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Between the Lines |
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Interview with Charles Harrington Elster |
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Test of Time
Charles Harrington Elster
Test of Time is a captivating time-travel adventure that incorporates vocabulary words from the SAT and ACT, boldfacing them throughout the novel and providing definitions in a handy back-of-the-book glossary. The result is a fun and effective study method for the thousands of students who take these tests each year.
For Orlando Garcia Ortiz and his friends at prestigious Hadleyburg University, it's finals week. That same week, but many, many years before, a famously eccentric writer in Hartford, Connecticut, is putting the finishing touches on a manuscript about a rebellious boy named Huck. Suddenly a bizarre thing happens: The manuscript disappears and in its place appears a strange contraption—a college student's laptop that has traveled through time. It's a mysterious set of circumstances, but our intrepid heroes at Hadleyburg, joined by Mark Twain, endeavor to retrieve their valued possessions and return to their proper places in time.
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Biography |
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| Charles Harrington Elster is a writer, broadcaster, and logophile—a lover of words. He was pronunciation editor of the acclaimed seventh edition of Black's Law Dictionary and a consultant for the second edition of the Dictionary of Modern American Usage. He is an occasional guest contributor to the "On Language" column of the New York Times Magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and other publications. For five years, Charlie cohosted "A Way with Words," a talk show replete with word lore and wordplay that airs weekly on San Diego's KPBS-FM and Wisconsin Public Radio. Charlie was born in New York City in 1957 and earned his BA cum laude from Yale in 1981. He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters. |
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Interview |
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Q: With both Test of Time and Tooth and Nail (Harcourt, 1994) you furnish students with a practical way to learn SAT and ACT vocabulary words. What gave you the motivation to write these books?
A: The same thing that motivates all serious writers—the need to make money. As Mark Twain wrote, "The lack of money is the root of all evil." And as Samuel Johnson wrote, "Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
Actually, my true and wholly altruistic motivation for writing Tooth and Nail and Test of Time was to give high school students a pleasant, painless, and effective way of improving their vocabularies, not only for the SAT and ACT but for college and beyond.
Q: Whether one's studying for the SAT or simply building vocabulary, it's an onerous task to ingest 2,000 words. Within the pages of Test of Time, you make it easy and fun for the reader by using the words in context—rather than by using a daunting list of definitions. How can test takers get the most out of your book?
A: First, by reading the preface, which explains the "novel approach" and how it works. After that, you'll get the most out of the book by making diligent use of the glossary and by keeping a hardcover dictionary handy so you can look up the "extra-credit words."
Keeping an eye out for unfamiliar words while you read is terribly important. And I mean reading anything, not just Test of Time. Too many people simply read around words they don't know or they guess the meaning without checking the definition. The result of this lazy habit is a stunted vocabulary and an embarrassingly imprecise knowledge of words. I wrote Test of Time and Tooth and Nail to teach high school students the words they need to know to do well on their college-entrance exams, but I also wrote these books to instill the sort of reading habits that will pay dividends for life.
Q: It's just you, your computer, and 2,000 vocabulary words. How do you approach such a project? And what happens when you have a handful of unruly words that just won't cooperate?
A: It really wasn't hard to incorporate 2,000-plus test words into my story, nor were the words themselves recalcitrant. In fact, most of the time they were clamoring to get in, and I was happy to accommodate them. I tend to think in SAT words anyway, so I would often just write a paragraph and then check to see which test words I had used and needed to put in boldface.
Come to think of it, I may have been destined to write vocabulary-building novels. Back in elementary school, when the teacher gave us a list of words and told us to look them up and use each one in a sentence, I was the precocious kid who tried to use as many as I could in one sentence. So you see, this kind of work comes naturally to me.
Q: The premise of the book is a time-travel story that retrieves Mark Twain from the year 1883 and dumps him into the twenty-first century—and, of course, adventure, culture clashes, and a bit of calamity ensue. After reading Test of Time, I feel as though I've spent a few hours with Mr. Clemens. You were able to bring him to life with such vibrancy. What were some of your research methods?
A: Fictionalizing Mark Twain was a blast. He was so brilliant, witty, and irreverent, and such a raconteur—what more could a writer ask for in a character?
In preparing to portray Twain, I studied actor Hal Holbrook's brilliant impersonation of the man in Mark Twain Tonight! I watched the PBS documentary by Ken Burns. And I visited Twain's remarkable (pun intended) house in Hartford, where Test of Time begins and ends. Then, of course, I read everything I could get my hands on, both about Twain and by him. And the more I learned about this complex, mercurial, and extraordinarily gifted man, the more fascinating he became.
While writing Test of Time, I surrounded myself with pictures of Twain—partly for reference and partly for inspiration. Another invaluable visual aid was a book about the Mark Twain house that I had picked up there. I also frequently referred to and borrowed from several collections of Twain's quips and quotes.
Many times while writing I honestly felt Twain's aura, like a spiritual presence guiding my thoughts—a sensation no doubt experienced by other writers who have immersed themselves in the powerful personality of some historical figure. Indeed, much serendipity surrounded the making of this book, and one anecdote is worth relating here.
I had given George Griffin, the Clemens family butler, a cameo role in chapter one, and halfway into the book I decided I wanted to bring him back and transport him to the future to join Twain. To do justice to George I desperately needed more historical information about him, but he seemed to have slipped into oblivion. All I could find was one tantalizing paragraph in Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture.
And then serendipity struck.
I was flipping through the pages of that book for the umpteenth time, and by sheer luck my eyes happened to light upon an endnote for the paragraph about George. "The most extended profile of him by Twain," it read, "is in the unpublished 'Family Sketch' in the Mark Twain Collection of the James S. Copley Library in La Jolla, California." La Jolla was only fifteen minutes up the road from my house in San Diego!
In a flash I was on the phone to the library, and the gracious librarians were only too happy to help. Within twenty-four hours I had a copy of the pertinent section of Twain's sketch, and it was everything I could have hoped for and more. Did the benevolent spirit of Mark Twain guide me to that inconspicuous endnote about George Griffin? I'll never know for sure, but I choose to think he did.
Q: The new SAT makes its debut in March 2005. Does this change the timeliness of Test of Time?
A: Not really. If anything, the changes to the test this time around make Test of Time and Tooth and Nail even more relevant and helpful. There will be an even greater emphasis on reading comprehension—in other words, knowledge of words in context—and that's what the "novel approach" is all about.
Q: When did you, the Grandiloquent Gumshoe, become a self-described "unrepentant, irremediable word nerd"?
A: For as long as I can remember I have responded viscerally to the rhythm of language and the sound and feel of it rolling off the tongue. For me the inexorable descent into logophilia started quite early, as I recall, perhaps with learning to recite some of A. A. Milne's and Robert Louis Stevenson's poems. Then there was the time, when I was about seven or eight, that I heard John Ciardi read his children's poetry and he signed my copy of his book, which I thought was the coolest thing ever.
Anyway, by the time I was in high school—where I compiled "A Glossary of My Commonly Used Slang Phrases" (e.g. "dork, zord, nerd: a pathetic, imbecilic, idiotic, uncoordinated, sloppy person") and devised a game with one of my teachers in which I would insult him with obscure words like botryoidal—I knew the jig was up. I was going to be a writer and a word nerd, and may God have mercy on my soul!
Q: As some of your readers may know, you cohosted a radio show for five years that airs on San Diego and Wisconsin Public Radio, "A Way With Words." In fact, some of the passages throughout the book are reminiscent of conversations between you and your fellow verbivore, Richard Lederer. Now that you're not gracing the radio waves, where can word lovers—and those of us lucky enough to have listened to the program—find you?
A: If you want to find me, listen for a bunched clamor of keystrokes. Look for a forehead furrowed from straining over where to place a comma or delete a word. Look for eyes gone blank from focusing too long on the cobwebs quivering in the corner of the ceiling. Look for a man seduced by the sound of syllables and caught in the web of words.
Actually, the best way to keep up with my work or to get in touch with me is to visit my Web site at http://members.authorsguild.net/chelster.
Q: If you were going to recommend one book—besides your own, of course—which would you choose? (The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't count.)
A: Okay, if the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't count then I'll just have to recommend the other wondrous treasury of words that reposes by my left elbow while I write—Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition. First published in 1934, Webster 2, as I affectionately call it, is a monument of American lexicography. It contains 550,000 words and has lots of nice line drawings and terrific supplements. And the writing is sublime. Consider this elegant definition of one of my favorite words, stalko: "an impecunious idler posing as a gentleman." Anyone who loves words and dictionaries will find enough browsing pleasure here to last a lifetime.
Q: With five published books, what word adventure will you take readers on next?
A: I'm currently working on the second edition of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, which should be out in the spring of 2005. After that I'm not sure. I wouldn't mind writing a third vocabulary-building novel, maybe this time a novel approach to the GRE and LSAT. I may try my hand at something for younger readers, perhaps some light verse. Or I may surprise you and write something completely different, like The Word-Watcher's Diet: The Sedentary Way to a Slimmer, Smarter You.
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