Bob Marley
v/s
Bob Dylan
v/s
me.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Some thoughts on technical writing
An email I wrote to someone a while ago; ended up never sending it (thank God). Makes for better reading in the blog-context.
Dear Ms. S,
I am --, a graduate student of Mechanical Engineering here at UT. This email is to inform you that I would be interested in judging the Braden Writing Competition.
It would perhaps be appropriate here to speak of what I have learnt about writing so far.
The right verb is one of the most important components of a good piece of technical writing. All activities entailed by research possess an accurate verbal description; "research is *conducted*", "experiments are *performed*", "projects are *undertaken*", goals are *identified* and then *fulfilled*, and references *highlight* important concepts. The correct verb reassures the reader of the writer's authority and his attention to the topic being discussed.
Less important are adjectives, except as qualifiers to critical nouns. Decorative adjectives are to be generally avoided, and depending on the register of the written piece may be unnecessary (register is discussed below). Adverbs are even worse than adjectives, and must be excised from the written piece unless they add significantly to its semantical content (for example, the previous sentence could have done without the adverb 'significantly').
Register -- by which I mean the tone of the written piece -- is also important. A good example to take is this email, which is written in a formal, rather prim tone. In such a piece of writing, certain forms of sentences must always be absent. I cannot here speak of my 'awesome experiences writing for my college mag dude!', or how I feel that 'UT is freakin' great! :) ' More correctly, I must be able to maintain throughout my piece the tone I choose to adopt at its beginning. Any register is acceptable as long as it is consistent.
So much for style; what of substance? I am sure that the students who participate in this contest will possess a degree of intellectual maturity matched by few peers. Their thought processes are no doubt advanced enough to develop complex but well constructed solutions to a posed problem. What remains to be seen, however, is whether they are capable of communicating their arguments in a manner that is both efficient and expressive. I believe that style is the key to this particular mystery; that it must (ideally) elevate the substance and (at the very least) not vitiate it. Style is the unseen mediator of the written word.
I don't have much else to say. I do apologize, though, for the tone of this email; I began with 'Dear Ms.S', instead of perhaps (first name deleted) (which would have been presumptuous anyway) and the rest of the email followed in a similar vein.
Regards,
--
Dear Ms. S,
I am --, a graduate student of Mechanical Engineering here at UT. This email is to inform you that I would be interested in judging the Braden Writing Competition.
It would perhaps be appropriate here to speak of what I have learnt about writing so far.
The right verb is one of the most important components of a good piece of technical writing. All activities entailed by research possess an accurate verbal description; "research is *conducted*", "experiments are *performed*", "projects are *undertaken*", goals are *identified* and then *fulfilled*, and references *highlight* important concepts. The correct verb reassures the reader of the writer's authority and his attention to the topic being discussed.
Less important are adjectives, except as qualifiers to critical nouns. Decorative adjectives are to be generally avoided, and depending on the register of the written piece may be unnecessary (register is discussed below). Adverbs are even worse than adjectives, and must be excised from the written piece unless they add significantly to its semantical content (for example, the previous sentence could have done without the adverb 'significantly').
Register -- by which I mean the tone of the written piece -- is also important. A good example to take is this email, which is written in a formal, rather prim tone. In such a piece of writing, certain forms of sentences must always be absent. I cannot here speak of my 'awesome experiences writing for my college mag dude!', or how I feel that 'UT is freakin' great! :) ' More correctly, I must be able to maintain throughout my piece the tone I choose to adopt at its beginning. Any register is acceptable as long as it is consistent.
So much for style; what of substance? I am sure that the students who participate in this contest will possess a degree of intellectual maturity matched by few peers. Their thought processes are no doubt advanced enough to develop complex but well constructed solutions to a posed problem. What remains to be seen, however, is whether they are capable of communicating their arguments in a manner that is both efficient and expressive. I believe that style is the key to this particular mystery; that it must (ideally) elevate the substance and (at the very least) not vitiate it. Style is the unseen mediator of the written word.
I don't have much else to say. I do apologize, though, for the tone of this email; I began with 'Dear Ms.S', instead of perhaps (first name deleted) (which would have been presumptuous anyway) and the rest of the email followed in a similar vein.
Regards,
--
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
A belated review of Slow Man
Slow Man is the first book I've read that attempts to be about authorial intervention. The cardinal rule in literature is, of course, that the writer must not intervene, that is to say he must only observe; any judgment he has upon the state of things must be suspended to service the 'nobler' cause of empathy. His creations must each be equally human (or sub-human), and no one should be deified (or demonized) relative to another.
A related goal in writing is one of enumeration. Anything and anyone can be the subject of a book (in fact this is also more generally true of art); however, the more ordinary the subject, the harder it is to write a book about it. For example, a theme like longing and alienation in a foreign country is easier to write about than one that is based upon the inactivity and enervation that accompany a dead-end job; the reason is partly because it is easier to degenerate into literality when confronted with the latter (theme). Authors usually settle for an easier theme and use arbitrarily abstruse symbolism to avoid becoming too direct (This is also perhaps why most stories are about falling in and out of love.) The latter option, one of writing about a difficult theme, is rarely chosen.
Except in Slow Man. The story -- Paul Rayment, 58, loses his leg in a skirmish with a car and is forever consigned to the ministrations of various nurses. He abruptly falls in love with his third one (after firing the first two), Marijana, and is forced to deal with his inability to present a masculine enough disposition to be of any interest to her. There is also the matter of age; Paul is a few decades older than M., and is confronted with the conflicting emotions of paternal and coeval love. He redirects his fatherly feelings towards M.'s children (offering even to pay for her son's education); his love for Marijana, however, is one that appears destined to be unrequited and (worse) inexpressible.
So far, pretty standard fare. Here's what changes everything -- the intervention of a vague (godlike?) figure named Elizabeth Costello, who tells Paul that he 'came to her', and summarizes, in an incongruous conversation, the state of his feelings towards Marijana. The fact that Paul has never seen this person before occurs to both himself and us, and for a time we wonder if Coetzee has placed God himself in the book, for whatever reason. This feeling is strengthened as Elizabeth continues to tell Paul things that he thought were only known to himself. We become wary of an impending gimmick.
However, Elizabeth becomes more ordinary as the book progresses, almost as if taking on Paul's own diffidence. She begins to talk more like a human being and less like someone from up on high, even remarking once that she would die of the cold if Paul threw her out of the house. She begins to exhort Paul to action, telling him that he must obey his whims but at the same time showing him how his brand of love is quite common, how the situation he finds himself in is itself quite common. Meanwhile Paul has confessed to Marijana that he loves her, but that his love is pure (something that he knows isn't true).
(There are a lot of other things that happen too; this is a novel densely populated with ideas and themes, and I could go on and on about the other kinds of symbolism in the novel, but I do also have to get up in the morning tomorrow.)
The answer, as it comes to us by degrees, is that it is not God who is in the book, it is the author. Elizabeth represents Coetzee; she is his alter-ego in some sense, like Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Unlike Zuckerman, however, she is aware that she is in a story, and tries to make the story hers. She tries to change Paul's commonplace sentiment into something more plot-worthy, something with more passion. Towards the end of the novel, she tells him:
and:
and:
Her efforts, however, are in vain; Paul is destined for a bathetic non-ending, with his situation quite the same as it was before. There is no last-minute passion, no happy lovers uniting, no revelations of a lurid nature. Paul simply continues to be what he is: lonely, old, handicapped, and incapable of action.
The role of Elizabeth, when seen this way, becomes clear: she represents the author's eternal longing for drama counteracting with the indifference of real life. Because we as human beings spend our days chained to the static of the everyday, because we have a natural affinity towards the certain, because we like to have a metaphorical roof over our heads, we are boring to the tyro artist; our lives cannot be placed in a plot with an artificially satisfying ending. An artist's response to this is to change himself; he understands that his characters need to be more real, and that endings must not (for example) contain easy solutions to difficult situations. He begins to understand that problems must be (as Roger Ebert says) dealt with and not solved. He undergoes a transformation.
Slow Man is also about this transformation. The change in Elizabeth from a pseudo-godlike entity who appears to dictate Paul's life into a person who is more or less like Paul is similar to the change an author undergoes during his maturation, when he realizes that he has no control over his characters, and that the only thing he can do is observe them as they behave in ways that are dictated by who they are, rather than who he (the author) deems they should be.
Which brings me to one final observation: Elizabeth is in fact not Coetzee, is not an alter-ego. We can think of her as such for the purposes of our argument, but in fact Coetzee is a much better author than Elizabeth can ever hope to be, because he understands something that E. does not; that he is not God.
PS: Wrote this in a hurry. Will come back and edit possibly tomorrow.
A related goal in writing is one of enumeration. Anything and anyone can be the subject of a book (in fact this is also more generally true of art); however, the more ordinary the subject, the harder it is to write a book about it. For example, a theme like longing and alienation in a foreign country is easier to write about than one that is based upon the inactivity and enervation that accompany a dead-end job; the reason is partly because it is easier to degenerate into literality when confronted with the latter (theme). Authors usually settle for an easier theme and use arbitrarily abstruse symbolism to avoid becoming too direct (This is also perhaps why most stories are about falling in and out of love.) The latter option, one of writing about a difficult theme, is rarely chosen.
Except in Slow Man. The story -- Paul Rayment, 58, loses his leg in a skirmish with a car and is forever consigned to the ministrations of various nurses. He abruptly falls in love with his third one (after firing the first two), Marijana, and is forced to deal with his inability to present a masculine enough disposition to be of any interest to her. There is also the matter of age; Paul is a few decades older than M., and is confronted with the conflicting emotions of paternal and coeval love. He redirects his fatherly feelings towards M.'s children (offering even to pay for her son's education); his love for Marijana, however, is one that appears destined to be unrequited and (worse) inexpressible.
So far, pretty standard fare. Here's what changes everything -- the intervention of a vague (godlike?) figure named Elizabeth Costello, who tells Paul that he 'came to her', and summarizes, in an incongruous conversation, the state of his feelings towards Marijana. The fact that Paul has never seen this person before occurs to both himself and us, and for a time we wonder if Coetzee has placed God himself in the book, for whatever reason. This feeling is strengthened as Elizabeth continues to tell Paul things that he thought were only known to himself. We become wary of an impending gimmick.
However, Elizabeth becomes more ordinary as the book progresses, almost as if taking on Paul's own diffidence. She begins to talk more like a human being and less like someone from up on high, even remarking once that she would die of the cold if Paul threw her out of the house. She begins to exhort Paul to action, telling him that he must obey his whims but at the same time showing him how his brand of love is quite common, how the situation he finds himself in is itself quite common. Meanwhile Paul has confessed to Marijana that he loves her, but that his love is pure (something that he knows isn't true).
(There are a lot of other things that happen too; this is a novel densely populated with ideas and themes, and I could go on and on about the other kinds of symbolism in the novel, but I do also have to get up in the morning tomorrow.)
The answer, as it comes to us by degrees, is that it is not God who is in the book, it is the author. Elizabeth represents Coetzee; she is his alter-ego in some sense, like Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Unlike Zuckerman, however, she is aware that she is in a story, and tries to make the story hers. She tries to change Paul's commonplace sentiment into something more plot-worthy, something with more passion. Towards the end of the novel, she tells him:
Remember, Paul, it is passion that makes the world go around. You're not analphabetic, you must know that.
and:
I merely plead that you look into your heart and see whether you cannot find within your tortoise variety of passion to accelerate your wooing of Marijana.
and:
Come on. Do something. Do anything. Surprise me.
Her efforts, however, are in vain; Paul is destined for a bathetic non-ending, with his situation quite the same as it was before. There is no last-minute passion, no happy lovers uniting, no revelations of a lurid nature. Paul simply continues to be what he is: lonely, old, handicapped, and incapable of action.
The role of Elizabeth, when seen this way, becomes clear: she represents the author's eternal longing for drama counteracting with the indifference of real life. Because we as human beings spend our days chained to the static of the everyday, because we have a natural affinity towards the certain, because we like to have a metaphorical roof over our heads, we are boring to the tyro artist; our lives cannot be placed in a plot with an artificially satisfying ending. An artist's response to this is to change himself; he understands that his characters need to be more real, and that endings must not (for example) contain easy solutions to difficult situations. He begins to understand that problems must be (as Roger Ebert says) dealt with and not solved. He undergoes a transformation.
Slow Man is also about this transformation. The change in Elizabeth from a pseudo-godlike entity who appears to dictate Paul's life into a person who is more or less like Paul is similar to the change an author undergoes during his maturation, when he realizes that he has no control over his characters, and that the only thing he can do is observe them as they behave in ways that are dictated by who they are, rather than who he (the author) deems they should be.
Which brings me to one final observation: Elizabeth is in fact not Coetzee, is not an alter-ego. We can think of her as such for the purposes of our argument, but in fact Coetzee is a much better author than Elizabeth can ever hope to be, because he understands something that E. does not; that he is not God.
PS: Wrote this in a hurry. Will come back and edit possibly tomorrow.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Reality and truth
I don't usually read novel introductions. There's something about the self-consciousness of the established author that never fails to engage my scorn. Yes, you have figured it out, Mr. Writer, figured out how people work, how your book came to be; why it was written, why your story is important. Now get on with it.
But the first few lines of the introduction to Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness made me pause --
I found myself nodding at these observations. The author was about to embark upon what I sensed was a flouting of these well-established tropes; was about to tell us how, in her novels at least, one would not find such an obvious adherence to tradition.
The paragraphs appeared to echo my opinion of good science-fiction, the sort that is purveyed by the Neal Stephensons of this world rather than the Robert Heinleins. The limitations of the mind's extrapolative ability are never so stark as when they attempt to enumerate the singular anatomy of an alien race, say, or describe to us the horrific nature of said alien race's motives. The invocation of disgust is usually all that the 'traditional' horror science fiction story aims for; such things as dread, fear, awe -- these are beyond its modest capabilities.
This has more to do with our own reaction to the material than its inherent deficiencies. The seasoned (science fiction) reader brings to the reading table a degree of cynicism, of dubiousness; his attitude towards the work before him is more along the lines of 'Let's see what you've got' than the 'Science fiction is the best!' Most authors are aware of this, of course, aware of what is sometimes called the burden of influence, and try to defy its effects on their writing. The results vary; some writers get away with a superficial originality that conceals the ordinary nature of the plot, and some cannot transcend their desire for originality to produce anything worthwhile. It is the rare science fiction author that can achieve that balance of familiarity and incongruity that provokes in the reader the visceral thrill of another space, another time.
And so it was that I continued nodding my head, appreciating the author's insight. But then she proceeded to say this --
She has jumped here, I think, to the wrong conclusion. It is in some sense true that most novelists lie, and one metric of their relative skill is the method in which such lies are perpetuated and the degree to which we -- the readers -- accept these lies. But -- as I shall proceed to demonstrate -- the lies themselves form no part of the fiction.
At any given point in time we have open to us many possibilities. I can choose to place the lid on the stewpot, or choose not to; I can accept this invitation to a party at a friend's place, or decline; I can buy this excellent book today, or postpone the inevitable. These possibilities, explored and unexplored, form an invisible framework of realities that influence our existences in strange undefinable ways. Our actions are meaningful, but no less meaningful is our inaction, our impotence; a day in our lives can be -- indeed, and is -- clarified as much by the things we did as the things we did not, or could not do.
We can, however, exist in only one reality; possibilities fold up as choices are made, and our arrival at a point is defined by these choices. What may have transpired had I not chosen to alienate my parents, what I may have achieved had I simply worked with assiduity, what might have happened if that car had swerved a tiny bit to the left -- such questions cannot be indulged in. We are here, we are now; nothing else matters; nothing else can. Our impoverished realities are the only ones that we are allowed to inhabit.
Except, of course, in a novel. It is the novelist's job to invent a new reality for his characters, one which could have transpired, one that is plausible. He says, 'Imagine if ---', and we do. We suspend our disbelief to allow the author to establish his premise. In so far as context is concerned, we indulge the novelist's every whim. This new world that the novelist has constructed is not, as Ms. Le Guin suggests, 'a tissue of lies' -- it is instead an exploration of what could have been. Perhaps hobbits could have existed, perhaps the Sun does have a sister star that orbits a few thousand AU away; who am I to say that it is not, it could not have been? Who am I to say that it is all lies?
(An inevitable question is -- why? Why do we need a separate reality to define us? Those among us that feel the need to deplore escapism will no doubt claim that this is in fact that selfsame abominable quality asserting itself -- where is the point in escaping, they say, when we have in the end to return to our own world? But this is both misguided and wrong; misguided because it is human to want to escape, to want to leave; wrong because escapism is only the specious reason, the surface beneath the surface. The real reason we fictionalize things is because our own context precludes perspective. We cannot understand what happens to us when we are surrounded by ourselves, when our world is filled with so much that is close to us. It is the author's job to achieve distance through artifice; it is ours to understand this achievement, and in so doing come closer to understanding ourselves.)
The fiction in a novel, then, is not lies -- it is reality. More specifically, it is a reality, one in which the author can tell the truth more comfortably. The telling of the truth, as I have discussed in numerous other posts, is the primary duty of the writer; it is his calling. (Whether or not he succeeds in confronting the truth is another matter.) And so it is that we accept the talking rabbit and the itinerant mouse; we empathize as much with our three-fingered protagonists as we do with our five-fingered ones. The fact that the worlds in which such things exist are in fact impossible -- in the limited sense that everything that is not possible is impossible -- does not bother us, because something inside us understands; knows that the truth is not anthropic.
But the first few lines of the introduction to Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness made me pause --
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here and now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. If this goes on, this is what will happen. A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation.
I found myself nodding at these observations. The author was about to embark upon what I sensed was a flouting of these well-established tropes; was about to tell us how, in her novels at least, one would not find such an obvious adherence to tradition.
This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens.... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
The paragraphs appeared to echo my opinion of good science-fiction, the sort that is purveyed by the Neal Stephensons of this world rather than the Robert Heinleins. The limitations of the mind's extrapolative ability are never so stark as when they attempt to enumerate the singular anatomy of an alien race, say, or describe to us the horrific nature of said alien race's motives. The invocation of disgust is usually all that the 'traditional' horror science fiction story aims for; such things as dread, fear, awe -- these are beyond its modest capabilities.
This has more to do with our own reaction to the material than its inherent deficiencies. The seasoned (science fiction) reader brings to the reading table a degree of cynicism, of dubiousness; his attitude towards the work before him is more along the lines of 'Let's see what you've got' than the 'Science fiction is the best!' Most authors are aware of this, of course, aware of what is sometimes called the burden of influence, and try to defy its effects on their writing. The results vary; some writers get away with a superficial originality that conceals the ordinary nature of the plot, and some cannot transcend their desire for originality to produce anything worthwhile. It is the rare science fiction author that can achieve that balance of familiarity and incongruity that provokes in the reader the visceral thrill of another space, another time.
And so it was that I continued nodding my head, appreciating the author's insight. But then she proceeded to say this --
[...]A novelist's business is lying.
"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, when we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even
become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
She has jumped here, I think, to the wrong conclusion. It is in some sense true that most novelists lie, and one metric of their relative skill is the method in which such lies are perpetuated and the degree to which we -- the readers -- accept these lies. But -- as I shall proceed to demonstrate -- the lies themselves form no part of the fiction.
At any given point in time we have open to us many possibilities. I can choose to place the lid on the stewpot, or choose not to; I can accept this invitation to a party at a friend's place, or decline; I can buy this excellent book today, or postpone the inevitable. These possibilities, explored and unexplored, form an invisible framework of realities that influence our existences in strange undefinable ways. Our actions are meaningful, but no less meaningful is our inaction, our impotence; a day in our lives can be -- indeed, and is -- clarified as much by the things we did as the things we did not, or could not do.
We can, however, exist in only one reality; possibilities fold up as choices are made, and our arrival at a point is defined by these choices. What may have transpired had I not chosen to alienate my parents, what I may have achieved had I simply worked with assiduity, what might have happened if that car had swerved a tiny bit to the left -- such questions cannot be indulged in. We are here, we are now; nothing else matters; nothing else can. Our impoverished realities are the only ones that we are allowed to inhabit.
Except, of course, in a novel. It is the novelist's job to invent a new reality for his characters, one which could have transpired, one that is plausible. He says, 'Imagine if ---', and we do. We suspend our disbelief to allow the author to establish his premise. In so far as context is concerned, we indulge the novelist's every whim. This new world that the novelist has constructed is not, as Ms. Le Guin suggests, 'a tissue of lies' -- it is instead an exploration of what could have been. Perhaps hobbits could have existed, perhaps the Sun does have a sister star that orbits a few thousand AU away; who am I to say that it is not, it could not have been? Who am I to say that it is all lies?
(An inevitable question is -- why? Why do we need a separate reality to define us? Those among us that feel the need to deplore escapism will no doubt claim that this is in fact that selfsame abominable quality asserting itself -- where is the point in escaping, they say, when we have in the end to return to our own world? But this is both misguided and wrong; misguided because it is human to want to escape, to want to leave; wrong because escapism is only the specious reason, the surface beneath the surface. The real reason we fictionalize things is because our own context precludes perspective. We cannot understand what happens to us when we are surrounded by ourselves, when our world is filled with so much that is close to us. It is the author's job to achieve distance through artifice; it is ours to understand this achievement, and in so doing come closer to understanding ourselves.)
The fiction in a novel, then, is not lies -- it is reality. More specifically, it is a reality, one in which the author can tell the truth more comfortably. The telling of the truth, as I have discussed in numerous other posts, is the primary duty of the writer; it is his calling. (Whether or not he succeeds in confronting the truth is another matter.) And so it is that we accept the talking rabbit and the itinerant mouse; we empathize as much with our three-fingered protagonists as we do with our five-fingered ones. The fact that the worlds in which such things exist are in fact impossible -- in the limited sense that everything that is not possible is impossible -- does not bother us, because something inside us understands; knows that the truth is not anthropic.
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