A Few Kind Words

‘The sob is in the story. It mustn’t be in the voice.’ So said Antonia Fraser on Radio 4’s Front Row this week. She was speaking of her difficulty in reading aloud the love poem by her late husband, Harold Pinter, with which she concludes her memoir of their life together, Must You Go?

She had been persuaded to read the book for radio, she explained. In the end it took her several attempts to master the neutral voice that concealed her personal feelings and left listeners the room they needed to discover the emotion in the poem for themselves.

I wrote last week about trusting that people will ‘get it’. This is the same. If the story’s strong enough and the writing good enough, no one needs another voice metaphorically holding up cue cards with exclamation marks or sad faces. But it’s a lesson many organisations still have to learn. The temptation to tell the world how innovative or robust or trustworthy or, most laughably, how passionate they are continues to seem irresistible. Yet it invariably sounds like a ham performance which at worst stretches credulity, at best provokes the response: ‘I think I’ll decide that for myself, thank you.’

‘Show, don’t tell’ is one of the first principles of fiction. Storytellers have known from time immemorial that an idea or message revealed has infinitely more power than one baldly stated. For many organisations, business case studies can be a nod in that direction; though even then the fear that people will somehow miss the point can result in the ‘lesson’ being spelt out at the end in bold type.

But the truth is that we learn from stories as naturally as we breathe, whether they hold sobs or laughter, facts or ideas; and we learn best when the author isn’t leaning over our shoulder pointing things out. The stories just need to be told with conviction – passion, if you prefer – for as the American poet Robert Frost said, in a nice corollary to Antonia Fraser’s bon mot: ‘no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’.

My colleague John Simmons blogged a couple of days ago on the Writers & Artists site about the significance of the place you write being as much to do with mental as physical location. I agree with him. I’m writing this in a busy Starbucks by Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station, on a snowy December evening. But more of that in the new year …

Last weekend I went to the Turner Prize show at Tate Britain and marvelled at Richard Wright’s winning creation. A vast gold-leaf fresco of mesmerising power and beauty, ‘creation’ seems the right word for it because that is just what it conjured for me: the Creation. Minutely detailed shapes seethe, swirl and flow in a gorgeous torrent of gold across a huge expanse of white wall. It has an almost religious intensity, like something by Blake or Michelangelo. I could have gazed at it for hours.

Not so the programme. Here is one sentence: ‘Wright accepts and virtually reverses the effects of attrition, re-assessing correlative notions of value and preservation, a virtue running across his practice.’ There are, in fact, three things you need to know about Richard Wright and that, whatever it means, is not one of them.

Sadly, this is language that seems designed to exclude, not because people are too dumb to understand it – it’s actually pretentious twaddle that is mostly not worth saying anyway; but because it exudes intellectual superiority, whose underlying message is that certain great cultural experiences are beyond the reach of ordinary people. That doesn’t seem to me like a very sensible or enlightened communications strategy for the twenty-first century.

And the three things about Richard Wright? First, he’s steeped in the history of art and draws on influences as old as they are wide. Second, he never knows what he will create until he steps into the space where he’s going to exhibit. Third, his work is impermanent; he makes it straight onto the wall and paints it out again when the show ends (in this case on 3 January).

Go and see it before he does. And have a Happy Christmas!

The visionary Arthur C Clarke once said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I spent an intriguing day this week in the presence of just such magic, at the Informatics Department of Edinburgh University.

Informatics is the science of information and information processing. If that sounds dry, picture a lab festooned with cameras and microphones which record every word uttered and every movement made by each member of any group that gathers there – essentially an intelligent meeting room that can capture the discussions and interactions that take place in it, and analyse them by practically any set of criteria you care to think of.

Alternatively, imagine a table top which is also a multi-touch screen from which you and the other people sitting around it can individually summon information or entertainment, share knowledge and communicate, or even play a game together, all by lightly pressing the glass in front of you.

A small, curious group of us were there as token consumers to brainstorm possible commercial applications for these technologies. We hadn’t the faintest idea how they worked, and to that extent they were magic; the things they were capable of doing seemed miraculous.

It struck me that good writing can also seem miraculous in its ability to touch the heart and stir the soul, enliven the mind and ignite the imagination. Yet, effortless and transparent as it might appear, it’s similarly underpinned by the application of, in this case, a finely honed craft rather than technology, to an idea that has germinated in the fertile recesses of someone’s brain.

And when the craft, like the technology, is not sufficiently well developed the idea itself is likely to wither – as, sadly, business writing all too often demonstrates.