I got a fair few responses to my \u201cCurse of Cool\u201d email last week.<\/p>\n
The majority of replies, obviously, were people disagreeing with my \u201cTom Cruise, I am not\u201d statement. Indeed, the email triggered another set of annoying calls from Barbara Broccoli at Eon Productions badgering me \u2013 again \u2013 to take up the Bond role. (And, Babs, no means no. This is getting silly now.)<\/p>\n
But I also got this (from someone who was grappling a bad guy and hanging by one hand from a speeding train as he wrote.)<\/p>\n
Nothing can be substituted for depth and character work \u2026 [But] there is a difference between an archetype and the end product in my view. It’s not the what of it, it’s the writer’s chops. Raskolnikov is the original bad boy from every teen book and uses tropes popular at its time (a ‘pure’ fallen woman), but hardly anyone would consider Crime and Punishment shallow.<\/em><\/p>\n And he\u2019s right, of course. You can take what looks like a battered old archetype and just write it well. The result won\u2019t feel battered or old at all, while still generating power from the depth of that cultural history.<\/p>\n Which brings me to the actual point of this email, which is the Maximum Absorption Theory of Writing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What makes a book good? I mean: there\u2019s a purely literary set of criteria which work (kind of) for separating the kinds of book that compete for Pulitzer and Booker Prizes. But there are good crime novels, good literary novels, good SF novels, and so on. What makes a good book good? What do they have in common?<\/p>\n I think the answer is a simple \u2013 and illuminating \u2013 one.<\/p>\n A book, in any genre, is good to the extent that it absorbs its audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s partly about the book\u2019s afterlife. If you lay a book down, reluctantly, and find yourself thinking about it later in the day \u2013 as you drive, as you wash up, as you walk the dog \u2013 then that book has absorbed you.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also about the experience of reading itself. Do you read every sentence with intensity, keen to break open the richness of each one? Or do you already roughly know how this scene, or this character, or this bit of dialogue will unfold? Because if you do already know, you\u2019ll find yourself scanning forwards to get to the next juicy bit of plot, or whatever else keeps you engaged.<\/p>\n Once you think about writing in terms of absorption, it clarifies every task you approach.<\/p>\n This week and next week, I\u2019m going to unpack that theory a little bit more in terms of its implications for the way you write. Today, I\u2019ll show you what I mean in terms of dialogue. Next week, we\u2019ll look at the same issue in other aspects of writing too.<\/p>\n In the bit we\u2019ll look at now (from This Thing of Darkness<\/em>), the two people speaking are Fiona Griffiths and her boss, Dennis Jackson, a senior and capable detective.<\/p>\n \u2018You hurt your hand,\u2019 he says, exhibiting the observational prowess of a seasoned officer.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Yes, sir. I splidged myself in a car door.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Did you now?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Sir? That stuff in Rhayader. You and DI Watkins. I want to say that I really appreciate the way you handled that. I couldn\u2019t have managed it if we\u2019d gone down official routes. So thank you. You really helped.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018You\u2019re more than welcome.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n This isn\u2019t hugely remarkable or significant dialogue in some ways, but it\u2019s mobile. You can\u2019t predict its next move. So:<\/p>\n Those numbered comments are twice as long as the text itself, but that\u2019s good. Because there\u2019s a lot going on in that dialogue, the reader can\u2019t safely skim it. And although readers won\u2019t consciously remark on, let\u2019s say, the repetitive flatness of DCI Jackson\u2019s comments, they will somehow notice them and integrate that flatness into their computation of what\u2019s going on in Jackson\u2019s brain.<\/p>\n Sure enough, what we have is the start of a much longer bit of dialogue, which ends up with Jackson virtually accusing Fiona of being one of the crew-members of a trawler that sank \u2013 the crew-member in question being a woman of approximately Fiona\u2019s height and build, and with a damaged hand.<\/p>\n As he loops back to the accusation, Jackson notes the hand issue again:<\/p>\n \u2018Remind me, Fiona. You \u201csplidged\u201d your hand?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018In a car door, sir. I know \u201csplidge\u201d isn\u2019t a real word.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Odd though. The same injury.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Here, you start to feel the weight of Jackson\u2019s interrogation technique. He doesn\u2019t bang the table and shout. He just returns, forensically but neutrally, to the challenging facts.<\/p>\n You also note the little reward for attentive readers. Anyone who was paying attention to the earlier bit of dialogue would have noted the use of \u2018splidged\u2019 and probably also noted that it\u2019s not a real word. Here we come back to it, find the reader\u2019s previous attention rewarded with a nod, and encounter Fiona\u2019s characteristically deflecting comment about it not being a real word.<\/p>\n That deflecting comment is kind of funny, but it also signals a ratcheting up of the pressure. Fiona looked like she won the first round of interrogation (she gave nothing away; Jackson didn\u2019t push), but the weakness of Fiona\u2019s deflection here suggests that Jackson is winning this bout.<\/p>\n The key thing here is that our early bit of dialogue didn\u2019t just yield absorption-rewards as the reader first read it. It is paying off again, several pages later.<\/p>\n It\u2019s as though the book is trying to say to the reader, \u201cThe more you pay attention to this text, the greater the rewards you will collect.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Just contrast that with a non-absorbing version of the same rough sequence:<\/p>\n \u2018How did you hurt your hand?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018I hurt it in a car door, sir.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018You have the same injury as the mystery woman on board the trawler. Are you that woman?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n \u2019No.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n The non-absorbing version here is much, much briefer, because it replaces all the text I\u2019ve already quoted, plus plenty more. And brevity is good, right? I personally bang on about brevity a lot, and prize it greatly.<\/p>\n Except nothing trumps absorption, and there\u2019s nothing here to hold the reader \u2013 literally not a single word. So yes, the reader might be intrigued to see if Jackson can stand his accusation up. (Not least because Fiona is, of course, the mystery woman.) But really, this is the kind of dialogue that an intelligent reader would want to skim through. Should want to, in fact.\u00a0<\/p>\n The more you absorb the reader \u2013 with hints of emotion, with humour, with unexpected words, with unspoken conflict, and so on \u2013 the more intently the reader is forced to read.<\/p>\n Which means the more they attach to the book.<\/p>\n Which means the more likely you are to find a publisher and make sales.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll come back to all this next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I got a fair few responses to my \u201cCurse of Cool\u201d email last week. The majority of replies, obviously, were people disagreeing with my \u201cTom Cruise, I am not\u201d statement. Indeed, the email triggered another set of annoying calls from Barbara Broccoli at Eon Productions badgering me \u2013 again \u2013 to take up the Bond<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n