An Old-School Writing Argument

Let's do something we haven't done in an age and a half! Let's talk about writing.

A friend called my attention to a bit of writing discourse that happened a few days ago, to wit this tweet by Tade Thompson:

And then a Medium post in response by Adam Roberts.

I mostly agree with the original Tweet (and I'll be circling back to it in a while) except for the "Cold War politics" thing, like, yeah the Iowa Writer's Workshop was funded by the CIA, but that doesn't mean that the style of writing it lionized is inherently imperialistic or pro-capitalist.

More to the point, though, yes! Sometimes you DO in fact need to actually tell your readership something so they'll have enough context to understand other things that you might be showing them later on. Especially, especially in genre fiction. I'm reflecting here on the ARG design truism I learned from Elan Lee oh so many years ago: If you want the players to know something, tell it to them. It is OK and fine to do that! It's just a different creative choice, and it is just as valid. We're not all trying to do the same thing, and we shouldn't anyway.

And I say this as someone who wildly prefers "showing," not because it's objectively better, but because it gives you a higher-bandwidth way of conveying information. If I say "she arrived in a very expensive car," that's a very small amount of information, but if I say "she drove up in the salsa-red F-150 her daddy bought her," you know a LOT more: she's attention-seeking enough to want a red car, she comes from a family with money, and she might have some right-leaning political tendencies or live in a rural area.

Meanwhile if you read Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, there are fucktons of telling, and it's fine and even great, because the spare, straight language is absolutely a critical piece of the art of what you are being told and how you are being told it.

Variety is the spice of life, yeah?

BOOKS ARE NOT TOO COMFORTABLE THESE DAYS

One of the things Roberts suggests is that books these days, especially in science fiction, are simply too comfortable and easy to read, and that is bad. Ugh I hate that kind of elitist bullshit hand-wringing. (Sorry, Mr. Roberts, nothing personal.) Look, we only consider the Western canon of books "difficult" because culture and language have evolved, and reading them is an act of cultural archaeology.

Shakespeare was a writer of the people! He did not set out to make high and difficult art, he wrote so many goddamn dick jokes. So many.  We just don't notice them all nowadays, because see above: cultural archaeology.

Indeed, the things that we consider "good writing" at all are a matter of fashion and taste, and can and have changed over time. We value concise writing now. But in the mid-1800s, a complex sentence and repetition were fashionable, possibly because readers read differently. There were fewer books, more often reread. Complex language gave readers something to sink into and spend time with, where modern readers want to get in and out because we have so many other things to read next.

That doesn't mean that writing like that was better. It doesn't mean that writing populist and comfortable works can't also address deep, moving themes of what it is to be human. I'd put the Futurama episode Jurassic Bark on the table against any number of works of "serious" literature to see which one makes you feel something more deeply.

A BIT OF A TANGENT

When the subject comes around to "difficult books," I become uneasy. The one that springs to mind for me is Too Like the Lightning, with which I did not have a good or rewarding reading experience. (Again, nothing personal, Ms. Palmer.)

In fact I bounced very early because I felt like I was being intentionally excluded from basic facts that would allow me to get my bearings in the world rather than — this is a key point here —  feeling like I was witnessing an artful unfolding of mysteries. It's been a long time, but the particular example I remember is this: the book was extremely oblique about the fact that the wealthy family in the beginning were magnates of some sort of global automated Uber network.

No narrative purpose is served by being coy about that fact in particular. It is difficult solely for the sake of difficulty. And so I felt like I as the reader was not being dealt with in good faith; even that I was being subjected to some sort of test of whether I was worthy of the book. I do not like the feeling that the author (not an unreliable narrator, the author) is intentionally excluding me.

Many, many people in my sphere have talked a lot about how rich and deep and complicated that series is, with overtones that mean admitting in public that it was not for me feels precisely like I am saying "I am a dumb and unsophisticated girl who was simply not good enough for this book." I suppose the fairest way to say this is, it was written for a very specific audience that I am not a part of.

It's great that books like that exist, truly, to each reader the book of their heart. And yet I am very, very uncomfortable with appreciation or enjoyment of that kind of work being used as a shibboleth for a reader's personal intellectual value. It shouldn't feel dangerous to say you didn't like a book, but here we are.

LIFE IS HARD ENOUGH ON ITS OWN

Roberts also advises seeking out creative constraints, to which I say, what, no. I do agree that writing is like going to the gym in that the more you do the more you can do, but it is equally valid to try to do more complex and sprawling things as you grow in skill and power, rather than limiting yourself to working inside a smaller box.

And it is ALSO valid to keep writing the same kinds of stories that you love writing, because art is good and valuable no matter what it is you're trying to express, and the idea that harder art is "better" is bullshit, see above. It's just a different thing, for a different audience. Both! Are! Worthy!

And many, many writers are already working in constrained-enough boxes without seeking out artificial limitations of technique. For BIPOC writers, for disabled writers, those with family troubles or in abusive situations or other whole-life stressors, whatever words you can get out are the ones you should be writing. Your style is you, your voice is you, use the words that you have.

GAMES ARE GETTING EASIER, NOT HARDER

These points are nothing compared to how much I disagree with his points about games. No, games are not becoming harder, no, gamers do not overall prefer more difficult experiences, and look, the industry backs me up on this.

High difficulty in games is an artifact of early technical limitations wherein they were trying to make you feel like you got the most bang for your buck while reusing resources as much as possible to save extremely limited storage space for the game's code. Making you do the same stuff over and over again was just thrift.

In the original arcade culture, difficulty was at an all-time high because game sessions meant more money. If Pac-Man were easier they would have made a lot less quarters. …But if it were harder nobody would've wanted to even try. For twitch-style games like that, even today, fine-tuning difficulty is about finding a level where a typical person can get into a flow state and stay there for at least a little while, and feel like they could probably stay there a little longer the next time.

Claiming that a game is better because it's hard is absolutely going against the way the entire industry is going right now. The example he uses, though, is BioShock, which is a different kind of beast entirely: a narrative game. These past few decades have seen huge growth in narrative-based games, which are actively cutting away difficulty with accessibility modes that turn down combat difficulty, give you more health, give you more time, even outright story modes where all of the challenging bits are either less challenging or not at all challenging. Some of them don't even have "difficulty" as a concept; the so-called walking simulators. Because people who want to play a game for its story are not generally the ones interested in having something to beat!               

Long-time readers will already know about the famous essay by Dr. Richard Bartle about the four kinds of players in a multi-player online game, roughly translated as: achievers, explorers, socializers, and trolls. Modern narrative game players fall into very similar categories. Not all of these are interested in something that is HARD, and the business is keenly aware of this. Hard loses you market share. It should be an option, not a default, and these days, it increasingly is.

I am absolutely on board with games being an amazing art form. (I mean, duh, of course I am, it’s like, a big part of my whole thing.) The thing that makes games art and makes great narrative games great art isn't "they can be hard." It’s so much more complicated than that. In my mind, one of the main reason is that you can evoke emotional responses based on the player's agency (they can feel guilty because they're responsible for X other character dying, they can be proud because they solved a neat puzzle) and you can't generally access those emotions from flat, non-interactive media.

And the possibilities of environmental storytelling above and beyond "read all of these diaries these people left around" is incredible and so far only barely tapped. Portal and Portal 2 in particular did some AMAZING things with that, and eg. Obra Dina, which is, to bring this back full circle, the whole-game game version of showing and not telling. But it’s a key part of the mood and artful execution even in such narrative-simple, mainstream games like Breath of the Wild, where the ruins of the world speak of an age gone by that you can just barely piece together to understand what's been lost.

Artfulness doesn't come from the difficulty. (Unless you’re trying to evoke the feeling of frustration for creative purposes.) The meaning doesn't come from difficulty. It's great to seek those things out if you want, and it's great to make that kind of work if you like! Just don't go around acting like those modes of creation are objectively better.

Art speaks to different people differently. Artists work in a myriad of ways. That’s fine! And anytime someone claims you should be doing something differently, you’re free to take it or leave it. Maybe they’ll help you get closer to your own vision. But maybe your art just isn’t for them.