Strange, Charm, Truth, Beauty, and Useful…
By Eric Witchey
While this little essay is about writing, it starts with physics.
My brother is a brilliant man—not kind of smart or sort of a genius. He’s cast iron solid brilliant. His Ph.D. dissertation was about particles and stuff and such and current decay rates of charm mesons. I won’t bore you with the long list of amazing things he’s done since that early success. Rather, I want to talk about something he taught me.
That paper wasn’t about the discovery of something amazing. It was about contributing to the body of knowledge about the statistical precision in having not found something.
That’s right. His job at the time was to provide more detailed data about something nobody had ever found. The people on that atom-smashing project wanted a tighter understanding of a very specific failure.
Being a writer who has no mathematical skill beyond balancing a checking account incorrectly, I asked him, “Dr. Nick, why?”
His answer has stuck with me. “Scientific method can’t prove a thing doesn’t exist. We can only prove with greater precision the probability that it will not appear.”
Uh, okay. So, there’s this thing that nobody has ever seen and that lots of people think nobody will ever see but other people think they might see someday, so science wants to prove how likely it is that nobody will see it in a given moment…
That is strange.
As I said, I don’t understand the math, and the concept was hard to wrap my head around. The trick, it seems to me, is that these physics people have lots of different ways of describing the universe. Some are more probable than others, but nobody goes out on a limb and says, “This is how it works.” Instead, they say, “This is how it probably works.” If one model of the universe predicts some kind of particle or a rate of decay for some other mesowhatsit, then figuring out how often you don’t see something is useful for working out new math and discovering new ways the universe “probably” works.
So, I asked, “Is it true there’s no such thing as a mesowhatsit?”
His answer was, “It’s not, not true.”
“So, it’s true that there is a mesowhatsit?”
“No. To a probability precision of (insert number noises), it’s true that our experiment shows that it’s not apparent.”
I took a few years to let that settle, and I’m being literal about how long it took me. At some family meeting or another, I worried that bone some more. “So it’s got nothing to do with truth. It’s just useful.”
This made him smile. He said, “Yeah. I suppose. Sort of.”
At some point when talking to him about his discipline, I have to just let it go and tell myself that I’d have to study the rest of my life to actually understand what he means when he says, “Sort of.”
That’s a profound beauty.
I let it go.
Instead, I started looking around at my writing world, the teachers I had, and the things I was learning and practicing. Where was the useful vs. the true? When was true useful? When was true not useful? When was a thing true and not true at the same time, and was it useful? Wouldn’t a thing that was both true and useful be beautiful?
When a college writing instructor said, “Show. Don’t tell,” My writing experiments revealed that the concept wasn’t true and was only occasionally useful within certain contexts, yet I heard it from teachers and professional writers over and over again. Somewhere, somehow, someone had believed it at least useful—if not true. Was it like the outdated belief that gravity is a force when it’s actually a phenomenon of time and mass-distorted space? Thinking of gravity as a force is very useful in many circumstances, like flying a small plane, juggling, or emergency-jumping over a Lego brick on the floor. Thinking of gravity as a phenomenon of time and mass-distorted space might be true, but it’s only useful to physicists writing papers and interstellar navigators in very specific circumstances.
Later, when I found myself teaching writing, I figured out how “Show. Don’t tell” was useful. Experience showed me that the admonition was not, not true. That is, I found it useful as a teacher because it let me protect myself from reading endless student prose that danced around presentation of setting and character behavior by applying the vacuous narrative equivalent of jazz hands to compensate for lack of practiced, agile footwork. I preferred lists of blatant, expository concrete nouns to narrative noise about what characters didn’t experience, might experience, or thought about instead of experiencing.
Other things that were not, not true but useful to me as a teacher protecting myself from boredom included rules against the use of Passive Voice, Isolated To-Be Verbs, Misplaced Modification, and tagged-on Prepositional Phrases. I even went so far as to provide lists of words the students had to search out and replace if they wanted to have strong essays or stories in the context of my grading. I would detail the catastrophic results of that last one if I were writing a confession. Thank the myriad deities I am not.
Experimentation revealed that these narrative rule particles probably shouldn’t appear above certain thresholds of probability, but when subjected to deeper experimentation, they should appear in dynamic relationship with other particles of narrative craft. Telling students they couldn’t use Passive constructions protected teacher Eric from trying to figure out who took action in sentence after sentence after sentence. It also forced the students to learn to recognize the form: To-be verb plus past participle followed by an implicit or explicit agentive by-phrase.
He was charmed by the idea.
He was charmed.
What it did not do was teach the students when to use Passive Voice, how to recognize when to use it, and how to use it once they saw the opportunity.
The “rule” was not, not true in that it protected teachers and moved the student along a little, so it had a certain charm in the context of the early college classroom. That same charm, however, turned the not, not true teaching tool into a less than beautiful belief and an untested rule carried by students into the world as a fact of writing. So many teachers have protected themselves with this rule that 30 years later, adults coming into my advanced Fiction Fluency classes carry this “rule” with them and have never executed the experiments that would take their sense of the precision of probability beyond the belief that the thing “should not” exist.
Developing writers struggle when they discover that social and psychological history of character combined with immediate agenda might cause the character, including the narrative character, to speak in Passive Voice.
When Tommy’s mother comes home and finds that the police arrested her son, she focuses on her son. “Tommy was taken.” When the nosey neighbor is filled with righteous negative potency tells the neighbors she saw it all, she focuses on the police. “The police came into our neighborhood with sirens blaring and guns drawn to arrest that shady Tommy boy.”
The rule has a probability of success, if applied, but establishing the precision with which passive should probably not appear requires further experimentation by each and every writer. Don’t get me started on joke cats in boxes and the Copenhagen interpretation of ambiguity in reader subjective interpretation and projection.
The not, not true rule, “Show. Don’t tell,” also causes consternations when developing writers discover that a first-person narrator often breaks the fourth wall to tell the reader things that may or may not be true. At least for a while, they struggle with keeping their belief alive while attempting to execute the new technique they have learned.
The opening line from the English translation of Fredrik Bachmann’s beautiful book about love, community, and mortality, A Man Called Ove, tells the reader:
Ove is fifty-nine.
He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s flashlight. . . .
There are other apparently strange “rules” that seem to have extremely high probabilities of truth, charm, beauty, and usefulness. One of my teachers used to say, “Conflict on every page! Ev-er-y Page!”
The strange came from me projecting my sense that poetics have great value into the equation and believing that somehow poetic language excluded the concept of conflict. There was some charm in both the rule and my erroneous belief. The rule certainly pervaded all my experiences with that teacher. His belief, if not the actual presentation of it, showed up as similar rules presented by other teachers. Later, I found myself teaching his version of conflict and how to pull it off. Then, one day, the rule’s strangeness made me step back and ask myself if it were true, just charmed, or always/sometimes useful. I decided to do some experiments to see if I could prove it was only not, not true.
Because conflict only appears when mutually exclusive agendas are executed either in the world or inside the character’s mental space, I tried to write a story in which no character pursued an agenda.
I failed.
Even a character sitting cross-legged in a cave focusing on their breathing in a meditative state will experience opposition to their agenda. The agenda is to meditate and simply be within a moment that is defined by the absence of intrusive thoughts. By immediate implication, the opposition is any intrusive thought. The conflict is Person vs. Self.
Well, said I to me, try a story that only has one kind of conflict. The meditation story almost did it, but even there the environment provided stimuli and triggered intrusive thoughts. Without that, the scene felt empty, contrived, and ultimately broken.
I tried to write a story about a man alone in the desert. My hypothesis was that a man in a barren environment could just feel it and not engage in conflict. “Mirages” has sold a couple of times.
Success? Nope.
Turns out, a man alone in the desert has an expiration date. Person vs. Environment showed up, and the poor man had to deal with himself in order to cope—Person vs. Self. In fact, reading about survival, I discovered that most survival instructors explain first thing that the most important factor in survival situations is mental focus and determination to survive. The mental battle to stay focused on the goal of surviving is the most important thing that separates the dead from the living. I’m not sure how they figured out what the dead people were thinking before they died, but that’s probably a level of precision problem for another time.
So it went. Experiment after experiment.
The probability that conflict would appear in a story approached, but statistically could never arrive at, 100%. Take out the conflict, the character didn’t demonstrate who they were or how they changed. In fact, they didn’t change. No conflict, no story. Certainly, the necessity of conflict on a page could be demonstrated to be not, not true to a level of precision, but I could never prove that a story could not exist without conflict. That would be proving a thing didn’t exist, which experimentation cannot do.
On a practical level, however, that idea that conflict must exist in a story is strange, charmed, true, useful, and when embraced and done well, beautiful.
Except…
Maybe my assumptions and training kept me from designing experiments that would result in a story that contained no conflict. Certainly, I could write text that didn’t imply or present conflict.
So, I did.
And I did again.
And again.
My results brought another conversation with my brother to mind. “Eric,” he said, “there’s a non-zero probability that you will suddenly dissolve into your component atoms then reassemble on the surface of Mars. However, the probability is higher that the heat death of the universe will come first.”
Strange, True, Charmed, Beautiful, and Useful…
-End-
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