Lightness

image by AI; my own prompt

I am reading Italo Calvino’s last and unfinished work Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Or, I should probably say, I am half-heartedly trying to read it, since it is all over the place, and packed with references to literature some of which was written millennia ago, some of it in dead languages, that I find utterly unfathomable. Still, he’s a good writer, in the sense that he has interesting ideas and keeps things moving along, so I persevere.

The book is a collection of six lectures for Harvard University written in 1985 to outline the six qualities of writing that he wished to urge writers to accommodate in their work to make it more relevant and useful for readers in the 21st century.

The subject of the first of these lectures is lightness. By this Italo did not mean that writing should be fluffy or light-hearted, but rather that it not be ponderous, buried under its own weight. He wanted writing and literature to provide relief from the often suffocating weight of the world, offering new ways of seeing past and around the terrifying, stultifying heaviness of civilized life with its bureaucracy, inertia, rigid ideologies, and excessive explanation. Seems like a worthy objective.

So I’ve decided I want to write lighter.

Even more than that, I’ve decided I want to be lighter. More playful. Less serious. Less attached to stuff. More agile. Of course, weighted down by my new ideology of not believing we have free will, this could be a challenge. But perhaps my writing is a place to start.

I began by wondering if I should find ways to make writing more fun. The problem with that is that I’ve found that the best writing, including my own, is hard work, and the pleasure comes from overcoming the obstacles and emerging with something better than what a slapdash effort would have produced, not from the writing process itself.

But paradoxically, often the best writing seems to me to be written through the writer, and the best way to allow it to develop is to stay out of the way. And only then, when a bunch of the magical stuff that just comes out is captured on paper, does the hard work of crafting something good from these magical fragments begin. Hard to fit this all into a mindset of lightness.

I’ve read that the best writing is not necessarily persuasive (since you can never hope to understand what all your readers might find persuasive) but rather inspiring, insightful, novel, interesting, and/or entertaining. And that the best source of ideas for such writing is, rather than staring at a blank page with a specific subject or prompt, exposing oneself instead to interesting and novel situations (either in person or through reading or other media), and then just paying attention. Not thinking about what it means or what you have to say on the subject (opinions are like assholes etc). Just listening, watching, noticing what is going on, without judgement, expectation, or projection.

Hence my propensity for wandering around my neighbourhood and hanging out in cafés trying to learn those skills most notoriously absent in males, listening and paying attention.

This is hard to do, because it’s not how our brains function. And also because we have no free will or choice about what we pay attention to, or how we make sense of it in any case.

Given that, is this quixotic quest to learn to write more lightly even achievable? One of my favourite writers, Frederick Barthelme, starts off his “39 Steps” to better writing with this:

Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please. Don’t let it make too much sense.

Of course what Frederick means by this is not that we should write stuff that’s meaningless or trivial, but rather that we should let the reader make what sense he or she wants to make of it, instead of imposing our own meaning explicitly on it, like Aesop unnecessarily hitting you over the head with the moral at the end of the fable.

So what else might I/we do to learn to ‘write lighter’ (both fiction and non-fiction), at least if our conditioning leads us to do that? A few thoughts culled from various sources:

REDUCE

• Edit ruthlessly to delete all the unnecessary verbiage (even though most of us hate editing and aren’t very good, or practiced, at doing it).
• Leave things unsaid to ‘leave space’ for the reader to fill in their own details and interpretations.
• Think carefully about use of qualifiers like “would seem”, “apparently”, “my sense is that”, etc. If it’s your impression or opinion, make sure it’s acknowledged as such. Ask yourself whether, if it’s your own opinion, the reader really wants or needs to hear it. And don’t hesitate to say “I don’t know.” Uncertainty and ambiguity are not generally popular with readers (or writers), but sometimes they are useful, and usually they’re the most honest thing to say.
• Be sparing in the use of words like “therefore”, “hence”, “because of this”, and “as a consequence”. The sequence should be clear enough not to have to ‘lead’ the reader by stating it. (I am truly awful at doing this.)

MODE CHOICE

• Use imagery rather than lengthy explanations in words whenever possible.
• Use dialogue to convey characters’ thoughts and actions rather than descriptions of what they’re thinking and doing.
• Use the active rather than the passive tense.
• Use (non-confusing) metaphors rather than argument to help the reader make connections and make sense of what you’re saying.
• Start essays (and speeches) with a story or a vivid image, not a thesis. And keep using stories and images wherever they are relevant and compelling, but don’t make them overly long.
• Use humour if you can do so competently. (*sigh*)

BE CLEAR

• Don’t use jargon or terms that need to be defined or explained, even if they’re used appropriately. And especially if they’re self-coined.
• Don’t use abstractions unless absolutely necessary, and then illustrate them with a concrete example. For example: “We don’t actually have free will over our choices. When we ‘decide’ to have coffee rather than tea, our body actually makes the decision through chemical signals and triggers. Then our brains ‘make sense’ of the decision that’s already been made.”

LEAVE SPACE

• Use questions, but not rhetorical or leading ones, which are just annoying. Sincere, thoughtful questions pique the reader’s curiosity, signal openness, and invite exploration of alternatives and new perspectives and insights.
• Even in ‘serious’ writing, try using playful humour rather than ham-handed sarcasm or bitter irony. The reader knows it’s serious.
• If something in the media reveals something obviously terrible (or wonderful) about someone, point the reader to it, and let the reader draw their own conclusions. (I am also truly awful at doing this.)
• Use shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs (yeah, I know — no comment needed).
• Keep conversations in stories realistic-sounding by using incomplete sentences, and by not having a single speaker say too much at a stretch (unless you’re Shakespeare).
• Avoid using too many bullet points in a single list!

I’m sitting here laughing at myself for the fact that I’ve ‘known’ that I ‘should’ be doing these things, and have been ‘trying’ to do them for decades, but I seem unable to learn. The ponderousness and assertiveness of the above list pretty much belies its objective.

I thought about changing each of the above bullet points into a question, but that seemed fraudulent. If I were a better writer, perhaps I would have written a story, skit, or cartoon that made each of these points by having the hapless protagonist do each of these things exaggeratedly badly, with comic consequences.

Many of the (sometimes semi-autobiographical) characters in my (mostly-unpublished) short fiction works are light people, in the sense that they don’t take things (or themselves) too seriously, don’t get worked up about things, speak concisely and sparingly (and cleverly), know themselves well, are fun to be around, and pursue what brings them joy. In some ways they are the antithesis of me, and I ‘draw’ them as models of what I’d like to be more like.

We all write ultimately mostly for ourselves, I think, to make sense of things ‘out loud’, to imagine how things might be better (or worse), to remember things we’ve learned and things we treasure. If we’re kind and competent enough to become really good writers, we learn to write things for other people.

I’m not there yet, and will probably never be. But a little more lightness, unbearable or not, isn’t totally out of the question.