Writing 3: purée of bat guano

Time was, writers could assume things. We assumed readers knew enough basic English, Mathematics, History and Science to get by. We assumed they were familiar with the central, basic literature of the culture. They would catch all the references we made, so we felt free to make them. After all, we were all from broadly the same educational background. They knew what we knew.

We cannot write like that any more. Not if we want to communicate. We cannot make the assumptions of old.

This is no tedious complaint about falling standards of education, or changes in society, it’s too late for that. As a writer, I just want to be sure that, given the standards of education, I can still be in touch with the audience. And I can’t. If I want to communicate, I have to change my references, or lose them altogether.

For example, here in the UK we can still assume, just, that most people will know about The Second World War and the Holocaust, but I think it may be different in the US. If you are writing for a worldwide audience, which increasingly we are, you have to explain.

Increasingly, people these days learn about history from Dan Brown novels and video games, but only if there is no sport on TV. And what they read and see is coloured by their own experience, not the experience of previous generations.

No-one spends time chatting with their grandma over the tea and biscuits any more. No-one ever sifts through the fading monochromes with Uncle Jim. The conversational cup has been replaced with children’s television or a video game of gut-spewing violence. Let’s face it, you don’t get your drug-money together by shooting the breeze with Grandad. Life is a bitch, and you’d better get used to it.

Harlan Ellison, the American writer, tells his experience of addressing a hall of university students in New York.

“In the course of talking I mentioned Dachau,” he says. “I can’t even remember what the context was, but I mentioned it. After a moment a woman about 21 years old, raises her hand.”

“I can usually catch most of your references,” she says, “but who was that you were talking about before?” she asked.

“Sorry? Who?” asked Ellison unable to remember what he had said.

“Dachau.” she said.

“Dachau?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“ Yea,” she said. “Who is that?”

Ellison, telling this story, gives his own commentary.

“What this points to,” he says, “is a rampant ignorance. A failure to maintain any ties with our past, a dissolution of our roots, a disregard for tradition.”

Later on he says that he finds that students are increasingly ignorant. “Not only don’t they know a damn thing, they are arrogant about not knowing a damn thing. Their brains have been turned to purée of bat guano by eating McDonald’s toadburgers and watching too much television.”

Of course, Ellison is known for expressing himself colourfully, and thank heavens he does. The truths he points to, however, are clear enough: we have failed to maintain any ties with our past.

But which of us has seriously struggled with this and changed our writing style to suit our changing audience? Which of us has taken to never mentioning things our audience will probably have never heard of (most stuff) – thus pandering to their ignorance – but maintaining lines of communication? This is what is required of us more and more.

The tail-spin destination of all this is to crash on the lowest common denominator of writing, the cardboard style (see Writing 2: cut out cardboard). The next is achieving a smooth, even texture with no variety of tone, syntax or meaning at all – the writing equivalent of babyfood, only less nutritious. Wet cardboard if you like, pulped for easy digestion.

Some of you, though, will refuse to write cardboard out of respect for your reader, whom you suspect may yet be capable of thought, or may wish to learn. Some of you will refuse to serve up pap to adults. Some of you will chose a risky written life full of variety and spice, hoping that people will enjoy the ride, risking that they won’t, and settling in for the long refusal to compromise with mediocrity.

You will become like an old war veteran who refuses to move out of his crumbling terrace house thereby causing a huge problem for developers who wish to put up newer, brighter, better designed and more efficient slums.

One or two of you will know, like that veteran, that the only battles worth fighting are the ones that are lost already. You alone can comfort yourselves with the thought that although you may be increasingly distanced from your reader, and the bulldozers are revving at your gate, you will never be purée of bat guano. You would die first.

© Roger Murphy 2008