Longtime readers know that, while I’m a man who gives a lot of advice about being a writer (and put together a little ebook of such advice), I am generally against writing advice. By that I mean that while I think there are many ways to write better or worse, static lists of writing advice are often unhelpful when they are broken down into particulars - avoid the passive voice, no adverbs, shorter is always better, etc. I could share many specifics about why I think these things are unhelpful, such as the endless number of exceptions that always attach to such advice. (Ask someone when they were born and see if you really want people to avoid the passive voice at all times.) We’d be here all day.
“The point is that you cannot take recourse in simplicity while you’re young and inexperienced, hoping to hide there, until you become a good writer. It’s like trying to hide out on land until you become a good swimmer.”
Of course! It takes an experienced swimmer to swim on land. Hemingway swam on land from early on, of course, but he was quite an athlete and outdoorsman.
I do think there’s a difference in what constitutes writing advice depending on who your audience is, speaking as someone who has edited high schoolers’ writing. Young writers simply don’t understand what good writing is, so they often mistake complicated writing for complicated thought. But once you reach a certain level of competency you need new advice to get to the next level.
This is a similar phenomenon to grammatical advice. For example, it’s not grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with “and” or “because”, but it’s good advice to give young writers or else they’ll start every other sentence with them (I did this. And then I did that. And then I did that. Because it was fun.) But once you gain a certain level of understanding about clause structure you need to move on from this simplistic advice.
Thanks for that - love the example. The saddest casualty of recent (maybe not so ‘recent’ at that, given my advanced state of decline) is the abandonment of teaching HS students anything much about sentence structure.
One problem is, if you're a widely-read child who's familiar with essays published by the writers you're taught to revere in English class, you know their essays don't follow five-paragraph format. It's a fine format if you've got nothing better, and you're marshaling some minimum amount of evidence irrespective of its strength. It's neither logically sound nor fun to read, though. (Admittedly, it's more fun to read than prose that's equally not-fun-to-read but excessively long and lacking structure.)
In middle school, they told widely-read children already chafing at the restrictions of the five-paragraph format that we'll do better in high school, when requirements wouldn't be so restrictive, but for now, we needed to master this one format. In high school, they said the same thing about college.
Senior year, my high school offered a Great Books course. Finally, the English teacher (who I'd had the year before) felt free to grade essays not on the five-paragraph format, but on whether they were clear, grammatical, thoughtful, honest, and interesting. Same teacher. Different grades.
Looking back, all the English teachers insisting that even students ready to move on stick to a remedial essay format were teaching an important lesson: one mark of adulthood is the discipline to stick to instructions, even when they only seem to make life dumber for all involved. It just wasn't an English lesson, but a social-skills lesson, at odds with the mythos of originality our school system paid lip-service to.
Schools teach conformity, and they should teach conformity, since as good as choosing not to conform can be, not knowing how to conform when you want and need to is far worse. I wish American schools were more honest about this, though.
If they were honest about it, it would completely undermine their efforts to teach conformity though...That kind of frank advice is already subversive enough that it would need to be framed as something other than "conforming." Don't you think?
I don't think being honest about teaching conformity completely undermines teaching it. Indeed, for less neurotypical children, frankly airing expectations of conformity may be one of the few effective ways of teaching it.
I'm not exceptionally atypical, and even I benefit from having implicit expectations of conformity explicitly taught. I realize many don't need that. Most people get the hang of phatic speech, for example, without ever needing to know that it's a category of speech distinguishable from informative speech. I didn't.
Social-emotional learning is trendy edspeak, but, I think, useful for acknowledging how much kids must rely on social and emotional conventions to show what they know. We implicitly knew that all along, of course, and used to call it "manners", "citizenship", "self-control"... though those hint that simply lacking skill at conformity equals being immoral or subversive. Kids sometimes do know better and play dumb to be difficult, but then again, sometimes they don't.
No, that makes sense when you put it that way. I'm actually not remotely neurotypical myself but my relationship to that particular form of conformity was less fraught, I think, if only because I tended to lean into that structure to help ground myself rather than defy it.
I was interpreting the earlier statement a bit more cynically as some rhetorical version of: "Schools should be honest with kids about the fact that one of the most important functions of education is social control, and the sooner students grasp this, the less they will suffer in life." You were simply being practical.
Oh, I agree with, "Schools should be honest with kids about the fact that one of the most important functions of education is social control, and the sooner students grasp this, the less they will suffer in life," too.
Whether we think social control is good, bad, or indifferent, and whatever our ideas about what, if anything, could make social control just, we're unlikely to evade social control this side of the grave, so we may as well get honest lessons in navigating it.
When education claims to prize idealism over cynicism, originality over conformity, and honesty over agreeability, I don't think it's completely lying, more like taking cynicism, conformity, and agreeability for granted. In fairness, many youth don't seem to need instruction in cynicism — or conformity and agreeability (at least with their peers). Still, vaunted nonconformist traits can prove useless to everyone, especially the nonconformist, unless they can be turned off sometimes.
My elders are, I think, too attached to the mythos of originality, and seem puzzled that a weirdo like me got so invested in helping her kids learn conformity, including to conventions I consider less than ideal. They wonder, do I want to raise sheeple? No. But I want my kids to know how to conform if they have to, to pick their battles.
Schools do teach conformity. I am not someone who is all that down on schools because my experience with my own kids at school has been largely positive but one incident does stand out. My at the time 8-year-old had been to the bookstore with me recently and picked out a book to buy and read. It was a book that challenged her but not one that was beyond her ability to decipher and understand. In her first week of 3rd grade the teacher told her it was too hard for her because “it took her longer than a minute to read each page” and told her to read something at her own level. After that, my daughter was very reluctant to read ANYTHING that would “take her too long to read” or that wasn’t on her teacher-determined reading level. I’m still incensed about the incident. I am a voracious reader and I read pretty slowly, partly because I enjoy reading aloud in my head and partly because I can’t absorb information as well reading faster. It often takes longer than a minute to read a page. Why do they insist on such stupid rules about things?
It always struck me as suspicious that the style that's the easiest to hide behind (minimalism) is the most popular. After all, if you write in a maximalist style, and you fail, you fail very obviously. But everyone appears smart when they're terse. So as a style minimalism is most amenable to academia, like in an MFA, which is all about creating a sort of package takeway for students, and minimalism is the easiest box to fit your prose into.
Plus, bad complicated writing is more painful to read -- if only because it takes longer, and you have to pause to figure out WTF they are saying. But when minimalist writing is bad, you don't think "I wish this were longer."
I come from an experimental literary background, which doesn't just mean that no one was reading it, but that we were deliberately writing what no one wanted to read!
I mention this because experimental writing is extremely easy to fake. You just deform sentences in very specific ways or torture your metaphors until their pain is novel enough to be unusual or evocative, even if they're not really meaningful.
Maximalism isn't necessarily more difficult than anything else. I think maximalism comes from a pure, bonedeep pleasure in words and the musicality of language.
Most people just don't have that. Some that do can't help but sing out of tune. But I always find a joyful buoyancy in maximalists. Like, if I'm reading Pynchon or Rushdie, they just feel like they're having way more fun writing their books than anyone else has fun doing anything else. Same with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (maybe only during The Waves, though).
I actually totally agree with everything you've said, but also think that experimental writing (of the "tortured metaphor variety") is not necessarily the same maximalism. As an example, Melville is maximalism, but doesn't strike me as particularly experimental (outside of his really late stuff, like The Confidence Man). Lovecraft is definitely a maximalist ("say 'chthonic' to me one more time") but not experimental. Joyce is both maximalist and experimental. Virginia Woolf is experimental but (at least a lot of her works) could almost be called a minimalist. To me maximalism is a certain *density* that may or may not be lyrically risky. But I think you're right that experimental stuff is the easiest to fake. Perhaps an objective metric: it's really easy for AIs to do explosively lyric poetry, it's very hard for them to write a scene with some clear character development.
Yeah, I didn't mean to conflate the two. After I hit Post, I thought this may lead to confusion!
Maximalism and experimental writing are very different, though there are writers who do both at the same time, just as there are experimental minimalists (Samuel Beckett and Blake Butler, for example).
I agree with your definition of maximalism, too. It at least feels right!
Experimental New Music is always the stereotype for easiest to fake in the contemporary classical music scene too.
“It’s all aleatoric anyway. That sounds close enough, the effect is what’s important. The audience won’t really know what’s going on, just make it up”
Sure, you could be really considerate with your precision of execution, your thoughtful improvisation in context, your ability to convey a performance. But for some it’s as simple as, why bother?
Freddie, as usual, gets it right, which is unusual in the writing world. (Great commentary about Lincoln btw.) And, oh, my, this section is just delicious: “The beauty lies in setting the rules as you go and seeing how far you can take them. Sometimes, when called for, I will reach into an archaic vocabulary and stay there awhile, try out the furniture, decorating my sentences with ancient constructions so recklessly that they take the shape of rusted cities, antique and corroded . . . Sometimes I work the words until they’re as brown as Winston Churchill’s scotch and as supple as a grandmother’s couch, beating them relentlessly until they yield to my inscrutable desires.” And that last paragraph, yes. Wonderful.
As a writer of 35 years who actually lives on his royalties, here are what I have found to be the best writing books to begin with: John Gardner, On Moral Fiction; William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl; Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer; Ray Bradbury, Zen In the Art of Writing; William Gass, Reading Rilke; Ensouling Language, Stephen Harrod Buhner. (Yes, I believe in my own work.)
The Iowa writers workshop and all the MFA programs have nearly ruined writing in this country. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory): Never in the history of writing have so many books been so well written that no one in their right mind would want to read. Or as a senior editor in NY once put it: All the MFA graduate submissions, they are all the same. There’s no unique personality or style to any of them.
This is because it is easy to teach technique, hard to teach the essence of the craft, which is why it is rarely taught. The books I have listed are focused on the essence of the craft and the state of mind that allows the fictional dream, as Gardner calls it (the nonfictional dream as well) to flow through the writer and onto the page. Writing is a communication, not a technique. Done well, something comes in from somewhere else and the words come alive. Good writing can’t be done with the brain but happens with some other part of the self, the brain/mind edits later on. But for true writing to occur the watcher must be absent from the gates. Unfortunately, most writing books and programs teach technique to the brain/mind. They have nothing to say to the part that dreams story into being. And dreaming story into being is an art form, a skill. It can be intentionally developed until the writer can drop into that state at will. That is when the magic happens, when typing becomes writing.
That last paragraph, is the correct take on the distinction between technical proficiency and artistic creativity. I find that this is also true in crafting music. There is a difference between learning musical structures and “syntax”, and then being able to express music “semantically” and creatively.
Even in math, practitioners notice a contrast between what Blaise Pascal called "l’esprit de finesse", intuition that leaps ahead of discursive reason and draws it onward, and "l’esprit géométrique", the “geometric spirit” of articulated, deductive reasoning – the faculty of the mind that's often just on janitorial duty, tidying up the syllogisms after l’esprit de finesse has passed.
Still, I wonder how deep the contrast goes.
David Cope wrote several computer programs combining composing rules with an inventory of examples, one producing music indistinguishable from classical composers' and another an extension of his own composing repertoire:
"Over time, I've accumulated these voices into something like a stable of styles, or toolbox of stylistic elements...
"That's not to say that I don't think that I have my own personal style; I certainly do. But it's a synthesis of these voices,"
I knew a programmer who claimed to have no creativity, but who "programmed" himself to write music as Cope programmed computers — by mastering music theory and memorizing inventories of examples. You couldn't tell he was as uncreative as he said.
Experiencing "l’esprit de finesse" flowing through you from "elsewhere" is common to human creativity, even if it's physically your brain talking to itself, synthesizing prior examples. It makes sense to cherish, cultivate, and use this spirit. Attribute it to God (I might), or the muse.
Does the muse learn to sing the same humdrum way we do?
A great comment and a great curated list of books about writing, all of them written from the heart and not the empty wallet. You left out Gardner's The Art of Fiction, which to my mind, is the best. As for the most meretricious, let me nominate Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott.
there are indeed good parts in bird by bird, but i did not find her book all that useful except for those few parts. i have gardner's the art of fiction as well but feel on moral fiction was superior. I have several score books on writing, if i count all of stafford's and Robert Bly's it is easily twice that.
Freddie, since you've been sharing a bit about your writing process lately, I'll take the opportunity to ask a question that's occurred to me a few times: how (if it does) does iterative drafting factor in to your approach? Are you a "writing is re-writing" person, or does your work come together in some other way? I'm always fascinated to chat with others who write a lot (I'm an academic—for now) about their methods and habits, and this strikes me as one of the broadest divides in how people work.
There is no formal drafting process - all the changes are happening at the same time as I'm writing. I constantly double back. I do perform rereads several times that inevitably morph a given piece, but I wouldn't call those drafts really.
It’s when the disciple is uncertain, only partly committed. Or when some of the popsicle falls onto the sand, it’s what’s left. Or the epistle on a precipice…
For the software geek in me, you need to end with "Hello World" on a line by itself. As the culmination of the first lesson in writing in any software language, is to print the statement "Hello World."
I have trouble jumping the hurdle of importance: I feel that what’s important to me won’t be important to anyone else. So insecurity or maybe fear of derision keeps me on the ground.
I think this is a difficult thing to break free from. I've been writing all over the internet for over ten years and I almost never revealed anything about myself for fear of...something?
But recently I've just leaned into what I like and care less about whether it's deemed important or significant. I think my best writing in the last year has been about a 30 years old videogame, for example.
Importance is catching eyeballs. Three things catch eyeballs: Fear; Sex; Novelty.
News and advertisements employ these three levers to catch eyeballs. We've all seen the news hook: "Up Next: Dangerous Thing ... details at 11." I'm of a mind that much of what passes as modern literature is junk, which includes sex, especially homosexual sex, or extra-marital affairs ... including these spins junk writing into avant-garde literature.
Your first point about writing simple struck a chord with me due a recent incident. My son, a freshman at a STEM college, received a failing grade on a paper because his vocabulary in the assignment was not sophisticated enough.
No discussion of whether his points were valid. This was a biology class. I was happy with his school right up to the moment I heard this and realized that college is broken everywhere and is doing little to prepare it’s students for the world after they graduate.
I would not have done this as an undergrad, but two approaches here are 1) he goes to the “writing center” and asks for tutoring to improve that paper - he’ll find out what that milieu thinks is good writing. 2) ask the professor for a sample of a successful paper, which will give him the same information, in time for the final. Inscrutable criticism - which that is - doesn’t give him the info he needs, how to do well in that class and that environment. If the class is a “freshman writing intensive” they are being critical on purpose. Good luck, I hope he gets the hang of producing whatever it is they’re looking for.
Thanks. Fortunately the teacher has stated that she will allow him to submit his work early for evaluation and rework based on her feedback. I had a similar experience. I was a poli sci major and my prof, despite claiming she was following the Chicago Stylebook, knocked my grade on a paper down for, and I’m not joking here, using an Oxford comma.
The world will little note nor long remember the infinitives we split here… In a freshman class on reading poetry, the professor - a grad student - sent something of mine back with a comment that it sounded like Disney. I think they hide in their fusty offices daring each other.
I vaguely remember (1980s) hours of grammar where that wrong comma was hammered into us as correct. I still like it.
Right now there’s a push in many parts of the legal profession to emphasize clarity and readability over sophistication of language. I get professional feedback all the time to make things clearer and more straightforward, don’t try to hide weak ideas behind ”lawyerly” words, try to balance writing for the judge with writing for my client who doesn’t have a law degree. It’s not informal writing at all, but it is a push against an affected register that I support in many contexts. Nothing lays your argument bare like having to explain it without the inflation of high register.
All this to say, the writing he eventually does professionally, for money, in whatever job, may well come off “unsophisticated” to this professor.
The grader may not deserve the charity I'm about to give, but the object of a writing assignment in science class could be to demonstrate understanding of technical vocabulary through correct usage, in which case, failing to use that vocabulary is failure to do the assignment, even if the plain words used illustrate the ideas at least as clearly.
If instructions for the assignment didn't explicitly state an expectation to use technical vocabulary, a fair grader should take this into account. Even mathematicians, who of all people should know they must stand by what they said, not by what they meant to say, sometimes give unclear assignments, though in my experience, they're quite fair about rewarding those who complete the assignment as written, rather than as was meant.
I was tempted to request an explanation for how — by working the words — you increase their brown-ness and suppleness, but I think I won’t. Some inscrutable mysteries are best left unsolved.
Style and personality are very hard to universalize or encapsulate in a list of rules or tips (beyond a generic "develop your personal voice and style"). But when someone like yourself writes "that's why they pay me the big bucks," it's both a beautiful illustration of the principle of using self-deprecating irony to make a point that's still just true enough, and an expression of your particular way of doing self-deprecating irony well. "Supple as a grandmother's couch" really does sound as supple as a grandmother's couch. And probably only you would have come up with that. So it's not just that our language has too many exceptions; it's writers themselves who are exceptions, allow themselves to be exceptions.
I don't know about the brown whiskey though, that's a tough one.
I just can't get past brown. Brown is the color of dirt and feces. Whiskey on the other hand: faint vapors, disembodied wisps of smoke drifting-dancing with golden rays of moonlight through a brassy amber field of stars.
I mean, brown is also the color of tweed, which does I suppose make me think of Britain and Winston Churchill, a bit. Would have been interesting to see how your alternative nestled in alongside the grandmother's couch, for sure!
Yes, but again brown ... for clothes ... ick. Brown is such a childish color for the written world.
His tweed shooting jacked is rumpled, edges softened-frayed at the claws of briars and thorns he's plowed through on the chase. The fabric but a miniature camouflage—snagged and pulled—yarns of tan, goldenrod, beige, burgundy, flecks of smoky amber and black yarns; hems and seams have shed their creases and lines, blending to a cloud of quiet restrained masculinity ... providing a Yin to the Yang of grandmother's bright rigid Queen Anne sofa.
I too had to run that sentence around in my mind a few times ... then decided I'd likely never choose those words.
When I picture "my grandmother's couch", I picture my great-grandmothers Queen Anne sofa, beautifully hand embroidered stuffed and sewn firmly ... as comfortable as a pew.
I enjoy the style of writing I learned from analytics philosophy courses. I've never thought of this as "minimalism," just a focus on clarity. I find that a lot of writing meanders without any noticeable premises and conclusions, which just ends up making me more confused.
Interesting, analytic philosophers are rarely celebrated for their prose style, with a few exceptions (Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel come to mind). Though I agree that such writers often achieve a workmanlike clarity such that you can't miss the main point
I think it's easy to hide half-baked ideas behind complicated prose. I agree that Peter Singer's writing isn't beautiful, but I always know what he's arguing for and what his reasoning is.
And write with intellectual honesty. Man, that gets me every time. In an age where everyone is an activist simply saying what you think is the refreshing new subversive...
“To me trying to write with self-conscious simplicity is like going from playing the guitar with an immense amount of distortion to playing with nothing but the barest unaltered tone: you find there is nowhere to hide.”
I tend to bristle at music metaphors bc they often feel forced but this was a gem. Exactly right.
“The point is that you cannot take recourse in simplicity while you’re young and inexperienced, hoping to hide there, until you become a good writer. It’s like trying to hide out on land until you become a good swimmer.”
Of course! It takes an experienced swimmer to swim on land. Hemingway swam on land from early on, of course, but he was quite an athlete and outdoorsman.
I myself am an impressive land mermaid. I’m told moisturizer would help with the scaliness.
I do think there’s a difference in what constitutes writing advice depending on who your audience is, speaking as someone who has edited high schoolers’ writing. Young writers simply don’t understand what good writing is, so they often mistake complicated writing for complicated thought. But once you reach a certain level of competency you need new advice to get to the next level.
This is a similar phenomenon to grammatical advice. For example, it’s not grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with “and” or “because”, but it’s good advice to give young writers or else they’ll start every other sentence with them (I did this. And then I did that. And then I did that. Because it was fun.) But once you gain a certain level of understanding about clause structure you need to move on from this simplistic advice.
Thanks for that - love the example. The saddest casualty of recent (maybe not so ‘recent’ at that, given my advanced state of decline) is the abandonment of teaching HS students anything much about sentence structure.
One problem is, if you're a widely-read child who's familiar with essays published by the writers you're taught to revere in English class, you know their essays don't follow five-paragraph format. It's a fine format if you've got nothing better, and you're marshaling some minimum amount of evidence irrespective of its strength. It's neither logically sound nor fun to read, though. (Admittedly, it's more fun to read than prose that's equally not-fun-to-read but excessively long and lacking structure.)
In middle school, they told widely-read children already chafing at the restrictions of the five-paragraph format that we'll do better in high school, when requirements wouldn't be so restrictive, but for now, we needed to master this one format. In high school, they said the same thing about college.
Senior year, my high school offered a Great Books course. Finally, the English teacher (who I'd had the year before) felt free to grade essays not on the five-paragraph format, but on whether they were clear, grammatical, thoughtful, honest, and interesting. Same teacher. Different grades.
Looking back, all the English teachers insisting that even students ready to move on stick to a remedial essay format were teaching an important lesson: one mark of adulthood is the discipline to stick to instructions, even when they only seem to make life dumber for all involved. It just wasn't an English lesson, but a social-skills lesson, at odds with the mythos of originality our school system paid lip-service to.
Schools teach conformity, and they should teach conformity, since as good as choosing not to conform can be, not knowing how to conform when you want and need to is far worse. I wish American schools were more honest about this, though.
Incredibly agreeable.
If they were honest about it, it would completely undermine their efforts to teach conformity though...That kind of frank advice is already subversive enough that it would need to be framed as something other than "conforming." Don't you think?
I don't think being honest about teaching conformity completely undermines teaching it. Indeed, for less neurotypical children, frankly airing expectations of conformity may be one of the few effective ways of teaching it.
I'm not exceptionally atypical, and even I benefit from having implicit expectations of conformity explicitly taught. I realize many don't need that. Most people get the hang of phatic speech, for example, without ever needing to know that it's a category of speech distinguishable from informative speech. I didn't.
Social-emotional learning is trendy edspeak, but, I think, useful for acknowledging how much kids must rely on social and emotional conventions to show what they know. We implicitly knew that all along, of course, and used to call it "manners", "citizenship", "self-control"... though those hint that simply lacking skill at conformity equals being immoral or subversive. Kids sometimes do know better and play dumb to be difficult, but then again, sometimes they don't.
No, that makes sense when you put it that way. I'm actually not remotely neurotypical myself but my relationship to that particular form of conformity was less fraught, I think, if only because I tended to lean into that structure to help ground myself rather than defy it.
I was interpreting the earlier statement a bit more cynically as some rhetorical version of: "Schools should be honest with kids about the fact that one of the most important functions of education is social control, and the sooner students grasp this, the less they will suffer in life." You were simply being practical.
Oh, I agree with, "Schools should be honest with kids about the fact that one of the most important functions of education is social control, and the sooner students grasp this, the less they will suffer in life," too.
Whether we think social control is good, bad, or indifferent, and whatever our ideas about what, if anything, could make social control just, we're unlikely to evade social control this side of the grave, so we may as well get honest lessons in navigating it.
When education claims to prize idealism over cynicism, originality over conformity, and honesty over agreeability, I don't think it's completely lying, more like taking cynicism, conformity, and agreeability for granted. In fairness, many youth don't seem to need instruction in cynicism — or conformity and agreeability (at least with their peers). Still, vaunted nonconformist traits can prove useless to everyone, especially the nonconformist, unless they can be turned off sometimes.
My elders are, I think, too attached to the mythos of originality, and seem puzzled that a weirdo like me got so invested in helping her kids learn conformity, including to conventions I consider less than ideal. They wonder, do I want to raise sheeple? No. But I want my kids to know how to conform if they have to, to pick their battles.
Schools do teach conformity. I am not someone who is all that down on schools because my experience with my own kids at school has been largely positive but one incident does stand out. My at the time 8-year-old had been to the bookstore with me recently and picked out a book to buy and read. It was a book that challenged her but not one that was beyond her ability to decipher and understand. In her first week of 3rd grade the teacher told her it was too hard for her because “it took her longer than a minute to read each page” and told her to read something at her own level. After that, my daughter was very reluctant to read ANYTHING that would “take her too long to read” or that wasn’t on her teacher-determined reading level. I’m still incensed about the incident. I am a voracious reader and I read pretty slowly, partly because I enjoy reading aloud in my head and partly because I can’t absorb information as well reading faster. It often takes longer than a minute to read a page. Why do they insist on such stupid rules about things?
This is the correct take on how technical and creative development evolves over time.
It always struck me as suspicious that the style that's the easiest to hide behind (minimalism) is the most popular. After all, if you write in a maximalist style, and you fail, you fail very obviously. But everyone appears smart when they're terse. So as a style minimalism is most amenable to academia, like in an MFA, which is all about creating a sort of package takeway for students, and minimalism is the easiest box to fit your prose into.
For sale: baby shoes, never used.
It’s hard to top that but boy do we try.
Well you’ve done it.
Plus, bad complicated writing is more painful to read -- if only because it takes longer, and you have to pause to figure out WTF they are saying. But when minimalist writing is bad, you don't think "I wish this were longer."
Lol
Judith Butler begs to differ.
I’m not convinced Butler is a native human speaker.
This has me cackling. I love it.
HAHA
I could never be convinced Hemingway was!
A million LOL wouldn't suffice for this ^
I come from an experimental literary background, which doesn't just mean that no one was reading it, but that we were deliberately writing what no one wanted to read!
I mention this because experimental writing is extremely easy to fake. You just deform sentences in very specific ways or torture your metaphors until their pain is novel enough to be unusual or evocative, even if they're not really meaningful.
Maximalism isn't necessarily more difficult than anything else. I think maximalism comes from a pure, bonedeep pleasure in words and the musicality of language.
Most people just don't have that. Some that do can't help but sing out of tune. But I always find a joyful buoyancy in maximalists. Like, if I'm reading Pynchon or Rushdie, they just feel like they're having way more fun writing their books than anyone else has fun doing anything else. Same with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (maybe only during The Waves, though).
I actually totally agree with everything you've said, but also think that experimental writing (of the "tortured metaphor variety") is not necessarily the same maximalism. As an example, Melville is maximalism, but doesn't strike me as particularly experimental (outside of his really late stuff, like The Confidence Man). Lovecraft is definitely a maximalist ("say 'chthonic' to me one more time") but not experimental. Joyce is both maximalist and experimental. Virginia Woolf is experimental but (at least a lot of her works) could almost be called a minimalist. To me maximalism is a certain *density* that may or may not be lyrically risky. But I think you're right that experimental stuff is the easiest to fake. Perhaps an objective metric: it's really easy for AIs to do explosively lyric poetry, it's very hard for them to write a scene with some clear character development.
Yeah, I didn't mean to conflate the two. After I hit Post, I thought this may lead to confusion!
Maximalism and experimental writing are very different, though there are writers who do both at the same time, just as there are experimental minimalists (Samuel Beckett and Blake Butler, for example).
I agree with your definition of maximalism, too. It at least feels right!
Experimental New Music is always the stereotype for easiest to fake in the contemporary classical music scene too.
“It’s all aleatoric anyway. That sounds close enough, the effect is what’s important. The audience won’t really know what’s going on, just make it up”
Sure, you could be really considerate with your precision of execution, your thoughtful improvisation in context, your ability to convey a performance. But for some it’s as simple as, why bother?
Freddie, as usual, gets it right, which is unusual in the writing world. (Great commentary about Lincoln btw.) And, oh, my, this section is just delicious: “The beauty lies in setting the rules as you go and seeing how far you can take them. Sometimes, when called for, I will reach into an archaic vocabulary and stay there awhile, try out the furniture, decorating my sentences with ancient constructions so recklessly that they take the shape of rusted cities, antique and corroded . . . Sometimes I work the words until they’re as brown as Winston Churchill’s scotch and as supple as a grandmother’s couch, beating them relentlessly until they yield to my inscrutable desires.” And that last paragraph, yes. Wonderful.
As a writer of 35 years who actually lives on his royalties, here are what I have found to be the best writing books to begin with: John Gardner, On Moral Fiction; William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl; Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer; Ray Bradbury, Zen In the Art of Writing; William Gass, Reading Rilke; Ensouling Language, Stephen Harrod Buhner. (Yes, I believe in my own work.)
The Iowa writers workshop and all the MFA programs have nearly ruined writing in this country. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory): Never in the history of writing have so many books been so well written that no one in their right mind would want to read. Or as a senior editor in NY once put it: All the MFA graduate submissions, they are all the same. There’s no unique personality or style to any of them.
This is because it is easy to teach technique, hard to teach the essence of the craft, which is why it is rarely taught. The books I have listed are focused on the essence of the craft and the state of mind that allows the fictional dream, as Gardner calls it (the nonfictional dream as well) to flow through the writer and onto the page. Writing is a communication, not a technique. Done well, something comes in from somewhere else and the words come alive. Good writing can’t be done with the brain but happens with some other part of the self, the brain/mind edits later on. But for true writing to occur the watcher must be absent from the gates. Unfortunately, most writing books and programs teach technique to the brain/mind. They have nothing to say to the part that dreams story into being. And dreaming story into being is an art form, a skill. It can be intentionally developed until the writer can drop into that state at will. That is when the magic happens, when typing becomes writing.
Thank you Freddie, great column.
That last paragraph, is the correct take on the distinction between technical proficiency and artistic creativity. I find that this is also true in crafting music. There is a difference between learning musical structures and “syntax”, and then being able to express music “semantically” and creatively.
Thanks for mentioning this.
Even in math, practitioners notice a contrast between what Blaise Pascal called "l’esprit de finesse", intuition that leaps ahead of discursive reason and draws it onward, and "l’esprit géométrique", the “geometric spirit” of articulated, deductive reasoning – the faculty of the mind that's often just on janitorial duty, tidying up the syllogisms after l’esprit de finesse has passed.
Still, I wonder how deep the contrast goes.
David Cope wrote several computer programs combining composing rules with an inventory of examples, one producing music indistinguishable from classical composers' and another an extension of his own composing repertoire:
https://psmag.com/social-justice/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507
Ethan Cordray said,
"Over time, I've accumulated these voices into something like a stable of styles, or toolbox of stylistic elements...
"That's not to say that I don't think that I have my own personal style; I certainly do. But it's a synthesis of these voices,"
I knew a programmer who claimed to have no creativity, but who "programmed" himself to write music as Cope programmed computers — by mastering music theory and memorizing inventories of examples. You couldn't tell he was as uncreative as he said.
Experiencing "l’esprit de finesse" flowing through you from "elsewhere" is common to human creativity, even if it's physically your brain talking to itself, synthesizing prior examples. It makes sense to cherish, cultivate, and use this spirit. Attribute it to God (I might), or the muse.
Does the muse learn to sing the same humdrum way we do?
A great comment and a great curated list of books about writing, all of them written from the heart and not the empty wallet. You left out Gardner's The Art of Fiction, which to my mind, is the best. As for the most meretricious, let me nominate Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott.
there are indeed good parts in bird by bird, but i did not find her book all that useful except for those few parts. i have gardner's the art of fiction as well but feel on moral fiction was superior. I have several score books on writing, if i count all of stafford's and Robert Bly's it is easily twice that.
Freddie, since you've been sharing a bit about your writing process lately, I'll take the opportunity to ask a question that's occurred to me a few times: how (if it does) does iterative drafting factor in to your approach? Are you a "writing is re-writing" person, or does your work come together in some other way? I'm always fascinated to chat with others who write a lot (I'm an academic—for now) about their methods and habits, and this strikes me as one of the broadest divides in how people work.
There is no formal drafting process - all the changes are happening at the same time as I'm writing. I constantly double back. I do perform rereads several times that inevitably morph a given piece, but I wouldn't call those drafts really.
nuts
I birthed several decades ago? Not even sure how to make that active. My mother birthed me several decades ago?
When my mother was 40 weeks pregnant, I emerged from her birth canal. The process, painful. The result, me. Hello world. I’m here!
lol
If you use your commas right, you never have to see a participle again.
Yes, but what, may I ask, if you don't mind saying, is a participle?
It’s when the disciple is uncertain, only partly committed. Or when some of the popsicle falls onto the sand, it’s what’s left. Or the epistle on a precipice…
Well done!
The thing that, when it dangles, means your writing's flaccid.
I'm really proud of you for this one, Midge.
For the software geek in me, you need to end with "Hello World" on a line by itself. As the culmination of the first lesson in writing in any software language, is to print the statement "Hello World."
My mother bore me two score and five years ago?
I have trouble jumping the hurdle of importance: I feel that what’s important to me won’t be important to anyone else. So insecurity or maybe fear of derision keeps me on the ground.
Soar on the wings of your comment of the week distinction!
Yes. I’ve been flying high around my household. My husband grows weary of my ego.
I think this is a difficult thing to break free from. I've been writing all over the internet for over ten years and I almost never revealed anything about myself for fear of...something?
But recently I've just leaned into what I like and care less about whether it's deemed important or significant. I think my best writing in the last year has been about a 30 years old videogame, for example.
Importance is catching eyeballs. Three things catch eyeballs: Fear; Sex; Novelty.
News and advertisements employ these three levers to catch eyeballs. We've all seen the news hook: "Up Next: Dangerous Thing ... details at 11." I'm of a mind that much of what passes as modern literature is junk, which includes sex, especially homosexual sex, or extra-marital affairs ... including these spins junk writing into avant-garde literature.
So you're saying I should do my writing while on OnlyFans
Umm ... umm ... it seems to have a better business model than medium.com. :)
Your first point about writing simple struck a chord with me due a recent incident. My son, a freshman at a STEM college, received a failing grade on a paper because his vocabulary in the assignment was not sophisticated enough.
No discussion of whether his points were valid. This was a biology class. I was happy with his school right up to the moment I heard this and realized that college is broken everywhere and is doing little to prepare it’s students for the world after they graduate.
That sucks. If he were irreverent he could break out the thesaurus for his next paper. Really tart it up.
I would not have done this as an undergrad, but two approaches here are 1) he goes to the “writing center” and asks for tutoring to improve that paper - he’ll find out what that milieu thinks is good writing. 2) ask the professor for a sample of a successful paper, which will give him the same information, in time for the final. Inscrutable criticism - which that is - doesn’t give him the info he needs, how to do well in that class and that environment. If the class is a “freshman writing intensive” they are being critical on purpose. Good luck, I hope he gets the hang of producing whatever it is they’re looking for.
Thanks. Fortunately the teacher has stated that she will allow him to submit his work early for evaluation and rework based on her feedback. I had a similar experience. I was a poli sci major and my prof, despite claiming she was following the Chicago Stylebook, knocked my grade on a paper down for, and I’m not joking here, using an Oxford comma.
The world will little note nor long remember the infinitives we split here… In a freshman class on reading poetry, the professor - a grad student - sent something of mine back with a comment that it sounded like Disney. I think they hide in their fusty offices daring each other.
I vaguely remember (1980s) hours of grammar where that wrong comma was hammered into us as correct. I still like it.
Right now there’s a push in many parts of the legal profession to emphasize clarity and readability over sophistication of language. I get professional feedback all the time to make things clearer and more straightforward, don’t try to hide weak ideas behind ”lawyerly” words, try to balance writing for the judge with writing for my client who doesn’t have a law degree. It’s not informal writing at all, but it is a push against an affected register that I support in many contexts. Nothing lays your argument bare like having to explain it without the inflation of high register.
All this to say, the writing he eventually does professionally, for money, in whatever job, may well come off “unsophisticated” to this professor.
The grader may not deserve the charity I'm about to give, but the object of a writing assignment in science class could be to demonstrate understanding of technical vocabulary through correct usage, in which case, failing to use that vocabulary is failure to do the assignment, even if the plain words used illustrate the ideas at least as clearly.
If instructions for the assignment didn't explicitly state an expectation to use technical vocabulary, a fair grader should take this into account. Even mathematicians, who of all people should know they must stand by what they said, not by what they meant to say, sometimes give unclear assignments, though in my experience, they're quite fair about rewarding those who complete the assignment as written, rather than as was meant.
Wonderful!
I was tempted to request an explanation for how — by working the words — you increase their brown-ness and suppleness, but I think I won’t. Some inscrutable mysteries are best left unsolved.
don't try to beat the meaning out of poetry (to paraphrase billy collins)
Style and personality are very hard to universalize or encapsulate in a list of rules or tips (beyond a generic "develop your personal voice and style"). But when someone like yourself writes "that's why they pay me the big bucks," it's both a beautiful illustration of the principle of using self-deprecating irony to make a point that's still just true enough, and an expression of your particular way of doing self-deprecating irony well. "Supple as a grandmother's couch" really does sound as supple as a grandmother's couch. And probably only you would have come up with that. So it's not just that our language has too many exceptions; it's writers themselves who are exceptions, allow themselves to be exceptions.
I don't know about the brown whiskey though, that's a tough one.
I just can't get past brown. Brown is the color of dirt and feces. Whiskey on the other hand: faint vapors, disembodied wisps of smoke drifting-dancing with golden rays of moonlight through a brassy amber field of stars.
I mean, brown is also the color of tweed, which does I suppose make me think of Britain and Winston Churchill, a bit. Would have been interesting to see how your alternative nestled in alongside the grandmother's couch, for sure!
Yes, but again brown ... for clothes ... ick. Brown is such a childish color for the written world.
His tweed shooting jacked is rumpled, edges softened-frayed at the claws of briars and thorns he's plowed through on the chase. The fabric but a miniature camouflage—snagged and pulled—yarns of tan, goldenrod, beige, burgundy, flecks of smoky amber and black yarns; hems and seams have shed their creases and lines, blending to a cloud of quiet restrained masculinity ... providing a Yin to the Yang of grandmother's bright rigid Queen Anne sofa.
From your lips to God's ears!
The first time I read it I thought you said "...as supple as my grandmother's crotch."
I too had to run that sentence around in my mind a few times ... then decided I'd likely never choose those words.
When I picture "my grandmother's couch", I picture my great-grandmothers Queen Anne sofa, beautifully hand embroidered stuffed and sewn firmly ... as comfortable as a pew.
I enjoy the style of writing I learned from analytics philosophy courses. I've never thought of this as "minimalism," just a focus on clarity. I find that a lot of writing meanders without any noticeable premises and conclusions, which just ends up making me more confused.
Interesting, analytic philosophers are rarely celebrated for their prose style, with a few exceptions (Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel come to mind). Though I agree that such writers often achieve a workmanlike clarity such that you can't miss the main point
I think it's easy to hide half-baked ideas behind complicated prose. I agree that Peter Singer's writing isn't beautiful, but I always know what he's arguing for and what his reasoning is.
And write with intellectual honesty. Man, that gets me every time. In an age where everyone is an activist simply saying what you think is the refreshing new subversive...
“To me trying to write with self-conscious simplicity is like going from playing the guitar with an immense amount of distortion to playing with nothing but the barest unaltered tone: you find there is nowhere to hide.”
I tend to bristle at music metaphors bc they often feel forced but this was a gem. Exactly right.
A. Beautiful
B. I think a third requirement is due: developing a compelling voice.
As a segue, it appears that President Lincoln may have heard the phrase “four score and seven years ago …” from a rabbi’s (who he apparently knew) sermon given and published three months earlier https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gettysburg-address-jewish-connection_b_3539959