On Cliche

 

Cliches often annoy me. They spread through the media like viruses. A few that are pandemic currently:

Literally
Not on my bingo card
Obviously
Is no exception
Spoiled for choice
, Indeed.
Again,
To be honest,
I’ve got to be honest
Awesome
So,

The modern style condemns cliché. George Orwell’s first rule for better writing is “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

I generally agree, and watch out for this in my own writing. Surely every journalist is taught not to use them. But these things spread due to laziness and haste. It is always easier to use a canned phrase than one you have invented on your own. And the need for speed in journalism makes them especially tempting.

However, Orwell’s rule can also be misapplied. He is primarily a journalist, and he is thinking of news and opinion writing. Different forms of writing follow different rules.

Fairy tales, for example, are all cliché, all the time. And I love them. The fantasy genre deeply offends me exactly because it tinkers with the conventions, and introduces novelties. Friendly trolls? Misunderstood witches? Balrogs? No, it is essential to fairyland that everything there is eternal, unchanging, and follows strict rules. This is Tir na Nog.

The Western is another such genre. I once compiled for classes the opening scenes of a variety of famous Western films, to make the point. They all began with the vista of a large empty landscape. Then you see a single rider approach a farm or settlement.

And, of course, they all end with that single rider disappearing into the sunset.

Similarly, I once found a very good summary of the necessary elements of the Blues—another such conservative form. As is folk music; full of timeless conventions.

The beauty of these forms is their sense of eternity. Reading them, you are back in the familiar land of your imagination.

Nor is a stock phrase even necessarily a fault in a news story. Orwell’s description fits any idiom, and idioms are a valuable level of language. They make discourse both more colourful and more friendly, as author and reader have a sense of shared knowledge and camaraderie. “He hit that one out of the ballpark.” “Blair was put on his back foot.” They are often bits of preserved wisdom and culture, worth passing on. 

The real problem, and what grates in the examples above, is when a phrase starts being leaned on when it is not appropriate to the message. This degrades the language, our ability to communicate, and the culture.

“Literally” is now almost always used to mean “metaphorically.”

“Not on my bingo card” is now a tiresomely cute way to express surprise. And it does not make sense as an expression of surprise. One is probably more surprised when a number is on one’s bingo card. It would make more sense as an expression of disappointment.

“Obviously,” especially in British English, is generally used when one is about to say something highly debatable. In other words, far from obvious.

“Is no exception” is often used in UK promotional bumpf as well as journalism. It may well be true, but it violates the basic principle of either advertising or news: that you write about the exception, not about what everybody already knows.

“Spoiled for choice” is another dead phrase commonly dropped into advertising copy, or travel writing. “Whether you like X or Y,” “Whether your interests range to V or Z.” are like. These phrases are applied to every destination, every shopping place, and are always more or less true. The immediate message to the reader is actually that this place offers nothing special or unique--only the choices you can get anywhere. Which is the opposite of what they mean to say.

Ending a sentence with “Indeed” is a common British verbal tic. “You are very welcome indeed.” The impression left by that extra word is that the speaker had to think twice about whether the listener really was welcome.

“Again,” to begin a sentence, is almost always used when the speaker has not actually said the thing previously. Or anything much like it.

“To be honest” or “I’ve got to be honest with you” or “To be completely honest” is a red flag that the next thing said will be a lie. If not, it is an open admission that the speaker is usually a lying when he speaks.

“Awesome” is now used as a consolation prize for anything underwhelming.

“So,” is a common verbal tic among press agent types and politicians to preface any response to a question. It implies that what it then said logically follows, and is usually used precisely because the answer they are about to give does not answer the question.

You no doubt have your own list of pet hates.

The Rage in Our Hearts

 

Asmodeus, the Demon of Wrath

I had been asked to review two short story manuscripts recently. Both had the same odd and disturbing flaw: they had the main character slaughter an animal, gratuitously, and in detail, early in the story. 

This did nothing to further the plot. Either incident could have been removed without affecting it; in fact, they distracted from it. 

If it was meant to establish character, it was bad practice: it alienated the reader from the protagonist. If the reader does not identify with the main character, they are no longer interested in what happens to them, and tune out. Even if you want to tell a sympathetic story of a killer, you start by showing them being nice to a puppy.

And what an odd thing for two random stories to have in common.

I suspect this shows what lurks in the hearts of men currently. When you compose a story, you start by letting your imagination run free. When these two authors did so, this is almost the first thing that came up.

Pent up male rage? That sounds plausible on its face, given how men are repressed currently. Both authors were young men. 

But rage does not work that way. It does not get stronger if not expressed. That’s Freud; Freud has been disproven. If you repress an emotion, it goes away. If you express it, it grows. Over time, it can become a settled vice—or virtue. 

Once it becomes a vice, it becomes part of our programming. When we let our minds go, it will come out, unbidden. Even, eventually, against our interest. It begins to seem to have a will of its own, which is why vices are traditionally imagined as demons. 

This is why, to be a good writer, you need to have nothing to hide; you need to be a fundamentally decent person. Artists are, in my personal experience, always naive innocents in person.

Yes, there are all those stories about bohemian types being libertines. I suspect this is to discredit the enterprise.  And often the writer or artist will play along with it, for cover. Jim Morrison was supposed to be the ultimate womanizer, for example. And yet—no paternity suits. I go with W.B. Yeats, who said you can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet, but you cannot do both. 

I think our society as a whole these days is nursing the demon of anger. It is behind all these claims of victimization and oppression. It is also nursing the demons of lust and pride. There are even parades.

The gravest sin any more is pointing out someone else’s sin.

The next worst sin is not sinning yourself.

And this may explain why the arts are moribund.

Mindfulness and Art

 

The creative writing text from which I am currently teaching advises that anyone who aspires to be a writer must develop “mindfulness”: meaning they must always be alert to exactly what is happening around them, mentally recording every sight and sound.

I think this is exactly wrong. And depressing. Real writers are incapable of doing this. Real writers are usually incapable of earning a driver’s license, because they cannot pay attention to what is happening around them. They live in their imagination.

The author gives an example to demonstrate her point, a “flash” essay chronicling a writer’s morning on her balcony watching a neighbour watering her plants. Only mildly interesting, not worth the time to read it: my primary impression as a reader is of self-indulgence. This is someone who thinks a thing is of immense importance simply because it happens to her.

“Realism” in art is a blind alley. 

Shakespeare is partially to blame for this misunderstanding. In Hamlet, he refers to art as “holding the mirror up to nature.” People assume this is a mandate for “realism,” for describing things just as they appear to our physical senses. Isn’t that what nature is? The physical world?

But of course, we do not need a mirror to see nature in this sense. We can look at it directly. Were this the point of art, there would be no point to art. 

Shakespeare here, as is clear in context, means “human nature.” Art holds the mirror up to our souls. “The play’s the thing/ With which to catch the conscience of a king.” Art shows truth, not mundane sense perceptions. Art should be unlike everyday life. Art is the escape from that. Art also should not be “self-expression”; it is the escape from self. 

Art should be vivid, not “realistic.” 

Consider Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis.” Has he ever had the opportunity to carefully observe what it would feel like to be a giant bug and to have many small legs that are difficult to control? Or crawling on the ceiling? Yet it is intensely vivid; we can imagine being Gregor Samsa ourselves. That is vividness, not realism. A thing is vivid if it appeals to the imagination.

Consider too fairy tales—the most enduring and popular of all literature. They never give authentic-sounding sensory detail. Some modern authors have tried to rewrite them in realistic terms—and the results are unreadable. One does not want to hear Cinderella contemplating a hangnail, or searching the prince’s palace for a toilet.

Sometimes verisimilitude to a common actual sensory experience helps make a passage vivid; usually not. Sometimes precise physical description is a means to this end; usually not. Certainly art should not editorialize or comment on the side; it should be visual, it should speak in images, not ideas: but that is not the same as sense perception. “Image” is the preserve of the imagination, not the senses. Art speaks through symbol and example, not discursively.

This is all also a misunderstanding of the originally Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Western materialists always reverse the meaning. This Western “mindfulness” is really emptying the mind of all thoughts--mindlessness. Anyone who aspires to be an arhat must learn to shut out what is going on in front of their eyes, and see instead with the mind’s eye. That’s why you sit still with your eyes closed. You shut out sensation, including the sensation of breathing or any ambient sounds, in order to ponder your memories and your imaginings; what Buddhism calls the “storehouse consciousness.”

Perhaps it is best to illustrate as a poem:

Mindfulness

The rain pings like loose change on the Chivas Regal sign across the street
Like the climax of a spaghetti Western
Heard through a drive-in speaker.
I do not know the dog sleeping mindfully at my feet
The karmic pinball machine has thrown us together for this moment
For reasons beyond comprehension.
The confused yellow butterflies of August 
Are grounded by the mild turbulence.
They do not tumble after one another.
The dog body wakes, raises his head
And stares at their absence.

Writers, Artists, and Prophets

 

Born with the gift of laughter, and a conviction that the world is mad.

The mask of mental illness, the mask of the fool, is one way to get away with telling the truth. Another is to tell a story. 

This is why Hemingway said the one essential qualification for becoming a writer is to have had a terrible childhood. It gives you the need to tell the truth. The same could be said of the other arts.

That is why we have myths and fairy tales. They are “the stories”; the literal meaning of the word “mythos.” They are the distilled truths of human nature and the world of man, told obliquely. The common run of humankind use the terms “myth” or “fairy tale” as synonyms for “not true”: this is a perfect example of denial. Pay close attention to the stone that is rejected.

Jesus spoke in parables; and warned the rest of us, the good people, not to speak plainly to the mob, not to throw “pearls before swine.” 

“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.”

Or crucify you.

Some people are not people. They are dogs or pigs. Consider the symbolism of these two animals. Dogs go along with social authority, no matter what. Pigs go with their natural urges.

Heartbreakingly, most people read Jesus’s parables in ways the text makes untenable. My father actually believed, or pretended to believe, that the moral of the tale of the prodigal son was that children should never leave the parental home and strike out on their own. He ignored the meaning of the word “prodigal.” Many seem to believe that the tale of the good Samaritan was simply about helping others in need. Of course we should; but we did not need the tale of the Samaritan to know. They ignore the meaning of the word “Samaritan.” And so it goes; the Pharisees can always quote scripture to their purposes. 

The postmodernists, the vanguard of the lost, even insist that no text has any inherent meaning. You are free to have it mean whatever you want. Supreme denial.

On one Facebook group, two hedonists were snickering about stupid Christians playing Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at their funeral. Didn’t they realize that it was a paean to sadomasochistic sex? The “Hallelujah!” refrain indicated orgasm; and the lines “She tied you to a kitchen chair; she broke your throne, she cut your hair” were female domination sex play. 

And then there are the snickerfests at Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed in Moby Dick; or Huck and Jim sharing a raft in Huckleberry Finn. This is pig thought.

I used to despair at this. What is the point of creating art, what is the point of telling parables or fairy tales, since nobody ever seems to understand them anyway? The Pharisees just co-opt it all and pretend they wrote it.

Jesus’s response is “let those who have ears to hear, hear.” One’s real audience is probably a small minority of the literal or physical audience. The rest enjoy a story, as an “escapist” exercise of the imagination, a few hours of not thinking of your problems. Or they like a painting because the colours go well with their other possessions.

A very few will understand; but then they will understand they are not mad, and are not alone.

That is perhaps the best we can do in a fallen world.

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.

How to Write Good

Just uncovered a cache of my old writings from high school, ages 12-16. Some good bits, but the prose was embarrassingly purple at times. And too much reliance on cheap thrills: sex and violence.

I could have used some guidance.

But I also noticed that, whenever there were markings in red from some teacher’s hand, they were wrong.

For example, I began one story:

“Mr. Bones watched the violent plaid socks silently follow each other down the stairs. He was in the habit of wearing socks to bed …”

And the teacher writes:

“opening is misleading at first reading – would be improved by changing the to his.” (Meaning the socks—“his violent plaid socks.”)

And that would 1) kill the little surprise or puzzle that lures the reader into the story; and 2) remove the introduction to the theme of the story--which is the protagonist’s detachment.

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence be able to grasp that I must have deliberately avoided “his”? And that there must be a reason?

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence have been able to work out what was actually happening by reading the second sentence? Did that really involve a great mental challenge?

Next teacher’s note: I had written

“He sat down in front of the window and placed his victim, a jar of pickles, on the counter before him.”

The teacher’s red hand had struck “victim” and inserted “target.”

That ought to do it—authors should always strive for the blander word, right? Avoid anything that might spark any mental images?

Exactly wrong, of course.

As a matter of accuracy of meaning, too, “target” is incorrect. You do not need to take aim to get a pickle in a jar. The image is absurdly wrong, like that of shooting fish in a barrel.

And “victim” foreshadows what happens next—looking through the pickle jar, Bones witnesses a rape outside the window—as if it were happening in the jar. So “victim” here conveys the idea that the rapist is treating his victim just as Bones does the pickle. “Target” breaks this careful thread.

All frustratingly lost on this reader.

I can only remember two teachers at any level who ever gave me useful guidance in writing. I adored both of them, perhaps for this reason.

Dr. Smith, in grad school, caught me mixing metaphors.

Mr. More, in grade 6, wrote “stop using big words just to show you know them.”

Great advice, which I have never forgotten, and which I still struggle to follow.

But there is obviously something fundamentally wrong here. We are hiring people to teach our children to write who instead mislead them. It is like hiring French teachers who cannot speak French.

But then again, come to think of it, I had that too.

This is a notorious problem among editors, who spend much of their careers fixing the result. There is a stock phrase among editors, also the title of a book, “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” to describe the many writing “rules” people are taught in school that make their writing bad.

We need to do a better job at hiring teachers.

In the meantime, as the reader has perhaps also noticed, there is a huge market for remedial writing courses.

The Simple Trick to Great Filmmaking--Or Writing

Marisa Berenson

It seems to me there is a simple and obvious difference between a good movie and a bad movie. A good movie leaves you with scenes, visuals, lines, that burn into your memory. This effect is so profound that sometimes I fear going to see a new film by a certain director, because I know there will be a part of my consciousness that I will never own again. A bad movie may hold your attention while it is on screen, but a few months later, you can remember nothing about it. Perhaps not even whether you have seen that movie.

This is what the great directors do. There are always memorable lines and memorable images.

The funny thing is that this in itself is a kind of formula, and not that hard to follow. A big part of this—and it applies just as much to good writing—is that a bad film follows all the conventions, and gives you just what you expected. A good film—or piece of writing—strives to give you something you do not expect. This is always what is memorable. George Orwell put it well when he gave, as one of his rules of good writing, “never use an expression or phrase you are used to seeing in print.”

To give one example, a bad movie will cast actors who are conventionally extremely good looking in the lead roles. Obvious enough, surely.

A good movie will instead cast actors who have an unusual appearance. If someone is conventionally extremely good looking, they will cast him in a character role—like George Clooney in Hail Caesar!, or Brad Pitt in Burn after Reading.

Then they will cast a character actor in the lead role, like Tim Blake Nelson in Buster Scruggs or Frances McDormand in Fargo.

Stanley Kubrick, with his photographer’s eye, was especially good at selecting lead actresses who were, although not extremely beautiful in the conventional way, entrancing to look at: Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon.