Learning From Our Forebears

     Among the most valuable of all skills is that of learning from others’ mistakes. If my observations are at all indicative, it’s becoming rare. In this connection I could natter on about politics and public policy, but I do enough of that already. No, this morning I’m thinking about the writing of fiction.

     Commentator Matt Walsh commented to this effect:

One thing you notice when you read pretty much anything written more than 100 years ago is just how impoverished and bland and limited our language has become. People spoke and wrote in a kind of effortlessly rich and descriptive way that almost no one does today. On this site a…

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 3, 2026

     While there’s some ancestor worship in there, Matt has a good point. The great majority of us speak and write a rather stunted variety of English. I agree that it’s a pity. English has the largest and most variegated vocabulary of all known languages. Our communication would be made richer by the general expansion of our vocabularies. But I’m not going to go further in that direction just now.

     If you’ve read much fiction from earlier times, one of the things you notice is how much the skills of our storytellers have improved. The writers of classic novels were prone to all sorts of self-indulgences that could weary the reader into tossing their book aside and not returning to it. Victor Hugo would halt his narrative at an arbitrary point to discourse on some point of philosophy or the history of France. Daniel Defoe would include all manner of details about how Robinson Crusoe spent his day that added nothing to the story nor to the reader’s sense for Crusoe’s character. Even C. S. Lewis, who is surely one of my idols, permitted himself flights of word-fancy that have made me shake my head and ask what he thought he was doing.

     Our well-known contemporary storytellers avoid those faults… well, mostly, anyway. We love their tales because they serve the story, rather than using the story as a vehicle with which to preach or preen. We tolerate their occasional lapses because in the main, they’re faithful to the stories they tell.

     A lot of well-known writing advice is derived from the recognition of those earlier writers’ missteps. “Show, don’t tell.” “Avoid cliches.” “Prefer the shorter word to the longer one.” “Prefer active to passive voice.” “Every scene should either advance the plot or enhance characterization.” And so on. Fledgling writers often chafe at those maxims. They seem limiting rather than enabling – and they are. But hewing to them improves the probability that your tale will please your readers.

     George Orwell, himself a master wordsmith, in his essay “Politics and the English Language” presents us with a compact set of rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

     Orwell was concerned in that essay with expository and opinion writing. Yet his rules are helpful in storytelling as well. They’re not absolute, but by remaining mindful of them the storyteller can avoid irrelevancies, digressions, vapidities, and verbal preening. The best storytellers probably have them tattooed on the inner surfaces of their eyelids.

     But as I’ve said before, I’m no authority. I’ve broken all the rules presented above, some of them many times over. In musing on this subject, a passage of mine from an early novel came to mind:

     From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn’t miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom.
     There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.

     Pretty, isn’t it? But it breaks most of the rules mentioned in this essay. I’ve maundered over it many times. Did I really have to put that in there? And my hand twitches, as if to grope for the Delete button. But I refrain. I leave it to stand as it I wrote it.

     You see, there’s this other writers’ maxim: Kill your darlings! But I can’t, not this time. And it’s all right. Now and then the storyteller must “cock a snook” at the rules and do as he pleases:

     For all stories are written, first and foremost, to please oneself.

     Have a nice day.