Day 367: Thisness

I stumbled across an interesting YouTube video the other day that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It makes sense of a huge swath of something that I always felt was missing from my writing, as well as a lot of others' writing too. Here's the video if you'd like to watch it. Pretty much all I'm doing here is putting it my own words.

https://youtu.be/c8P4U0ip3T4?si=7pUH9-y2X_5zTCt2

I mean how can you resist clicking on that, right?

'Thisness' is bit of a strange term. It's hard to figure the meaning from the word alone, which is a bit ironic. It refers to how present a story is in your mind. Do you really see it unfold in crisp resolution before you, or is it vague like watching through a fog? Is the story real, or is it just something someone wrote down on a piece of paper? An example used in the video, which is also one of my favorite lines of all time, is from Douglas Adam's 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.'

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

It's a specific way of putting those ships in your mind that completes the scene exactly. Those ships are not some other way, they are this way, and there is no other way they can be. Compare it to the following:

"The ships hung in the air as if they should fall at any moment, lifeless."

Literally it means about the same thing, but it doesn't quite bring them into focus the same way, does it? There are many ways a ship could look like it should fall at any moment, and there are many ways a ship could be lifeless, but there is only one way a ship can look like a brick in the sky.

And it doesn't just have to be a metaphor, it can be literal language too. Compare the following two excerpts:

"The blackbird that caught his eye flew through the cool morning air gracefully, before landing on the stoop and cawing to its friends."

"The bird caught his eye for the way it changed colors, black feathered, but violet at the fringes where early morning light could shine through at the apex of each wing flap. It settled on the stoop next to his steaming coffee and cawed to its friends, letting out a vapor cloud of its own."

Hopefully if I constructed this the right way the second one put a much clearer picture in your mind. The bird can be graceful in many ways, but when you see the way its colors change in the light, you know that's the one way in which it is graceful. It doesn't just land on some random stoop, it is this stoop, the one with the perspective character's coffee on it, which is therefore right in front of the reader. When it caws, its breath interacts with the environment, further cementing the existence of the bird in the reader's mind. The first line does none of these things to put the bird in your mind's eye.

The drawback to putting these details in the scene is that it takes up more space. In fact, it's almost at odds with another crucial aspect of writing, which is to keep things concise. Well if you have to give up on one to get the other, I say just go for it. You can always cut down on flowery language later, but if you forget the precise details you wanted in a scene, then it becomes a lot harder to draw those out of a dry first draft than to remove the excess in my opinion. Also, as I will explain a little later, sometimes this seemingly excessive detail can save space later.

The concept behind thisness, and the lack of it a lot of writing, seems to underlie a lot of the issues I always see in stories. Complaints of "it's missing something," or "I don't get it," and "what's the point?" all go away when the reader feels like they're really there. They make up their own point, or see meaning in the scene that maybe the reader didn't even intend to insert. Did your English teachers ever ask you something like "what is the significance of the blue curtains to the author?" They probably didn't have any significance at all other than to make sure you knew exactly what you were looking at, but adding thisness to the scene with details that draw a reader in can create the sense of deeper meaning without there really being any. Of course, it can be used more intentionally to add meaning, and that's also important. My point is a lot of common complaints can be smoothed out if you let the reader insert themselves, and thisness can help them do that immensely. Here's another example from the book I just read, 'Blood Music,' by Greg Bear.

The rectangular slate-black sign stood on a low mound of bright green and clumpy Korean grass, surrounded by irises and sided by a dark, cement-bedded brook filled with koi. Carved into the street side of the sign was the name GENETRON in Times Roman letters of insignia red, and beneath the name the motto, “Where Small Things Make Big Changes.”

This is the first paragraph of chapter one, and it drew me in immediately. He could have just said, there stood a slate-black sign with GENETRON carved into it, but no. It's more important than that. It is this, and not anything else. Later he references this sign, and when I say later, I mean twelve chapters later. There was not a single other reference to the sign in that twelve chapter gap, but I saw it just as clearly as I saw it the first time. That's the power of thisness. Bear didn't need to redefine the sign again, or make it super obvious which sign he was talking about, I just knew it was the same sign. That's what I meant earlier when I said it can even save you some words. Implanting an image that clearly makes it much easier to recall previously defined objects and people.

I'm sure that's only scratching the surface of what you can do with the concept of thisness, but frankly I'm out of thoughts. Let me know in the comments if thisness is something you use and how you use it, or if like me, it's something you tried to use without really knowing there was a word for it.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley