how to use restraint
Sometimes, audio is the superior medium. It’s easy to forget this because audio is often just a supplement or alternative to video. The audio show Random Tape is a good reminder. It’s a collection of audio recordings that don’t have much to do with each other than having all fallen into the hands of man named David Weinberg. I cherish it as a testament to the power of pure audio as a medium.
Recently during my routine cleaning of Google storage forced by their 15GB max and my determination to stay in the free tier, I came across a video that was all black. It was 1 minute and 34 seconds long and had retained its place in my Google Photos purely due to its audio. I had recorded it purposefully with my phone in my pocket during a recent Christmas trip I took with my mom and younger sister to Puerto Vallarta. In it you can hear only our voices and the sound of the beach. So I lifted the audio and scrapped the video, reducing the file’s size 100 times. Here it is:
Inspired, I tried the same for a video I took that same trip of a live band at River Cafe, where we had dinner. It was blurry, a bit shaky, and not much to look at. I figured keeping just the audio would be a good compromise. Footage of the band lost, but their music conserved and in a much smaller file. But then I listened to it and realized that I liked it better as pure sound. It wasn’t a compromise, it was an improvement.
Admittedly, part of my satisfaction was in finding an efficient way to conserve the memory without paying for cloud storage. But I think the audio version is better because it omits sensory details – visual, in this case – that would’ve otherwise made the moment seem more ordinary. By making it difficult to know exactly what is going on in the scene, by slightly disorienting the listener, and by forcing them to sharpen their focus on the limited source of sensory information, the audio version heightens the feeling of being transported to a particular place and time. Feeling around to get a grip on what’s going on, you find yourself pulled in.
A writer creates meaning in collaboration with the reader by manipulating their attention. They curate bits of experience and bring them into sensory focus for the reader to notice and experience. The literary writer’s job isn’t to explain experience, but to
simulate ithow to make instead of describing
Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along? He says he learned from a fellow writer to “distrust adjectives”. I don’t know exactly what it is he learned about adjectives because he did not abandon them.
Jack Kerouac also writes in this way in On The Road, impressing directly and vaguely the sentiments in his mind. “Stream of consciousness” sounds right not only because of Kerouac’s unedited, spontaneous style, but also because he offers access to the unrefined state of his thoughts, the feelings that are evoked in him. Unlike Keroauc, Hemingway edited and manicured his writing until it was pristine, but he presents the minds of his characters in the crudeness of their existence. He portrays thoughts in the way they rise and fall in a mind, appearing as a notion that remains vague if not developed before it exits soundlessly.
At the end there I wanted to use the word “intuitive”. Perhaps this is where Hemingway’s rule of thumb comes into play. Instead of describing the writing and the thoughts as “intuitive”, I can make them intuitive by describing as they exist, rather than describing the category (“intuitive”) to which they belong. Perhaps his rule is about describing things as they are, not as we later understand them. If so, then make instead of naming, or show instead of telling are better phrases.
Perhaps that’s why he uses the word “good”. A good cafe, a good wine, a very good novel. And somehow it works, despite the admonitions of high school English teachers for such vague wording. It describes an easy satisfaction, a vague but certain joy.
and thereby provoke the reader to reckon from it their own understanding.
Making art is in part an act of calibration. Creating
secondhand experienceshow to tell a story
(This is an edited excerpt from my piece The Virtual Book.)
Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it. Writers aspired not just to document scenes but to recreate them for readers to witness. Though some writers criticized this practice for warping truth through interpretation, other writers flourished in it. Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and evangelist of the method, compiled exemplary articles in his book The New Journalism. According to Wolfe, using techniques of literary realism was like
adding electricityinto the otherwise mechanical machine of journalism. By using dialogue,
point of view, and symbolism, writers could achieve “absolute involvement of the reader”.
The anthology includes a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s nonfiction novel on the Hell’s Angels, which he wrote after a year of living with them. Thompson depicts a tense confrontation between the Angels and the locals of Bass Lake, the gang’s preferred destination for their Labor Day tradition of binge-drinking and mayhem-making.
“If you play straight with us, Sonny, we’ll play straight with you. We don’t want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we’re gonna come down on you hard, it’s gonna be powder valley for your whole gang.”
On the day, Thompson’s newspaper editor requested “no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.” But in his book Thompson gives us much more. He doesn’t report the events in the cold, detached voice of the typical journalist observing from the sidelines. Nor does he simply list the facts and state the outcome. He recounts, in first person, the experience of being caught in a stand-off between outlaws known for their brutality and a makeshift militia of locals determined to defend their town:
“The first one of these sonsofbitches that gives me any lip I’m gonna shoot right in the belly. That’s the only language they understand.”
The reader leaves not with memorizable facts, but a secondhand experience based on Thompson’s point of view:
I was standing in the midst of about a hundred vigilantes…as I looked around I saw that many carried wooden clubs and others had hunting knives on their belts. They didn’t seem mean, but they were obviously keyed up and ready to bust some heads…under these circumstances the only neutrals were the tourists, who were easily identifiable. On my way out of town I wondered if anybody in Bass Lake might take one of my aspen-leaf checks for a fluorescent Hawaiian beach suit and some stylish sandals.
depends on the omission of details just like it does on their inclusion. A good writer, a good storyteller, a good filmmaker, good artists of all kinds withhold things from us so that we lean in closer, listen more carefully, read between the lines. An artist’s greatest resource is not words, images, sound, or any of the elements of their craft. Their greatest resource is the human body, the magnificent biochemical machine wherein all experience real or artifical takes place. Artists use their own to intuit what stimulus and how much of it will evoke something in their audience’s brains and bodies. Insufficent information renders a blurry image, but so does excess. Clarity lies in between.