Please be sad. I'm begging you.
Or 'Don’t you let that cowboy come in here.' (Writing advice)
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I’ve been performing improv for a while now. It’s a medium that values bluntness, as you need to get on the same page with your fellow performers as you are making up a story together live on stage. In improv, if you want to do a scene as a cowboy, it often doesn’t hurt to say, “I’m a cowboy, this is my gun. Bang, bang.” Doing this lets you and the others on stage build goofs and more subtle off-the-cuff sincerity from the same understood foundation. But this is a conceit of the medium afforded, because the audience implicitly understands the performers didn’t write out this story beforehand.
Bluntness in a written work, however, tends to need more consideration. Now, I love goofing and being a clever little bastard, I’m the type of sicko who'll perform improv for 48 hours straight (Come see us at The Hideout Theatre in downtown Austin June 6th-8th). But ever since I started writing professionally a decade ago, I’ve kept a certain idea close to my heart. There's no need to be clever when writing about something serious.
Roy Peter Clark best sums up the reasoning in his book Writing Tools. “Most writers have at least two modes. One says, ‘Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world.’ The other says, without inhibition, ‘Watch me dance. Aren’t I a clever fellow?’” he says.
“The more serious or dramatic the subject, the more the writer backs off, creating the effect that the story tells itself. The more playful or inconsequential the topic, the more the writer can show off.”
If something is sad, truly sad, you don’t need the writer’s lips pressed up against your ear, desperately stammering out Mitski lyrics to get you to feel the desired emotion. If they’ve done the rest of their job right, they can rely on the inherent gravity of death, war, illness, etc, to allow the story to speak for itself.
There’s a scene that takes place about an hour into the narrative video game Fire Emblem Engage, where the amnesiac main character’s mother is dying. The story thus far has not spent any time crafting compelling characters. After a fatal blow, the mother delivers five minutes of sappy lines all in a breathy, dying whisper. Due to the main character’s amnesia, they effectively met a few moments ago, all the same, the main character lets out gigantic crying wails. The scene continues, as the writers stuff more sad beats into the scene to convince the viewer to care (including a mother-son pinky promise). She does eventually die, and the remaining characters spend the next four minutes talking about how sad that was. With the level of blunt, over-the-top emotion on display, it would not feel out of place for a cowboy to enter the scene and say. “I am a cowboy. This is sad. Bang, bang.”
While a lot of foundational work would need to change in that game’s story either way, the scene itself may have been better served if it had attempted a more understated approach. There are perhaps a few writers out there who can succeed with five-minute death monologues and pinky promises, but the point is that they are wholly unnecessary to imbue weight to the inherent tragedy of a son losing his mother.
Compare this death to one from the first season of Tony Gilroy’s Andor (light spoilers). There's a minor character called Lieutenant Gorn, a military officer who secretly undermines the fascist regime he serves. We learn that he fell in love with a local woman on a planet his faction keeps under military occupation. In time, he lost a promotion, later the woman, and eventually his taste for The Empire. Over the course of three episodes, we see the great depth swirling within him. We see the pain with which he bites his tongue as his Imperial colleagues speak disdainfully of the local people. We see his quick wit when the rebel heist he's helping orchestrate goes south. But when he dies from a single gunshot, the camera does not linger. Gorn dies, and the universe keeps moving.
The death is incredibly understated. The hand of the writer disappears as we're left with a deep, frenetic unease. We’re given enough information to fill in the details of the difficult choices Lieutenant Gorn had to make. His story is vivid and hard-fought. But all those doubts, efforts, risks, and dreams are gone in a fraction of a second. We, the viewer, fill in that every life snuffed out by The Empire in this show was just as robust as his. Death is casual, but life is not. It's gripping, it's devastating, and there was no need for the storytellers to send in the cowboy to tell the audience how to feel.
My advice then for most writers dealing with inherently weighty subject matter is not to let that damn cowboy feel welcome.
Conversely, you can use all the hit-a-horse-with-your-car, here-I-am, bluntness you want if the subject matter is silly. Rene Ricard’s 1978 essay I Class Up a Joint is one of my favorite pieces of writing. In it, he mostly just talks about how cool a guy he is.
“I've never worked a day in my life. If I did it would probably ruin my career, which at the moment is something of a cross between a butterfly and a lap dog. I never went to high school either,” he begins.
The whole piece is a breezy, not too serious affair, where Ricard throws in clever turns of phrase at every corner. In these kinds of stories, we can show off all of our writerly tricks with abandon. We can be blunt, bold, and clever because what we’re doing in somewhat frivolous stories like this only matters as much as we inject into it. If the cowboy showed up at any point during this essay, he'd actually fit right in. You could picture him saying, “I’m a cowboy. I never went to high school either. Has anyone seen my gun?”
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It’s important to note that understated does not necessarily mean lacking in poetry. When I have written about politics and the loss of late relatives of mine, I certainly do not eschew metaphors and witticisms. Poetry is, of course, a natural companion to grief. But when we know our subject matter is serious, we are building as much with what we don’t say. We are constructing fractured ceramics, trusting that the universality of loss will fill in the rest. Know this. Believe in those you write to.
We’ll close this letter then with the final passage from Jesmyn Ward’s On Witness and Respair. In the essay, Ward reflects on the world bearing witness to the moments of high-profile Black American suffering and solidarity, which she meditates on alongside the primary subject matter of the piece, her husband’s passing. He died officially from “acute respiratory distress syndrome,” just two months before the COVID-19 pandemic took root in America. He was 33 years old.
“When my Beloved died, a doctor told me: The last sense to go is hearing. When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.
I hear you.
I hear you.
You say:
I love you.
We love you.
We ain’t going nowhere.
I hear you say:
We here.”
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That’s all for this week, everybody. Thanks for reading. We’ll be back another Thursday here soon.
More words to read!
"But when we know our subject matter is serious, we are building as much with what we don’t say. We are constructing fractured ceramics, trusting that the universality of loss will fill in the rest." I felt this in the way I speak about my dad. I often just sum it up with, "That was my dude."