Hooked On A Feeling

The amazing (and creepy) power of great felt writing.

Hello again! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science & curiosity and, in the coming new season, clouds that are indeed just clouds.

At the end of today - or perhaps tomorrow morning, since I still have a few things to wrap up here! - I’ll be sending out an email to paid subscribers of this newsletter inviting them into my newly reworked non-fiction storytelling course, as I explained in the last newsletter.

If you’re reading purely for the science stories that make you go ‘wow!’ - not to fear, they’ll be back soon. (In the meantime, why not check out EiA’s nearly 4 years of archived editions, including this look at how watery outer space is, and the story of an imaginary town that refused to stay fake?)

But today, as an introduction to the kind of stuff my course is teaching, here’s an excerpt from its original introduction when I was running it a decade ago - which begins with a quote from one of my favourite novels.

"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn each day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country."

That’s the haunting, foreboding-riddled opening paragraph of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath.

As you can see, it’s a whopper. Such a lengthy opener might be deemed unfashionable these days. Modern audiences aren’t perceived to have that kind of patience.

Maybe you didn’t read it all, and skipped to this paragraph. If that’s the case, I urge you to go back and read it slowly.

Done that?

Now, it could be that this style of storytelling does nothing for you, like this reader on reddit! That’s part of the fun of storytelling - what lights your imagination up can have all the charm of someone YELLING! INTO! THEIR! PHONE! in a quiet train carriage.

But even if that’s you, I reckon there’s still value in pulling this paragraph apart to see why it worked so well on so many other people.

Imagine, then. Imagine those last rains drifting down, those clouds boiling away, the heat building in the earth. Everything coming and going (especially going - note that recurring phrase, “any more”). Everything changing. Moisture evaporates. Signs of life disappear. Everything bleaches, turning ghostly. The land starts to die...

What Steinbeck is doing is mesmerizing his readers with the passage of time, and he uses rhythm to do it, the tick-tock, back-forth of rain and cloud and plow/plough.

When he wrote it, timelapse photography was in its infancy, but these days our imaginations are well-trained from watching countless documentaries, and we can all imagine those clouds evaporating into nothingness, that ground baking hard as the sun blurs overhead again and again, getting hotter every day, browning and blackening the land.

Thanks to modern video techniques, we have that visual vocabulary to draw upon, a modern kind of imaginative shorthand - and this makes it all the more real.

Can you smell the ground as it turns to dust? Can you smell the hot, dusty air as it sucks the moisture from everything?

(Do you feel thirsty all of a sudden?) 

Can you see all the colour fading from the land as life itself is cooked out of it?

Now - go back to the very first line.

"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."

For me, there’s one word that makes it real, making the scene tangible, something you can feel. What’s the word?

"Gently." A physical sensation.

This isn’t a thing of B-movie or cartoonish violence. It’s something slow but inexorable, like a river carving through rock - and therefore, all the more real. And without it, it wouldn’t make your memory jump back to when you were last standing, face upwards, as gentle rain drifted down, laying on your hair and running over your face and dripping from your eyebrows.

It wouldn’t tap that sensual experience that everyone recognises, rain as soft as a cobweb that somehow manages to soak you as much as “real” rain.

Steinbeck may be (may be - I’m not convinced here) writing for an audience more accustomed to lengthier reads, but his use of 'gently' is timeless. It’s not a word thrown in just to add a little colour or suit the rhythm. It’s there for a specific purpose: to light up the parts of your brain connected with the senses and really make you feel it.

Here’s the science, courtesy of Annie Murphy Paul at the New York Times. (Archive link here.)

When writing evokes a sense-related memory, it appears our brains react in much the same way as they would if we had that sensual experience for real. In broad terms, reading “the rose smelled sharp & fruity, like crushed blackberries” and then smelling an actual rose will activate much the same parts of the brain in each case, and lead you to having two very similar neurological pay-offs. Remarkably similar. For a split-second, absolutely indistinguishable. Your brain is fooled.

Think about the last time you smelled something that triggered a strong memory. Think about how that memory carried you away to a distant time and place...until you shivered and blinked, and there you were, back in your own boots again. How real did that memory feel while it was rushing through you? Were you really, truly there in every way that mattered?

This is why good storytelling requires writing that makes a reader feel it. There are so many terms for this, but let’s go with felt writing - the kind that summons a certain place at a certain moment in time as if you were really there.

If you’re writing up a memory, it’s much more powerful if you find a way to blot out everything you’ve learned since that event, and focus on only what your senses were telling you at the time. In the language of the drama series “24” - you’re creating the illusion of events occurring in real-time.

This lands the reader “right in the action” in a visceral, brain-stoking way. At some level, they start having that experience too - as long as you manage to maintain the illusion, staying consistently in that moment and filling it with the right kind of detail that makes the story come alive, as if it’s unfolding for real that very second, as you write.

The power of this kind of storytelling cannot be overstated.

It’s how good salespeople make you buy their products - by leading you through a number of plausible problems that their products can fix, telling that imaginary story as if they were you, making you really feel the problem for yourself - before offering you the solution you suddenly desire.

It’s how you kept reading your favourite novel at bedtime - maybe you were only intending to read a few pages, but after a few sentences the world faded away and you stopped reading the book and started living it - and then, all of a sudden, you didn’t need your bedside light anymore because it was daylight. (My first reading of The Martian was absolutely this experience.)

It might be how to nail the perfect interview. Want to impress a potential employer with how awesome you are? Don’t say “I’m awesome”, or list your achievements. Tell a story that slyly, modestly shows those winning traits in action. ‘Show’ them instead of telling them, using language that makes them feel they're going through it themselves. The result? You’ve ‘demonstrated’ your competence.

It’s ludicrous and faintly disreputable - but it certainly works.

It’s how politicians make you cheer in public speeches, or whip you into an indignant frenzy. It’s how psychoanalysts try to take you back to the memories that haunt you. It’s what you tell yourself deep inside, whenever you worry about anything. It’s how to write things that people don’t just understand...they also believe.

And if your audience feels about something deep enough, they’ll remember it.

Why?

Because their brain was partially fooled into believing it had a real experience - so at some subconscious level, your words will have become indistinguishable from their memory. [This is part of the way false memories can be implanted, as I recently wrote about here.] They really lived your words - and might carry them forever. 

(Whew.)

More importantly for you, they’ll also act on them.

If your story is meant to persuade, and it makes your readers feel something, there's an excellent chance they’ll be won over, and a good chance that will inspire action.

Felt stories convince like nothing else, because decision-making is strongly influenced by emotion as well as rationality - and emotions even help us make more decisions, not less.

Yes, Mr. Spock, that is profoundly, disturbingly illogical - but it's also very human indeed.

So, how do you find those tiny felt details that bring the story alive?

Well, that’s tricky. It’s a different process for every piece of writing and every audience, relying on a grasp of what contextual details will bring an experience alive for particular folk.

Your best bet is to pay attention to how other people do it to you - and then try to reverse-engineer that process. You’ll also have to try a lot of stuff and see what resonates with different groups of people. You need to get to know your readers, to find the triggers - like "gentle rain" - that best tap into their own experiences, so you can use them to deliver your own arguments in a way that gets heard.

In general - you need to find the universal truths of human existence, the things we encounter with all of our senses, and then you need to evoke them with your words. No pressure, eh?

It's really hard, is what I’m saying.

But it's also how to write less.

Felt writing is a key that unlocks tighter writing. Pulitzer prize winners know how to write 100 words that will cover the same ground as 1000 words from an inexperienced writer - and because they're a tenth as long, those 100 words will be read by more people. How do skilled writers do this? By picking the details that tell the wider story in a vivid, sensual, deeply felt way, and leaving the reader to fill in all the boring between-the-lines stuff for themselves.

If you’re writing in this way, you can be thrifty with your word-count and still have a massive impact on the reader.

Felt writing used to be the holy grail of blogging, a medium where, because of the always-clicking-onwards nature of Web traffic, every word had to count. Now the same is true in newsletters, where everyone’s Inboxes are overloaded.

It's how to get people sending you thank-you e-mails, because by writing in a way they could quickly and deeply identify with, you really seemed to understand them. You got under their skin. People will read your stuff for sheer pleasure, because you'll yank them out of their seats and take them somewhere different, no matter what you're writing about.

They'll feel everything you want them to feel.

Isn't that a skill worth learning?

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BONUS:

"Then, alone on the metal deck, damp and moonlit, just when I fancied darkness might be complete, I heard a faint call. The boat throbbed on, leaving behind a wave as straight as a glacier. A human call. I must have been mistaken, but I listened and - it came again. I scanned the water: there were only the waves, the oil-dark sea. It gave me a fright, and had anyone else been out on deck I might have tugged their arm and said: "Listen!" I'm glad I was alone, because, so help me, it was only Elton John. The music was so nearly drowned out by the ship's engines that I'd just caught the top notes. I bent down, stuck my ear to the speaker and yes, it was Elton John, singing, of all things: "Don't let the sun go down on me." I gave up on the dark then, and went below for a drink."

- Taken from one of my favourite pieces of felt writing, from Kathleen Jamie in Findings, her unexpectedly best-selling collection of nature essays.

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Images: Bogomil Mihaylov; Brett Jordan.