Such a Lonely Word
This will be a short one. And a little bit ‘swirly’, as I called it in one of my writing groups on Saturday. But important, I feel, all the same.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Honesty in writing. My own, as well as in the work I read and edit. And rather like George Saunders’ use of a big needle in his head that veers from Positive to Negative as he scrutinises his writing choices sentence by sentence - ‘My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts.’* (see link to Guardian article below) – lately I have been using a Honesty meter to help me get closer, or help others get closer, to what we really want to say. And to what works for the Story, as a whole.
There’s a famous quote by Ernest Hemingway: ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’
But what is a true sentence?
It’s easy to take this as meaning we all need to write sentences as pared-back and minimalist as Hemingway’s. But no one would say that Charles Dickens wasn’t writing true sentences - or if they did, I’d need them to explain to me the huge popularity of Dickens’ stories and their longevity. Because readers don’t stick with what they don’t believe.
To me, truth in sentences is a personal matter. Related directly to the writer and who she is, her life experience, what she knows about people and life and how it all works. So it’s confusingly subjective. But at the same time, whenever I talk about honesty in a writing group, everyone nods. Honesty means something to all of us, and so we can all apply this Honesty meter to our writing and our stories.
Yet in the busy work of creating the World of the Story in our readers’ heads, it’s oh-so-easy to lie. To fudge, to concentrate more on the perfect descriptive sentence than what’s really happening in the scene and the real effect of those happenings on the characters we’ve birthed.
To me, dishonesty in my writing looks like this:
extra words that creep into my sentences yet have no real purpose and nothing to do with how I or my character would honestly voice these things
‘beautiful’ writing (often in imitation of a writer I admire), trying to be someone else
passivity, a lack of reaction or effect on characters, they just drift along pretty unaffected
And the questions I ask myself over and over, to keep myself honest:
Do I need this word or this phrase?
How can I use the skills I admire in other writers, while staying true to my own voice?
What would this character really do if this terrible, wonderful, challenging thing happened to them? What would I do if it happened to me?
You are not your characters, but you can imagine you are - they came from your need. And when you feel the story has got stuck, sometimes it’s because you haven’t been honest about a character’s actions (and so they’re rebelling, refusing to move on). In this case try stopping to sit deep inside a character, strap on a lie detector, and ask yourself again and again, sentence by sentence: is this honestly what he would do? Is this actually what she would say? Persist until you find the truthful answer, and you’ll be off again, I promise.
Honesty via the pursuit of specificity, George Saunders calls it. And it’s strange, but no matter what kind of story we’re writing, any kind of genre, any kind of voice, any kind of writer, we all know what that feels like.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write