Writing complex topics that feel accessible

On the "single stark element" that's with you all along in your narrative, something that "underpins the whole thing," Charlie Jane Anders says today:

"I have a feeling my stuff errs on the side of 'deceptively complicated.' I write things that have a million things whizzing around, but they boil down to one or two simple ideas. Or at least, I hope that there’s one or two main ideas when you look past all the fancy whizzbangery on the surface, or else you are left with just a mickle of a muddle. Right?

* * *

But if something is deceptively complex, how do you keep it from becoming just straight-up overcomplicated and messy? I wish there was a magic bullet – but I think part of it is that if you want to be able to strip away all the layers of complexity and find something stark underneath it all – a single stark element – then that needs to be there the whole time. You have to have one idea that you keep coming back that underpins the whole thing."
— Charlie Jane Anders, "The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex," Buttondown, January 10, 2024

Her book on writing:

But what makes it serious?

Be your theme simple, complex, or somewhere in the middle like "deceptively complex," what makes it serious?

Sometimes you have to write it to find out and let the reader decide.

An affirmation: My essay theme "may seem silly" and "probably is silly, which is a shame, considering that I’ve got this whole essay about it now." ("This is What Makes Us Girls: On the Lana-Del-Rey-to-Red-Scare Pipeline." Jude Doyle (on Ghost). 11 Jan 2024.)

Ask lots of questions

Ask questions, e.g.,:

• "What words would you use to describe the most important values held by people in your culture?"
• "Who taught you those values? Why are they important to you?"

And so on.

Those two questions, and a few more, are from "50 Possible Questions to Open Israeli-Palestinian Dialogues," Kenneth Cloke, Mediate.com, January 26, 2024

Ask one big question

"The personal essay can be about almost anything," Aimee Liu writes, but is "rooted in a central question." The writer writes themself into the frame as the person who is raising the question, a recognition that is central to what makes it a personal essay. It doesn't matter so much if the question is answered. The personal essay "doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, these essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to explain or organize it in a logical manner."

This is from "Picture Your Structure" in her Legacy & Lore (Substack, February 16, 2024):

"Like a memorist, an essayist always writes two essays simultaneously, overlapped as transparencies, one exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the situation, the other what she terms the story. Poet Richard Hugo talks about a piece’s 'triggering subject' and its generated, or real, subject. Phillip Lopate describes the 'double perspective' that an essayist needs, the ability to both dramatize and to reflect. I’ve always talked to my writing students about the narrow subject and the larger subject."

Know the answer to 'did they or didn't they'?

"Fitzgerald had to know whether Gatsby died in that pool in the end. If he wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure which story he was telling..." — George Saunders, "De Maupassant, Part Three," Story Club, April 4, 2024

There's no one model to explain all of human psychology

Paul Tournier explained in The Violence Within that there are “schools of scientific psychology” that “set up a doctrinaire model into which they attempt to fit the whole of human behaviour in terms of a few relatively simple mechanisms — projection and introjection, identification and differentiation, unconscious repression and liberation of complexes, drives and resistances…” While these may contain insights that are “true and valuable,” Tournier says that when we give too much weight to them (exactly “in the very fact of their being elevated into systems”) we risk “the infinite diversity of life and of the mind,” and we may forget that “the essential problems are not about mechanisms, but about values, not about functions but about the person, problems which cannot ever be reduced to an inventory of functions. Literary psychology cannot be learnt—it is too rich, too varied, too subtle, because it never allows itself to be reduced to any sort of model. It may be looked at as one might contemplate a big bunch of wild flowers…the bouquet as a whole does not deliver up the secret of its harmonious unity.”
Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.

People have feelings about what they do

"I can’t think of a way for a character — fictional or otherwise — to pull off a convincing redemption story without experiencing and expressing true remorse ... feeling remorse is a valuable and cathartic experience that empowers change. Whether personal responsibility is an illusion or not, feeling responsible and taking action to change our behavior, is a powerful thing."
— Steven Toews, How to Write a Convincing Redemption Story, The Writing Cooperative, Feb 8, 2024

People can reflect on their arguments

To reduce fights, reflect on:

1. "Why the conflict happened"
2. "How the conflict should have been handled"
3. "How conflicts should generally be dealt with"
4. "How people should generally respond to conflicts in their relationship"
5. "Why this kind of response makes sense"
6. "What would be most helpful for dealing with future conflicts"

"6 simple questions that reduce relationship fights — from a psychologist." Mark Travers. Forbes. April 18, 2024.

Pick a compelling title

Michael Gallant gives some tips in How to Write a Book Title That Gets Attention, BookBaby, January 11, 2024:

• "Be clear and concise."
• "Use strong, evocative language."
• "Be original and unique."
• "Make sure your title is relevant to your book’s content."

Brian Evenson: 'Denarration....you're told something and then it's removed'

The Horror Is What We Don’t Yet Know (and Maybe Never Will): Brian Evenson Interviewed by Rob Goyanes, BOMB Magazine, Jun 25, 2019

One of his books is "Last Days, about an amputee cult who captures an unwitting messiah."

From the interview:

RG
You use repetition, in terms of wording and syntax, to create an unsettling effect. What other devices do you consciously employ to produce this?

BE
Most of my work in revision is about sound and rhythm, trying to figure out what is going to really serve the story. I'm working with those things to try to manipulate the reader. A lot of my work uses a process of “denarration”, by which I mean it presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away. A lot of things are qualified or taken away or compromised, or you're told something and then it's removed. That is a big part of the unsettling effect, of destabilizing the story’s world.

Evenson continues:

"So much fiction has this idea: there's a character, they confront something, they change, and then they're different people. If you're around humans for long enough, you realize that that's the exception rather than the rule. It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I've always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader. That, to me, is more important than conveying some kind of change in a character in a world that doesn't look like our world."

This reminds me of what William Maxwell enjoyed in novels (1955)

William Maxwell, in a 1955 speech at Smith College, said: "These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it." (see: The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine. Reprinted in LitHub, January 24, 2024.)

The reader stays to find out whether "there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had." The characters don't know something because "they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you." You're introduced to a character, and "you have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands..." Or: "A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in." Or the narrator "has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront." Or the writer gives special voice, attitude: "A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s." And "the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up." Trust: "If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. ...you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)" As in "the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. ... As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end." Timing: "a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos."

More reading (if you've got a Medium membership)

Medium members: Check out "The Worst Philosophy Paper I Ever Wrote."