Writing well; an art easily misconstrued

A friend of mine lent me a book, How to Write a Sentence; and how to read one by Stanley Fish, which is a New York Times bestseller according to its cover. It’s not a lengthy book and it’s easy to read, but I’m unsure of its intended audience because I don’t believe it’s me. And I’m a writer, albeit not a very successful one.

Fisher is a 'professor of law at Florida International University' with an impressive curriculum vitae in teaching at tertiary level. His deconstruction of the humble sentence reminds me of why I’m not a teacher; though, at the risk of sounding self-indulgent, I think I make a good teacher, with the caveat that the quality of my teaching seems to be more dependent on the quality of my students than myself.

I recently watched a biopic on virtuoso Dutch violinist, Janine Jensen, which I considered so good I’ve seen it twice. At one point she’s asked why she doesn’t give master classes. Given her schedule (200 concert performances in 1 year) she might have said lack of time, but one of her close friends said she won’t teach because it would require her to analyse her own method; deconstruct her technique. A lot of artists would empathise with her, including me, yet I have taught writing. The point is that I never analyse how I write sentences and, to be frank, Fish’s book doesn’t inspire me to.

The human brain has the remarkable ability to delegate tasks, that we perform routinely, to the subconscious level, so we can use our higher cognitive facilities for higher cognitive tasks. We do this with motor tasks as well, which is why we can walk and talk at the same time. Other animals can also do this, but they don’t do it at the cognitive level like we do. Young animals play in order to hone the motor skills they need in adulthood to survive, whether they be predators or prey. Humans do it with language amongst other things. And creating sentences is one of those things that the brain delegates so that when we are having a conversation they seem to come ready-made, pre-constructed for delivery as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Elite performers like professional sportspeople and musicians (like Jensen mentioned above) are so good at what they do that their brain delegates tasks that we can’t even do, which is why they dazzle us with their brilliance. When it comes to writing fiction, the same level of delegation applies. The first hurdle in writing fiction is to create characters, and, in fact, when I taught creative writing the first lesson I gave was to give an exercise in creating character. This is something that most people can’t do, even though they can write coherently, yet writers create characters in their sleep, sometimes literally. In other words, creating characters becomes second-nature, something they do without really thinking about it too much. Characters come into their head, complete with dialogue, temperaments and attitudes, in the same way that melodies come into the heads of tunesmiths.

Fish gives us two new terms, “hypotaxis” and “parataxis”, both Greek words; technical terms for the 2 main sentence ‘styles’ that he discusses at length: ‘the subordinate style’ and ‘the additive style’ respectively. To be fair to Fish, he acknowledges, after referencing them once, that we will probably never use them again. By ‘style’ Fish means structure, and the subordinate style is effectively a main clause with subordinate clauses added on. The best example he takes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), where King delivers a train of clauses describing the oppression of his people at that time, ending with a succinct final clause that sums it all up: “…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” The entire sentence is some 300 words long, yet it’s a rhetorical tour-de-force.

The additive style is where clauses are strung together almost dissociatively and the examples he gives seem to ramble a bit, which I suspect was a deliberate device by their authors to create the impression of a disjointed mind. Then he gets to Hemingway, whom I think was a master. I believe Hemingway was such a significant influence on 20^th Century writing that it’s worth quoting Fish at length:

Hence his famous pieces of advice to writers: use short sentences, write clearly, use simple Anglo-Saxon words, don’t overwrite, avoid adjectives and leave yourself out of it. The result was a style that has been described as realistic, hardboiled, spare, unadorned, minimalist, and lapidary. The last two words are particularly apt: a lapidary style is polished and cut to the point of transparency. It doesn’t seem to be doing much. It does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through as a master stonecutter allows the beauty of the stone to shine through by paring away layers of it.

I read somewhere last year, a reviewer saying that Hemingway changed the way we write, and I agree. I had just read Islands in the Stream, a loosely connected trilogy, published after his death, concerning the exploits of an artist living in Cuba and performing undercover operations in the War. What struck me was how he put you there, and you felt like you had experienced what the protagonist had experienced, some of which was emotionally gut-wrenching. As I said, Hemingway was a master.

So there are places in Fish’s tome where our minds meet and concur. In other places he suggests exercises in creating better sentences, which I neither promote nor condemn. If a writer is an artist then they ‘feel’ their sentences without analysing them or dissecting them. A writer of fiction should write as if they are the first person to read their words, as if they were actually written by someone else. I know that doesn’t make sense but anyone who has done it knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Reading Fish’s deconstruction of style (as opposed to content) prompted me to re-read the opening page of my novel, which stands pretty much as when I first wrote it, and they were also the first words of that story I put down. What I notice is that it has an edginess and urgency that reflects the content itself. In fiction you have to create a mood; there is always an emotional message; but you have to create it in a way that the reader is unaware of it, except subliminally. I used to tell my class that good writing is transparent: readers don’t notice good writing; they only notice bad writing. The reader should be so engaged by the character and the story that the writing becomes subliminal. The medium of the novel is the reader’s imagination, not the words on the page. The words are like notes on a music score, which, without an instrument to play them, are lifeless. In the case of a novel, the instrument is the reader’s imagination.

Before Hemingway, writers used long-winded descriptions, though I think film has had a lot to do with their progressive extinction. But Hemingway, I believe, showed us how to create a scene without belabouring it and without ‘adornment’, as Fish describes above.

I’ve said on this blog before, that description is the part of a novel that readers will skip over to get on with the story. So, not surprisingly, I provide as little description as possible, and always via the protagonist or another character, but just enough so the reader can create their own images subconsciously, which they do so well that I’ve had people congratulate me on how good my descriptions are. “I could see everything,” they say. Yes, because you created it yourself.

Melbourne wildlife warrior is a young, entrepreneurial woman

Jessica McKelson is the sort of person whom I admire. She saw a problem that seemed overwhelming and then did something about it. She’s Director of Raw Wildlife Encounters: an eco-tourism enterprise designed to help locals in Indonesia save orang-utans from extinction and raise consciousness in both cultures - Australia and Indonesia – to the plight of wildlife in the wake of human consumerism. In this case, it’s palm oil that is the principal reason for habitat destruction.

I won’t say much more as this story in The Age says it all. McKelson is also ‘head primate keeper at Melbourne Zoo’, and she typifies the changing role that zoos now play in a global society.  To quote her:

''Zoos have a purpose and they are changing for the better. Half of the primate team at Melbourne are involved in international programs. The industry is moving from being zookeepers to conservation ambassadors.''

Read the story and check out the photos.

The Uncanny Valley

This is a well known psychological phenomenon amongst people who take an interest in AI, and the possibility of androids in particular. Its discovery and consequential history is discussed in the latest issue of New Scientist (12 January 2013, pp. 35-7) by Joe Kloc, a New York correspondent.

The term was originally coined by Japanese Roboticist, Masahiro Mori, in 1970, in an essay titled, “Bukimi No Tani” – 'The Valley of Eeriness' (direct translation). But it wasn’t until 2005 that it entered the Western lexicon, when it was translated by Karl MacDorman, then working at Osaka University, after he received a late night fax of the essay. It was MacDorman, apparently, who gave it the apposite English rhyming title, “the uncanny valley”.

If an animate object or visualised character is anthropomorphised, like Mickey Mouse for example, we suspend disbelief enough to go along with it, even though we are not fooled into thinking the character is really human. But when people started to experiment with creating lifelike androids (in Japan and elsewhere) there was an unexpected averse reaction from ordinary people. It’s called a ‘valley’ in both translations, because if you graph people’s empathy as the likeness increases (albeit empathy is a subjective metric) then the graph rises as expected, but plummets dramatically at the point where the likeness becomes uncomfortably close to humans. Then it rises again to normal for a real human.

The New Scientist article is really about trying to find an explanation and it does so historically. MacDorman first conjectured that the eeriness or unease arose from the perception that the androids looked like a dead person come to life. But he now rejects that, along with the idea that ‘strange’ looking humans may harbour disease, thus provoking an unconscious evolutionary-derived response. Work by neuroscientists using fMRI machines, specifically Thierry Chaminade of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Instituted in Kyoto and Ayse Saygin at the University of California, San Diego, suggest another cause: empathy itself.

There are 3 different categories of empathy, according to neuroscientists: cognitive, motor and emotional. The theory is that androids create a dissonance between two or more of these categories, and the evidence suggests that it’s emotional empathy that breaks the spell. This actually makes sense to me because we don’t have this problem with any of the many animals humans interact with. With animals we feel an emotional empathy more strongly than the other two. Robotic androids reverse this perception.

The author also suggests, in the early exposition of the article, that cartoon characters that too closely resemble humans also suffer from this problem and gave the box office failure of Polar Express as an example. But I suspect the failure of a movie has more to do with its script than its visuals, though I never saw Polar Express (it didn’t appeal to me). All the PIXAR movies have been hugely successful, but it’s because of their scripts as much as their animation, and the visual realism of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (and now The Hobbit) hasn’t caused any problems, apparently. That’s because movie characters; animated, motion-capture or human; evoke emotional empathy in the audience.

In my own fiction I have also created robotic characters. Some of them are deliberately machine-like and unempathetic in the extreme. In fact, I liked the idea of having a robotic character that you couldn’t negotiate with – it was a deliberate plot device on my part. But I created another character who had no human form at all – in fact, ‘he’ was really a piece of software – this was also deliberate. I found readers empathised with this disembodied character because ‘he’ developed a relationship with the protagonist, which was an interesting literary development in itself.

Addendum: Images for the uncanny valley.

A master storyteller talks about his craft

This is a brief interview with Ang Lee, where he talks about his latest movie as well as his career and his philosophy. I've been a fan of Lee ever since I saw The Wedding Banquet and have seen most of his movies, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, all of which illustrate his eclectic interests, extraordinary range and mastery of genres.

I haven't seen The Life of Pi, but I read the book by Yann Martel many years ago, after it won the Booker Prize, and was singularly impressed. Given its philosophical nature, one should not be surprised that Lee was attracted to this story, despite its obvious challenges, both technically and thematically.

This interview reveals, more than most, the relationship between the artist and his art. How his art informs him in the same way it informs his audience. All artists strive for an authenticity that effectively negates the pretentiousness and ego that is so easily obtained, especially with success. Ang Lee demonstrates this better than most.

Addendum: A very good review here.

What’s real?

Eric Scerri, who is a lecturer in chemistry and the history and philosophy of science at the University of California, Los Angeles, asks a very basic question in last week’s New Scientist (24 Nov. 2012, pp.30-1): how do we know what’s real?

In the world of physics and chemistry, scientists deal with lots of unobservables like electrons and photons (we see their effects) not to mention all the varieties of quarks that can never be seen in isolation, even in theory. Now an electron, and even a positron, will leave a track in a cloud chamber which can be photographed, but quantum phenomena are so anti-intuitive that people are sure to ask: is it real? Where ‘it’ is the Schrodinger wave function that no longer plays a role once the event in question is ‘observed’. In fact, an earlier issue of New Scientist dared to address that very question (28 Jul. 2012, pp.29-31), and it goes to the heart of the longstanding debate as to what quantum mechanics really means epistemologically. The truth is that no one really knows.

The fact is that since so much of modern science, especially the fundamentals that underpin physics and chemistry, is based on unobservables, it leads people to argue for a form of relativism whereby anything is valid. This point of view is supported by the belief that all scientific theories are temporary, given their historical perspective.

The gist of Scerri’s article is a discussion on the philosophical approach proposed by John Worrall in 1989 (Philosopher of Science at the London School of Economics) called “Structural Realism”.  To quote Scerri: ‘For Worrall, what survives when scientific theories change is not so much the content (entities) as the underlying mathematical structure (form).’

Scerri gives the example of Fresnell’s theory of light (involving an aether, 1812) being replaced by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory.  Worrall argues that some of Fresnell’s mathematics can be found in Maxwell’s theory, therefore ‘structurally’ Fresnell’s theory is still sound even if the aether is not. The same criterion can be applied to Einstein’s theory of relativity compared to Newton’s mechanics. Newton’s inverse square law for gravity is still intact in Einstein’s theory and all of Einstein’s equations reduce to Newton’s when the speed of light becomes irrelevant.

Scerri’s own field of expertise is chemistry and he’s written books on the periodic table, so, not surprisingly, that becomes a point of discussion. Dmitri Mendelev published his paper in 1869, when the structure of atoms and all their components were unknown. Most people are unaware that it wasn’t until the 1920s when Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Pauli were pioneering quantum mechanics that the periodic table suddenly made sense. It reflects the orbital shells that quantum theory predicts.

At my country high school, we had a farsighted science teacher (Ron Gunn) who taught us what all these quantum shells were (without telling us that it was quantum mechanics) so that we could make sense of all the properties that the periodic table predicts. As Scerri points out, the periodic table literally embodies the quantum mechanical structure of the atom. This is something that Mendelev could never have known about, in the same way that Darwin didn’t know in 1859 that DNA underpins his entire theory of evolution.

In fact, Scerri also references Darwin and DNA as another example of mathematical structure underpinning a theory and ensuring its continuity a century and a half later. To quote again:

‘But DNA only takes things so far: to go deeper we need to take a mathematical direction. DNA determines the sequence of bases, A, T, G and C. This becomes a question of mathematical combinations… played out during the human genome project.’

Of course, this does not mean that all mathematical models determine reality, as Ptolemy’s epicyclic solar system demonstrates; only the ones that survive scientific revolutions. In this context, no one knows if string theory will follow Ptolemy or Einstein.

Stephen Fry proselytises Classical Music

I don't know how anyone can't be a fan of Stephen Fry. In this debate at Cambridge University he's at the top of his form. His analogies are as outrageous as they are comical; his argument is both informative and entertaining. The world is a very lucky place and we are fortunate who live in his time.

I need to acknowledge Sally Whitwell, who embedded it on her site with an appropriate quote taken from his closing words.