The Art of the Blurb

The folks at my publisher tell me they love the blurbs for my new book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, that, on a bad day at the shop, they read them just to lift their spirits. Not content to leave well enough alone, though, I came up with a few dream blurbs for my book, which would have come from a dead author, a secret agent and a superhero:

"Old man Strunk and I are spinning in our graves." —E.B. White

"This work leaves me shaken—and stirred." —James Bond, 007

"As sharp as a stake in the heart!" —Buffy Summers, Vampire Slayer

But what's in a blurb?

An exploration of the blurb-o-sphere suggests that the blurb, crucial to the success of many books, is a genre unto itself, a pop art form, the haiku of advertising. The Supplement to the OED credits an American humorist with coining the word "blurb" in 1907: "Said to have been originated... by Gelett Burgess in a comic book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Blinda Blurb."

That same satirical tone descends in our time to editor and writer Robert McCrum, who considers the blurb so hyperbolic a form as to require an anti-lexicon. "Intense," he argues, really means "quite boring" and "magisterial" translates to "too long."

Each blurber has a style, and mine is the 28-word blurb. No logic or algorithm there, just the average mileage of my last three trips to sub-blurbia. Take, for example, my praise of Watchdogs, Blogs and Wild Hogs, a collection of quotations on the media: "Gordon Jackson has done us all an immense service by compiling this collection of wise and funny comments upon the media, from Juvenal to the juvenile Howard Stern." (A blurb with a kicker.)

If a good haiku has 17 syllables, why does a good blurb take about 28 words? Shorter ones, to my taste, are chintzy, and longer ones cheesy. Worse than spasms of ecstatic praise ("Compelling!" "Riveting!" "Electrifying!") are blurbs so long they break the boundaries of the form, like a sonnet of 19 lines. Such mini-essays need a different name ("blabs," perhaps?). The collateral damage of blurbosity is to make the reader fear that the work inside is as dense as the praise outside—which, alas, is often the case.

But back to blurbs' raison d'être. They had it right in 1907: the blurb is an ad for the book, designed to persuade the holder to buy it. Since then, the rhetoric of the blurb has included many effective strategies. As I re-read my book's blurbs for the 97th time, here's what tickles my fancy:

Association of the book with other books I admire, sometimes known as "shelf-abuse": "His Writing Tools fits on the same shelf as Strunk and White and lends it some streetwise fun," writes my friend Gene Patterson, a legendary newspaper editor.Quirky characterizations of the author: "Roy is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of writing teachers," writes Tom French, a Pulitzer winner who has seen Star Wars way too many times.Good writing and memorable images that suggest more good writing within: "The book... is beautifully carpentered, the prose equivalent of a Shaker table," offers author Madeleine Blais, a blurb angel, who gracefully extends the "tools" metaphor in the title.Testimony of utility: "This is the most useful book of its kind I've seen since William Zinsser's On Writing Well. The format is lucid and concise. The examples are brilliantly chosen." Those 28 words come from author David Von Drehle, a blurb mensch.

Finally, I admire a book that can attract a range of blurbers, which is why it pleases me to be praised by a nun who opposes capital punishment, Sister Helen Prejean ("Would that I had had Clark's manual when I wrote my first book, Dead Man Walking"), and by a zany humorist, Dave Barry, who opines, "Roy Peter Clark knows more about writing than anybody I know who is not currently dead."

Which is why I want a blurb from E.B. White.