The Grasshopper #18: Bliss and Logic in Writing
I had a moment yesterday
As some who read me may know, I fell and cracked a lower vertebrae about five months ago. The healing process has been challenging but I’m much better. Yesterday, I was walking down to a corner store to pick up something and I had a moment of pure bliss.
I’m a walker and this back injury made walking very uncomfortable. I could walk relatively short distances but I was always very conscious of this dull pain. That has very slowly been improving and yesterday I found myself on this beautiful street filled with Victorian houses and lined with mature trees and plantings.
One of the things I’ve had to work on is looking up and around while walking. For months I had a legitimate fear of tripping and falling so I tended to look down. But lately I’ve been able to pick my head up and take a look at the world.
And, yesterday, the world looked back at me and said isn’t this just perfect? And it was. The weather, the lovely setting, the whole nine yards. Only for a second but that was enough to remind me that walking is one of my great pleasures and will be again.
In writing the ability to convey a moment like this, frozen in time, is important but very tricky. It has to feel seamless for the reader, a natural lull allowing a character to take a break from the action and recharge. It’s very easy to keep throwing challenges at your character without giving them a chance to remember why they are enduring some writer’s exhausting pacing!
It’s a breather for the reader and your story.
Logic is critical to both nonfiction and fiction
Stories have to follow a logical flow through the thread of what you are trying to convey. If that logic breaks down, the reader can lose the thread of what you are getting at. And that violates the all-important pacing of the piece.
The best example I can think of offhand is found in poorly written fantasy or dystopian fiction. The writer loses the logic and then, because it is fantasy, invents some magical thing out of the blue to save the day. The problem with this is that readers seldom buy the sudden appearance of a weapon or new character obviously thrown in to fix a lack of imagination on the writer’s part.
If you read a classic piece of fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books, you’ll find a carefully constructed logic that the story adheres to. Call it the rules of the game. In LOTR one rule is a mortal cannot safely wield the Ring of Power without courting disaster.
This rule is established early on when Gandalf identifies Frodo’s Ring as the central power object in the trilogy and warns him not to use it. Anytime anyone tries to break this rule, bad things happen.
If the writer were to break his own rules and use that magic object to get out of a jam, the story can fall apart or become much weaker.
In nonfiction these same rules of the game apply. If I’m writing about an unfolding series of political events, like the FBI seizure of classified documents from Trump’s home, I have to construct a narrative that draws some kind of conclusion. That conclusion has to have some logic to it.
For example, if we look at the ex-president’s series of excuses in the past week, we find he doesn’t follow any logical path, contradicting his own words. As a result his story doesn’t hold up. It’s the same logic attorneys must present when making a case.
There are experimental writers who seek to defy these logical paths and break down time or space. This is a very different and challenging form of writing and, unfortunately, it is very difficult to do successfully. One writer I can think of who pulls this off was Hunter Thompson, the famed author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his epic drug-addled story of a journalist pursuing a story while high on a literal carload of drugs.
The characters’ existence in this netherworld, while seemingly chaotic, does follow its own set of rules, rules unique to Thompson’s unusual perspective on life. In his case, the rules include breaking all the rules of society, but that is in itself is its own set of rules and logic.
On Medium.com where most of my topical writing appears, there are surfeit of stories of how to get rich by doing a list of things or following this or that logic. You can always tell when the writer has not actually made these things work for themselves because they are simply copying the work of others but do not make a truly compelling case.
A lot of these are young or newbie writers who, seeing successful writers, try to portray themselves as equally successful by imitating the work of those more experienced writers. But they haven’t learned yet that even self-help writing must feel credible to be effective with readers.
They are trying to take a shortcut to developing a voice and jump to the head of the line. You have to develop your own logic and stick to it to improve as a writer.
And if you can throw in a true moment of bliss or enlightenment you might eventually succeed.
This afternoon there is a distant rumbling of thunder in the background, a sound I love, but there is no rain accompanying it, and we really need some rain. But it is a great soundtrack for writing.
Thanks for reading and special thanks to the many new readers that have poured in recently. For many of you this may be the first real time issue of The Grasshopper you’re receiving. I hope you enjoy it. Comments are open and I’d love to hear from you. ME
995 words (I’m now going to be including word counts in these posts as they are a critical tool for professional writers. More on that in a future issue.)