Pulp Fiction

Like a dog intent on a squirrel up a tree, linguists have been trying in recent years to figure out just how it is we read. Their conclusions, predictably for the social sciences, are either outright wrong or common sense. Nevertheless, the obvious facts they have stumbled over in their charmingly pedantic way offer some useful tips for writers.

They find we do not read letter by letter, or word by word, or even sentence by sentence. We no doubt do as we need to, but we also read by pattern recognition. We anticipate what comes next.

A famous example is the phrase:

Valleyfield in the
the spring.

Most people will read that without the second “the.”

Or this example:

It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe

Who knew? Besides everybody. But have we as writers thought through what this means?

Kintsch and van Dijk (you can’t beat the Dutch as academics; in my experience, they stand a half a sliced door above the rest) suggest that this is also true at higher levels: at the level of the paragraph or, in editing terms, at the structural level.

This is the appeal of genre writing. If writing is a tool to communicate, genre writing is the best writing, because the predictability allows us to dispense with the more mechanical parts of reading, and concentrate on the meaning.

If we are reading a medical paper, for example, that is following the conventions of that form, we can extract what we need efficiently. Or a technical manual; or a news story. We can read it at a higher cognitive level; less of our attention needs to be occupied by annoying little individual words and letters and sentence constructions.

This is the opposite of what most writers, most editors, and most writing instructors currently profess. Recall George Orwell’s famous advice, in “Politics and the English Language”: “Never use a word or phrase you are accustomed to seeing in print.” We look down our bespectacled noses at genre writing. Genre writing is for hacks and dummies. Romance novels, cowboy stories, detective novels, comic books. Pulp fiction.

There’s a collection online, at the Internet Archive.

But myths are also highly generic—more so that these modern forms. And myths express the deepest thoughts of most cultures. Poetry is more generic, has more rules, than prose; Shakespeare preferred the sonnet, a highly mannered medium. And he was a decent writer. Classical Greek tragedy, surely as deep as any writing, followed strict rules approaching a ritual performance, Aristotle’s “three unities.” For a more prosaic example, philosophical writing is always concerned with clearly defining terms, and then using them consistently. Each philosophical essay may amount to its own genre, but it follows strict rules so that the thought is not obscured by any unnecessary novelties.

That heavily generic writing also works for low-level readers simply shows that its communicative value is absolute. For the marginally literate, or for children listening to a fairy tale, it works for all the same reasons that it works with Aristotle and Shakespeare: it allows them to assimilate the information efficiently, to participate in the story or the emotion or the idea, without getting bogged down by the mechanics of reading, in which they may be unskilled.

And for all the rest of us, generic writing is the most enjoyable, for exactly the same reason. We can get fully engaged in the story, and with our own imagination, without being distracted.

Introducing some unnecessary novelty is like letting the boom microphone appear in the shot; it kills the willing suspension of disbelief.

Orwell is close to having a point, with his cliché against cliché. The problem is not the use of a stock, familiar phrase. The problem is that, when a phrase becomes too familiar, it starts being resorted to unthinkingly, and so without meaning or even incorrectly. That is what grates, and what impedes communication. Every night is not “a dark and stormy night.” But if you want to tell the tale of a haunted house, then it ought to be.

Every once and again, some writer comes out with something generic and good, violating all the academic norms by following all the norms, and makes a big splash. That’s what JK Rowling did with Harry Potter. That’s Stephen King. That’s JRR Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. That’s Star Wars; that’s Indiana Jones. These do not experiment with or violate norms, or treat them ironically; they follow them well. And readers appreciate it.

For a narrative, genre allows us to enter more fully into the fully imagined world.

The fact that “sophisticated,” “serious” writers do not write this way goes a long way towards explaining why reading has become less popular. We have forgotten what good writing is, and are instead self-righteously scribbling inferior stuff, interesting only to other writers. Good writing is, by definition, what is easy and enjoyable to read. 

We have stumbled into this because, beginning at about the start of the 20th century, certainly by the 1920s, we came to idolize science as the crown and measure of all things. Accordingly, we got the notion that good writing should be like science, or like technology. James Joyce declared himself “the greatest engineer who ever lived.” Strunk and White compared an essay to a machine.

So literature should, like technology, be undergoing constant improvement. It must not rely on the tried and true. It must, like science, always be “experimental.”

Art does not work like that. That makes as much sense as inventing your own alphabet. Experiments might be useful in the writer’s private study, or among artists, but art as a whole does not progress. It is tied to eternal truths, eternal truths of human nature, and eternal things do not change. The tools of communication are relatively incidental, and the only issue is that they are clearly comprehended by both author and audience. There is a point at which that cannot be improved upon, and it can never be improved upon unilaterally. “Experiments” cannot work in actual communication, because any unexpected novelty reduces communication for the reader.

There may be times at which you want to inhibit communication in order to make a point; to jolt the reader out of a familiar and false way of thinking. But this will be the exception, not the rule.

James Joyce is a magnificent writer in detail. Nevertheless, he is unreadable.

Genre writing is the way to go.