Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
The connection between a spoken language and its written form, known as its orthography, is seldom straightforward.
Much has been made of the non-intuitive symbol-to-sound correspondence in English -- you've probably seen the old quip that "learning English spelling is rough, but it can be taught through tough, thorough thought, though." There are two main reasons for the often weird pronunciation rules (and multiple exceptions) in English. First, there's a general rule of thumb that the older a language's writing system is, the more time it's had to diverge from pronunciation. (Put a different way, pronunciation tends to shift faster than written language does.) Second, English is an amalgam of Germanic/Old English and Romance/Norman French, each of which had its own (different) pronunciation rules, with borrow-words added in from just about every culture English-speakers have contacted.
Honestly, though, for a strange writing-to-pronunciation correspondence, I don't think any language in the world can beat Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In what sensible system would the feminine name Caoimhe be pronounced "kwee-va?"
Now, don't get me wrong, I think Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both gorgeous languages. I just look at the written forms and think, "I can't even make a guess at how that's pronounced."
Of course, there's no problem that arose naturally and organically that humans can't make worse out of sheer cussedness. Deliberate misspellings in (for example) business names make me wonder how any child grows up knowing how to spell correctly. Near my village there used to be a children's dance studio -- now long out of business -- called, I shit you not, "The Shug'r-n-Spyce Skool of Dance."
And I'm with Dave Barry, who said that any business tacking an extra "e" onto the end of words to make them look old and quaint should be taxed at a higher rate. ("Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe.")
We add another layer of weirdness when there are ill-advised attempts to meld English with non-English alphabets. There's a whole thing called "faux Cyrillic," where Cyrillic letters are thrown in to give something a pseudo-Russian flavor. Just look at the header on the game Tetris -- it's almost always written "TETЯIS." The problem is, "Я" isn't pronounced /r/, it's pronounced /ya/, so the game spelled this way would be "Tetyais."
Then, there's this sign in front of a Greek restaurant that I saw while visiting family in Santa Fe, New Mexico:
"Ooh, my favorite! Grssk Rthtphsssrphs!"
Throw into the mix the recent development of "Textspeak" -- lmfao and brb and ttyl are so commonly used that they don't even flag as misspellings -- and you have the makings of a confused mess. These sorts of conventions aren't only created to speed up communication, however; they can also be used to hide -- like "Leet," an online spelling convention originating in the late 1980s to allow hackers to communicate with each other on message boards without alerting the moderators by using forbidden keywords. (An example of Leet is that "elite hacker" is written "31337 H4XØR" -- the first word using 3, 1, and 7 for the letters E, L, and T, respectively, so the first word is "eleet.")
It's always a struggle to stay one step ahead of bad actors, and there are scammers who have used this kind of technique to get people to respond to scam emails (or click on their websites), by substituting one similar, but non-English, character in a legitimate-looking website address. "Citibank.com," for example, might turn into "Citibɑnk.com" -- substituting the IPA symbol "ɑ" for the standard "a" -- and unless you were looking closely, you might well not notice the difference, and click your way to a website that is definitely not the real Citibank.
So what we end up with is a mishmash of problems that arose from a combination of the vagaries of language evolution and deliberate attempts to mess things up further, along with a good measure of pure idiocy:
As Julius Caesar so famously said, "Vspph, vphdph, vphcph."
In the above case, there's also an apparent disregard of what my tattoo artist said to me -- "Be sure it's what you want, because that shit's permanent."
So that's this morning's musings on some weird features of written language. Understand that I'm not one of those types who rails at every alteration from the King's English -- I'm about as far from a prescriptivist as you can get. I can't help but wonder, though, if some of what's happened has actually made it more difficult to be understood.
Of course, if you're a ЯUSSIAИ 31337 H4XØR, that's probably exactly what you wanted.
Two days ago, I finished the draft of my historical novel Nightingale.
I checked the document to see when I created it -- October 21, 2025. Ten weeks and 96,600 words later, I've got a complete story, about a man in the thirteenth century who unwittingly becomes involved in treachery and double-dealing between the kings of France and Scotland, ends up cornered into committing an act that leads to chaos, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone.
Oh, and there's a ghost and a curse and a guy who may or may not be an angel.
It was an interesting tale to tell, and for sure the fastest I've ever written a whole novel. I love the main character, Simon de Montbard, because he's complex and multi-layered, and also because he's a very unlikely hero. I'm actually sad to say goodbye to him.
I'm doubly sad, though, because this propels me into my second-least-favorite part of being a novelist, which is:
Editing.
My first-least-favorite, of course, is marketing. Most authors dislike it as well, but I have a special loathing for it, because I have a fundamental, reflexive hatred for self-promotion, coming from a childhood where I had beaten into me that Talking About Yourself Is Conceited And That's Bad. When I was little, any time I mentioned anything I had accomplished, or even was interested in, it was met with "No one wants to hear about that," with the result that even now I come close to being physiologically incapable of bringing up creative stuff I'm doing in conversation. (It's a little easier to write about it, obvs. But even the mild level of self-aggrandizement I'm doing here is kind of uncomfortable. Childhood trauma never quite goes away.)
This is why even doing stuff like posting a link on social media to my website or to one of my books on Amazon makes me immediately afterward run and hide under a blanket. Probably explaining why my sales figures are so low. It's hard to sell any books when I self-promote so seldom that it's met with "Oh, I didn't know you'd written a book!" when in fact I've written twenty-four of them.
Well, twenty-five, now.
In any case, now Nightingale goes into the editing stage of things, which is not anxiety-producing so much as it is tedious and a little maddening. As my friend, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, put it, "Editing is difficult because it's so easy to see what you meant to write and not what you actually did write." I've had errors slip through multiple readings by multiple people -- not just simple typos or grammatical errors, but the bane of my existence, continuity errors:
Roses are red, Steve's eyes are blue But you said they were brown back on page 52.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've caught stuff like a character opening a window that she just opened two pages earlier, or going down the stairs to the first floor when she started out in the basement. I sincerely hope I have caught all of those sorts of things, because nothing yanks a reader out of the world of the story quite as quickly as that "... wait, what?" response when there's a problem with continuity.
However, I did learn something yesterday that should be a comfort to my fellow writers who have been reading this while nodding their heads in sympathy; errors, all the way from typos to major plot snafus, aren't your fault. They're the fault of a demon named Titivillus who is in charge of making writers fuck things up. Then when they do, Titivillus keeps track of all the mistakes, and when it comes time for God to judge the writers' souls, he reads out all the errors they've made so the writers will end up in hell.
Apparently people back then honestly thought Titivillus was real. A fifteenth-century English devotional called Myroure of Oure Ladye has the lines, "I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus... I muste eche day ... brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes."
Judging by the spelling, it looks like Titivillus has already racked up a few points just on that passage alone.
A fourteenth-century illustration of Titivillus trying to induce a scribe to screw up his manuscript [Image is in the Public Domain]
I must say, though, the whole thing strikes me as unfair. If Titivillus is responsible for my errors, they're not really my fault. Maybe the logic is that I should have concentrated harder, and not listened to him whispering, "What you mean to write is 'The man pulled on his trousers, then slipped on his shit.'"
What amazes me is how tenacious some of these errors can be. As K. D. pointed out, our brains often see what we think is there and not what actually is there, with the result that we breeze right past goofs that you'd think would stand out like sore thumbs. It's why all writers need good editors; you're not going to catch everything, no matter how carefully you think you're reading. (And that's not even counting the fact that I seem to have a genetic condition that renders me incapable of using commas correctly.)
So now I need to go back through my own manuscript looking for faylynges and neglygences in syllables and wordes, before I turn it over to my actual editor, who no doubt will find plenty more. As hard as the writing process can sometimes be, at least it's creative, whereas editing seems to me to be more like doing the laundry. It's critical, and you can't get by without doing it, but hardly anyone would call it fun.
The whole thing reminds me of Dorothy Parker's quip. "If you have a young friend who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to give them a copy of Elements of Style. The first best, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're still happy."
Be that as it may, I still prefer editing over marketing. So I'll just end by saying "Please buy my books, there are links to some of them in the sidebar." Now y'all'll have to excuse me. I'll be hiding under a blanket.
They have an amazing way of collapsing a tremendous amount of punch into a small space. The best poets use language in vivid and surprising ways, often contravening the laws of grammar to evoke powerful images and emotions. Consider, for example, Peter Viereck's striking poem "The Lyricism of the Weak:"
I sit here with the wind is in my hair;
I huddle like the sun is in my eyes;
I am (I wished you'd contact me) alone.
A fat lot you'd wear crape if I was dead.
It figures, who I heard there when I phoned you;
It figures, when I came there, who has went.
Dogs laugh at me, folks bark at me since then;
"She is," they say, "no better than she ought to";
I love you irregardless how they talk.
You should of done it (which it is no crime)
With me you should of done it, what they say.
I sit here with the wind is in my hair.
Viereck's twisted syntax and use of questionable forms like "irregardless" and "should of" might be wrong -- more about that in a moment -- but man, they work.
In my opinion, though, no one used language in more startling and creative ways than e. e. cummings. He's the name I come up with whenever I'm asked, "Who is your favorite poet?" He uses words the way a skilled Impressionist painter uses color. Some of his best -- from paeans to joy and love like "if everything happens that can't be done" to emotional sucker punches like "me up at does" and "anyone lived in a pretty how town" actually use ungrammaticality as a tool.
This is why I was of two minds when I read an interesting paper by Thom Scott-Phillips of Central Europe University called, "Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition?" Why, for example, do we intuitively recognize that the sentence in English "I don't want to go to the cinema" is okay but "I don't want going to the cinema" is not? Why, in Viereck's poem, did the word "is" in the first line sound like a linguistic hiccup?
Scott-Phillips's contention is that our expectation is that the speaker (or writer) is expressing him/herself using the "principle of optimal relevance:"
Informally, "optimally relevant" means "efficient use of cognitive resources." More formally, the relevance of a stimulus is the trade off between the cognitive costs and the cognitive benefits created by attending to and processing the stimulus; and stimuli are optimally relevant if and only if neither costs not [sic] benefits can be improved without making the other worse off. Cognitive costs are, in the most general sense, the opportunity costs of attention; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means audience processing costs. Cognitive benefits are, in the most general sense, the impact that attention has on future decision making; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means accurate enough identification of the communicator’s intended meaning. Putting all this together, the Communicative Principle of Relevance implies that when interpreting communicative stimuli, audiences presume that no alternative stimulus could suggest the same (or a very similar) meaning at lower processing cost for the audience.
He compares our sense of sentences that "feel wrong" to our immediate (and intuitive) recognition of the weirdness of "impossible objects:"
[Image is in the Public Domain]
He further states that our linguistic alarm bells go off in one of three situations:
The sentence appears to have no plausible cognitive benefits in the first place (i.e. no meaning can be determined), such that there is no possible trade off of costs and benefits (i.e. no relevance).
The sentence deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced. Such sentences raise the cognitive costs of interpretation with no plausible change in benefits.
There are mutual contradictions between the functions of two (or more) constructions within a sentence, rendering the optimisation of cognitive costs and cognitive benefits impossible.
Well, okay, but.
I can accept this in the case of technical communication, or even (most) common conversation, where the main goal is simply being understood. (Although given how often misunderstandings take place, perhaps "simply" is itself the wrong choice of words.) But what about language being used to evoke emotion? In Viereck's poem, the non-standard grammar was a mirror of the disordered thoughts of the jilted lover he was writing about, and in context works brilliantly. I mean, try straightening out the sentence structure and "correcting" the wording -- what you'll have left is an empty complaint you probably wouldn't remember five minutes from now.
On the other hand, I first ran into "The Lyricism of the Weak" when I was in college, something like forty-five years ago -- and it popped into my mind immediately when I read Scott-Phillips's paper.
My point is, strange and unexpected syntax -- ungrammatical usage -- might have "no plausible cognitive benefits" in a scientific paper, a news report, or a conversation with your significant other. But in poetry, and in beautifully-written prose fiction as well, the cognitive costs are worth it. Consider the epic smackdown King Théoden of Rohan gave to Saruman in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers:
"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort. Several of the Riders cried out gladly. Théoden held up his hand. "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts. You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc. So much for the House of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm."
There's some non-standard grammar in there, and a few words (like "elsewhither") that wouldn't show up in common vocabulary. It's not written simply -- with "optimal relevance" -- but wow. I defy you to find a single word you could change in that passage without lessening its impact.
Honestly, I suspect that Scott-Phillips wouldn't disagree; he did, after all, say that the problem arose when a sentence "deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced," and it's that nuance that I'm talking about here. But I think sometimes a strange, even jarring, turn of phrase can be preferable to more straightforward diction. Think of your own favorite example of evocative writing (and feel free to post some examples in the comments!), and consider the damage if some grammar prescriptivist insisted that it all be written according to "the rules."
For me, the cognitive cost of reading something beautiful is one I'm willing, even eager, to pay.
A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.
My initial response was that the answer had to be no. The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like." What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity. I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable. I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.
But my friend's question went further than that. Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad? What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?" The problem is, even that may not be so easy. Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.
It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored." I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion. Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.
What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies. Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough. What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards." Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art. (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.) MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."
But what does it mean that "something went wrong"? Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it. But even that suggests something curious. The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."
Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough. It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible. This was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."
Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection
So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this. There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively. Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling. But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work? Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar? If so, what makes it bad? I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.
What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good. Exactly as we should expect. So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly. Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there. "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said. "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."
Maybe. I don't know. If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art. As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck." (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.) But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.
After all, that's the nature of creativity. You win, you lose. Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.
Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.
Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.
To me, though, the interesting point here isn't the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher's balloon, it's the last part: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know." Because that's true of all creative endeavors, isn't it? When creativity succeeds, it's a dialogue, not a monologue. We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.
I ran into an interesting example of that last week when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me -- Joywave's "Tongues." I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.
They seem to exist at that strange intersection between "evocative" and "fever dream." They're downright peculiar in places:
Pick me up, dust me off Give me breath and let me cough Drag me back, collect my thoughts I've come back to the land I'd lost
The palms are down, I'm welcomed back to town Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me I hear their mouths making foreign sounds Sometimes I think they're all just speaking in tongues
Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me. Pretty much all my life, I've been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans. When I'm in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they're going to say next, I don't really get why they have the emotional reactions they do. I often feel like I'm witnessing something I don't really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can't really parse what happened and why.
I've described myself as feeling like a changeling -- someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him. And "Tongues" seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.
My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it'd be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it. The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack -- this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are. [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances. Be forewarned.]
Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song. Here's what Armbruster had to say:
There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers. Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc. All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them. They never left the bar so far as I could tell. It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other. In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort. After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them. I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect. Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.
So there's yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what "Tongues" means.
As a writer, I share Armbruster's frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don't take away from a creative work what we intended. But that's part of the game, isn't it? Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can't (and shouldn't try to) control where it goes. Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience. And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form. I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony. A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess." My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we've been described as sharing a brain, found my favorite book (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) a colossal bore, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty. Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, "It wasn't a bad read" from me.
But that's what we should expect, you know? How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works?
It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers. If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way. Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do. Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.
So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor. Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship. It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn't mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.
And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?
Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a dear friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite. (Do yourself a favor and check out her books -- she's written in several different genres, and the one thing that unites them all is that they're fantastic.) It had to do with how we authors come up with characters -- and how often it feels like we're not inventing them, but discovering them, gradually getting to know some actual person we only recently met. The result is that they can sometimes seem more real than the real people we encounter every day.
"In my early days of writing, my lead male character was a handsome but rather reclusive country-boy detective," K. D. told me. "The kind who doesn't realize how good he looks in his jeans. Anyway, whilst in the middle of bringing this book to life, I saw him in the store looking at shirts. I was startled, seeing him so unexpectedly that way. So, like any good delusional person would do, I walked toward him and started to ask, 'Hey, Cody. What are you doing here?' Thank God, I came to myself, woke up, or whatever, before I reached him and embarrassed myself into the next realm."
I've never had the experience of meeting someone who was strikingly similar to one of my characters, but I've certainly had them take the keyboard right out of my hands and write themselves a completely different part. The two strangest examples of this both occurred in my Arc of the Oracles trilogy. In the first book, In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard literally appeared out of thin air -- the main characters meet her while fleeing for their lives as law and order collapses around them, and she cheerfully tells them, "Well, hello! I've been waiting for all of you!"
I had to go back and write an entire (chronologically earlier) section of the book to explain who the hell she was and how she'd known they were going to be there, because I honestly hadn't known she was even in the story.
In the third book, The Chains of Orion, the character of Marig Kastella was initially created to be the cautious, hesitant boyfriend of the cheerful, bold, and swashbuckling main character, the astronaut Kallman Dorn. Then, halfway through, the story took a sharp left-hand turn when Marig decided to become the pivot point of the whole plot -- and ended up becoming one of my favorite characters I've ever... created? Discovered? Met? I honestly don't know what word to use.
That feeling of being the recorder of real people and events, not the designer of fictional ones, can be awfully powerful.
"Another time," K. D. told me, "we had taken a road trip to North Carolina so I could do some research for a huge historical family saga I was writing. (I was so immersed in the creation of that book that my then-husband was actually jealous of the main character -- I kid you not!) As we went through Winston-Salem, we drove past a huge cemetery. I said, 'Oh, let's stop there. Maybe that's where the Raven boys are buried and I can find their graves.' And then I remembered.. the Raven boys weren't buried there. They weren't buried anywhere. Good grief."
Turns out we're not alone in this. A 2020 study carried out by some researchers at Durham University, that was the subject of a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, and received a review in The Guardian, involved surveying authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh in 2014 and 2018. The researchers asked a set of curious questions:
How do you experience your characters?
Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice? Please tell us about this process.
Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around? If so, please describe these experiences. How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?
Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway. But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters. 62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.
You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type, to scoff at this. But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.
Here are some examples that came out of the study, and that line up with the exactly the sort of thing both K. D. and I have experienced:
I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head. I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write. Of course, I turn and no one is there.
They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me. They belong to the characters. They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen. To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
They do their own thing! I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.
"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech... Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions. For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."
Which is kind of fascinating. When I've done book signings, the single most common question revolves around where my characters and plots come from. I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me." They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important. I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.
I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside. Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.
But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful. So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably intense and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.
And I swear, I didn't have any idea beforehand about Mary Hansard's backstory and what Marig Kastella would ultimately become. Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.
British science historian James Burke has a way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space.
I still recall the first time I watched his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, in which he looked at moments in history that radically altered the direction of human progress. The final installment, titled "Worlds Without End," had several jaw-hanging-open scenes, but one that stuck with me was near the beginning, where he's recapping some of the inventions that had led to our current scientific outlook and high-tech world. "In the fifteenth century," Burke said, "the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg took our memories away."
Being someone who has always loved the written word, it had honestly never occurred to me that writing -- and, even more, mass printing -- had a downside; the fact that we no longer have to commit information to memory, but can rely on what amount to external memory storage devices. Burke, of course, is hardly the first person to make this observation. Back in around 370 B.C.E., Socrates (as recorded by his disciple Plato in the dialogue Phaedrus) comments that the invention of writing is as much a curse as a blessing, a viewpoint he frames as a discussion between the Egyptian gods Thamus and Thoth, the latter of whom is credited with the creation of Egyptian hieroglyphics:
"This invention, O king," said Thoth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
Socrates also points out that once written, a text is open to anyone's interpretation; it can't say, "Hey, wait, that's not what I meant:"
I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
And certainly he has a point. A writer can write down nonsense just as easily as universal truth, and (as I've found out with my own writing!) two people reading the same passage can come to completely different conclusions about what it means. Even the most careful and skillful writing can't avoid all ambiguity.
I'm not clear that we're on any surer footing with the oral tradition, though. Not only do we have the inevitable "mutations" in lineages passed down orally (a phenomenon that was used to brilliant effect by sociolinguist Jamshid Tehrani in his delightful research into the phylogeny of "Little Red Riding Hood"), there's the problem that suppression of cultures from invasion, colonization, or conquest often wipes out (or at least drastically alters) the cultural memory.
How much of our history, mythology, and knowledge has been erased simply because the last person who had the information died without ever passing it on?
Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau seems to side with Socrates, though. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, he writes:
Writing, which would seem to crystallize language, is precisely what alters it. It changes not the words but the spirit, substituting exactitude for expressiveness. Feelings are expressed in speaking, ideas in writing. In writing, one is forced to use all the words according to their conventional meaning. But in speaking, one varies the meanings by varying one’s tone of voice, determining them as one pleases. Being less constrained to clarity, one can be more forceful. And it is not possible for a language that is written to retain its vitality as long as one that is only spoken.
I wonder about that last bit. Chinese has been a written language for over eight millennia, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend the opinion that it has "lost its vitality." Seems to me that like most arguments of this ilk, the situation is complex. Writing down our ideas may mean losing nuance and increasing the dependence on interpretation, but the gain in (semi-) permanence is pretty damn important.
And of course, this has bearing on our own century's old-school pearl-clutching; people decrying the shift toward electronic (rather than print) media, and in English, the fact that cursive isn't being taught in many elementary schools. My guess is that like the loss of memory Socrates predicted, and Rousseau's concerns over the "crystallization" of language into something flat and dispassionate, the human mind -- and our ability to communicate meaningfully -- will survive this latest onslaught.
So I'm still in favor of the written word. Obviously. My own situation is a little like the exchange between the Chinese philosophers Lao Tsu and Zhuang Zhou. Lao Tsu, in his book Tao Te Ching, famously commented, "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say." To which Zhuang Zhou wryly responded, "If 'those who say don't know and those who know don't say,' why is Lao Tsu's book so long?"
All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.
One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with. The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings. I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.
The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation. I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes. My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab). As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.
I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself. And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.
The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.
I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here. Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.
In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else. It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.
The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along. I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life. I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife). But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery. I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like. The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house.
All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.
It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.
I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected. A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts. It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge. In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."
So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.
I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls. I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.
Usually, that's where I'd stop. If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it. Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go. But here... that was only the first step.
One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it. You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from. Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.
He leans into the unevenness hard. And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.
So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.
One of the results
The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut. Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile. Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."
But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.
Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice." The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.
So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.
I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't. I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make. And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...
... fun.
I've never been much good at "having fun." In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound." Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse. (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.) But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity. I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.
I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere. When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain. There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me. I'm important, and here's why." (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.) When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.
And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.
So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work. I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them. (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.) Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up. There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things." Take a risk. Then take another one. The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.
As French author and Nobel laureate André Gide put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."
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