Not Quite a Guide
Some books on a theme
Why I Write by George Orwell, On Writing by Stephen King and The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Books about writing are mostly useless. They are either written by people who cannot write and who are selling you a bill of goods, or they are written by people who can, but whose advice is so general as to be worthless. The latter type: tragic cases. Their words are wrapped up in good style, but they are so often lacking, sadly lacking, in things of importance which can be actually taught to readers.
I read as many books about writing as I can be bothered to read, which roughly means I read one every half-dozen years. These three are enjoyable – and for radically different reasons.
Stephen King’s other works don’t really appeal to me. I think Carrie has some interesting stylistic quirks: I am a great fan of formats, and the retrospective pseudo-academic monograph format is an enjoyable one. But otherwise, I find King’s plots have made one or two great movies, yet otherwise fail to excite me. That doesn’t matter. On Writing is not a King novel and it’s also not really about writing at all: it’s the classic American book admixture of part self-help, part memoir – and yet, this one actually works, folks. It actually works.
I enjoyed reading about King’s childhood – how his obsession with the sick and twisted grew out of fear and not fun. He created little scrapbooks of the serial killers active when he was a boy not because he admired them, but because he wanted to know to look out for guys who looked like that. The scared little boy in all of us: morbidly curious, but not through malice. Through amazement that people can be like that. That they can pose such a threat.
I cannot say I liked the portion of the book which dealt with King’s horrific accident, either (he was struck by a van and it is a miracle he survived), but it was written with great detachment, almost abstraction. When King notes, completely flatly and without embroidery, those moments when, on the way to the ambulance, on the medical trolley, he screamed out in pain from his injuries, the reader winces. This is good work.
Steven Pinker’s book, of course, is different. Not pseudo-academic, like Carrie, but pseudo-popular. It’s printed as if on tissue paper and the text is minute. I recommend a magnifying glass, not to say binoculars. It is ridiculous. Not least because the content is so good, so clearly put, so interesting. Pinker’s thoughts on style do not benefit from being boiled down but a few of them are worth copying down.
He concedes that people often write badly because they have misunderstood what the reader really has to know – what the reader needs, desperately needs, from them. The reader does not want hedging, does not want a million citations, does not want an acknowledgement of the ‘complexity’ of the issue at hand (and the difficulty in solving it when so many other wonderful scholars have already had such a good go), but instead something definite and precise.
Most academics can neither be definite nor precise. Lawyers can be both but they love to mystify. Advertising men, marketing guys, they want to be clear on why you should pay them and buy the things they’re selling, but tastefully vague about everything else. How many instalments you might run up if you sign on to that plan; what the long-term health risks of that product might be; whether you’d be better off going down the street to another vendor. Those kinds of things.
Pinker makes the case for an idea thought up by other people: that you ought to try to write with ‘classic style’. That you ought to tell a story, with a beginning, middle and end, even when communicating dry facts. That you ought to consider the ordering of information, so that one statement naturally tees up another. You’d ideally like your reader, interested and primed though she might be, not to notice that she is being force-fed her greens. So elegantly did you serve them up, so nicely has the first course done its job, so enticing is the promise of pudding to come.
And finally, the Penguin selection of George Orwell includes some of his better-known essays although nowhere near the majority of the really stunning ones. ‘Why I Write’ itself is an interesting thing: an examination of the obsessives. Orwell flatly notes that for those of us who cannot help it, who have to express every thought in words, it’s more a compulsion than a gift to the world. We see things and they are interesting to us; we are self-conscious, yes, vain enough to think we might as well have a crack at getting them down on paper. There’s no helping us. We’re hopeless cases. So we may as well spend our lives trying to say something worthwhile. It’s only fair.