The nature of such work

The opening paragraphs of The Unquiet Grave, a 1944 collection of aphorisms and pensées by Cyril Connolly:

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Quite the opening salvo even if “an artist should always strive for his best” is not going to be a revelation to most of us, but the challenge intensifies in the second paragraph—to me the most striking passage:

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

This brought me up short, and not because I disagreed with it.

I recently read this review of the great film historian David Thomson’s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies. The reviewer notes Thomson’s fame as the author of the massive and authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film—first published in 1975 and now in its sixth edition—as well as what seems to be Thomson’s steadily increasing dislike of movies: “He has come to think of cinema as the cave in the Republic. Unlike Plato’s prisoners, though, who have no real idea of what is going on in the world outside, we have willingly chained ourselves in order to avoid thinking about anything external to the self. We have let ‘the lifelike’, Thomson says, ‘distract us from life’.”

I have to agree with more than I’d like, and I’ve slowly recognized a dissatisfaction—a falling out of love, in the terms of that review—in myself with regard to the movies. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but I didn’t write a movie year-in-review for 2025. I doubt I’ll have one this year, either.

But I don’t think I’ve arrived at Thomson’s place, not least because I still love old movies. So what if the new stuff is mostly terrible?

Well, it’s the ephemerality Connolly notes that bothers me. If a cruddy movie nowadays seems like a waste of time, effort, money, and talent, how much more so when you think about what it will take to preserve that movie? Will anyone be watching movies in a thousand years? Will they be interested? Crucially, will they be able to?

The fragility and impermanence bother me, I think, because I spend so much time studying the Early Middle Ages. So little of ancient literature survived, and that thanks only to the enormous effort of anonymous copyists. Years ago in college I began to wonder just how well one of my own books would survive a similar chain of transmission. This was prompted by the unlikely duo of Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. McCarthy, of course, was a textual and punctuation minimalist. His meaning comes from the words themselves, simpliciter. Foer’s books play all kinds of postmodern typographical games. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has a multi-page spree of a single unbroken stream-of-consciousness paragraph in which the lines slowly run together until the letters and words are indecipherable and, finally, a solid block of black ink.

Suppose a collapse comes, or simply a long downturn—not a bang, but a whimper. Which author will be easier to copy? Which is easier to read now? Everything I write now I write with a view to being understandable without accurate punctuation or things like the italics used for emphasis in the previous sentence.

Even one movie relies on so much technological infrastructure that I have to assume the entire medium will be lost someday. For those of us who love movies, are they worth the time? The effort? The mental energy? Digital versions will inevitably be lost, but will the physical films become just so much Linear A, or the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum? Assuming some future Canticle for Leibowitz society arises and is able to view them again, will even that be worthwhile?

This is worth thinking about, because Connolly betrays himself a bit in that final line. Potatoes may not last—you’ll have to grow them again, and you’ll have to eat again—but that doesn’t make them pointless. And isn’t even a masterpiece ultimately impermanent?

I have no answer to any of these things, but I’ve been more and more concerned with things that last. The digital age is the most ephemeral thing there is. Our culture is electricity. How long does a flash of lightning last? How much of it is left once it’s over? Look at YouTube, Tiktok, social media, and consider the nature of such work.

Toad ex machina

For the last couple months I’ve been slowly reading The Wind in the Willows to the kids before bedtime. Last night we finished the penultimate chapter, in which Toad, having escaped from prison and reached Rat’s riverbank hole after a madcap cross-country chase in disguise, learns that Toad Hall has been taken over by the stoats and weasels who live in the woods. They’re living off the fat of Toad’s patrimony and wrecking his house, and, what is more, have guards posted and regular patrols around the perimeter of the property.

Rat and Badger rule out a direct attack. The stoats on guard duty will warn the weasels, who will be ready and waiting—provided Toad and company ever get past the guards. Despite Rat’s passion for weaponry of all kinds, they’re outnumbered and outgunned by opponents who have no scruples. How will they ever get in and reclaim Toad Hall?

Then we read this exchange and revelation:

“Then it’s all over,” sobbed the Toad, crying into the sofa cushions. “I shall go and enlist for a soldier, and never see my dear Toad Hall any more!”

“Come, cheer up, Toady!” said the Badger. “There are more ways of getting back a place than taking it by storm. I haven’t said my last word yet. Now I’m going to tell you a great secret.”

Toad sat up slowly and dried his eyes. Secrets had an immense attraction for him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.

“There—is—an—underground—passage,” said the Badger, impressively, “that leads from the river-bank, quite near here, right up into the middle of Toad Hall.”

“O, nonsense! Badger,” said Toad, rather airily. “You’ve been listening to some of the yarns they spin in the public-houses about here. I know every inch of Toad Hall, inside and out. Nothing of the sort, I do assure you!”

“My young friend,” said the Badger, with great severity, “your father, who was a worthy animal—a lot worthier than some others I know—was a particular friend of mine, and told me a great deal he wouldn’t have dreamt of telling you. He discovered that passage—he didn’t make it, of course; that was done hundreds of years before he ever came to live there—and he repaired it and cleaned it out, because he thought it might come in useful some day, in case of trouble or danger; and he showed it to me. ‘Don’t let my son know about it,’ he said. ‘He’s a good boy, but very light and volatile in character, and simply cannot hold his tongue. If he’s ever in a real fix, and it would be of use to him, you may tell him about the secret passage; but not before.’”

Now for an odd comparison:

One of the great weaknesses of Ready Player One is that every time narrator Wade Watts meets some hitherto unprecedented challenge, something that should pose a problem and complicate his quest, he waves dismissively to the reader and lets us know he actually mastered whatever skill is required to complete it—playing an obscure arcade game, watching every episode of some trash 80s sitcom multiple times, memorizing every line of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—ages ago. No biggie. Very convenient.

Wade has a stash of knowledge and skills he only mentions once it becomes relevant. Ordinarily something like this should be set up or at least mentioned beforehand, as in a fair-play mystery. (Contrast this with the best Harry Potter novel, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Rowling performs dazzling sleight-of-plot with all but a few key elements plainly visible from the beginning.) What Ready Player One does is not exactly deus ex machina, but it feels both contrived and lazy and it’s all too common in bad fiction.

Badger’s revelation in Wind in the Willows, on the other hand, which similarly introduces a solution to a thorny problem just as it seems impossible, works. It works because the way the information is revealed is rooted in the characters. We know Toad all too well by this chapter—of course if there were a secret passage no one would tell him. And we know Badger both through his actions and his reputation among the other animals—of course if there were a secret passage he would be the best person to trust with the secret. It feels natural and therefore credible not because the secret passage was set up beforehand, but because of what we have seen of the characters all the way through.

The other animals looked hard at Toad to see how he would take it. Toad was inclined to be sulky at first; but he brightened up immediately, like the good fellow he was.

“Well, well,” he said; “perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am—my friends get round me—we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories—and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. Never mind. Go on, Badger. How’s this passage of yours going to help us?”

That Kenneth Grahame is able to get some laughs—again, rooted in character—out of this plot point is just the icing on the cake.

A weird, unique, brilliant, funny, and fun little novel, and so much better written and plotted than a lot of fiction today. (This climactic section is also quite consciously modeled on the Odyssey, something even my kids picked up on. Perhaps material for a future post.) I’m glad I’m finally reading it and hope to finish it tonight.

Dialogue, dialect, and expectations

Back at the end of last month I made a dumb joke on Substack that went viral. A classical educator I follow shared this meme, which he captioned “Finally, dealing with the real issues…”

I restacked it and added, on the spur of the moment, “Muse, sing of a guy who was wicked smart…”

I don’t keep close track of my Substack analytics but I think this is now the most widely viewed thing I’ve shared on there. That was May 31st, and June is about to end and I still get multiple notifications a day that someone has liked it or restacked it or—the point of this post—commented on it. And the people commenting on it have made the same highly original joke over and over for a month. Maybe it’s already crossed your mind as you read my silly invocation above:

That should say “wicked smaht.”

I haven’t counted but I’ve gotten at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, versions of that joke. It’s actually given me cause to think, again, about writing dialect.

My abortive series of long-form posts on Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing ended with a single post about dialect. Leonard’s rule: “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.” After examining several long passages from different novels featuring different approaches to writing dialect, I arrived at six general guidelines, my personal approach to the problem. What I think is one of the most important is: “Keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, using it always to suggest a broader pattern that you don’t render.”

I have striven to follow this guideline, letting syntax and vocabulary suggest the way a character pronounces words—so that the reader hears it in his head—rather than spelling the pronunciation out. Heavy use of phonetic spelling becomes difficult to read, distracting, or, at worst, insulting to the dialect being rendered. But.

But sometimes some words are so distinctive to the way a dialect is spoken they become emblematic of that dialect. The result is that writing even a line of dialect speech that does not spell a distinctive word phonetically will be interpreted by the reader as a failure. An unforeseen pitfall, one I fell straight into.

In the 2004 film The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton’s David Crockett only wears his buckskins and coonskin cap for what amount to PR appearances. When questioned by Jim Bowie about his hat later (“What happened to your cap? Crawl away?”), Crockett confesses to wearing it only because of his popular image: “People expect things.”

A useful point to keep in mind when writing dialect. Even as a joke.

Latitude and the borders of the possible

For Father’s Day my wife gave me a gift card to a brand-new local bookstore. I used it to pick up, at long last, a copy of AS Byatt’s Possession, first recommended to me years ago by my best friend at Clemson. The novel’s epigraph, a passage from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables, struck me:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

“Romance” here hewing closer to its original medieval meaning of “adventure.”

As it happens, just yesterday I finished rereading The Thirty-Nine Steps for the fifth or sixth time—and the first time I’ve revisited a book for John Buchan June. Buchan’s dedication, to his friend and publisher Tommy Nelson, includes this oft-reprinted explanation of the kinds of books Buchan liked—and wrote:

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.

There’s that word romance again.

Just the other day I saw an ordinarily thoughtful Substacker assert that condemning TV while reading “plot-driven genre fiction” was hypocritical, as the latter was no different from the former; the reader just holds his head in a different position from the TV viewer. This is not the stupidest thing I’ve seen online recently but it wasn’t far off.

First, there is nothing wrong with reading for entertainment. I’d even argue, as I will momentarily, that a book should at the very least entertain, whatever its subject. But the romance, the story that stays “just inside the borders of the possible” and for which the reader must—but most often quite gladly—grants “a certain latitude,” need not be mere entertainment. A good plot and a little excitement open the imagination to truth and argument better than any bluntly stated thesis. If genre fiction is nothing more than brainrot, why have our most gifted writers turned their hands to it over and over for centuries? Why did Jesus tell pointed, engaging, and surprising stories in popular forms?

Per CS Lewis, for whom the fantasy stories of George MacDonald “baptised” his “imagination” long before the arguments of his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson could reach him, “every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less.”

Buchan and Hawthorne could hardly be more different, but I appreciated the consonance between their explanations of what the novelist who aims for something more striking than kitchen-sink realism—Hawthorne’s “very minute fidelity”—dull modern or postmodern rumination, or pure didacticism must do. The reader willing to grant that latitude and march with the author on the ragged edge of believability should, if the author knows what he’s about, be amply rewarded.

* * * * *

Our new bookstore is a small local brand of M Judson of Greenville. Check them out here. I reviewed The Thirty-Nine Steps for the very first John Buchan June in 2022. You can read that here. Last year I reflected on the duty of the good writer—in this case, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming—to entertain as a prerequisite to doing more here. And yesterday I recorded a podcast with a longtime reader about Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps specifically, a conversation I’m excited to share with y’all. Be on the lookout.

On audacity and plausibility

Earlier this week I got the chance to catch up with my friend JP Burten. We were talking about a recent writing project of his that involves Bitcoin as a plot element and he noted, as an aside, that he doesn’t really know anything about cryptocurrency. Could’ve fooled me, I said. I found his use of it for the purposes of his story completely believable.

I related my own plausibility story. In Dark Full of Enemies, Colour Sergeant Graves, the commando team’s explosives expert, carries a small tin of thermite with him for improvisatory use. In the sabotage scenes leading to the novel’s climax, the team uses some of this to melt the steel doors of the dam shut, sealing in the main explosive charge and thwarting German efforts to counterattack and remove them. I put a lot of imaginative effort into this passage and was pretty pleased with it, especially as a chance to play with the Arctic winter setting and theme of darkness:

McKay took the tin and went to the end of the gallery. At the steel door he took out a wad of thermite, prepared by Graves at the Petersen house, and a match and squashed it into the gap in the jamb, just above the lock. He set the bolt and lit the thermite.

The little wad caught and burned white. Molten steel fizzled and guttered in sun-bright globs onto the floor. The tunnel lit up—McKay shut his eyes. He had not seen real light for days. Yellow metal coursed in runnels down the jamb, cooling as it went. A minute later, and only the lock still glowed. The rest of the door stood smoking, fused shut.

“I’ll be damned,” McKay said.

He set another pinch of thermite in the jamb just above the lower hinge, set it aflame, and left.

But—I have no idea whether that would work. I did research on thermite (and knew more about it then than I remember now) but never determined whether one could use it the way Graves does. And yet no one has ever called that out as unrealistic, even the technically-minded Tom Clancy fans who’ve taken a look at Dark Full of Enemies and enjoyed it. Whether it’s possible or not, it came across as plausible enough to work.

Per my discussion with JP, the writer can—and should—do research and plan and prepare, but sometimes what sells something questionable is pure confidence. Whether a technical detail like these two or a plot contrivance or coincidence, present it without blinking and it’ll seem plausible. Believability is the daughter of audacity.

This requires art and good judgement and is no substitute for actually knowing things but, like Graves’s tin of thermite, it’ll do in a pinch.

Our conversation was prompted by JP’s new novella Dead Drop, a followup to his mystery The 8-Bit Detective, an internet-age cozy mystery. Dead Drop is a fun, tightly constructed short read and available free on his website.

The writing rule everyone misses

A recently popular genre of Substack note—judging by what the algorithm sends my way, anyway—is complaining by writers about “rules” for writing. These frequently take the form of fulminations against old advice to avoid adverbs. To paraphrase one note, which if I remember correctly was originally much ruder, “Every adverb I write is a little screw you to Stephen King.” More broadly, some will argue that the there are no rules for good writing and even to formulate rules is a kind of tyranny or imposition or—for a special subset of writers who self-consciously posture as independent outsiders—the mark of the dreaded “MFA writing.”

I can’t speak for every writer who has ever laid out a list of rules for their own writing, but these Substack warriors could save themselves a lot of time and lower their blood pressure by noticing one all-important caveat or disclaimer in every good list of rules I’ve ever seen: break the rules if breaking them will produce better writing.

In the early days of the blog I collected three sets of writing rules from three favorite writers: CS Lewis, George Orwell, and Elmore Leonard. They have areas of broad overlap, especially a concern with precision and clarity, but here’s perhaps the most important:

• Orwell: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

• Leonard: “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.”

Orwell’s rule comes at the end of his list; Leonard’s before he even lays his out. They’re emphasizing that these are their rules for how they write, a set of strictures that they have found effective, but space must remain for artistic judgment. This rubbishes another species of Substack complaint about rules, one often leveled at Orwell specific: that of hypocrisy.

Most of the complaints I’ve seen about rules for writing stem from a misapplication of or unwarranted rigidity in a using particular set of rules. This is a legitimate problem. The rule against adverbs exists not because adverbs are inherently bad, but because they become a crutch for weak writers. Most of the items prohibited by lists of rules have this temptation about them: overuse of adverbs can cause verbs, where the action happens, to atrophy; overspecific dialogue tags can, in addition to reading clumsily, bear more of a burden of information than the dialogue itself; passive voice can become an unthinking habit until the involuted relation of subject and verb in repeated passive sentences kills the pace of writing. Noticing and controlling these effects is necessary for strong prose; never, ever using an adverb or passive voice is something a high school English teacher might enforce (indeed, I know specific examples), but is an overreaction.

Again—the authors who lay out these rules usually say exactly that. These rules aren’t hard and fast. These rules aren’t universal. Sometimes you must break them. After all, they’re my rules.

One would think that would settle it, but some of these complaints also seem born of willful misunderstanding or mere resentment. This isn’t limited to Substack writers: I was surprised several years ago to see Ursula Le Guin taking an obvious potshot at Leonard in her book on writing. She took much the same tack, talking about his rules as if they are obviously phony and accusing him of hypocrisy. She was wrong, and the complainers are wrong.

Most crucially, rejecting or refusing even to consider rules and constraints will warp a writer’s artistic judgment. Any attempt to be bold or daring must begin at a baseline, because without that one cannot make judgments about what does and doesn’t work, and a writer who never works within constraints will never grow. Writing without rules is no more feasible than living without them.

* * * * *

Addendum: Even Strunk and White, who are the object of a Two Minutes Hate that comes in almost predictable cycles, were trying to train the sensibilities of beginners, not lay down eternal laws of good writing. One can write well while ignoring their advice, but not until it’s become a conscious decision, not a habit one slips into.

Preliminary notes on worldbuilding

Over the weekend I started reading my first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. This isn’t my usual fare but it came highly recommended enough by enough trusted friends that I finally picked up a copy last year. I’m enjoying it.

What I’ve found especially enjoyable is the convincing post-Return of the Jedi situation Zahn imagines: the Empire struggling to recoup its losses, especially in manpower, and calling in reserves from the outer edges of its reach, and the Rebellion threatened by diverging priorities, in-fighting, overconfidence, and poor choices leading to bad PR. Grand Admiral Thrawn is not unlike “Hitler’s Fireman,” Field Marshal Walter Model, being rushed from one doomed campaign to another on the strength of his tactical acumen, and this outcome for the Rebellion will be familiar to anyone who saw Lawrence of Arabia or who has studied the American Revolution in real depth. (It is, in fact, the better outcome, since the members of most resistance movements end up like the protagonists of Rogue One, the most realistic Star Wars movie.)

That is, Heir to the Empire has good worldbuilding.

I hate the term worldbuilding.

It was cute as a term for what novelists, especially those dealing in fantastical or unfamiliar worlds, have to do to make their stories believable the first 10,000 times I heard it. But the more I heard it the less I liked it, or at least the way it was used—especially when it was used as a single criterion for praise of condemnation of a novel.

At any rate, Heir to the Empire got me thinking about this topic again, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and misgivings about it down in writing. Consider the following informal preliminary notes toward a full account of worldbuilding.

As I conceive of it, “good” worldbuilding works along or toward the following aspects of a story:

• Plausibility

• Complication

• Depth

• Thoroughness

In addition to their obvious purposes—any story should be plausible, right? and “deep” is always preferable to “shallow”—the first three should all suggest the fourth.

This brings me back, as so often, to John Gardner’s “fictive dream.” I’ve written about this in much more detail before, but the short version is that fiction works like a dream in absorbing the dreamer’s attention with a situation and story that are unquestionably real as long as the dream endures. It should be “vivid and continuous,” with the reader’s senses convinced by carefully selected concrete details and nothing to distract and “awaken” them.

Gardner’s conception of fiction as a dream is key to my own understanding of writing, but if it is missing or fails to account for anything it is the strangest and most uncanny aspect of dreaming. In a real dream, we simply know a lot of things beyond the specific events and details of the dream itself. A dream comes prepackaged with unexplained context. This is often the most difficult part of a dream to explain to whatever patient person you’re telling about it: “I was in the lobby at work, but it wasn’t really the lobby, it was an airport terminal, and I was there to…”

Worldbuilding’s best and most proper function, I think, is to fulfil this role, to provide context for what is assumed by the characters within the story. Because really vivid characters will seem to have existed before your story begins, in a world that was carrying on without waiting for you, the writer, or the reader to show up.

I have two basic problems with worldbuilding as it is popularly talked about. The first arises with the verbs I keep using: seem just now, and suggest above.

There is no law governing how much worldbuilding an author should or must do for a given story. It’s going to depend on the story. A novel about ordinary people with nine-to-five jobs set last year will not need a lot of deliberate, calculated explanation. A story set in, say, the marches between the native Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons in AD 550, or in a fantasy world, or in a galaxy far far away, will require much more. In writing a novel like these, some authors will lay it on with a trowel, and some readers will complain if they don’t.

But worldbuilding works best by suggesting thoroughness. The full world imagined by the writer should come through organically, without a lot of direct explanation, and “build” through allusive power that also characterizes and advances the plot. This requires skill and art. The infodump—which is not the same thing as exposition—does not. The writer must resist the urge to put every detail on the page. They must know what to leave out.

Pro and con examples: Tolkien is the paradigmatic example of allusive, suggestive worldbuilding done well. People who complain about the long songs or mentions of “irrelevant” legends of historical characters miss this dimension of his storytelling and read an impoverished version of his work. Robert Jordan, on the other, hand, actually does most of the things people accuse Tolkien of doing: going off on tangents, bringing the story to a halt for extraneous info, overexplaining, overdescribing, overstuffing.

My second problem with worldbuilding is that, as much as it is discussed as some special characteristic of fantasy, science fiction, or some other genre, it is something all writers of all fiction should be doing. Indeed, if they’re doing a good job of writing fiction at all, they’re already doing it. It is inseparable from imagination and good craftsmanship and is, ultimately, a meaningless subcategory of creativity. See again Gardner’s fictive dream.

Again, these are notes on the subject, not an exhaustive treatment. I may revisit the topic again soon, especially if having gotten this into writing I’m able to refine my thoughts.

Does it matter if the movie is faithful to the book?

Over the weekend Substack, in its mysterious way, showed me a month-old note by a literary critic I follow and respect. Since this is a month old and there was already some debate along these lines in the comments, I’ll share and gloss it anonymously:

It doesn’t matter if the film is faithful to the book.
It’s a film! Judge it as a film.
And anyway, you cannot faithfully turn prose into film.
It’s an affront to literary genius to think otherwise.

I’m not actually sure what the last line is supposed to mean. How does holding a filmmaker to a high standard when adapting a writer’s work degrade the writer? But I strenuously object to the rest of it.

To work backwards, the critic here is asserting that the difficulty of adaptation from one medium into another actually makes it impossible—“you cannot faithfully” adapt from book to film, he says. An appalling oversimplification. What does he mean by “prose,” here? When we talk about how a book is adapted into a film and the film isn’t faithful, we might mean it fails with regard to one or more of the following:

• The literal events of the book

• The overall story arc of the book

• Particular details of the settings and/or characters

• The narrative structure of the book

• The meaning or thematic import of the book

• The tone of the book

I’ve tried to arrange that list from simplest to most complex. The events narrated in a story are the easiest to get on screen. The meaning, what the author is apparently both getting out of the story and trying to share through it, and the tone of his storytelling are much harder. We’ve probably all seen movies that more or less adapted a book’s events without capturing the immaterial elements that give the book personality. A Handful of Dust, a quite literal adaptation of the great Waugh novel, comes to mind, as does the John Wayne True Grit. But other films might deviate here and there from the original while nailing its tone and moral register. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men and True Grit, both of which capture most of the events of their respective novels while, much more importantly, faithfully adapting their tones, are masterpieces in this regard.

All of this, according to our critic, is just “prose,” which “cannot faithfully” be made into a film. Cannot. This is not only oversimplified but wrong. Adaptation is difficult, but that we want to judge faithfulness at all indicates that it can be done, and can be done well.

Our critic is on firmer ground in asserting that films and books should be judged by different artistic standards, but this is common sense. Novels and movies tell stories in different ways and may or may not do so well, of course. But—still moving backwards—to assert a novel and its film adaptation are so separate that “it doesn’t matter” whether the adaptation is true to the book is foolishness.

Of course it matters. It matters because if a film adaptation of a book exists it exists because of the book. If a movie presumes to share a title with an author’s book, if it is meant to please readers of the book at all and not to be purely parasitic on the writer’s work and readership—we’re all familiar with the term cash-grab by now—the filmmakers owe it to the book to be faithful in at least some of the areas listed above. And having established that faithfulness is not, in fact, impossible, they owe it to the original to try.

I think it also matters because this kind of talk about the difficulty or impossibility of faithful adaptation has far too often served as an excuse for vandalism. Some vandalism originates with filmmakers contemptuous of their literary source material and wanting to drag it down to their level. Some comes from filmmakers who hubristically think they can improve on great literature. But perhaps the most common problem is the filmmaker with neither contempt nor reverence for the original, who sees it only as raw material to be reworked according to his preferences. It’s all content, after all.

This was my problem with two of the worst film adaptations I’ve seen in the last few years, The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which—if you look at my reviews—I tried to judge on their merits as films while also noting their utter failure as adaptations. They don’t adapt the events, characters, meaning, or tone of the originals even a little bit faithfully. Are we to give them a pass because they have nice cinematography? Because they try to flatter our present assumptions?

There are other reasons to demand faithfulness of a film adaptation—the movie may be the one and only time many viewers, especially students, encounter any version of an author’s story—but these, I think, are the strongest. There is room for debate, of course. Arguments about whether and how Peter Jackson succeeded in adapting The Lord of the Rings, for example, have been fruitful for an appreciation of both the film trilogy and the novel. But handwaving even the possibility of faithfully adapting a book is bad for both.

A film might be just a film, but a film based on a book exists in relation to that book. If an author cared enough to write it and readers cared enough to read it, filmmakers owe them something more than apathy, hubris, or contempt. So do critics.

Kubrick, conspiracism, and what happens when we assume

Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on set. The miniature hedgemaze in the foreground is an accidental metaphor for the subject of this post.

YouTuber Man Carrying Thing posted a funny and thought-provoking video yesterday concerning a strange emergent pop culture conspiracy theory. Apparently some disappointed fans of “Stranger Things” decided that secret new episodes are on their way, a fact signaled through elaborate visual codes in the final season. (I have no dog in this fight. I saw the first season when it first appeared and have not bothered with any of it since.) These fans have compiled huge numbers of minor details as “evidence” but the date of the supposed release of these surprise episodes has already come and gone. Undeterred, they continue with the predictions.

Jake (Man Carrying Thing) has some thoughtful things to say about this weird story, the most important of which, I think, is the role of bad storytelling in creating false assumptions and the way those assumptions fuel the mad conclusions these fans have come to. In the process he makes a brief comparison to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining, which is what I really want to write about here.

The Shining is the subject of several bizarre but elaborately worked out theories, the two most prominent of which are that the film functions as a hidden-in-plain-sight confession by Kubrick that he faked the moon landings for NASA and that the film has something to say about the fate of American Indians.

The latter is more easily disposed with along the lines Jake uses for some of the “evidence” of the “Stranger Things” theory. Why does the Overlook Hotel have so many Native American decorations? Because that’s what a Western hotel in that era would decorate with. Next question.

The NASA stuff goes deeper, though, and this is where Jake’s comments on the assumptions behind such theories are pertinent. The conspiracy theory interpretations of The Shining lean heavily on several assumptions, the most important of which is that Stanley Kubrick meticulously planned everything about his films down to the last item in every frame. Every detail, the argument goes, is intentional and meaningful, and so the film can and has, as Jake notes, been analyzed frame by frame for “evidence” of these theories. But is this assumption correct?

No. Kubrick was meticulous, yes, but not that meticulous. Or not that kind of meticulous. He was, in fact, too good an artist for that.

I encourage everyone to watch “The Making of The Shining,” a documentary shot by Kubrick’s 17-year old daughter Vivian and included as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-ray. (You can also watch it online here.) While the myth of Kubrick is of the chilly visionary with a perfect movie in his head that he brutally forces into reality, Vivian Kubrick captures her father changing and adapting on the fly, picking the ballroom music at the last minute, discussing the different versions—plural—of the script, and even coming up with the iconic floor-level angle of Jack Nicholson in the storage locker as they’re shooting the scene. She presents us the collaborative mess of filmmaking.

Kubrick knew what he wanted, but he had to work his way there, improvising and improving. This both rubbishes the conspiracist assumption about Kubrick, that The Shining presents some utterly controlled pre-planned message, and also functions as broadly applicable insight into creative work and human nature.

Any good artist in whatever medium will have a clear goal and an idea of how to accomplish it but will also adapt as they go, even the meticulous ones. That’s because every plan is subject to the combined friction of creative work and reality, which test the artist. The later illusion of coherence and completeness is part of the art. A great artist like Kubrick can disguise it well, because thanks to his gifts the final product is better than what he set out to make. But the Duffer brothers? Jake—and audience reaction to the conclusion of “Stranger Things”—suggests otherwise.

As for human nature, conspiracy theories, whose protagonists are often hypercompetent if not omnipotent, fail to take account of the messy, improvisatory quality of reality, especially when they presume to encompass a larger slice of it than that available on a film set. They are, as German scholar Michael Butter puts it in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, “based on the assumption that human beings can direct the course of history according to their own intentions . . . that history is plannable.” Or in Jake’s words, “So many conspiracy theories would lose their convincing quality if those who believed them acknowledged human fallibility.”

Recognizing this can make us less susceptible to falsehood—because we all know what happens when we assume—and better creators. A strange but heartening intersection.

Five basic typesetting fixes for self-publishing

I’m currently reading The Cruel Sea, a 1951 novel about the Battle of the Atlantic by Nicholas Monsarrat. A few days ago on Substack I shared a few pictures of the interior of the book, simply but beautifully designed and set in Janson, a readable typeface still in wide use today.

In my note I called this kind of mid-century design “typographical comfort food.” A number of people agreed, noting the “visual delight” of the look of the page and that good typesetting makes it feel “like I can breathe through my eyes” reading it. Another, very much to the point, described the reassurance that comes with good type design: “You know you’re in good hands.”

This last comment is particularly important because at least two others remarked on self-published books in this context. One, an author of sci-fi, said he took this aspect of books for granted until he started publishing his own work, at which point he realized “it really does make a difference!” Another, slightly more dourly, wrote of the need to undo the damage done by desktop publishing.

I don’t know so much about widespread damage, but self-published books very often look bad at the page level. I’ve certainly put books back on the shelf after looking at an unreadable interior. But I’ve been doing desktop publishing of one kind or another as an amateur for thirty years, and—through a lot of trial and error and, crucially, just looking at a lot of books—have learned a lot about what makes the interior of a book look like a book. I’m no expert, but what I hope to offer here are a handful of specific things people designing their own books can do to make sure readers focus on the writing and not on shoddy typography.

Paragraph spacing

A lot of the problems I see with self-published books come from designing the interior of the book in a program like Word. This by itself is not a problem—I’ve laid out all of my books in Word. The problem is leaving Word’s often moronic default settings in place.

Among the worst of these is Word’s automatic insertion of a space between paragraphs. No professionally published book does this, and to a potential reader, even one who doesn’t know much about design or publishing, it won’t look right. Something will feel off.

This setting can be corrected in the paragraph formatting menu. Under the “Spacing” section, you’ll want to make sure that both “spacing before” and “spacing after” are set to zero.

Level up: Word’s default indentation is set to half an inch (.5”). Finished books don’t indent paragraphs this much. Reset it to .2” or .25”.

Line spacing

Manuscripts may be double-spaced, but a finished book should be single-spaced. You may occasionally see a professionally published book fiddle with the line spacing a bit—1.1 or 1.2 between lines, for instance—but the lines will always be closer to single-spaced than otherwise and precisely how this looks on the page will depend somewhat on the typeface or font (about which more below). Again, too much space between the lines won’t look right.

Like paragraph spacing, this is adjustable in the paragraph formatting menu.

Faith through justification

“Alignment” is how the text in a manuscript lines up with the margins. Word’s default is the entirely sensible “left aligned,” meaning the text will be flush with the left margin but not the right. Professionally published books are “justified,” meaning the text reaches all the way to the right margin on every line (except for the last sentence of a paragraph). This used to be a painstaking task for old-fashioned printers, who had a variety of ways to scootch and squish the text to fit the length of a line, but computers adjust the text to fit the margins automatically. Simply highlight the text and, out of the four alignment buttons, click “justify.”

Caveat: publishers do occasionally get artsy and toy with unjustified text with “ragged” edged paragraphs (my CSB Reader’s Bible has unjustified text), but I’ve never met anyone who actually likes this when they see it. Err on the side of traditional standards.

Level up: Be aware that, once you’ve justified the text of your manuscript, you’ll probably want to go through it looking for places where justification has opened huge gaps between the words on a line. You can manually control hyphenation or letter spacing to fine-tune this.

Stay out of the gutter

Even competently designed self-published books sometimes misstep when it comes to setting up the margins of the page. This is not typically a make-or-break aspect of page design but can be off-putting to readers.

Pick up a dozen or so books at random and flip through, looking at the margins, and you’ll see a wide variety of designs and widths. What you won’t see, however, are margins so narrow that they allow the text to stretch all the way across the page, or margins that allow the text dip into the gutter, the middle of the book where the pages join. If the line is too long, it can tiring to the eye and difficult to see into the gutter, and you want your book design to eliminate as many physical obstacles to the act of reading as possible.

This is slightly more relative than some of the other tips I’m giving here, but in a normally sized paperback book (say 5x8”) the outer margin should be about half an inch. This can be the narrowest margin. The top of the page should be a bit wider, the bottom wider still (to accommodate a page number in the footer, for instance), but the inner margin by the gutter should be around half again as wide as the outer.

I’m still unsatisfied with the margins I laid out in my first published novel. My most recent book and the one I’m most pleased with in regard to margins, has an outer and bottom margins of .7”, a top margin of .6”, and an inner “gutter” margin of .9”. When setting this up in the margins menu in Word, be sure to select “mirror margins” to get the facing-page format of a published book.

Appropriate typefaces

Word’s default typeface or “font” all the way through my school and college years was 12-point Times New Roman (single-spaced, I’ll add). At some point when I was in graduate school someone somewhere at Microsoft decided to goof all of this up. They added that automatic line after a paragraph and reset the default font to 11-point Calibri.

The other defaults in this post are mostly basic manuscript format things you’ll need to adjust to make your book look like a book, but these default font settings are mindbogglingly stupid.

The best size for your text is going to depend on a few factors like the length of the book and how that affects the cost of manufacture. Like margins, what looks best is going to be partly a matter of judgment.

What is and is not an appropriate typeface for the text of a book is not. The problem with Word’s Calibri is that it’s sans-serif. (Here’s a quick primer on serifs.) Professionally published books may use a sans-serif typeface for chapter headings or other design elements, but the actual text itself should always be in a serif font for readability.

Fortunately, there are many, many of these available. A few of my personal favorites, what I like about them, and where you might sample them:

• Bembo—a classic old-style typeface with a slightly old-fashioned look and elegant italics. You may see it in older Penguin Classics, religious books from Ignatius Press, or many John Grisham paperbacks.

• Sabon—a modern typeface with well-balanced letters; it is also highly readable at all sizes, even down to footnote sizes like 6 points. Very widely used both for fiction and non-fiction now.

• Dante—nicely balances old-style design with readability. You may see it in the Walt Longmire mysteries, Penguin Modern Classics fiction, or a variety of non-fiction books.

• Minion—a relatively recent but widely used font that is highly readable but, in my opinion, a little bland. Frequently used for non-fiction but you will sometimes see it used for novels—like the Tor Essentials reprint of The Prestige that I read this fall.

• Caslon—a nicely weighted typeface with elegant italics that suggests the old-fashioned printing press (it is often used for books on the American Revolution, and there are some varieties that look artificially weathered, like 300-year old pamphlets).

• Baskerville—another classic, widely used by university presses and fiction publishers a few decades ago. Like Bembo and Caslon, it has as suggestion of class and history about it. You can see it in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

There are plenty of other good typefaces commonly used for professional typesetting, but any one of these will look better than Calibri, Times New Roman, or whatever Word’s default is tomorrow. If these don’t come pre-packaged with your edition of Word, they’re available online in either licensed or free generic versions.

Avoid:

• Sans-serif fonts

• Typewriter fonts like Courier

• Slab-serif fonts, thick, heavy typefaces that are better used for titles or headings than the main body of text

• Fonts designed to look like calligraphy or other handwriting

• Whimsical fonts, of which there are many available

If what you’re after is professionalism and readability, you should pick something unobtrusive and clear.

Level up: With those strictures in mind, experiment with typefaces a bit. A choice of font doesn’t have to be strictly functional, it can suggest tone, add texture, or, like Caslon for those American Revolution books, suggest a time and place.

Conclusion

One of the challenges—or, if you enjoy this stuff like I do, one of the fun things—about self-publishing is that there are always things to fine-tune and improve. Again, the above is a list of basics that, even if they won’t give your self-published book perfect interior and type design, they’ll at least eliminate some of the most obvious mistakes or problems. As that one Substack commenter put it, you want potential readers to feel that they’re “in goods hands” just by looking inside. I hope y’all find it helpful.