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September 25, 2024 - writing philosophy communication literary analysis cognition
tl;dr: I’m always a little uncomfortable being called a “good writer” or my work a harmony of form and function. Instead, tell me how you live better because of words.
In the eyes of the general public, a “good writer” is often seen as someone who can vividly bring reality to life through words. More discerning readers might appreciate a writer’s ability to accurately translate real-world experiences into language. However, writing comes with an inherent risk: the potential for form to be mistaken for function.
There exists both good form (effective writing) and bad form (poor writing). The latter can manifest as either a misrepresentation of reality (falsehoods) or a failure to engage the reader (poor style). It’s all too easy to confuse these different shortcomings, or to conflate different types of success. Something that reads well may be unconsciously accepted as true, regardless of its actual veracity.
A significant part of the reward in reading—given that it’s a cognitively demanding investment in understanding reality—is the absence of burden in the process, coupled with the resulting mental stimulation. This creates a bias towards interpretations of reality that are pleasurable or align with existing preferences. Paradoxically, the better or more truthful the writing, the more challenging it becomes to differentiate between enjoyable reading and truthful reading.
While this phenomenon is evident in fields dedicated to capturing reality, there are also more subtle, metaphysical ways in which the form of writing can consistently misrepresent the underlying reality it attempts to convey.
It’s worth noting that there’s a disproportionate representation of artists and writers in fiction compared to the real world. Far more protagonists, and friends of protagonists, or wise sages have late nights of passion, pen and paper, than do people–usually writers. More insidiously, there’s also an overabundance of words, ideas, and beliefs in these fictional realms. This is because words are made to represent such things, better than their opposites.
Of course, much of the world is not in words. This is partly what seems to make an author valuable - their ability to bring things into words. That said, not all meaning and significance is translated. There are functions of life, great periods of time and space occupied by uncertainty, chaos, quietness, boredom, and these aspects of reality easily go unnoticed or uncommented–worse, they are often distracted by or masked by words: running rambling thoughts, just-so conveniences about the world.
To see beyond the blurred line between form and function, it can be helpful to think of form as analogous to surface area, and function to volume. Form is essentially a dimensional reduction of the complete picture. When it successfully extracts meaningful information, it’s celebrated for its difficulty—like a well-crafted map that highlights exactly what you need. This is one of the ways we arrive at celebrations like, “Form is function.”
Ideally, form implies and infuses function; it refines, focuses, guides, and asserts. However, our deep-seated notion of “is”—our tendency to equate appearance with reality—can be misleading. Instead, it’s more accurate to consider form as an aspect or dimension of function. Form can represent an ideal function, a subset of a function, or even reference the complete function, but form itself is specifically and merely the appearance of function, not the function itself.
Understanding this distinction is crucial for both writers and readers. It allows us to appreciate the craft of writing while maintaining a critical eye towards the underlying truths being conveyed. In doing so, we can better navigate the complex landscape of written communication, appreciating both its aesthetic qualities and its capacity for truthful representation.