Learning from T.H. White

[skip.knox]

I've been re-reading T.H. White's classic, The Once and Future King. It's been many and many a year, and it has somehow got better with time. Some aspects strike me as relevant to us as writers, so I'm writing a post (or two) about that.

First is being learned. White knows his Mallory inside and out. But he also knows tons about hunting, including falconry and boar hunting. He is deeply knowledgeable about English history, including the many myths that trot alongside it. He knows not merely about dogs but about medieval dogs and little-remembered hunting breeds. There's more, but you get the idea.

I do not suggest we all ought to become historians (Heaven forfend!), but it's clear to me on this re-read that the only way the author could flesh out that world so thoroughly is by knowing it thoroughly. I've never been far into the camp of "read books to learn how to write books", but here we see a different reason to read lots of books: to become learned. To know a subject area--it can be something as simple as knowing a place or knowing a craft--so thoroughly that it is ready to hand as you write. It lets you construct sentences and scenes smoothly, adroitly, the way a musician can create variations on a theme when they are well versed in all the forms of scales and chords.

Second is caring about your characters. There is a plot here; indeed, one of the many brilliant accomplishments of White is that he managed to find a solid, modern plot in the morass of Mallory and Tennyson. More remarkably, he found real people in there. Wart and Jenny and Lance are such vivid re-imaginings, they are very nearly his own creations. It's telling that no one else, not even Mordred, gets a modernized nickname.

It becomes evident early and is reinforced many times that White was sympathetic to Arthur, saw Guinevere as admirable, and Lancelot as tragically flawed. Well, all three are flawed, but we see the flaws manifest in different ways over the course of the books. But I don't think authors write memorable books with memorable characters without caring deeply about those characters. White takes his time with each of them. He doesn't merely throw obstacles in their way, he shows them succeeding, being silly, being kind--in short, being fully human. You can't invest that kind of time and effort without caring.

So, there are a couple of things I got from White this time round. I'll make a second post to show examples of his skill. Those are harder to learn from, and I'll talk a little about why that is.

If others here have read these books, feel free to chime in.

 

[skip.knox]

Second Post
I really noticed White's writing skill this time round. He does a thing that reminds me mostly of the misdirection used by magicians. Here's an example.

In one chapter he goes on about how wonderful things are in Arthur's England. This is after he's become king and created the Round Table and his ideas about Might and Right seem to be working.

His descriptions are both detailed and fun and wildly anachronistic, but he's done that before so we accept it. It's part of the tone. All the peasants are happy, all the nobles are noble, and young knights are flocking to Camelot to be part of the excitement and honor and glory. Among them is a young man named Gareth. And another is named Mordred. End of chapter.

Boom. He has to this point barely even breathed that name. I suppose if one didn't know the story, one would just go right into the next chapter, but for those who do know the story, it hits like a mic drop.

He does something like it earlier. At the end of The Sword in the Stone he gives us a lovely description of Wart becoming Arthur. We feel for the young man who is clearly out of his depth but who so earnestly wishes to be a good king. It ends hopeful for the future.

We then go to the next book, The Queen of Air and Darkness. That book, which is really just the next page in the whole epic, opens with a scene of shocking cruelty in which Queen Morgause boils a cat alive. He goes into gruesome detail on this, in a matter-of-fact way that somehow makes it all the worse.

That change in tone is arresting, for the entirety of the previous book is lighthearted. If you've watched the Disney movie, you'll have the idea of it.

OK, one last entry, about something different. Near the end of The Ill-Made Knight we have a heartbreaking scene. Lancelot has been banished from England. He has brought Guinevere back to Arthur and now must leave. He's old. Everything's old. We know this is the end of the friendship of these three, but also the end of much more. He walks alone out of the great hall of Camelot, and the line is this:

His future closed about him as he went.

He does this pretty regularly throughout. A simple line, uncluttered with adverbs, delivered at exactly the right place.

Now, how am I to learn how to do *that*? I submit it's impossible. It's like watching someone hit a home run, or catch a pass surrounded by defenders. You can watch and study, but that's not going to make you one whit more athletic. All you can do is admire. If there's any direct benefit, it's that we learned to understand what constitutes a standard of excellence. Something to aim at, even when we cannot hope for it.

And I think that's good. If we read only average work, how are we to aspire? The musician listens to other musicians not to learn clever tricks but to be moved, and to carry that into their own art. And, I can attest to it, if you read enough, and do so for many years, you develop an ear for what's good, and this will serve you in your own writing. There was a TV series long ago called Young Composers (or something like). Part of their training consisted of listening to a full orchestra play a piece and to pick out the lone instrument that had struck one false note somewhere in there.

That, I think, is what reading the good stuff can do for us.

 

[Incanus]

I read the book once quite a while ago (possibly between 15-25 years ago).

My memory is that I really enjoyed the 'Sword in the Stone' portion, but struggled with the rest of it.

One thing that makes this a tad odd is that I usually like darker material over lighter fare. The later entries I found to be much drier and much less immersive. I'm not sure, but it seemed the narrative voice of the latter stories was far more distant from the characters--sort of like someone writing about talking with someone who had talked about someone else who had read about the characters, if you follow.

You definitely nailed the strengths of the first tale--the author brings a lot of detailed knowledge to bear on the narrative, and it is a pleasure to read. If the rest of the book had been more like that, I would have been a fan for sure.

I still have my copy, and I'd like to take another look at it at some point. I may appreciate it more now, who knows?

 

[skip.knox]

>My memory is that I really enjoyed the 'Sword in the Stone' portion, but struggled with the rest of it.
Yep, that was my memory as well. And it may well prove difficult on a second read. White tosses in scads of references without bothering to explain them, and plays historical games that are as easily confusing as amusing. What I found notable, though, was how many writerly devices I saw and appreciated.

 

[pmmg]

I've never read this author, but now it feels like I should. Certainly there is a lot to be gained from knowing a time, or a region, or a character so as to actually make them real on the page. I am not sure I know enough history to ever do this for a subject here on earth, but on my fictional world...there is no one who could know it better. I hope this is something that can be achieved. I would be very happy if readers just felt the liked the characters and did not know why. Maybe its cause so much of the stuff is fictional, but feels real enough.

 

[Devor]

He walks alone out of the great hall of Camelot, and the line is this:

His future closed about him as he went.

....Now, how am I to learn how to do *that*? I submit it's impossible.

It's not impossible. It's personification, or something close to it. He took an abstract idea, future, and gave it the ability to do something, close.

I know that's obvious, and that you mean the more subtle ability to find the right timing and way to use it that works so well. I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just, we keep hearing how we shouldn't use these kinds of purple techniques, so we never figure out how to use them well. But you learn to drop lines like that by practicing your worldplay techniques, just like anything else.

The three that I think are worth learning so that you can use them this way are personification, alliteration, and analogy.

Personification is great for exactly this kind of heavy feeling reaction use. I mean, that's how I usually use it. Her mind sank into her chest and snuggled with her heart. It conveys a ton of emotion very quickly. As kind of a note, I call it personification, but I'm referring to letting an object or idea take any kind of action it shouldn't, whether human or not. It works so well because it starts with a loaded noun but still relies on the weight of the verb. It's just an extension of activating your verbs.

This is also how I think about symbolism. My mother's brooch whispered to me that I was doing the wrong thing. That one is off the top of my head, but you get the idea, the brooch is a symbol of the mother's advice or judgement. But I don't think "what's a good symbol," I think how can personify this feeling, which leads me to a symbol.

Alliteration is great for highlighting an already powerful sentence, one that's already strong enough the reader isn't going to be distracted by your wordplay. Although alliteration technically refers to repeating consonants, it helps to broaden it a little to just thinking about the sound of the passage, which can include assonance (repeating vowels) and cacophony (repeating harsh sounds). Here's an example of a paragraph I wrote doing just that.

Before culture and reason and beauty were permitted to prosper on the continent of Qua Shūn, in the ancient ocean of the east, the land was still whole while it's people were broken. Mounted archers tore apart the midland plains, savage corsairs besieged the peoples of the coast, and the legions of ever-changing feudal empires castigated hope from their realms. From the suffering, slowly a commanding new philosophy began to surface amid the victims of the villages: Murder the women, force Nirvana, end us all.

There's so much going on in the paragraph, yet the alliteration and cacophony are there too, almost like background music in a film.

It's like an advanced form of using word choice to set the mood. You're just doing it with letter sounds as well. It's not as impossible as it might look because those mood words often have these similar sounds built into them.

Analogy is a word that I'm using because "metaphor" feels a little too abstract for some people to get their heads around. Analogy is something you can figure out with the logical side of your brain. "This is to that" in the same way as "Thing is to what-have-you." Once you have your analogy you can play with the way you use it so that it's more of a typical metaphor or simile if you want to.

Despite their efforts, as though the mountain were kicking off its britches, an avalanche punched from the clifftop and crashed into the supporting walls.

It's like an extension of using sensory language, except that I'm giving you a different image that's easier to visualize..

A big literary use for an analogy is the personal "this is how I see myself" analogy, like with Catcher in the Rye. That's one I've been trying to play with recently to work on my themes. You can change that personal statement behind the analogy, make it more like "this is who I want to be," or "this is how I see myself in my family," or "this is how I've always seen the person of my dreams," or whatever else captures a main piece of your character. I don't have any good examples from my own writing because I'm still figuring that out. A good personal analogy makes the character's emotional center more relatable to the readers.

There we go, three literary device techniques to practice for better power moments like the one above.

 

[skip.knox]

First, those are great references well illustrated. Second, though, I wasn't referring to the rhetorical device so much as learning how to drop just the right line at just the right place. When I said it was impossible to learn that sense of timing, I meant that some people have the skill and some don't.

I'll pull from other art forms. A painter can and probably should learn color theory. But all the study in the world won't help the painter know quite the right color in just that one spot in the foreground. To pull from music: I can study scales and chord structures, and I should. I can and should practice scales and various chord shapes. But when it comes to composing a song, some artists will put in a grace note here, will choose this guitar over that guitar, and so on.

In one sense, the artist does learn to do this and does learn through practice. But another can study and practice and their work will always be wooden. It might be correct, but not inspired, or inspiring. Indeed, and one can hear this from artists of every stripe, looking at great work sometimes is more dispiriting than inspiring. It leaves me, at least and sometimes though not always, shaking my head wondering how in the world I can pull of something that good. The answer, of course, is maybe I can and maybe I can and only the trying will tell.

Which is no more than Devor was saying. Pay attention to Devor, not to me!