On description: Enstrangement, surprise, and masturbation · 9:34pm Apr 23rd, 2023
Last year, I wrote two posts on descriptions in fiction:
They were triggered by writing this letter to a friend who'd asked me to critique his novel. (No one any of you know.) I didn't post the letter because I thought it might hurt his feelings to publish this critique publicly, even without his name on it. But he hates me now, so fuck him.
Dear X –
I feel like I'm making the same comments I made the last time I read these chapters.
I'm marking things line-by-line, and I see lots of line edits you made after my previous notes, agonizing over individual words. But most of my comments weren't about specific word choices, but rather your general attitude towards writing.
This email may come across as all criticism; sorry about that. It's just that it's all one piece; all these things are interconnected and mutually reinforce each other.
I think that you're in love with words themselves; that you write long sentences with long, Latinate words just for the pleasure of hearing them roll out, regardless of whether they communicate more than a few short words could. Great writers communicate a lot of meaning in their long sentences, and choose big words only when they're more-precise than small words. You might be modeling yourself on James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon; but if you read an exegesis of a passage in Finnegan's Wake, you'll find that Joyce's long sentences are often packed with multiple meanings, hidden connotations, connotations through sound-alike words or words in foreign languages, and so on. It's not a story so much as a crossword puzzle. Writing a sentence is like a crossword puzzle; ideally you want many of the words to be used as part of two different meanings, just as a letter in a crossword puzzle can be used in 2 different words.
Even Pynchon's long sentences aren't just long. Here's the 3rd paragraph of Gravity's Rainbow:
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .
I have issues with some things: "poising" is a mash-up of "poise" and "posing" that I think doesn't work; "an uneasiness" is a lazy and useless description, apply show-don't-tell here; and "second sheep" fails to communicate anything to me at all. (Maybe it would if I lived in the English countryside.) But others, like "velveteen darkness", "vibration in the carriage’s frame", "still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete", convey something specific and, I think, accurate, or at least in harmony with the other parts of that paragraph.
I think you enjoy novelty for its own sake, especially in putting words together that don't usually go together, for instance in descriptions. Now we often find great writers doing that; Shakespeare comes first to mind. But the great novelty is not an unprecedented combination of two or more words, but an unprecedented combination of two or more ideas. If you choose an unusual set of words to describe a familiar thing or concept, more often than not, other people don't use those words that way because they don't quite work, or aren't quite grammatical.
For instance, writing "the cylindrical manifestation of relief" instead of "the cigarette" isn't just wordy, it's grammatically incorrect. Things "manifested" are usually theories, abstract concepts, or souls. A manifestation is similar to a physical reification. It therefore shouldn't be applied to words that "reification" can't be applied to. 1 John 4:9 says "the love of God was made manifest among us", but that's invoking a specific Platonist conception of love as a thing that exists somewhere outside of space-time. Even if we allow that feelings can be made manifest, the manifestation of relief would not be the instrument that brings relief, but a physical instantiation of the feeling of relief itself. Maybe something like "she inhaled the harsh, sweet whisper of death," or something describing the smoke swirling about inside her lungs (which doesn't actually happen because lungs aren't hollow, but whatever).
The value of a description isn't the sum of the values of its words. It's the sum of the impact of the meanings communicated.
When you wrote "cylindrical manifestation of relief", you may have been going for "enstrangement", also called "defamiliarization", associated with Viktor Shklovsky. "Art, Shklovsky claims, re-awakens us; it makes us see objects in their complexity rather than recognize symbols in their mundanity." --Nathan Goldman. An enstranging description describes a familiar object in purely sensory terms, forcing us to notice details which may be erased when our mind categorizes them and replaces the sense perception with a word. (Defamiliarization also covers larger-scale structures, like Virginia Woolf defamiliarizing gender by describing men's clothes in a way conventionally applied to women's clothing.) For instance, these lines from Emily Dickinson, visually describing the way one perceives a hummingbird without ever quite seeing it:
A route of evanescence, with a revolving wheel --
A resonance of emerald, a rush of cochineal --
Good enstrangement like this does the same thing that Impressionist painters tried to do when they tried to paint the precise colors that the retina registers before the brain has adjusted them to factor out the ambient light, with the fuzziness of non-foveal perception rather than the precision our brain pieces together from dozens of imperceptible saccades of our eyes. It gives us something less-processed, less-abstracted, from earlier in the chain of perceptual refinement. Your "cylindrical manifestation of relief" goes in the opposite direction, giving us something more abstract and vague than "cigarette": nothing but a pure geometrical solid associated with an abstracted feeling.
Another type of great description uses associations to connote more than they say.
He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. ... His horns were as pale as scars.
-- Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn, chapter 8, describing the Red Bull
Emily Dickinson's description of fame both communicates attitudes towards fame using associations, and fits the parallel to fame surprisingly precisely, so that the reader can map all of these associations correctly, from a loud but unimportant frog, to a self-absorbed, superficial celebrity:
How dreary to be somebody
How public, like a frog
Croaking his name the livelong day
To an admiring bog.
Surprise is always information-dense; that's why it's surprising. "Surprise" means "not what we expected", which literally means the message communicates more bits of information than the one we expected.
The door dilated.
-- a fragment of a sentence from Beyond This Horizon by Robert Heinlein
This tells us the door opened, but also tells us this is a door unlike any we've ever seen; possibly one designed to be able to open or shut regardless of a pressure differential between the rooms it connects. It tells us we're in the future, probably in space or underwater.
In one corner, against the wall, colorful cushions have been spread out over a Persian carpet. Some of us are sitting propped up against the cushions. The wine and vodka are homemade, but you can't tell by the color. -- Reading Lolita in Tehran, IV.15
You expected "taste", but got "color." The scene is a secret party to enjoy things the Islamic radicals forbid, like wine. Using "color" instead of "taste" tells us they didn't need it to taste right, but only to look right, because they didn't have enough hope to aspire to true enjoyment, but only to the illusion of it.
A great description can be humorous; humor always involves surprise. See Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams for humorous descriptions.
The Vogon Constructor Fleet hung in the air exactly the way bricks don't.
-- an inexact quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Here's the surprise of being told something is "exactly like" something that's its complete opposite in regards to the property in question: that of hovering. It's funny not just because this was unprecedented, but because it's precise: you imagine the fleet like bricks hanging in the sky, and you get a sense of amazement at this feat that you wouldn't if it just said "the fleet hung/floated in the air", which communicate only the everyday experience of a thing hanging or floating, neither of which is technically accurate for a spaceship.
More than that, bricks suggest ugliness; and also density and thickness, which both have the alternate meaning of "stupidity"; all of these things describe Vogons.
I think you don't empathize with your reader. You're trying to express something you can feel--I'm not saying it's a thing you in fact feel, but it is a think you can conceive of someone feeling, for story purposes--without feeling from the perspective of the reader, imagining yourself as reading along for the first time, unaware of what's in the writer's head and what is to come. You don't notice when your descriptions and dialogue can't be interpreted without information that you haven't put on the paper, or else you're doing it deliberately.
Most of the time it does seem like you're deliberately hiding something, to keep the reader continually uncertain about what they're reading, as if they could keep a hundred ambiguities in their head, and then resolve them all 30 pages later. They can't. People can keep about 5 new questions in their head; going beyond that means they'll never figure it out. Mystery novels do often stack up more than 5 questions or clues; they do that to make sure that most people won't be able to solve the mystery, but will recognize how they fit together when it's explained to them in the end. That works in mystery novels only because they're different from other novels in 2 ways:
- All of the clues they raise are clearly pieces of the same puzzle, connected in some way; and we know what that puzzle is.
- They explain everything in the end.
In this concealment, and in other ways, such as your deliberate stretching and straying from grammar, your style resembles that of Thomas Pynchon.
A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
-- The first 2 paragraphs of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
There are good things about this: "A screaming comes across the sky" communicates the sound of a ballistic bomb coming in on a shallow trajectory, from far away. But it's also a signature Pynchon move to way overdo in media res, dumping the reader into the action in a way that makes it initially incomprehensible and disorienting, with no idea whose viewpoint we're in or what's going on.
I don't think Pynchon is a great writer. He's a great stylist; a great imitator of Joyce, especially Joyce's strategic ungrammaticality and his technique for stream-of-consciousness.
Across a blue tile patio, in through a door to the kitchen. Routine: plug in American blending machine won from Yank last summer, some poker game, table stakes, B.O.Q. somewhere in the north, never remember now. . . . Chop several bananas into pieces. Make coffee in urn. Get can of milk from cooler. Puree ‘nanas in milk. Lovely. I would coat all the booze-corroded stomachs of England. . . . Bit of marge, still smells all right, melt in skillet. Peel more bananas, slice lengthwise. Marge sizzling, in go long slices. Light oven whoomp blow us all up someday oh, ha, ha, yes.
-- opening of the second section of Gravity's Rainbow
This sounds like what you're aspiring to, and it's nice, precise description, using Joycean stream-of-consciousness. But it's still confusing and emotionally flat, because we don't know whose mind we're in, nor what that person wants. "Everyone in a scene should want something in that scene, even if it's just a glass of water." -- from Kurt Vonnegut, applied to each scene by Jim Mercurio. The scene above goes on to suddenly drop in elements that we would have been aware of from the start, including 2 other witnesses, which shatters any immersion created by stream-of-consciousness by highlighting the fact that we are not there. Then, "Pirate goes to the phone and rings up Stanmore after all." This before ever mentioning Stanmore. Highlighting the fact that we are not in the head of the person whose head we thought we were in; we're merely reading a transcript.
There is a neo-classical aesthetic associated with Kant, and a modernist aesthetic associated with Bertholt Brecht, which says one should deliberately avoid immersion in order to maintain an impartial detachment from the work. This is based on the Platonist idea that reason is completely detached from feelings, and must rule them. It is therefore bullshit, because first Hume and then neurology showed that Plato was wrong about that. Besides which, Kant, by reputation the blandest of all philosophers, is hardly someone to take advice from on aesthetics; and Brecht didn't really believe in detachment, but only in using propaganda to detach people from what Marxists call "dominant bourgeois narratives", by presenting such narratives while constantly poking through the 4th wall.
I think Pynchon could be a great writer if he had something to say, or even if he just admitted he didn't have anything to say and wrote a commercial novel. But instead, he uses a cheap trick to give tiny revelations an aura of importance: He deliberately withholds needed information from his descriptions, forcing the reader to struggle to interpret the bare minimum narrative of what is factually going on. In this way he can lead the reader on for hundreds of pages, with the reader always getting the thrill of struggling with puzzles and uncovering their mysteries. But they're trivial, unimportant puzzles like "Who is talking?" or "How can I parse that string of sentence fragments?"
As I mentioned, a reader has limited cognitive capacity. Keeping the reader working on trivial matters leaves her no room to think about ones that matter. Pynchon exploits the pleasure of puzzle-solving, which evolved to encourage us to solve important puzzles, in the way Cow Clicker exploits the feeling of achievement to lead us through hours of meaningless "achievements", or the way masturbation exploits the pleasure of sex. It's fun and entertaining, and there's nothing wrong with that, except for all the things we don't do because we're busy figuring out mini-puzzles, clicking cows, and masturbating. To me, stimulating the reader by exploiting pleasurable stimuli, without ever connecting with the significant things that pleasure evolved to connect us with, is not literature, but decoy literature. Which I think is an apt label for Pynchon's novels full of lovingly-crafted details that add up to nothing.
EVERYTHING IN THIS BOX DOESN'T REALLY BELONG IN THIS POST.
Most of the comments are about "do/don't write for yourself", which is entirely tangential to the main point of my post, which is how to describe things and scenes. I'm not deleting it bcoz that would make the people who replied to it look insane, but I wish I hadn't included in this post. I've already said all this stuff before anyway.Academics and writers often give other writers these orders:
- Find your voice.
- Write for yourself.
I think both are terrible advice. "Find your voice" seems to fit the evidence; famous 20th-century writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, Pynchon, and Flannery O'Connor all have very distinctive voices. But they all tell the same stories over and over, in different forms. They aren't versatile like Chaucer or Joyce, who have many voices. And they were all chosen as "great writers" because they met the modernist conception of an Artist as one who has a distinctive voice; and because having a single voice, and thus telling the same story over and over, is more commercially effective; it makes a writer marketable as a product, and categorizable, so all her works can be put on the same bookstore shelf, like you can with Ernest Hemingway or Tom Clancy.
A voice is a tool you select for a specific purpose. A great writer writes a different story every time, and this usually requires using different tools for different stories. The exception is Shakespeare. Don't rely on being Shakespeare.
"Write for yourself" works for people like Stephen King and Tom Clancy who, by freakish good luck, like exactly what a large fraction of some market likes. But someone who has the unique perspective needed to write a novel the world needs, rather than yet another variation on a well-worn theme, probably won't like all the same things as most people. Such a person is likely to find, like I did, that while there are some people who like exactly the same things he does, there aren't enough of them to generate the publicity necessary to bring in more readers who like those things. Popularity is a threshold effect; you need to reach escape velocity, the point at which you gain new readers faster than old readers forget you.
Besides the practical considerations, I just don't like writers who don't care about their readers, who want me to sit and listen to them rant for hours about things I don't care about. I dislike them as people. They're self-absorbed. If you want to write for yourself, do it like Emily Dickinson, putting everything away secretly in your dresser after writing it. If you can do that and be happy, you have my blessing. If you'd find that unsatisfying, you do in fact care what other people think, and want to connect with other people, so you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking you should write for yourself because people say that's the artistically "authentic" thing to do. When I find an author whining about how the public is too Philistine to appreciate him, it's usually a writer writing for himself.
Hey! Occasionally I complain that the audience is (for the most part) too philistine to appreciate something I've written, when the (or at least A) real problem is that I've put that piece of work before an audience that isn't right for it.
So sometimes the complaining author isn't 100% wrong, but is failing to properly split the difference.
Somewhat more seriously and more generally, I'm still enjoying your writing about writing. I don't necessarilly AGREE with everything you said here, but sometimes just being prompted to think some more about these things is fun and imho helpful. Also, your selections of examples of good writing are usually fun.
Too bad about your falling out with your friend, and your publication here of even tiny excerpts from their novel.
A friend of mine says, 'write for yourself...except when and where and how that isn't quite the right way to do it.'
Similarly, don't rely on being Joyce. Especially when you only like Joyce for the way in which he enables elitist assholes to be elitist and assholes.
There's got to be a happy medium, right? if you write for yourself, then you find the experience pleasurable, or at least the result which makes the effort worthwhile. How much that matters will be affected by why you write. As a hobby, then there's nearly zero motivation to put yourself through the torture of an action you don't like to get a result you don't like to please an audience you get nothing from. As a job, well, ideally everyone would like what they do, but there are certainly lots who do suffer through something they don't like because that's what pays the bills.
On the other hand, someone who writes for their audience only is often branded as a sell-out, someone who has no care for artistic merit as long as what he writes sells.
I think we all do both, right? You want to be satisfied with your work, and yet you do want an audience, too, or else there'd be no point in posting it here. I do think you need to show your audience respect, though, and touched on one aspect of that in a recent blog: if you're aware of typos in your work and refuse to take the few minutes to fix them, that says a lot about what regard you hold for your readers.
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What works for me most of the time is to think of all the stories I want to write, and then write the ones that I also think lots of people will want to read.
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Aye, there's the rub. Oh, right, don't try to be Shakespeare. The eternal lament of those wondering why certain stories made the feature box or became bestsellers instead of certain other stories: if I knew ahead of time what ideas would explode in popularity, then I'd write nothing else.
I think there's a mid-point you're missing here: writing for oneself, and then publishing the results for the benefit of whatever maybe-or-maybe-not-existent demographic might want to read it.
As a matter of personal experience: when I write things, whether for others or for myself, I pretty consistently end up concluding "this is pretty bad and probably not a thing others will get much value out of reading". When I show them to others, meanwhile, I consistently get at least a subset of the others expressing their enjoyment of them. Thus I've gotten into the habit of posting whatever I write, even when I think it's bad and even when it was written entirely for my own purposes with no intention of either quality or comprehensibility-to-others, because clearly people are enjoying them despite that lack-of-intention.
Now, at the point where a writer is "whining about how the public is too Philistine to appreciate him", that's clearly no longer the thing he's doing; such complaints are indicative that the writer is seeking appreciation as a primary target rather than as a freebie side-benefit. And it's silly and unstrategic to engage in nominal pursuit of the appreciation of others by building a product engineered in a fashion one knows to be unappealing to others. But the mistake there is in misunderstanding one's own goals, not in writing for oneself or in publishing one's pieces-written-for-oneself.
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Yes, that's what I was trying to say.
Write for yourself or the pure joy of writing; edit for an audience. Then again, perhaps the audience doesn't happen to include you or me.
Here's someone on Reddit coming to acceptance of the joys of non-commercial writing. In some ways, it's arguing the opposite about targeting an 8th-grade level vocabulary for commercial schlock that'll make an agent take notice of something that'll sell. Write a story that's important enough for others to read.
Damn good words. Prak said something similar in his 2015 RCL interview that really resonated with my younger self:
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Or you entered your story in a fimfic contest and you don't want to make changes after contest deadline until judging ends, ha.
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And then, presumably, just forgot about it. Because otherwise, all the same caveats apply.
I will say, personally, I pivoted from writing for the audience to writing for myself again last year. I spent a lot of time detoxing a lot of anxiety associated with my writing.
As a result I've written around, by my count, 200,000 words in the last six months - even during periods of severe bipolar depression, recovering from a surgery, and major illness. That's more than four times as much as my most productive period almost seven years ago and I've been absolutely bodied for half of it. The difference in my capacity to write is staggering, on good days I'm comfortably hitting 8,000 words.
The quality's been good too, that hasn't suffered for it. I had to learn how to write for an audience to write well, to write something people would want to read, but after already having done that then writing for myself again makes it a lot easier to put words on the page. I'm about to have two novels to send to an agent after last year was my least productive year ever.
I'd gesture at King and Clancy as examples of insanely prolific writers, and say that's where the advice lies, I think.
I'll say this though: When I write for myself, what I'm writing is the things that I wish someone had told me when I was younger, the things I had to learn on my own that I wish could have been taught, or the things I was taught that I want to pass on.
I think that's probably a good asterisk for it. Write for yourself as a reader as well as an author, I guess.
It's amazing how I regularly encounter professional writing advice on a pony website.
The website famous for My Little Pony animal smut is also the one responsible for most of my run-ins with intellectual essays
This right here is what, nowadays, I see as the one great cardinal sin of writing. It actually connects to a lot of other things - the tendency of showing vs. telling (since the author already has the story told in his head, and is only preoccupied in showing it), characters falling in love out of the blue, and lots of nonsensical plot points. This seems more prevalent these days, which I partly blame on people growing up with storytelling in visual mediums, instead of in written form, where it is perfectly OK to hide things from the audience, since 99% of the time you are supposed to be an external observer, instead of actually being in the character's mind.
For a particularly egregious example, a book I read recently had one PoV character with the power to see the future. Then, there is this whole battle situation where she makes a number of decisions which seem to be clear mistakes, born from arrogance – and you, as the audience, feels zero engagement in that scenario, since of course she is doing it all because she can see the future. But then by the end of the book it's revealed that no, she had lost that ability sometime in the previous book, and she did it all through her ingenuity - except that at no point there is any indication of that, with a number of scenes even referencing her powers. So you get an exceedingly dull sequence, and then the dissatisfaction of knowing that no, there were actually stakes involved, except they were hidden from you for no good reason other than landing a revelation on the last chapter, and the things that seemed to have happened by prescience were just lucky guesses or due to other characters acting dumb.