Go Read Some Old Books

I'm going to resume posting my Steering the Craft exercises in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to take a detour to discuss the necessity of reading older literature, even if it's outside your comfort zone.

Behold, a snippet of a conversation I had with a friend on Discord:

I got called out

It is true. I mean, I've read Pride & Prejudice a hundred times, and that's an old book. I took a Victorian Lit class in college and read Jane Eyre and The Mayor of Casterbridge (over 15 years ago). But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you ask me to pick a book to read, I will choose something contemporary.

However, my friend in the above convo pointed out that if I wanted to improve my prose on a sentence level, I could do no better than read some old books. It was, as I conceded, a fair point.

So, we decided to start reading Middlemarch! It has great reviews, not only from when it was published, but also from readers on Goodreads.

I'm not entirely sure what it's about, aside from provincial life. I'm only, at the time of writing, five chapters in. Admittedly, I had a rough start. Look at this:

Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.

That is one sentence. And it's the second sentence in the novel. I read that and was like, "This book is going to be so dense."

But it's not. Yes, some passages I have to read a few times to make sure I understand. But the dialogue is easy to grasp. And it's a pretty funny book!

A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.

...a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

Both those passages made me laugh out loud. Good times.

Update: I am now on Chapter 33, and I am loving it. It's like a Victorian soap opera with sharp satire! I also found out there's a miniseries that I fully intend to watch once I finish the book.

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You can learn a lot about the craft of writing from reading older literature. Look at these passages from Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens. Count how many times it repeats the word "fog."

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the water-side pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes; fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

That kind of intentional repetition drives home the ambience. So often in these modern times, we are told not to repeat words too close together; it's valid advice, but all rules of writing must be taken with a wink. Know the rules, then break the rules. If you do so correctly, you get an impactful piece like the above excerpt.

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Reading older literature can be difficult. I prefer to read for entertainment—for pleasure. But you can read classics for pleasure. You may have to read a bit slower, but patience in reading is a useful skill, isn't it?

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