The opposite of Mr Koontz
Last week we pondered the awkward prose and strange success of Dean Koontz. Today – rather stupidly – I’m going to do the opposite.
Our theme this week is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. The book deals with the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. (The two names, Hamnet and Hamlet were used more or less interchangeably in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare wrote the play a few years after the death of his son.)
The book is obviously Great Literature. My copy is jam-packed with superlative reviews and the book won both the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK and the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction in the US.
So: serious critical heft, plus it talks about Shakespeare, so what’s not to love?
Well, when we were looking at Dean Koontz last week, we thought that some of his writing habits are there to reassure his readers that they’re going to get what they came for.
Koontz’s readers don’t want fancy writing, so Koontz is quick to reassure them: buddy, you’re not going to get any. On the other hand, they do want big, clear, comic-book style characters, and Koontz makes sure he places one prominently on page one.
I suggested that that Koontz’s approach to prose was like a box of cheaper chocolates, where the point of the packaging was to reassure shoppers, “This is not too fancy. If you feel worried by fancy, expensive chocolates, we promise that you won’t find any of that stuff inside.”
But how about the opposite? If you’re buying fancy chocolates, you want the packaging to match. Elegant fonts, dark colours, plenty of layers of foil and fluffy packaging and fancy tissue. The packaging says, “You want fancy? We’re going to give you fancy. Worried that these chocolates won’t pass muster at your posh dinner party? Don’t worry. We’ve got six layers of fancy tissue and each chocolate comes in its own mini-wrapping, so your guests are just going to KNOW that you’ve spent real money on this box.”
OK. Hold that thought.
Here are some bits from Hamnet:
Quote 1
You might find the [edge of the forest] a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it.
Quote 2
The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn’t even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.
Quote 3
He gives a nod and a shrug, all at the same time, eyeing the broad back of his father, who looms behind his mother, still facing the street. He is, despite himself, despite the fact that he is clutching the hand of the woman he has vowed to marry, despite everything working out which way he will have to duck to avoid the inevitable fist, to feint, to parry, and to shield Agnes from the blows he knows will come.
Two things before we go on.
One, please look at those quotes and see what you think of them. Forget that you are reading a hugely successful work of literary fiction. What do you think of the quotes on the page?
Two, I’m going to have some challenging things to say about those snippets of writing, but I’m not so daft as to think that Maggie O’Farrell can’t write. There’s plenty of excellent writing in the book – just, I’m not sure she nails it every time.
Right-o. So let’s dig in.
Quote 1, comments
You might find the [edge of the forest] a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it.
If I were being mean about this snippet (and I am), I think I’d point out the following:
- Verdant means covered with thick green foliage and it’s a word almost never used in ordinary speech. It’s what you might expect from a Victorian poetess. Any more recent usage tends to feel like it’s straining a bit too hard.
- Restless and inconstant mean much the same thing. Certainly, it’s not clear that both are needed here. What is the additional word supposed to add?
- On the topic of pointless repetition, caresses, ruffles and disturbs seems like repetition for the sake of it.
- When O’Farrell writes the mass of leaves, she could just as well have written the leaves. The word mass adds a kind of pretension without any useful addition to meaning.
- The weather’s ministrations: the use of the word weather here seems like an awkward way of repeating the word wind. But she doesn’t really mean weather; she definitely means wind. So the sentence needed a bit of a rethink…
- And the word ministrations is rather like verdant: do you ever actually use the word if you’re not straining to sound posh? I’d suggest mostly not.
- On the matter of a slightly different tempo from its neighbour – I actually liked this. Different trees do move in different ways, as do their leaves. So a poplar alternates rapidly between showing a darker upper leaf, and a more silvery underside. A beech behaves differently. An oak differently again. If O’Farrell had offered us some detail of observation along those lines, we might actually see something new in nature – taking stock of something we’d seen but never before noticed. As it is, the comment is blandly general and getting close to a statement of the obvious.
- When we get to bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, then once again I think we mostly have repetition for the sake of it. I’m not even sure that trees do shudder. That implies a rapid repetitive movement which is not really how trees behave.
- And trees moving in the wind suggests that they’re trying to escape from the air and the soil? Really? I mean, I love a tasty metaphor, but for me this just seems like a fail. A big, bold image that in the end just feels unconvincing.
Quotes 2 and 3, comments
I’m not going to comment on these passages at length, except that now we’ve noticed O’Farrell’s habit of repetition, it’s hard to un-notice it – and it doesn’t feel better on further acquaintance.
But do just take a note of this: ‘The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets’. These words are clearly not very like hornets, since they dart and crackle and maim none of which are things that hornets do. These words also twist and mangle the woman’s tongue and you’d have to be a very muscular (and peculiar) hornet to do that. The thing that hornets are best known for doing is stinging people, and there’s no mention of sting here. So: these words aren’t really like hornets at all, are they?
Presumably, O’Farrell knows that, so why does she write it?
Well, I think two things. First, there’s the literary attraction to the big, bold metaphor, and the attraction remains, even when the metaphor isn’t sound. And secondly, if you want to cut a dash with book critics, then some great tips are:
- Write about Shakespeare or adapt a story of Shakespeare’s (Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres) , or adapt another classic tale (Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles), or …
- Make sure that, every now and then, you talk about words themselves, or sentences, or parts of speech, or vowels, etc. That way, you’re showing proper deference to the tools of the literary trade
- Use fashionable phrases where you can. ‘Freighted with a cargo of X’ for example is an excellent way to say “possesses X” for pretty much every possible instance of X.
- Use some fancy words (verdant, not green)
- Toss in plenty of verbs, in lists.
- Use semi-colons freely – or avoid them completely. Doesn’t matter which: you just need a clearly visible policy.
- And so on! This list is definitely not exhaustive.
The opposite of Mr Koontz
The truth is you can write a terrific novel and still fall prey to some of the weaknesses of Literary Writing – no novel is perfect, after all.
But as with Mr Koontz, I think part of it has to do with wrapping and how you appeal to your target market. In the end, it’s the chocolate itself that matters. But clever packaging is a smart way to market yourself to your target audience.
It’s not just Dean Koontz that does that, it’s prize-winning Maggie O’Farrell too. And hell, it’s not just those two: it’s all of us. Nowt wrong with that. But we still need to make sure that the writing passes muster. The writing has to come first.
I find your newsletters to be a cataclysm of tedium and boredom, (two words which mean much the same thing. Oh! The horror).
I think the job of a writer is to be brilliant and outrageous while using the wild power of language to enrich the mind of the reader, which is what Maggie O’Farrell does in Hamnet.
And yet your perspective is to dismiss the passion of her words and rather focus on the technicalities of her writing and the marketability of the entire exercise.
I don’t think that when Maggie O’Farrell was writing Hamnet that she stopped to consider the seven points which you outline that might help her to ‘cut a dash with book critics.’
You treat writing as a purely technical exercise whose sole purpose is to sell. Sure, a writer needs to sell, but if that is the point from which you start then you are missing the entire purpose of the exercise. And yes, Dean Koontz writes books for profit, which is probably why his novels are a mere collection of sentences arranged to suit the needs of his readers.
But, if your premise is that writing is a mere vessel by which money might be made (which is what I get from your newsletters) then you must also eliminate many great novelists and for that matter musical bands from the archives of history.
I get that writing is markedly technical (I discovered this the hard way after submitting a horrid first draft of my manuscript to the Jericho Writers assessment service. And while I understood that I needed to address those aspects of my writing, I did not lose my passion or integrity).
And I get that a writer needs to sell books and money must be made. And I get that it must be wonderful to make the New York Times best seller list. And I get that cutting deals with Hollywood movie producers must be rewarding. And I get that I am probably an idealist that is entirely full of shit.
And I also get that the legends did not (do not) write to satisfy the critics or please readers.
Idealists are not necessarily full of shit; your ‘idealism’, as you call it, sounds shit-free to me.
I bet most of ’em damn well did write to please readers. They just had, consciously or unconsciously, a certain readership in mind. Of those that didn’t, they were lost to posterity, most of them, with only one or two being discovered, probably posthumously, by an enthusiastic critic or publisher
You’re probably right.
Perhaps it is just the dreamer in me that hopes that Hunter S. Thompson, Salman Rushdie and Irvine Welsh and so many others catered to critics and wrote to please readers.
But again, I fully admit to being a dreamer; a tendency which leads to foolishness.
Mmm. I may disagree with Harry occasionally – maybe not as completely as I have this week – but I’ve never, ever found his weekly emails ‘boring’ or ‘tedious’. Quite the opposite; I usually find them thought-provoking, challenging and often laugh-out-loud funny.
I think it’s a little unfair to characterise Harry’s advice and commentary as wholly commercially-orientated too. There’s a huge amount of advice on non-commercial aspects of writing, and commentary on techniques for simply being a better writer; all coming from not only a successful author but a damn good one, too – I’ve read several of Harry’s books, and his writing is top notch.
OK, I disagree with this week’s take on Maggie O’Farrell and the style of writing she represents. But I’ve learned heaps from reading Harry’s weekly words (and even being edited by him in a scary but incredibly useful webinar a while ago). I certainly don’t think that these blog posts show any lack of passion and integrity, and I’m often inspired by the sheer enthusiasm Harry shows for the craft.
Dickens? Conan Doyle? Christie? The ‘golden age’ SF authors? And many others… They were incredibly ‘commercial’ authors, surely, and definitely writing to ‘please readers’. As well as being brilliant writers.
I was probably too harsh. I was actually aiming for humour with my opening line. It came across wrong, I guess.
And yeah like those authors you mentioned probably wrote to please readers.
His newsletters are interesting and informative, entertaining and useful.
I second this, 100%. Very well put, as always, Jon.
Thanks to Sarah for mentioning the e-word: emotion. It is an emotional feeling (sorry, are those two synonyms?) that readers seek, and that writers are tasked with providing. It might be an emotion that’s deemed shallow, like excitement or laughter; or something deep, like empathy. Different genres have them in different proportions. Lean writing heightens excitement, poetic writing uses language to add nuance, to enrich character and place, to draw us in.
Critics are writers too, so naturally they are excited by the art and the craft, more so than most – but not all – readers.
One emotion that any good story conjures at its end is a sense of closure, completion, resolution. The story has put the world out of joint, but at the end it’s fixed, and this gives us children, I mean readers, a sense of security, a consolation for us insecure indivuduals in a restless and inconstant world.
(Okay, yes, there are good unresolved stories, but they still generate an emotion, albeit a different one: excitement, fear, or somesuch. Possibly a sense of freedom. I speculate here, because I get no frisson from the hollow feeling of irresolution. Further, since I started writing, I sense storytelling cop-out: the unresolved ending wasn’t placed for artistic reasons, but because the writer simply couldn’t find, or be bothered to work out, a satisfying conclusion.)
The expectation of closure is a Western construct. Eastern literature – allegedly; it’s not like I’ve read enough of it to speak from direct experience – more often concludes with an open question rather than closure; an artefact of collectivist culture, as closure is of individualistic culture. (Which all comes down to staple grains…)
…and he’s back!
I’m not sure what rice or wheat has to do with it. To the extent that you have a point, it is surely more to do with a pantheistic or Buddhist religion and a strong belief in reincarnation and lesson-learning in the east; and notions of judgement, heaven and hell, and a single omnipotent god in the west.
True, Glyn, but incomplete. The religion reflects the cultural core, not the other way round, which derives from the farming practices required for the various grain: wheat can be farmed in small patches, each to his own, whereas rice requires the compounding benefits of collective effort.
I love these discussions. A little microcosm of all society’s arguments. There is room in the world for poetic, literary repetitions and punchy, in your face writing just as there is room for Beethoven and the Sex Pistols. Horses for courses and all that.
But which is which?
So enjoying the British banter! In terms of trees…Aspens definitely shimmer—referencing light in movement and connecting to their autumnal gold. You could say they shiver, but shudder? No, I don’t think so. Sounds like something Poe would say.
Your emails make my foggy brain think! Thank you!
Verdant is used a lot (probably too much) in travel writing, so not quite obsolete. Try writing about green hills/valleys/mountain over and over, and you’ll soon find verdant to be a friend. I’m with others who talk about the importance of rhythm. Sometimes writers can be too technical in their approach, and the poetry is lost. Surely good writing involves the writer trying to get across, as best they can, what they see in their heads? A tree “bending and shuddering and tossing its branches” creates a very specific image in my mind, one that’s quite different from a tree simply bending in the wind. Still, food for thought as always.