nice people," she ruled. A month later they proved her right by having a free-for-all, so we moved. Before we vacated, she and my mother, normally the most indifferent of housekeepers, spent the final days scrubbing the old place “so the landlord will know that nice people lived here."

I doubt readers would pause long for my words on nice people. But Florence King has the knack. Once her words take hold of you -- which comes almost simultaneously with their first appearance on the page -- they're not likely to let you go, no matter what she's babbling about.

Any subject can be made interesting if the writer has the facts, the style, and the off-center frame of mind.

If we, as writers and editors, were inclined to await the portentous subjects, we'd get few issues out. We must, of course, also depend on the less vital and the less vibrant but make them verbal-information-metaphorical products the reader cannot resist.

A classic article from a past issue in tribute to the late Peter J. Jacobi, longtime EO writer and author of The Magazine Article: How to Think It, Plan It, Write It.

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