LESSON Less is more and more is different, or when to trust your reader

unanun

Child is born, with a heart of gold
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I'm wary of magic with lots of rules.
I often read many passages where it seems that the author doesn't trust me to feel the right way, even for basic emotions like happiness and sadness. I can tell they don't trust me when the number of words needed to describe something increases, often in the form of adjectives and adverbs.

The best works of literature in all of history trust us to have shared experiences and the empathy to share them. They trust us to know the color red and don't try to explain it again. I cannot hope to reproduce such greatness, so let's liberally quote from examples I found to be the most impactful:

"Upon his string the hero laid
An arrow, like a snake that hissed.
'Twas feathered with the rushing wind;"

- The Ramayana​

"Twas feathered with the rushing wind." In six words, Valmiki of circa 500 BC draws upon every cinematic memory of arrows or bombardment. We even get a bonus, for he accurately describes the motion of the arrow as an undulating snake.

Have you read One Hundred Years of Solitude? I highly recommend it, the experience is incomparable. The author, Gabriel García Márquez, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in part for the development of magic realism. Magic realism is "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe," but the author treats it with the same familiarity as everything else. When we would expect distrust of the reader to be high, magic realism completely trusts us.

He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.

Gabriel's style is punctuated by great leaps in time. The lack of grammar is used to great effect to give us a breathless passage of time. In one sentence he moves forward thirty-two wars (an oddly specific number, which he treats matter-of-fact), yet we do not doubt the weight of the atrocities he has committed. He returns home from war, yet the matriarch:

She spent the whole morning looking for a memory of her son in the most hidden corners, but she could find none.

In one sentence we keenly feel his absence and how he has changed beyond recognition. There is no need to describe her actions of the morning, nor her emotions, in minutae.

Minimize your distrust ratio, the ratio of words to action, by
invoking a common experience with your reader.

Sometimes that fails. The Russians, masters of deep introspection, know well. Following Beowulf,

I say it again, the sooner you tell
where you come from and why, the better.

The leader of the troop unlocked his word-hoard;

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist who was sentenced to death, but spared. Dostoevsky later alluded to his experience of what he believed to be the last moments of his life in his 1868–1869 novel, The Idiot, where the main character tells the harrowing story of an execution by guillotine that he recently witnessed in France. (quoted from Wikipedia)

We don't know what it's like to be sentenced to death only to be freed from it at the last second. Dostoevsky knows, and he wants to share it with us. His distrust ratio is going to be high, yet in his genius he still finds a way to relate it to an experience that we might have.

"Do you know, though," cried the prince warmly, "you made that remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps—but I could not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain! That's the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.

"This is not my own fantastical opinion—many people have thought the same; but I feel it so deeply that I'll tell you what I think. I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape until the very moment of his death. There are plenty of instances of a man running away, or imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon's mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary—why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!"

How strange that an incoming deadline for assignment ticking down from days, to hours, to one hour, to minutes, the strange feeling of desperation increasing as an immovable wall comes closer, can share similarities with an execution!

"It was just a minute before the execution," began the prince, readily, carried away by the recollection and evidently forgetting everything else in a moment; "just at the instant when he stepped off the ladder on to the scaffold. He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and understood all, at once—but how am I to describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw it, you, if possible. I thought at the time what a picture it would make. You must imagine all that went before, of course, all—all. He had lived in the prison for some time and had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet—he had counted on all the formalities and so on taking time; but it so happened that his papers had been got ready quickly. At five o'clock in the morning he was asleep—it was October, and at five in the morning it was cold and dark. The governor of the prison comes in on tip-toe and touches the sleeping man's shoulder gently. He starts up. 'What is it?' he says. 'The execution is fixed for ten o'clock.' He was only just awake, and would not believe at first, but began to argue that his papers would not be out for a week, and so on. When he was wide awake and realized the truth, he became very silent and argued no more—so they say; but after a bit he said: 'It comes very hard on one so suddenly' and then he was silent again and said nothing.

"The three or four hours went by, of course, in necessary preparations—the priest, breakfast, (coffee, meat, and some wine they gave him; doesn't it seem ridiculous?) And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast out of pure kindness of heart, and believe that they are doing a good action. Then he is dressed, and then begins the procession through the town to the scaffold. I think he, too, must feel that he has an age to live still while they cart him along. Probably he thought, on the way, 'Oh, I have a long, long time yet. Three streets of life yet! When we've passed this street there'll be that other one; and then that one where the baker's shop is on the right; and when shall we get there? It's ages, ages!' Around him are crowds shouting, yelling—ten thousand faces, twenty thousand eyes. All this has to be endured, and especially the thought: 'Here are ten thousand men, and not one of them is going to be executed, and yet I am to die.' Well, all that is preparatory.

"At the scaffold there is a ladder, and just there he burst into tears—and this was a strong man, and a terribly wicked one, they say! There was a priest with him the whole time, talking; even in the cart as they drove along, he talked and talked. Probably the other heard nothing; he would begin to listen now and then, and at the third word or so he had forgotten all about it.

"At last he began to mount the steps; his legs were tied, so that he had to take very small steps. The priest, who seemed to be a wise man, had stopped talking now, and only held the cross for the wretched fellow to kiss. At the foot of the ladder he had been pale enough; but when he set foot on the scaffold at the top, his face suddenly became the colour of paper, positively like white notepaper. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and helpless, and he felt a choking in his throat—you know the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear, when one does not lose one's wits, but is absolutely powerless to move? If some dreadful thing were suddenly to happen; if a house were just about to fall on one;—don't you know how one would long to sit down and shut one's eyes and wait, and wait? Well, when this terrible feeling came over him, the priest quickly pressed the cross to his lips, without a word—a little silver cross it was—and he kept on pressing it to the man's lips every second. And whenever the cross touched his lips, the eyes would open for a moment, and the legs moved once, and he kissed the cross greedily, hurriedly—just as though he were anxious to catch hold of something in case of its being useful to him afterwards, though he could hardly have had any connected religious thoughts at the time. And so up to the very block.

"How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active, and works incessantly—probably hard, hard, hard—like an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head—all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts, very likely!—like this, for instance: 'That man is looking at me, and he has a wart on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his buttons, and the lowest one is all rusty!' And meanwhile he notices and remembers everything. There is one point that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else dances and turns about; and because of this point he cannot faint, and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows—that's the point, he knows that he is just now about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it, too! There would probably be but the tenth part of an instant left to hear it in, but one would certainly hear it. And imagine, some people declare that when the head flies off it is conscious of having flown off! Just imagine what a thing to realize! Fancy if consciousness were to last for even five seconds!

Of course Dostoevsky has to use an enormous amount of words to convey this rare experience, but he manages to keep it familiar. After reading these passages, we are almost acquainted with the horror of execution, and it works because it draws analogy to things most humans are familiar with.
 
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