'There’s a fear of great writing, of reaching for it, of calling it that': Eleanor Anstruther on prose style

Detailed discussion of writing and editing from the author of A Memoir in 65 Postcards ^ Plus Part 37 of The Demon Inside David Lynch

In today’s issue:

— ‘I owe it to the reader not to piss about with their time, and the same to the characters and stories which have chosen me. Who am I, in the face of such an honour, to send them out half-cocked? Never and not a chance’: Eleanor Anstruther on prose style. We recently chose Anstruther’s A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries from our subscribers’ submissions.

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— ‘He wanted to provide practical advice to folks hesitant about sexual congress with their rapist, wanted to put a reclusive madman’s arm round the hesitator’s shoulder and counsel them that Yip, yip, they should proceed if this would invite a rumoured nasty creature to a new dimensional plane, arguably. Blinkered shows such as Baby Reindeer were in denial that the inviting-a-rumoured-creature quandary even existed’: Part 37 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.

— Do you know a valid (non-circular) justification for the existence of the self, as that term is normally understood?

If so, send that proof to the above email and if your proof is indeed non-circular we’ll publish it and send you a complimentary lifetime paid subscription to Auraist.

Most answers so far have been a variation on ‘If I hurt myself then you don’t feel any pain’, circular because it assumes the very thing, the ‘I’ that hurts, that it’s trying to prove. Thaddeus Thomas’ prizewinning entry isn’t circular, but his understanding of self is fairly unusual (which is not to say inaccurate).

There is a point to this challenge, by the way, and how difficult it proves, which we’ll get to soon.

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ELEANOR ANSTRUTHER ON PROSE STYLE

What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?

Henry James, Doris Lessing, Graham Green, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf; the list goes on, but these are the ones which spring to mind, so I guess they were the advance party, come to get me.

Please quote a favourite sentence or passage from one of these and describe what you admire about the writing.

You’ve caught me on holiday in a house full of books ancient and falling apart, so I’ll quote the latest I’ve read and loved, it is from The Cut Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“If Evelyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties it came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her.”

Short, complete and straight to the point, within this perfect description, language is working triple time to create image, story, meaning. A sleight of hand that is the mark of a master.

Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?

Not a chance. The collective soul, which is where writing like this comes from, can’t be copied.

What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of A Memoir in 65 Postcards?

Immediacy was important, making the distance between thought and page as short as possible. Conversational. No shilly-shallying. I needed it to feel direct and have pace so that the reader stayed with me.

How important is style to the reader’s immersion in your writing?

Crucial. Reading is a friendship, and writing style is character. To be immersed is to get past the getting know and the having judgements that are implicit in the experience of meeting someone new. Once that’s done, and agreement is reached that we like each other, the reader can concentrate, forget everything but the experience of being with me and my words.

Did your editor suggest anything that improved the style of A Memoir in 65 Postcards?

No. She was clear that the existing stylistic quirks, beginning a sentence with ‘and’, letting sentences run and run, playing fast and loose with person and tense, were a vital part of the telling, and needed no edit.

You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?

It takes time to read a book. It’s literally giving me your time. Why would I waste that privilege? No part of me is able to churn out any old shit and not care. It’s not within me. More to the point, the words themselves matter to me. The ideas have chosen me to translate them onto the page, and not caring about their quality would be akin to not caring about my children.

What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?

Voice, style, these are all character traits of a writer, and fundamental in building identity. My process was pretty typical, I’m sure, of most writers; I noticed the same when learning to record audios, how initially, an overlay of performance arrived to shade what was my normal speaking voice, a knee-jerk habit of performance and copying. My early writing sounded like the poor relation to a multitude of masters, from Woolf to James. It’s forgivable, we all do it, and I learnt a great deal, but until I broke out of their orbit, I couldn’t know what my voice sounded like, or, by extension, what I had to say. However weak, a writer’s voice will always be stronger than that which they impersonate, and you cannot say what you want to say without it. Readers can feel voice. It’s an instinct, like knowing when someone is lying and when they’re telling the truth.

Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught?

The technical aspects can be explained, but I think, like singing in tune, you need a natural ear for it.

Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?

Understanding that there’s a rhythm to sentences, and my ear for that rhythm, came naturally. I do have to listen very closely, and I have to be exacting about it. I can hear a bum note but it might take me ages to find the right one to replace it.

Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?

I’m reading this out loud as I edit. It’s an exacting technique, and laborious, but if I want to know what works, I have to hear it. It’s not about personal style. All writing has rhythm. I helped a friend with their blurb the other day, and read their work out loud too, so as to identify what was and wasn’t working.

Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.

Never. Although my ManPerson Andy would be unfazed if it happened. He’s used to my obsessive, focused behaviour around my work. Nothing surprises him.

Do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?

Learn the rules then throw them out. That’s the difference between aping your hero’s voices and finding your own. You have to do your ten thousand hours¹, and then you’ve earned the right to build your own house. After that amount of time, the technical know-how will have entered your bones and you’ll be stylistically safe to throw caution to the wind and go wild. Do what you’ve always wanted to do, experiment, play, see what happens.

Any tips specific to writing a memoir?

Get on with it. There’s nothing so troubling as a writer who doesn’t start. In terms of form, try things out, give yourself the freedom to muck about. Commit to a thousand words a day, or two hours daily in your seat, whichever works for you, they both support getting that first draft done. After years of wrangling with the material, my memoir emerged as postcards run live on Substack in daily publications, not a standard form at all, but such was my overwhelm, that it felt as if the memoir itself took the reins and said, “Okay, this is how we’re doing it.” Sometimes that happens. The work knows best. Remember that.

As for the sticky issue of story, and who owns what, I’ve talked at length about this with Mary Tabor in our collaborative Writing Life project. For detail, have a look at my answers to Joshua Doležal and David Roberts where I get into the ethics and pitfalls of telling personal stories. Memory is unreliable, your truth will not be the truth of the person standing next to you, and motive for writing a memoir is everything in terms of the choices you make. All memoirists experience a backlash of one kind or another, even those who set out pure of heart. In many ways, the memoirist can’t win, and you can read about an instance of this which happened during the writing of The Recovery Diaries in a chapter called The God In Me. As Anne Lamott puts it, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” On the other hand, you’re going to have to stand by those choices, so examine your heart and be clear on your reasons why this is the story you need to tell and this is how you need to tell it.

George Saunders proposed on his Substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?

Yes, absolutely, he’s right. It’s in the editing process that pretty much everything happens. That’s why getting your first draft down is so important. Finish the damn book², and then start editing. Everything emerges from that, including your voice and style. The postcards that I published each morning were edited. Each one took between one and two hours to produce, even though they take only one minute to read.

How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?

Even putting this together, I’ve had to give myself a number of strict talking-to’s. Writing’s easy. All you have to do is stare at the page until your head bleeds. And the issues? Getting it right, getting it right, getting it right; beginning, middle and end. It makes me cry as much as it thrills me. It makes me rage and happier than I have words for. I owe it to the reader not to piss about with their time, and the same to the characters and stories which have chosen me. Who am I, in the face of such an honour, to send them out half-cocked? Never and not a chance. My head bleeds every day.

Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?

Yes, probably. You’ve got to have a stomach for it. You’ve got to care, and I mean really care, as if your life depended on it. Bad writing is easy. Good writing takes determination, grit, talent, perseverance, faith. Notice I haven’t mentioned perfection. It’s not about that. I’ve never published anything when I haven’t looked back and thought, Shit, I could have done that better, but not publishing because I know it’s imperfect is a perfect way to publish nothing at all. I care and I cry and I fail and I will do it all again tomorrow because there’s no greater satisfaction than getting it right.

Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?

I see marketing departments in publishing houses, with disastrous effect, adapting to the writing people read online, but that hasn’t prevented us who write literary fiction from continuing to do what we do best. We might not be getting the deals anymore, we absolutely have been forced to come up with other solutions, but it hasn’t changed the way we write, and nor has it dimmed the hunger for what we do. If anything, it’s enlivened it. People are exhausted by scrolling. They want good books, and we’re here to provide them.

Writers from the patrician class long enjoyed the advantage of their voice and style being the standard in publishing. AI can now churn out this style thousands of times faster than any patrician, so how might this class adapt to re-establish its advantage, and how deeply do you sympathise with their plight?

I’ve a feeling this is a wind-up question designed specifically for me, but to hell with it, I’ll take the bait. I don’t sympathise with their plight, and I am one, so I feel on pretty solid ground. I do take issue with “AI can now churn out…” as if that’s all we were doing. As for “re-establish its advantage”, art is not a competitive sport. The moment that premise is bought, the art suffers. I’m interested in the best art getting out there, I fight the good fight alongside my equals because that’s how it should be. What needs to change is not the system to suit me, a white and wealthy literary fiction writer, but the system to suit us, artists of every stripe contributing our voices to a world that needs us to remind it of its humanity.

Mark Fisher railed for years about the demise of what he called ‘popular modernism’. Adele Bertei and Rob Doyle have spoken in Auraist of the increased conservatism across our century’s mainstream arts, while the corollary in contemporary prose is, we believe, the Replicant Voice. Does mainstream published prose now tend towards insipid conservatism and even automatism?

I think there’s a fear of great writing, of reaching for it, of calling it that, and explicitly differentiating between good and bad. Anyone can string a sentence together, and there’s no shame in the learning curve, but not everyone puts in the time and effort to learn how to do it, to make that sentence a place where form and function meet. Not everyone has the gift and the grit to stand in that place and not move till they’ve nailed it. The tendency of marketing flattery has diluted what it means to write well. Not everything is amazing. Not everything can be, and literary fiction is a standard, not a genre. Look at Stephen King. It drives me mad that he’s shelved as “Horror”, when what he is, is genius, his subject incidental. Yet here we are, an agreed plane where everything not included in the categories “Genre, Commercial and YA” is “Literary fiction”, while all those other categories are allowed, somehow, to be sub-standard when in truth, the standard of literary fiction should be applicable across the board, from children’s books to the most high-falutin attempts at rerouting the universe. “Literary Fiction” does not mean complicated, it means the author cares, and how else are we to develop the art other than by setting the bar that high? Reaching for the sun is how we grow. When someone asks me what I write, I always want to answer “books.”

Name some contemporary writers you admire for the quality and originality of their sentences and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.

I recently read The Requisitions by Samuél Lopez Barrantes, and the relief of finding a contemporary writing the good stuff was immense. He cares. There’s no dead wood. It has speed and density. He’s unafraid of the simple sentence. It is a complete piece of art, and I’ve been raving about it ever since.

Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?

That’s easy. Fitzcarraldo. Every time. From cover to content, they are my style heroes.

1 “of crying” as my friend and fellow writer, Fiona Melrose puts it.

2 I’m quoting Julie Cohen

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The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.

The Summit

The absolute rock bottom was our secret for now. Nobody was to say a word about it on el zumbido, we all agreed, until we’d reached consensus about David Lynch. That rock bottom was so calamitous that it forced us to face once more the question at the heart of this mystery. What had befallen my former higher power that he’d make something so hoaching?

Throughout the seven-year war the cultists had told us how blind we were, and in a sense they were right. Though I’d never admitted this to anyone else, even to Ella or Les, there had long been a niggling sense that just as I’d been blinded by kayfabe for years with drink and wrestling, when it came to The One I was missing some vital fact. Maybe I’d been too distracted by problems with Ella and then losing her to properly understand what Lynch was up to. So what was it?

The first step was to get my Qustodio password from Les, which after being hospitalised by the series and its auteur he was glad to give me. Then surrounded by posters of Lynch and his works, figurines from his works, sat on stools covered in chevrons, around a kitchen table covered in chevrons, lit by The One’s lettering blazing down greenly through the window from the sky, with no gut-churning hairstyles or facial hair or bangles on display, the six of us and Stanley gathered whenever possible in Mateo’s Chueca flat, the very place where Ella had made her momentous breakthrough, which being on the ground floor was easiest for her, Mateo, César and Les as they waited for their knees to fully heal.

Here we’d meet to look at the show from every angle we could think of in the hope of finding some explanation for its awfulness other than a total collapse in skill and care and basic humanity on the part of the hermit we still thought was responsible. As in recovery meetings, we served strong coffee and had cards on the table that said THINK THINK THINK; THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I; and MORE WILL BE REVEALED. There were plenty of nods at what others shared and we frowned upon any kind of cross-sharing, i.e. pointing out flaws in what anybody else proposed. No idea would be too ridiculous to share.

Word got out about what was happening in that kitchen and others began to turn up. The AntiRe warrior-twins Veronica and Beatriz in tee shirts that featured the hermit French-kissing Franco. The Strobes + Robes DJ team who were no help at all and frankly seemed intellectually out of their depth. Trinna’s Nazi Satanist crew were quickly banned because they were just as unpleasant as you’d expect, especially when drunk, two of them refusing to wash or dry their coffee mugs, and one to put on shoes to cover up his foetid hairy Nazi Hobbit feet. And Ella’s fellow witches were quickly banned because they were just as transfixing as you’d expect, and some of us couldn’t focus on Lynch as they whirled round the table hand in hand casting spells to inspire us.

After getting nowhere for a fortnight in late May, we decided that we should try to find some common ground with Lynch and work from there. Where if anywhere did we accept what he was saying in The One? Trinna shared that she didn’t accept most women over forty are whiny hags. Les shared that he didn’t accept seventeen hours of cheese are funny or genius. Veronica shared that she didn’t accept no homosexuals in the US speak. Ten minutes later we were still sharing this kind of stuff.

Ella lit some candles and called for a minute’s silent meditation or prayer. After that silent minute she proposed that we make our starting point the bit at the end of Part 7 where for two and a half minutes all we get is a barman sweeping the floor of the Roadhouse (Franck Boulègue: ‘One of the most interesting dance sequences in The Return… a long and complex choreography for a man and a broom that creates a suspense of its own, based solely on the movements and choices of the cleaner’).

‘The scene is terrible and deliberately so, clearly,’ Ella shared. ‘So let us see if we can view the entire series the same way, people, as deliberate 1960s filmschool rubbish, and try to figure out why David Lynch would produce such a thing fifty years too late.’

Nods went round the table. Yes, we agreed, good starting point, Ella. The possibilities suggested were as follows.

>> Lynch had crossed the Line and gone off his rocker, simple as that, and become lost in Neil Breenish so-bad-it’s-good to the extent that he now believed black equals white and good equals shite.

He wanted folks to think through the potential repercussions, dammit, the next time a frickin teapot rolled up offering in a poor imitation of a dead guy’s voice to send them back in time. He wanted to provide practical advice to folks hesitant about sexual congress with their rapist, wanted to put a reclusive madman’s arm round the hesitator’s shoulder and counsel them that Yip, yip, they should proceed if this would invite a rumoured nasty creature to a new dimensional plane, arguably. Blinkered shows such as Baby Reindeer were in denial that the inviting-a-rumoured-creature quandary even existed.

>> The voices in his mad loner’s skull told him to structure the entirety of Twin Peaks like two adjacent mountains and their valleys.

With the Season 1 premiere, because we know nothing about the series yet, we start off on the left in the valley at ground level. Next for fourteen episodes we go up till we reach the pinnacle of Episode 14 and the revelation that Leland murdered Laura. Next we go back down for fourteen episodes of trash and end up in a second valley. With Episode 29 we start to climb the next mountain and continue up to the second pinnacle Fire Walk with Me. Then we get the severely but not yet apocalyptically minging first few episodes of The One and sharply descend this second mountain, before hurtling down, down into the third valley and then with the final two hours deep under it all the way to the planet’s molten core.

>> He made the series only for his Manbam audience which often watches on drugs.

Good drugs significantly improve the experience of watching The One, since good drugs improve many things. Give me some 4-HO-MiPT, I thought but didn’t say in front of Les, and I’d enjoy the company of Gove, or at least find it bearable, at least for a while. In both cases the drugs would fill in the witters, longueurs and dead air with coherence, meaning, and simple human interest and so help to view these respective national embarrassments as flukes thrown up by some glitch in the Ultraverse, absurd but not completely unfunny, rather than insanely ambitious but befuddled, reactionary and sadistic travesties given platforms beyond what they deserve.

>> Accelerationism is the view that things won’t get any better until they’ve got far worse, so let’s make them hellish. In the context of addiction to booze accelerationism can be responsible for some of the drunk’s worst benders and behaviour, a subliminal attempt to experience rock bottom in order to hurt so bad you’re forced to finally clean up your act and sober up in kayfabe 4, while in the context of the addiction that underlies all the rest, accelerationism might involve gorging on our thoughts so excessively and sickeningly it helps break us out of our imprisonment in language. For similar accelerationist reasons some people are fine with the likes of Mr Trump and Vox, and environmental armageddon.

So perhaps the hermit made The One and the imminent and horrendous-sounding Season 4 so hoaching with the barely conscious aim of shocking and shaming himself and the wider culture into sorting themselves out.

>> A related possibility was that he’d made them so hoaching that their traumatised viewers would never want to watch TV again. Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead? as the BBC kids’ TV show said for twenty years to little apparent effect.

Mark Fisher’s view was that retro mainstream culture, the death of what he called popular modernism, was so important because of the message this sent politically, that the era of progress, cultural and political, is over for you chattel. Rehashes and Total Capitalism are now all you’re going to get. Drop any hopes of removing that proboscis from your neck. Know your place, eat your cereal, and wait for the apocalypse. But there is another way to view popular culture, which is that it isn’t actually very important and the delusion that it is keeps politically and environmentally frustrated people sat on couches entranced by screens rather than doing something less boring and passively defeatist instead. Therefore maybe The One and The Extinction-Level Event were Lynch’s equivalents of that kids’ programme, the TV shows, he hoped, to end all TV shows.

>> And maybe he also wished to give his audience endurance tests so far-out in their frustration, barrenness and ugliness that nothing in our lives would ever again seem to have those qualities to any significant degree.

Even as the climate apocalypse arrived, compared to the horrors of The Return every moment of life would feel smooth and easy, beautiful, Edenic. As in the previous proposal, The One was a Christ-like act of divine and therefore easily misunderstood generosity from the artist to his apostles, through which he nailed his hard-won reputation to the Cross so that hell on earth might feel like heaven. You can probably guess the two contributors who shared or sang these proposals.

>> Or possibly the show wasn’t quite as bad as we thought. It was terrible, despicable, but maybe not to the extremes that we believed.

Mr Trump was despicable as well, nobody but throbbers would deny this, but he was a proxy too for folk’s resentment of the parasite class in general—This is who rules the world?—as well as a beneficiary of that resentment. And in a similar way The Return might have attracted people so tired of insipid TV drama made by millionaires funded by billionaires that they’d swing all the way in the opposite direction, they believed, and vastly overrate a show such as this because, like jazz-scatting at a raped child’s deathbed, it wasn’t just more genteel blandness, because as their Grand Maître enthused about a certain president, it disrupted the thing so much. (Though there was of course an alternative solution, which was to stop watching bad TV. For example, if reviewing it’s your job then perhaps find another one. If you’ve been brutalised by the monotony of reviewing mainstream TV or of factory or security work, the remedy isn’t to applaud that bedside scat).

Meanwhile many of the rest of us so disliked that same culture and the plaudits sent its way by gatekeepers paid by the same billionaires, and resented too the many treacheries of the boomers, that we were no longer able to keep kayfabe 2, and therefore may have lost our equanimity a little and slightly over-criticised the pile of dung—dung with yellow worms wriggling in it, worms with rows of needle-like teeth, also pincers covered in poison that gives you a leprosy-like disease there’s no name for yet—that those same gatekeepers claimed was a masterwork. If we couldn’t take a swing at the parasites and boomer generation themselves then perhaps we could make do with the next best thing, the boomer multimillionaire responsible for the most lauded recent example of the parasites’ most influential artform.

Egged on by several Monster Ultras, I wondered if Mr Lynch and Mr Morrissey had also acted as proxies for my dislike for Mr Trump. Maybe something had snapped inside me, possibly due to years of bitterness about boomers and to consequent headwreck compounded in recent times by too many drugs, and at some level I’d got these three boomer reactionaries jumbled in my mind. And perhaps my dislike for Mr Trump and Mr Morrissey was intensified because their gaudy grotesqueness, tediousness, chauvinism, self-veneration, confusion, pretentiousness, characterological chaos, characterological implausibility, ridiculous dialogue, and so on meant they were like creatures spawned by The One.

None of these possibilities could be discounted. Nevertheless they were so uncomfortable to consider as explanations for the show’s perceived rottenness that an awkward tension began to circulate, not good for César and our host Mateo’s healing bottoms. We called it a night, therefore, and agreed to team up in groups of two or three and meditate or pray some more to spark off less troubling ideas.