Cooger and Dark's Guide to Writing

"Omit needless words," said Strunk, and a great deal of writing advice hinges on this dictum. This has led to even starker imperatives: never tag speech with a verb other than "said"; eliminate adjectives; prefer simpler words.

But if Strunk's advice was the touchstone for 20th Century writing and every creative writing workshop thereafter, Ray Bradbury never heard that dark whistle-warning sounding over the plains. Consider, for example, the merry-go-round rush, the hall-of-mirrors sentences of Something Wicked This Way Comes:

The surface slit itself further in a wide ripping smile across the entire surface of the gigantic pear, as the blind Witch gabbled, moaned, blistered her lips, shrieked in protest, and Will hung fast, hands gripped to whicker, kicking legs, as the balloon wailed, whiffled, guzzled, mourned its own swift gaseous death, as dungeon air raved out, as dragon breath gushed forth and the bag, thus driven, retreated up.

How many needless words, redundancies, not to mention opaque constructions, metaphors, contradictions?

Reason for the need, however, and the case is clear. Bradbury's cavalcade prose, his carnivalesque expression, his mirror-house language, is the dark carnival, the show, the temptation, and the action that resides within it: the urge to engage, be thrilled, and the fear, the wish to escape. If it subverts the rules, well, doesn't the big show subvert the real, and that's where the terror and the lure of it lie?

Misters Cooger and Dark understand the fear, the temptation of the rules the #writingcommunity and workshops and classes lay down: omit needless words! follow the rules for good writing, and find an agent, impress a publisher, or follow the lonely path of the unpublished.

Consider another rule that sometimes boils up, the proscription from Elmore Leonard: Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Fine. J.K. Rowling abuses dialogue tags to an excessive degree, but compare:

• "I love you," she said.
• "I love you," she whispered.

And ask which verb means more, which has more imaginative potential, given the right scene and context?

No one wants stark prose, boring prose, bland styles, or we all end up writing for the Web, flat and technically correct. The writing challenge is not to excise the needless, but to find the needful in every word and sentence. What does it serve: atmosphere, character, action, plot? 

When the characters in Something Wicked This Way Comes realize there is no perfection in life, as there is no perfection in craft, that's when they find liberation, compassion, joy even. That's not a good reason to stop trying, but a pretty good rule for all rules.

The doorstopper fantasy

 The Lord of the Rings is no doubt a long read and well worth the time, but compared to the “doorstopper” multi-volume fantasies that followed it, it’s positively compact. Indeed, LOTR was drafted as a single long novel, and then published in three volumes, a choice with a strong tradition in the case of the triple-decker novels of earlier Victorian publishing. But, at some point in the 70s and 80s the trilogy became the pattern, and then commercial fantasy developed the even more substantial series format, which gave us behemoths like The Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones. These doorstopper fantasies, of significant mass and length, well exceed LOTR in word-counts and represent several intriguing challenges and questions.

I’m minded of this because my shelter-in-place COVID-19 reading has included Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, both a trilogy and one of the better exemplars of the doorstopper series. William’s certainly wrote at length, introducing multiple character threads and alternately cultivating and subtly defying genre conventions, but at least MS&T came to a satisfying ending. I still remember overhearing Robert Jordan being pressed as to when The Wheel of Time would end by a Christchurch bookstore owner during a visit. As I recall, he gave a firm “we’ll see” in answer, and sadly died before his series was finished. George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, has attracted the scorn and concern of fans for not yet completing Game of Thrones, and yet I think the more interesting question is how will he finish his own sequence when the script writers of the TV series have already preempted his choices.

The trilogy format certainly offers some advantages. The three book sequence frames and encourages a beginning, middle, and end structure, offering the clarity of exposition, development, and conclusion, rising tension, and similar desiderata. And a wide range of authors have made good use of the scope of multiple story threads to develop tension and suspense. And perhaps the more complex the fantasy, and more complex the fictional world, the more need for development and explanation.

But issues of completion aside, the doorstopper has encouraged and even enabled some weaknesses, perhaps the worst of which was bloated storylines with more long-winded development for development’s sake and seemingly interminable politicking and journeying. Even Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn drags in the middle volume, shifting and transferring characters back and forth across Osten Ard like an over-cautious chess player advancing and retreating pieces in the mid-game before the end-game becomes apparent. But worse than pacing, I think, was the proliferation of shallow minor characters and ancillary story-lines. The main reason I dropped GoT and the sprawling, interminable Malazan Book of the Fallen was the ever expanding cast of characters, which made a focal point, much less a protagonist, impossible to settle on. 

And yet the fantasy trilogy trilogy, with its open horizons, its richness of texture, its sustained evocation of a world, remains compelling. Perhaps there are ways to adapt and develop the three part structure; to make the long journey an adventure, to provide authentic scope for characters to emerge, and to make the imaginary world dense and strange again. 

What happened in the end

Pandemic reading has led me to two quite different authors and two quite different formation of one of the crucial challenges of writing in the long form: the stakes and satisfaction of an ending. 

We take it for granted, of course, that novels end. If they simple finished, terminated arbitrarily, we would recognize immediately that we possess a fragment, not a whole. And even fragments, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suggest their own missing structure. If we were to come across half of a broken boat, we will still see in the broken beams and keel the shape of the whole.

Here, then, is a study in contrasts.

M. John Harrison's Empty Space is the last volume in the loosely federated Kefahuchi Tract series, but it rigorously resists any disclosure that could be taken as a resolution to the complex of unsettling questions of character and causality that the sequence raises. There's a remark about a control room instrument: "Everything was processed to look 'real', arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view," which taken in reverse suggests Harrison's method. From separate, selected points of view, narrative is disassembled, the structural illusion of reality is unravelled to reveal the contradictions, incoherencies, and dissonance of a future poised on the shockwave between the unfathomable physics of chaos and quantum indeterminacy and the unbearable nostalgia of submerged human identities.

But, also on my e-reading device is the first volume of the Penguin series of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels—French detective fiction from the 30s, almost as far from contemporary science fiction as you could get. And, of course, what happens at the end of any Maigret is that the crime is solved, the guilty are discovered, the selected points of view, clues, plot points, are assembled into the narrative of the crime and its solution.

And yet—I'm not sure anymore whether Empty Space can be called an "open" ending and Pietr the Latvian, for instance, a "closed" one. Because however the inspector exposes the material logic of the crime, the human problem, Maigret's point of entry into the solution, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, remains. And isn't that the point of Harrison's radical uncertainties and unresolved threads, and inchoate nostalgia, that the human problem persists, a struggle to assert a sense of reality and identity against the shimmering chaos of an unknowable universe?

Whether SF or police procedural, perhaps the distinction lies in what is settled and unsettled, the points that are decided and undecided. In this sense, Harrison's project is to disrupt the confident teleology of technological progress, where Maigret's detective can close the case but leave open, and subtly unstated, the implications of character and the ironies of morality, guilt and deviation. In any case, what happened in the end counts, but we are left with something beyond the ending that haunts our reading still.

The Last Battle

Beginnings are tentative, difficult, subtle. Few parts of your work face as much revision, as much rewriting, than beginnings. 

Endings, on the other side, roar in and seem to compose themselves, inevitable, like the cresting of a wave.

This is how endings should be. Lay the ground, set the pieces in motion, the end game will play out itself. 

As I've grown older, as a reader I've found it harder and harder just to finish a book I like, not through dislike of the task, but because the pleasure of reading, discovery, is something I want to sustain. 

As a writer, the agony of ending a piece is the constant stream of distractions that break the whole into fragments of work, and the awareness that the measured end-game also requires its own patience, its own pacing. But of course, the ending is never the end of the writing task, only the point where you go back to review and revise again.

When Bilbo gets to the end of The Hobbit, he has his share of the treasure. All he has to do is get it back across the Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and the wilds of Eriador again. 

What have other found at the end?

Why study creative writing?

It's been a few months since I've posted, one of the reasons being that at the end of February I completed the dissertation for a PhD in Creative Writing that I've pursued part-time, with many gaps and hiatuses, at The University of Queensland.

Reflecting on the experience, I have cause to ask myself: why study creative writing? Surely my own experience suggests you don't need to study writing in order to be a writer; why make a detailed study of one's own vocation, at the expense of time and effort a research degree demands?

Some brief, provisional responses:

• Firstly, every deep, complex field of human activity is, I think, worthy of study. The foundation of scholarship is not necessarily gain – that job, that publication – but interest.
• Now, you can't teach creativity, but you can, of course, practice it, and practice can strengthen.
• And practice can also refine. The self-reflection inherent in scholarly practice may not make me better, but it makes me clearer about my interests, my strengths and weaknesses, my influences, and formalizes of my techniques and approaches. Writing about one's own writing helps to refine intuitions and make them explicit.
• Finally, writing to a task and reflecting on that work not only allows you to apply skills but to experiment, to take risks and write out scenarios and possibilities that test ideas and your personal capacities. Not all writing in the academic context may be publishable, but it is constructive, a workbench for concepts and techniques.

Where this will lead next, I don't know. A new historical mystery is almost finished, and beyond that there are only sails on the horizon, suggestions of destinations. But studying creative writing has at least given me some sense of how I set the sails, what stars I steer by.

A thought about metaphors

All fictions, all fictional worlds, are to some degree extended metaphors. Recently, I've had reason to wonder how metaphors work, and that kind of work they do. We all sense that through the process of reading we not only gain an experience but discover, or recover, something. But what kind of meaning or knowledge is this, and how does the metaphor generate this response?

For a long time I was much taken with a remark by Umberto Eco: “What… is known is what a language has already said, and it is possible to recognize a metaphor that demands unprecedented operations, and the identification of semes not yet identified” (Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 122), which suggest to me that the telling metaphor can produce a realization or sense of ideas not already known. Eco’s discussion is dense with pseudo-mathematic notation, but the idea that a metaphor that is not closed can prompt the identification of a new meaning is a powerful one.

More recently, I came across this remark by David Gelernter in his essay “Machines that Will Think and Feel” that metaphors and the experiences they encapsulate are indexed, arrayed in memory, by emotion:

The poet Rilke compares the flight of a small bird across the evening sky to a crack in a smooth porcelain cup. How did he come up with that? Possibly by using the fact that these very different things made him feel the same way.
Emotion is a hugely powerful and personal encoding-and-summarizing function. It can comprehend a whole complex scene in one subtle feeling. Using that feeling as an index value, we can search out—among huge collections of candidates—the odd memory with a deep resemblance to the thing we have in mind. 

A striking or difficult metaphor generates an complex emotion that in turn points to another related thought curated by the same subtle emotion. In other words, it is how we feel about a metaphor that brings other metaphors, other possibilities of meaning to mind.

Are these two notions aligned? The best metaphor draws us both beyond ourself and within ourself to find a connection between things we could not previously describe. This connection is an authentic discovery, forged through memory and imagination; it extends beyond what has already been said, the given properties of the language, to see things differently, to say what we can't yet say, to connect and enrich our inner and outer worlds.

The Sign of the Rose - on Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, the scholar, semiotician, and writer, was a touchstone for me as both a theorist and practitioner, for what he wrote and how he thought about writing.

Some books, a handful over a lifetime perhaps, have the authentic power to change how we think, and I still remember reading my father's copy of The Name of the Rose while on holiday, in a car by the lake in the rain, through the long evenings in the High Country bach without TV, captivated by the mix of whimsey, mystery, medievalism, and ideas that this singular novel combined. The Name of the Rose is more than a mystery about a book, it traces the mystery of books themselves: how, why, and for what we might read, and why that matters. Its qualities are too much to contain in a single blog post, but it was compelling enough that I have long used The Name of the Rose as a measure of the kind of books I wanted to write: intelligent, atmospheric, and entertaining.

Years later, as I worked on my Masters dissertation on detective fiction, The Name of the Rose was an obvious choice, and it was then that I also began to delve into the other labyrinth of Eco's thought: semiotics and literary theory. His thinking was dense, sometimes mathematical, but I found in it also a rigor, not to mention a humor and humanity, absent from the linguistic vagaries and anti-humanism (not to mention the anti-realism) of the deconstructionists. Eco, to my mind, saw that the text was a machine for generating interpretations, that metaphor sparked in the friction between signifier and signified, that intertextuality was a labyrinth and that fictional worlds were grounded in a sort of encyclopedia. But that did not mean that any interpretation was viable, or that the map was also the terrain without reference to anything else. Perhaps because he was also an author, Eco's work was sensitive to the role of the reader and the writer, to the endless fascination and pleasures of story-making.

As I learnt from Eco, semiotics anchor reading and writing as clues anchor detection. And in honour of his methods, I will indulge in a little literary detection. The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) is a fine and memorable title, but there is very little reference to it in the actual text (which deals with monks, libraries, heresies, witchcraft, murder, and hermeneutics, among other things), so what does the title allude to? It is attractive to think of Juliet's remark (a rose by any other name) as a kind of appeal to realism, but this hardly connects with the mystery. On the other hand, we have a labyrinthine library guarded by a blind librarian whose name happens to be Borges. Now, Jorge Luis Borges wrote two stories about a rose, and though one, "The Rose of Paracelsus", serves our purpose only indirectly, the other, "A Yellow Rose", ends on the same note of skepticism as The Name of the Rose:

Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

The writer's rose, the semiotician's sign, the detective's clue: they refer to things but do not capture them, they are hints, allusions, pointers. Writing is not a mirror of the world, which persists beyond words, but our faltering attempt to trace it, the only knowledge we have to hold on to.

Farewell, maestro!

On genre fiction

Some remarks by the inestimable M. John Harrison on his blog propose that in the crowded market of genre writing, which ranges from fantasy and science fiction to mystery, history, horror, and crime, our writer's consciousness that we are writing within a genre (and presumably to a formula) leads us to strive too hard:

Why are genre writers so desperate to convince? Treat ’em mean keep ’em keen seems to be lost advice. The result is chapter after opening chapter of needy, to which the experienced reader is only going to react with contempt.

Readers, asserts Harrison,

know the weakness of your position. They’ve passed the groaning tables at the front of the shop. They’ve heard all your desperate lines.... What else can you show them? Even as they ask they’re walking on by, looking for someone who knows the product but has the dignity not to oversell it. 

The point has resonance. The commercial genres make for crowded shelves. Some writers are so attached to replicating what most succeeds in the genre (I'm thinking of epic fantasy) that they come only to replicate the experience they believe the reader most wants: the fantastical becomes routine. But other mysteries, like detection, seem to satisfy only in the reiteration of certain stages and tropes: the murder, the investigation, the reveal.

I've been tinkering for a long time with what might be called the fluid boundary between genre fiction and literature. What can you achieve within the bounds of genre, and what are the limits? Can a detective's story also read like a novel? Can a novel enclose a mystery without losing its other qualities? It's important to bear in mind that literary fiction, as defined by an emphasis on complex characterization, on realistic settings and action, on aesthetic language, is itself a genre, with only a marginal claim on preeminence.

What is the writing problem here? If it's a problem with writing to the formula, of adhering too closely to the conventions in the hope that recognition will equal sales in a saturated marketplace, then that's a worthy and valid challenge. But I wonder about the bigger question: I was once asked what happens when the detective becomes "novelistic"? Would the mystery seize to function or capture our interest if, for example, if the detective became a fully rounded character, no longer bound to the principle of investigation? What if, for example, we only cared about Commander Dalgliesh for his poetry?

But I think the question only holds if we valorize some quality of the literary genre as superior to the qualities of other genres, and seek that to the exclusion of others, which leads us into the same formulaic round as before. So Harrison's answer, knowing the product and not overselling it, keeping ourselves open to the challenge of writing well while quietly acknowledging whatever conventions we choose, is at once our answer and our first task.

And so, for what it's worth, here are the first lines of A Hangman for Ghosts:

A woman was shrieking in the cells when the hangman and the surgeon met inside the gate of old Sydney Gaol.

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you

This is an intriguing review, of a book on the role of the weather in English arts and literature. I've always had a soft spot for literary atmosphere, from Dickens's fog and mud onwards. Readers of The Raven's Seal will know that winter and summer, snow, shine, and cloud, all have a role in that novel also. It's easy to mock the pathetic fallacy in fiction, but I find myself falling back on what you might call the soft pathetic fallacy. Setting, tone, atmosphere count heavily for a reader's sense of immersion, and weather bears on us and alters mood and perception in a singularly direct, sensory way. This is a vital tool in the descriptive writer's toolkit.

Of course, not every funeral takes place in the rain, and lovers don't always meet in storms or sunshine, but in A Hangman for Ghosts, the weight of the antipodean summer stands in for the oppressive machinery of the prison colony administration, while the bright light of the sun only serves to make the shadows of murder darker.

Go Set a Watchman - not a review

This is not a review of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's puzzling late-career publication of an early-career manuscript. Like many, I read To Kill a Mockingbird decades ago, in high school, but like the rest of a small set of mythic texts, it stays with you, and subtly colours your other readings of the type.

What saddens and puzzles me, as it surely does other readers, is the way this work has been presented as a discovery, a sequel, a new work by an admired author. Indeed, some readers have been so disappointed, they have been offered refunds.

There is nothing wrong with publishing early drafts, manuscripts, even notes, from a major author. We have a large body of Tolkien's work, published posthumously, from the fine and moving The Children of Hurin to the meandering collection of notes and drafts that form The History of Middle Earth. But these works are read and understood as drafts, ideas, part of a developmental and creative process.

The difficulty here is that, setting aside the dubious circumstances of an elderly writer abruptly discovering her enthusiasm for a manuscript she set aside decades before, the marketing and presentation of Go Set a Watchman suggest continuity where none exists. This is particularly painful in the case of the presentation of Atticus Finch, shown as a decent and honourable man in Mockingbird and a bigot in Watchman. To suggest a continuity here is to dishonour the reader's relationship with the characters of Mockingbird, whatever the merits of the individual works.

Understood as a draft or a precursor, there is surely an interest in the recent release, but how can we unfold the complex ethics of the relationship between author, reader, publisher, and character here?

First and last

I started writing the last chapter of A Hangman for Ghosts. But given that the last chapter of a murder mystery is necessarily that first one that the author devised, and that the rest of the writing process is selectively concealing and revealing the nature of this chapter, does this mean that I really started writing this chapter first, and it has simply taken the longest to finish?

Mystery and stupidity

This is an odd topic for a longish post, but as the end of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts draws near, as an ambiguous detective hunts down the conclusion of an intricate and ambivalent case, I've had cause to consider the nature of stupidity, as a theme of the novel and in society.

By stupidity, I don't mean simple, individual foolishness, but consistent, willed idiocy in grave matters of public life, from the spectacular boorishness of a New Zealand talk-radio host attacking a respected writer for disloyalty to – of all things – the government; to the exceptional callousness of the Australian Prime Minister, who refuses to prevent the further brutalisation of children held in detention and instead moves to change the subject; to rewriting the charter of a respected university to diminish truth and enquiry, to – most dangerous of all – admitting the reality of global climate change while not recognising the human cause.

In many of these cases, from the cruelty of Mr Abbott to putting humanity and the planet at risk, there is an element of harm, as cruelty and stupidity go hand in hand, even as there is also a violent disrespect for persons and their good sense in the other instances. Of course, folly, bigotry, self-interest, and deceit are nothing new – unsurprising, in fact – but what is worrying is that this stupidity has become naked and shameless, that there is no attempt to reason or persuade, only a bald assertion that should be as embarrassing to the speaker as it is irritating to the audience. Was there not a time when political leaders, rightly or wrongly, would at least attempt to persuade us of their case, on whatever grounds?

How is this related to mystery? Because I think that in a good mystery there is a satisfaction in the discovery that truth can be found, that the detective, whether a private individual or an official, can use reason and observation and imagination to track down the real facts of the matter. In this way, the mystery narrative schools us or engages us in a certain kind of thinking. By the same token, the dark forces the detective might confront, malice and crime, are aligned with stupidity as well as the fog of circumstance. Hence, in A Hangman for Ghosts, in the harsh environment of the Australian penal colony or on the doorstep of the empire, my reluctant investigator, an outsider even in exile, must confront official stupidity as well as the complexity of the crime, because this kind of stupidity is about preserving the order of the system rather than justice.

Which brings me back, from another direction, to my first point. Just as propaganda in a totalitarian society is not about reality but bullying and demeaning the subject, official stupidity is not about the facts or even reasons, but about muddying the waters, creating confusion in the hopes that confusion seeds doubt, not to sway the majority by argument but to target the wavering few by obfuscation. As such, stupidity is the great red herring, the concealer, the distraction from who is guilty.

Eleanor Catton was subjected to a stupid personal attack because she demurred, mildly, to act as a cheerleader for a New Zealand government she thought at odds with her values. The response to her in some media shows that on the contrary, her writer's role as critic, conscience, and doubter is even more vital.