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- WWN22 : Pouring Concrete
My daughter, like most young kids, loves Paddington Bear.
We’ve got a good selection of them kicking around.
But one of the lesser-known stories has Paddington starting a garden. Of course, in the process he accidentally spills a heap of quick-drying cement on top of a jar of marmalade, and when the builders break it up, the concrete chunks are all marmalade orange.
Perfect for a unique rockery.
Now, call me a sceptic but I somehow doubt that mixing marmalade and quick-dying cement will give you beautiful orange rocks.
(Feel free to try this at home, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
But it illustrates the danger of pouring concrete around without a bit of thought.
Concrete, of course, is one of the greatest building materials in the world. Everything from the Christ the Redeemer statue to the dome of the Parthenon to mafia-issued boots to the Three Gorges Dam is made of the stuff.
And so are all the best books and pieces of writing.
Wait, what?
Yes.
Concrete words are the key to great writing.
And so this issue of the Write Way Newsletter is gonna break that down for you so you can write something real.
Yesterday I posted this tweet which sums it up:
The most important principle of writing?
Choose concrete, vivid words.
"Some fruit" is bad.
"Two apples" is better.
"Two red apples lay on the counter" is better still.Paint a picture with your words.
— James Carran, Get Paid Writing (@getpaidwrite)
7:08 AM • Sep 17, 2024
But let’s expand on that a little shall we?
This really is the most important principle of great writing.
It’s all about moving from wool to concrete.
Because woolly words are weak. They’re fluffy, they don’t hold their shape. They’re like smoke, you can make out the meaning but grab hold of it and it just puffs away.
And yet few writers take the trouble to weed them out. To solidify their writing. To hunt down and execute the vague handwaving and replace it with concrete, solid, tangible language.
To take the trouble to add metaphors for the abstract thoughts they’re discussing.
I think that’s a crying shame. Such writers should be driven out of the online space like tax-collectors in the old west, tar and feathers and all.
Let me be bold and say this:
The primary purpose of metaphor is to make the intangible tangible. And that is an essential part of good writing. And yet we treat it like optional colour. Like a flourish that goes on top of the main thing - instead of the main thing itself.
But it IS the main thing.
Saying things concretely is vital.
'How excellent a thing is sleep,' sighed Sancho Panza; 'it wraps a man round like a cloak'—an excellent example, by the way, of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that 'among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.'
How vile a thing—shall we say?—is the abstract noun! It wraps a man's thoughts round like cotton wool.
Quiller-Couch is masterfully correct.
The kind of fluffy cotton-wool content that focuses on abstract ideas is deadly to effective writing. It’s vague. It’s intangible. It’s all in the head.
And so probably the most important thing you can ask of every sentence in your screed is this:
Can you picture it?
And likewise, can you feel, smell, taste it.
Human beings are not ‘brains on a stick’. We don’t, despite the techno-futurists android fantasies, live in the cloud. We’re not living in a Gnostic’s paradise.
We’re physical beings in a physical world.
Touching trumps telling. Your readers need to be able to see the concepts in real and tangible terms in order to be able to grab hold of them. Otherwise you’re asking them to grab hold of pipe-smoke, instead of gripping the pipe and letting the smoke get into them from there...
It’s the difference between “I love you” and a kiss.
…The difference between “you’re safe kiddo” and a warm hug.
…The difference between “I’m with you” and a silent handshake.
And the difference between telling you “make it tangible” and showing you examples.
And so there is one thing we need to do.
(Well, there are a hundred, but this ain’t a book, it’s a newsletter.)
We need to move from the abstract noun to the concrete image.
Which is to say:
Use more metaphors!
The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, 'They gave him a silver teapot,' you write as a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,' you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun.
What is the concrete noun?
It’s a noun that refers to something you can touch and see.
We writers are head-space people. We like to talk ideas. But even we live in a real physical world and need real physical touchstones.
(As an aside, one reason why the Content Creatooooors suck at this is because they spend their lives online. They can’t relate ideas to the real world because they don’t live in it.)
So whenever you find yourself talking about abstract ideas (love, hate, growth, life, death, courage, democracy etc.), weave in imagery that brings it back to what you can touch, taste, smell and see.
Jesus understood this. Again, I’m going to give you Arthur Quiller Couch:
I ask you to note how carefully the Parables—those exquisite short stories—speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'—'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,'—and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'—not 'Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.' The Gospel does not say 'Consider the growth of the lilies,' or even 'Consider how the lilies grow.' It says, 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'
That last example is key to understanding it.
Growth is an abstract idea. And although all three sentences sound superficially similar, the first two sit in the abstract area of growth. They’re focused on the growth - which is abstract. The growth of lilies aren’t tangible, you can’t see or touch or taste the growth of a lily.
But lilies are concrete. You can see, smell, touch and taste (ew) a lily. And then you can move into the abstract of their growth and their being clothed by the God who makes all things and will clothe his children even more than he does the lily.
Whenever possible, you want to make the abstract concrete by using metaphors and imagery to bring it home.
So tell me not of love.
Tell me she turns to him like the flower that turns towards the sun at dawn.
Tell me his cold-hearted reserve melted like ice in the noonday sun.
Tell me about how on seeing her loved one dying she was:
as a snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again
Make me feel it, see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it.
Don’t just expect to beam it into my brain by the magic of saying “love”.
And until next time, may your pipe burn warm in your hand, the smoothness of the briarwood as tangible as your metaphors,
Yours,
James Carran, Craftsman Writer
fin
Meanwhile, Craftsman’s Corner, exclusive to current subscribers, where I give you an excerpt from Arthur Quiller-Couch that dives even deeper, followed by my own thought on how exactly to turn the abstract concrete…
And if there was no green box and you’re seeing this instead, then you’re not an active subscriber and that particular bonus has vanished like mist in the morning sunlight and shall never be seen again.
But there’s still time to sign up before the next one, which you can do right here:
See you inside next week!
P.p.s. even if you were subscribed, you’ll still see this box as well as the Craftsman’s Corner above, idk how to fix that yet…
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