I’ve really got to learn how to read. Not how to read as we think in the traditional sense – recognizing letters and words out of Dick and Jane – but how to read. How to string all of what I’m seeing together while sorting out the stuff that doesn’t really matter that much.
And there certainly is a lot of that these days, particularly in the non-fiction realm.
I’m convinced – and I know I don’t have to work hard to convince anyone else – that the problem we have in the writing of non-fiction is that publishers are in it for the money. They need quantity because it’s a lot harder to charge 30 to 40 bucks for a 100-page book than it is for a 400-page book. And yet, I’m sure the author could say as much – and more powerfully so in its undiluted form – in the shorter book.
This comes to mind today as I’m reading through a book by Stephen Meyer called Return of the God Hypotheses. I just got done with a section on concerns with Newton’s theory of gravity among his contemporaries, and the discussion went on for several pages. Fascinating, I’m sure, to those who would be interested in the minutia of 17th century scientific debate. Several pages to explain it when a short paragraph would do? Yeah. For sure.
To tell you the truth though, I find these gems all over the literary world, most disappointingly in the realm of Christian theology. I really just want them to boil it down for me. Give me the Cliff Notes version. It doesn’t have to be stripped completely bare, but c’mon – if you can say something in a page but take four, you’re saying too much. I think a lot of decent writing is put out of reach of the common reader because it’s just too big of an investment for them.
I like to draw parallels with the trend in news that I think really emerged when CNN came out with “Headline News” (which isn’t really even a thing anymore, is it?) in 1982 – a 24-hour news channel that just cycled through the big stories in 30-minute blocks. It didn’t take them long before they figured out they’d have to fill time, so they started digging up things that were, at the heart of it, irrelevant and then trying to find ways to make it seem relevant. Nowadays, I’ll walk into a place that has a major “news” network channel doing a story, and when I leave 20 minutes later I see the same two faces talking on the screen with the same chyron scrolling across the bottom that I saw when I walked in. Just droll and drivel on for far longer than it matters. No wonder we have such short attention spans these days.
So, as I’ve mentioned already, we’re faced with the problem of money. Money makes things happen in media. Publishers of all kinds have to flood us with content in the hopes that something catches our attention. Your click – or your turning to their channel – pays the bills for these guys. And it makes sense, since we all seem to be tied to our computers as the only option for living life. The Catch-22 from the world’s viewpoint though is that we don’t see those who are really living their lives because they’re not sharing in their interpersonal interactions in the same lanes as most of us – they’re too busy actually going out and doing things. For the rest of us, though, we’re caught in this loop of meaninglessness, and it seeps deeply into our reading materials.
But of course, overall, I love reading. It relaxes me. It makes me think. It takes me places. It’s just that I don’t have the time to wade through all of the sludge that accumulates around someone’s desire to pump up word counts so they can charge me more to get to the few nuggets of useful information they include. You might find this odd coming from a person who has so recently written about his love for the long and winding sentence. But this is different. Fiction should be as descriptive and effective at bringing a connection to the story as necessary. Sometimes that can be done in a few words, sometimes it can be done (quite well, thank you Salman Rushdie) in a paragraph. The only real requirement is that the sentences actually move you somewhere. They can’t simply ramble without purpose. They should be beautiful and meaningful.
On the contrary though, this kind of writing isn’t usually a requirement of non-fiction. Non-fiction should convey the meaning more quickly. Sure, it can be descriptive (especially if it’s historical narrative) if it’s trying to capture an essence of what was really happening at a time and place. But when you’re explaining the basics, it’s best to keep it to the basics. Don’t give me paragraph after paragraph about an academic controversy; just give me the players, their disagreements, and what you want me to get out of it.
So yeah. I have to learn how to read. I have to learn how to fly through the fluff and hold onto those things that are of value – and I’ve got to learn how to recognize the difference more quickly. In the meantime, thank God for public libraries. Not only do they give me variety, they also save me the expense of sinking money into the meaningless.
