Writing Beyond Description

I have a question for you: What about the books we grew up with is worth carrying forward, given how much they have influenced us? It’s something we should be conscious of so we don’t latch onto things out of mere nostalgia. It’s obvious that this is what’s been happening to a large portion of the population, and it’s not a good thing for a writer to adopt such tendencies. Nor should we do the opposite and reject everything we came to love as children in order to ‘grow up’ and become the equally immature edgy type. I’d like us neither to stay indoors forever, nor to leave everything behind and never return, but to pack a suitcase of what we’ll need on our next venture. Hmm… although, before we pack, we’ll need to unpack a few things to make room. However, that might take some rummaging, as these suitcases seem to be from the same store where Mary Poppins bought her handbag. Of course, we all know what we put in the front pocket: all of our vices and devices…

We know that the age of 9 is when most people become lifelong readers, or not, depending on whether they bury themselves in Treasure Island or their tablets. And yet one of the reasons cited for why Middle Grade is suffering compared to other target audiences is that, ironically, the kids are too young to be content creators themselves, and yet still old enough to treat reading like a social activity and therefore mostly read to be on the same page, so to speak, as their friends. This is sort of how it works for every group, but since marketing has moved to social media, there is no organic way to reach such a young audience via their peers anymore. There’s a lot that we could get into with that but suffice it to say that our devices are both helping and hindering our reading habits, depending on a host of factors. The only issue is, as I said, that if you don’t get into that habit by a certain stage in your development, it is unlikely that you ever will. The outcome is that we will see fewer and fewer readers, especially of fiction. Non-fiction tends to appeal to a different sort of person, who is less interested in enjoying a book as they are in ‘extracting value’ from it (despite fiction providing more value, if you know where to look, even in practical matters).

Oddly, despite these trends, it seems that we are consuming more books than ever as a society—and ‘consuming’ is the right word. People who are in the hobby are buying books at a higher and higher rate and are getting through them at an incredible pace. This is another effect of letting algorithms have such a grip on us. When you’re a part of the group, you go all in, and when you’re not, you abstain. It’s binary; you’re either a 1 or a 0. In some ways, it is as though we now have tighter social bonds than ever, yet they are bonds which have formed between strangers. Funnily enough, this part does not actually bother me so much as, throughout my life, I have always been a very take it or leave it kind of person. I would either obsess over something or take no interest in it at all, and while we may medicalise hyperfocus, I think it can be a superpower when channelled in the right ways. The difference comes down to the individual and how one exercises their autonomy. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the non-fiction crowd to look for the value in books first and foremost? Either way, finding intelligent literature and then engaging with it intelligently is certainly my aim; it just needs to be well written.

Being the driver of my own critical engagement and constantly rethinking what it means to be a reader, as well a writer, is how I will get better at both, hence my return to my foundations in revisiting many of the books from my early childhood all the way into my late teens, in an effort to gauge what in me has changed, and what I perhaps need to reassess. It is a way of making visible the blind spots of my own making. Part of why we are normally unable to do this is because we silo ourselves according to what we think we are ‘supposed to’ read. The industry ‘helps’ us along in this (never mind with the increasingly microscopic marketing niches) with the categories of Board Books, Picture Books, Early Readers, Chapter Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult and Adult. Of course, you will find better and more mature writing in a good ‘Middle Grade’ novel than in a bad ‘Adult’ novel. Either way, we need to go back to publishing books with illustrations—no, haha, I don’t mean literally, but literarily. I’m talking about ‘verbal illustrations’, or interior descriptions. Here, it’s better if I show you. This is a lovely passage from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908):

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering—even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.

There are a few reasons that, though we grew up with writing like this, or I should hope, it has mostly not carried over into the prose of today. For one, to achieve this quality requires a great deal of mindly energy and so could never transfer simply via osmosis, unlike what has carried over from children’s books, such as the puerile and heavy-handed treatments of themes, so common now for all ages and across all narrative forms. For two, publishers feel like such passages slow down the reader and that (once again thanks to the algorithms) people don’t have the attention spans for them anymore. Of course, that’s the point! No, not that people don’t have any attention spans, but that we should be slowing down from time to time to savour great prose. I’m not saying publishers were pure back then for putting out work like this. The Wind in the Willows had a hard enough time getting through their gates at the turn of the century, given its unusual structure and how hard it was to categorise. Even so, if you look at most editions today, you will find them to be heavily abridged, and most of those wonderful, illustrative passages have been removed. So, I suppose that we have a dearth of prose worth savouring even when we are supposed to encounter it early in life. That, more than anything, might be why it hasn’t carried over, despite my earlier rationalisations.

I do, however, recall a period of being captivated by prose of this sort, and I thought there was something wrong when I found the likes of Harry Potter turgidly written and dull. Nonetheless, I persevered and decided that maybe such passages as floats through The Wind in the Willows like Rat on his boat was for ‘children’ after all, and that maybe books are supposed to test one’s patience. I later became sucked into ‘learning to appreciate’ whatever turgid dreck passes for literature according to the establishment. That’s a phase a lot of us go through with our online pipelines, where pseudointellectualism is outmatched only by anti-intellectualism, and it’s just a matter of whether we grow out of it or get stuck thinking we need to praise the garments of naked Emperors. Those who don’t grow out of it end up handing more and more territory to two invasive species of writers: those who think artful prose ‘gets in the way of the story’ and those who fancy themselves artistes and saturate their prose with modifiers.

Now, I admit that the passage I quoted is itself overwrought. However, I think it is the result of Kenneth Grahame being a very intuitive writer and feeling that the rhythm and flow of these words would have been harmed had he been too strict about cutting them down. He’s much like Tolstoy in that way. The sort of over-description I’m talking about is often made duller and more mechanical for its excesses, as though they had built up like rust. The pianist Claudio Arrau would say that you must relax to allow the ‘current’ to flow unimpeded into the keyboard. Well, a writer has their keyboard and must relax the mind and the body, not least to get their fingers moving. So, I have found that when I’m not in the right state mentally, it physically prevents me from writing, and my fingers begin to feel heavy and, well, rusty. Anyway, the balance is about being thoughtful without overthinking. I doubt that Kenneth Grahame planned his ‘illustrations’; despite his being a banker, they could only have come from an imaginative and playful way of engaging with the world. It was not a result of workshops but of long walks and ponderings, of being in touch with nature and his own nature and finding words to connect the two. And, as charming as I find real illustrations from the likes of E. H. Shepard and Robert Ingpen, who lent their pens to Grahame’s work in their turn, no picture could convey what those verbal illustrations do.

One of E. H. Shepard’s decorations for The Wind in the Willows (1908).

Now, while there was the promise of a limited sort of adaptation in the form of what were still referred to as ‘decorations’ at the time, these were delightfully impressionistic pictures, and culture had not yet been held up in focus of would-be film cameras keeping time at 24 frames per second. From this little passage of ours, our video of winter in the Wild Wood comes filtered through Mole’s eyes. And now that so many authors bar us from these parts of their characters’ internal woods, it is one reason I have grown to dislike the term ‘world-building’. More personally, even, this was sped along by having a writing mentor rail against my use of the term in discussion of a science fiction novel of his, and though at the time I didn’t think it such a big deal, I have come to appreciate his point of view. You see that novel had an incredibly rich cosmos—long and multi-layered enough to make Dune look like a half-baked short story—and everything was done in service of not merely expanding that cosmos but deepening it. This is what’s missing from the idea of world-building in common parlance. All good description is ultimately about realising the characters, and characters are like trees that need thick, rich soil into which to plunge their roots and reach their full heights. But if you keep those trees in a pot, no matter how well you maintain the soil, you will, at best, only end up with bonsais. As far as what cameras have to do with this? Well, I could overexplain, but I’ve implied the connection, and I’d like you to finish tying that knot on your own. Let’s cultivate good readers, shall we?

Of course, not everything in The Wind in the Willows reads like that excerpt I shared, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s part of letting your art be organic to not rely on one fixed style but allow many styles to take on the various tones of your voice. But with the commodification of literature has come the standardisation of prose in the name of a false notion of consistency (notice how I shifted style to become more authoritative?). Variety is what keeps literature interesting at every level. There is no strict way anything must be written; the only criterion is whether it works. I feel that often, writers somehow try too hard without trying hard enough, and back to the pianist analogies, for I cited Claudio Arrau and, well, he was a great pianist in his own way, in the way that Yasujiro Ozu was a great filmmaker, very subtle and warm and humble, but not wanting to be too spontaneous, and maintaining a certain reverence for his art form. On the other hand, you have a man like Josef Hofmann, who was great in a very different way, in the way John Cassavetes was a great filmmaker: fiery, fluid and raw. Even though Arrau had few good things to say about Hofmann, both were among the most revered artists of their times and remain so today—and I think there is room for their ways and more. The point is that they had their own ways. One’s artistic coming of age is the journey of discovering and deciding upon their own principles. Once you have those, you can be as fluid as you like. Anatoly Karpov, the former World Chess Champion, once said, ‘Style? I’ve got no style,’ and yet, a game of his would nonetheless be unmistakable because his principles guided him where nobody else could follow.

Likewise, there are principles of verbal illustration totally outside of Grahame’s. I’ll show you an example from another of the most well-written children’s books. However, you might not have read it, given its dark and twisted nature and the fact that Disney’s sanitisation has drawn so much attention away from the source material. And this, despite how, as racist and otherwise problematic the book is, the film, which came out decades later, is arguably more so. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about Peter Pan, or, as it’s titles in older volumes, Peter Pan and Wendy, and originally, Peter and Wendy. I think the titles have made more sense over time from a marketing perspective (because, of course, that would be kept in check), and it now follows the Charlotte’s Web approach of naming the book after a character who is not the protagonist—who are Wendy and Wilbur, respectively. Whatever you want to call it, the book was written in 1911 and technically is itself an adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play, after he had let the character stew for several years. Peter himself predates even that story, originally appearing in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird.

It is believed that Barrie had pituitary gland issues preventing him from going through puberty all the way and so was unable to quite ‘grow up’ himself. Peter was one of his demons come to torment him—as I might say if I prone to such clichés, ahem—and it seemed he never left the poor old (and young) man alone, which is how Peter is in the story, returning over and over to those he both remembered and forgot. His short-term memory loss (Peter’s, not Barrie’s) is at once sad and terrifying at times, as, on their way to Neverland, the Darling children wonder if Peter will lose interest in them and go off to do something else. You know, I just remembered that Disney, via Pixar, has their own story about a character with short-term memory loss, in Finding Dory (2016), but that film treats it as a disability and is a story about raising awareness for all kinds of disabilities, albeit in that condescending way only a corporation is capable of. Peter Pan, on the other hand, treats it as an otherworldly curse of the sort that fairy tale lands tend to impart.

Though as much as we ourselves have forgotten of the man behind it, Neverland made Barrie one of the most famous celebrities of his day, to the point that Charlie Chapin declared him the person he most wanted to meet on a 1921 trip to London. Chaplin, too, was a youthful spirit, of course, but in a very different way from Barrie. I could imagine a darkly comedic encounter between the two… I won’t go into that here; perhaps it could be fodder for a play or something. Anyway, the book has many great moments, and Captain Cook is one of the most well-sketched characters in all of children’s literature. Yet it is neither Hook, nor Peter, nor even Wendy, but Mrs Darling who stand out to me, for, though she appears only briefly, at the beginning and towards the end, her small portrait is one of the most deftly composed. Hence why I’ve chosen one of her passages for this excerpt:

Mrs Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, packing into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

You know, I used to be a magician, and one of the core ideas among our ken is that magic is not something that happens before our eyes but within our minds. This is the case when it comes to stories as well. What I mean by this is that whether a story has magical elements or not has surprisingly little to do with how magical it feels. The above paragraph makes magic, figuratively, literally, and literarily, from both the mind and the mundane and holds its own with the story’s most fantastical sequences. Contrast this with today’s ‘magic systems’, which some have dulled even further into so-called ‘hard/scientific magic systems’, and those authors who want to emulate not just films but video games with their work and make the magical feel mundane.

Hmm. I’m going to rant on this, if you’ll excuse me, and then I’ll wind my way back to the main discussion: No, as you may have gathered, I’m not a fan of Brandon Sanderson’s work, and that’s for a few reasons, but, the main one is that he has swung the fantasy genre even further away from a language of enchantment than it had already been, and the discussion now seems entirely about world building and magic systems and all that other BS (which happen to be his initials). Doubly irritating is that Sanderson writes the types of ‘adult’ novels I alluded to earlier, which are less thematically mature than children’s novels like Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows. In fact, I’m not even sure they have more violence or other PG aspects than Peter Pan. Again, I think it mostly has to do with style, not substance—or lack thereof—and the turgidness associated with ‘grown up’ fiction. That he gives lectures on creative writing while Sanderblasting his own prose of any sense of creativity is just more to sigh over. He even said in one of his lectures that literature was about boring people with boring problems. Huhhh…

Of course, he and his asinine statements are symptoms of a deeper issue, that being the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, for the best works in any genre are always classed as ‘literature’ down the line. The false dichotomy goes like this: ‘Literature means unusual or difficult language, and genre means simple and plain language.’ Some may consider literary fantasy or anything else to be a stylistic subcategory of that genre, but this feeds into that same narrow view of what literature is or can be. The true distinction is one of quality. How to make that distinction? Well, that is what this is all about.

All of culture is a war between minds—not only between the minds of individuals but the minds of and within every individual. One of the foundational laws of physics is the principle of least action, which says that all things adhere to the most efficient and low-cost ways of being, moving and doing, given the circumstances. That is not to say that there is no free will or that anyone is bound to always take the lazy way out, for the more complex something is, the more complex are its principles, and we are complex enough even to create our own, as I’ve already said. Nonetheless, we see in those impartial/indifferent partial differential equations into which the only true laws are written the source of our own unmaking. All things tend toward entropy in time. The challenge is to overcome it just long enough.

A writer’s true audience is the masses, at least a part of them. No part that can be divided into demographics on a spreadsheet, but that part of each individual able to resist those old commandments of the cosmos. All great writing is universal. Yes, there are caveats. I would not recommend a truly adult book to be read by children, though a great children’s book can and should be read by adults. I suppose all great writing is universal when it comes to everyone 18 and up. That’s less poetic than what I was going for, but the point stands! Moby Dick is a rather masculine novel and maybe a novel of men, but it is a novel for men—just as much as The Wind in the Willows is a story of animals, though animals don’t read.’

‘Well, I don’t think many humans read either. In fact, I doubt most of them will even get to this point of the essay.’

‘What? Who are you? When did this become a dialogue?’

‘Since I put a quote on the end of that paragraph.’

‘That was you? What was the point of that? I thought it was a typo.’

‘I’ve been hearing a lot about how people only read dialogue these days, so I just thought I’d try to do something that appealed to those types.’

‘So, you read all of that about how literacy is struggling, and that it starts in childhood with the lack of good writing in children’s books, and you want to reinforce the dumbing down by resorting to this?’

‘Listen—sorry, what was your name?’

‘Dan’

‘Listen, Dan, I think it’s good to give people what they actually want sometimes. As long as they’re getting some enjoyment out of it, what’s the harm? And btw, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those “illustrative passages” and what have yu. But there are books that have a way faster pace, and they’re also pretty good. You might even say that writing like that, those “Paper Lanters,” as I’ve heard you call them elsewhere, well, wouldn’t you say those are a bit indulgent?’

‘First, why are you writing like this is a text chat? This is an essay. And second, how did you know I called them that? Have you been snooping around in the manuscripts I’ve been editing? Those are confidential.’

‘We’re having a convo, aren’t we? And I doubt that if Plato wrote his Socratic Dialogues today that he would refrain from using text-speak. It’s just the way people talk online. This is online, isn’t it?’

‘Are you serious? Huhhh. You can’t win a race to the bottom. Enjoyment and escapism is one thing, but it narrows your potential to encounter to engage with reality when the book ends. I think this is only growing more important as the world becomes both so connected on a surface level and yet so fragmented in deeper ways. Of course, there is something to be said of immersion, I’m not denying that—hence why illustrative prose is so important. No, it’s not the only way to supply the reader with that depth that they can take with them in life, but with the right techniques, you can basically write a story about anything, and if you do it well, the reader won’t to mind—as long as they are open-minded. You know, I’ve been reading a new novel, well, manuscript, from that mentor of mine—’

‘Is that that guy who—’

‘Hold on a second. I’ll formally introduce him and his work in another essay, when I have room to so a whole story about it.’

‘Sounds fun. Continue.’

‘So, I’ve been reading this new work of his, and I had certain expectations for what it was going to be. It turned out to be something completely different. Now, I know that most readers have a very hard time with that. It’s why I believe Moby Dick is seen as boring by a lot of people. They’re engaging with it on the wrong level because they have been primed by what they’ve read before to look for certain things, and when they don’t get them—while missing everything they would get instead if they were only paying attention—they get mad at the book. Well, we’re all prone to that to some degree. The difference is that a mature person doesn’t let their preconceptions dictate their whole experience. The same is true of life. It would be like if a wildlife photographer decided to aim his camera at one spot all day and complained that the animals wouldn’t stand for a picture.’

‘I mean, the animals in The Wind in the Willows might. Some of them, at least. Maybe not Badger.’

‘Are you following what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Now, it wasn’t just that what happened went against my expectations. I just was not a fan of it. It felt like it was recycled from his plays, and all I could hear was the grinding of an old axe. I just found it frustrating that he would hijack what I had thought was going to be the story to do this. And yet, the longer he went in this direction, and the sharper the axe got, the more compelled I was to keep reading. It’s like finding the water too cold when it’s only up to your knees, but as you go deeper and start to become immersed, you acclimate and don’t want to leave.’

‘I wanted to ask, why do you use a lot of metaphors?’

‘I think they’re colourful ways to communicate. Why not? Anyway, I wish you respond to the substance of what I’m saying.’

‘I mean, I don’t quite relate to what you’re saying is the thing. I’d just be like, “When are we getting back to the story?” I find tangents annoying.’

‘Then why did you interrupt the essay? This whole thing is a tangent.’

‘You know your paragraphs are really long? And I thought you were just going to go on and on and keep opening things up further and further. It’s like, I get it, everything is connected, and so there’s a lot to discuss, but I thought you were getting carried away.’

‘I was actually about to wrap up this part. We’re going on and on because of this nonsense. Anyway, the way I write is just called maximalism, which is all about doing the most with the least, and I think that’s what we should be doing as writers. I mean, I love I Am Legend, the book, but it feels so short to me these days, and now all I can imagine is just how much more could have been done had it been, pardon the term, fleshed out.’

‘I don’t know. Long books tend to waste a lot of pages with filler.’

‘I’m with you there. It just has to be done well. However, given the choice, I would take a long book over a short one if they were equal quality, even though many of my favourite books are short, ironically. That’s probably because more writers are sculptors, as opposed to builders, on average, so they overwhelm on sheer numbers.’

‘They are? I thought most writers just did a regular job?’

‘What? Oh, I see. Well, it has to do with whether your approach is one of adding or subtracting. In my editing, I always try to determine what a manuscript needs. Do we need to add blocks or chisel away at them? Obviously, it’s something I have to address at a granular level, but authors do have certain temperaments. Builders are quite rare, but Kenneth Grahame was surely one of them. Melville too. Unfortunately, most editors aren’t trained to discern who is a builder and who is a sculptor, so they often cut the builders and indulge the sculptors. I have found that, while I can be a sculptor, cutting things down E. B. White style because of certain neuroses I developed during my time in magic, it always leads to a destructive amount of overediting.

‘Wait, what’s the difference between that and all the other things you mentioned? Overmodifying and overwriting and whatnot?’

‘So, those have to do with using too many adverbs and adjectives. Overediting is like seeing so many small defects everywhere that in your desire to correct them, you end up ruining the whole. If you see a small bump on the nose, and you end up chiselling away the nose to remove it. I would literally do this when I had to do woodworking in school.’

‘Like that Father Ted episode?’

‘Huh? I don’t remember much of Father Ted. It came out ages ago.’

‘There’s an episode where they are trying to sell a car, but it has some dents. I don’t recall the reason. Anyway, Ted tries to hammer out the dents and ends up turning the car into a wreck because he can never quite get it right.’

‘Ha, okay, that’s pretty good. Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like. You’ve got to relax. And when you’ll be able to transition between high and low much more naturally. It’s part of why I’m such a fan of Moby Dick. Melville could go from the comic to the cosmic in one breath.’

‘If he’s able to go so far in one breath, that would make him a whale in a way.’

‘Are you trying to make a metaphor? Well, I guess it ties into the whole immersion thing.’

‘Literally! Or figuratively? Wait, I’m confused.’

‘Literarily.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. We’ll continue this some other time.’