Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey writes for Auraist on prose style: 'All writers walk around in a huff thinking their work deserves more respect.'
Detailed discussion of sentence mastery by the author of Orbital
Photo by Sarthak Maji
COMING SOON:
—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes.
—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘Our fascination with stories that are believably made up has lately been a bit Top-Trumped by those that are unbelievably real. Real and yet new and bizarre and which ask nothing of us’: Samantha Harvey on prose style. Harvey’s novel Orbital won this year’s Booker Prize, and we chose it as the best-written work on the shortlists for the Booker and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative literature. You can read an extract here.
—’In a lifelong search for sanctuary and awareness, deep listening has become my way of leaning closer, opening wider, taking more responsibility for honoring the music of everything’: our last pick from the recent releases in nonfiction. The previous picks are here and here, along with the the full list of books considered.
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SAMANTHA HARVEY ON PROSE STYLE
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Orbital?
I’m going to come clean and say that I don’t really know what my writing style is, what literary style is in general, or how to speak about it in any logical or systematic way. Does that bode well for this interview?
When I started writing Orbital, did I ever sit down and have thoughts about style? I don’t remember doing that. What did I think about? I thought about atmosphere a lot - no pun intended. I knew roughly what I wanted the prose to feel and sound like if it were a piece of music – it would be gentle and pastoral. It would be open and fairly melodic but its notes might not always go where you’d expect them to. It would have breathless flurries. Its gentleness would have to be spiked with longing, a sound that speaks to nostalgia more than anticipation. It must somehow reach toward awe. All of that. Then there’s a blind searching through sentences to try to find and sustain this sound that I have in my head, and when to go for it and when to give the reader a break. Too much awe! Give us a flurry! Too much flurry!
So maybe I’ve stumbled on an answer to your question – the wafty matters of music and feeling were most important to the writing of Orbital. And I wonder if this thing called style is, for me, not a beautifying or embellishing of a functional thing, but the functional thing itself. It’s very internal, to myself and then to the writing. I feel something and I want to transpose that in words. For Orbital, this thing I felt was some oxygenated, flammable concoction of rapture and sadness and upending and excitement, maybe a bit like being in love. I tried to write, always, from inside that feeling, and to see if that feeling could get inside the sentences.
Some famously weak stylists believe their work deserves more respect. Why don’t they just pay some dirt-poor style-obsessive 1% of their advances to edit their books into shape?
All writers walk around in a huff thinking their work deserves more respect. This is the writer’s professional shtick. If we thought our work got the respect it deserved then we’d be happy and what would be the use of that?
In your early writing career, did you ever consider not working hard on your prose? Were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? Has your tolerance for less polished prose decreased over time?
When I first started writing it was all about prose for me; it was about sentences and paragraphs. That’s what I loved writing. Not stories as such, or plots or places or characters. And I imagined that, since I liked writing sentences and paragraphs, I’d be at my happiest writing lots of them, and so I decided to write a novel.
Over time I’ve begun to love, appreciate and be challenged by all aspects of writing because I understand that they’re all expressions of the same thing. But prose – the knocking together of sentences and paragraphs – has abided as the thing that gives me the most pleasure, and this is true of my experience as a reader too. I feel thrilled by good writing. So the urge to ‘work hard’ on it has always been there, though it doesn’t feel laborious ever. And I do definitely remember reading certain writers whose prose raised the bar. Thomas Hardy. Marilynne Robinson. Virginia Woolf. José Saramago. In some senses it’s been poetry that has raised, and still raises, my own reading and writing aspirations. I go to poetry when I’m stuck, when I want to remember how words work, or when I just want to read something brilliant. A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a/bucket - (This is Ted Hughes.) How that small evening is pulled in tight around all those k sounds. When I read that line I see and hear and know that evening so vividly it’s like a memory to me, a memory that brings emotions, thoughts of my parents, my childhood, a time we kept horses, my parents’ divorce. That, in fifteen words.
It’s true that my tolerance for what I think of as weak writing has decreased over time - maybe an occupational hazard. I don’t think it’s polished prose I want so much as honest prose, something written from the bones that enters into the bones. But I would say that as my tolerance for not-great writing has fallen, my appreciation of great writing has increased, has soared. I get so much joy from it.
Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief. How important are voice and style to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
It’s interesting; I hear some people say that too. Maybe this is in part a question of realism vs. reality. What is it to immerse yourself in fiction? Why go to the effort of suspending disbelief when there’s this chimp break-dancing to K-pop in a paddling pool on TikTok? Our fascination with stories that are believably made up has lately been a bit Top-Trumped by those that are unbelievably real. Real and yet new and bizarre and which ask nothing of us.
So in part this inability (or just reluctance?) to immerse in the world of a novel reflects a cultural moment, and is born of humanity’s current love affair with the ever-more-stupendously ‘real’. There are people who, at least for now, aren’t going to get as far as the first page of a novel because why bother? There’s not only this chimp but also some seals playing volleyball and the whole of Succession and also this amazing Substack about literary style.
But if a person does get to the first page of a novel, then how important are voice and style to this idea of immersion? For me, as a reader, they’re everything. For some readers, not so much. For some readers, the spell is cast by plot. How does person A overcome thing B to get to place X and achieve thing Y? That a novel is spellbinding is its universal measure of success. How it does that is particular. And in many ways I find it all the more impressive that novels that don’t depend on voice and musicality and the gorgeousness of a precisely hewn phrase – that is, novels that depend on story and plot – can still be spellbinding. Novels are made of words, nothing else. As such they’re very low-tech. A novel that suspends primarily through dramatic turns of plot has, just like a literary novel, only words. Yet it can be as thrilling and tense as an action movie that has a hundred million dollar budget. To me, that’s extraordinary.
Next, the subject we’d like to explore with you in the greatest detail: do you have any stylistic tips that for Auraist’s readers? We’re particularly interested in tips relating to voice, editing, originality, energy, authority, clarity, structure, virtuosity, precision, concision, richness, tonal complexity, and that elusive quality generally known as charm or charisma.
Of course, I could easily address all of those deeply and in a single perfect paragraph which tells Auraist’s readers exactly and definitively how to write an immaculate and charming novel. But what would be the fun in that? Instead I’ll grope around with the idea of structure as a way of saying something that might (?) turn out to be half useful.
My ‘tip’, if it can be called that, is to think about structure early doors, and to think about it as perhaps the key stylistic decision you need to make. How will I use structure to express something integral to the novel? How will I get structure and subject, form and content, to speak to each other? If you can’t make this decision at the outset (often I can’t), it’s enough to keep the question alive until you do know what to do.
In my novel Orbital, as an example, the structure is sixteen orbits of the earth over a twenty-four hour time period. I’m not suggesting that this structure is perfect, but in ordering the narrative in this way I could use the structure to simulate something of the experience of time when moving at 17,500 mph in low earth orbit – I could structurally encode this experience of time. I could giddy the reader, rather than just telling the reader that time was strange and fractured and giddying. Sometimes I think structure can be the writer’s way of saying the thing in the novel that’s otherwise too fundamental or big or diffuse to say.
For myself, I find that once I have my structure in place, it frees me at the sentence level. I’m no longer asking my sentences to labour certain elemental points, and now I can make them hum and buzz, or otherwise recline, relax. I can attend to the patterns of energy in them, I can decide how much or little time I’d like moving through the narrative, how slow or fast, how compressed or expanded; I can make efforts to find the exact verb I want, where precisely I’d like the full stop or the line break, what sort of lift or fall when the line break comes.
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
I’m sure musicality can be taught. And even where it comes naturally it can and must be attended to, directed and refined. Reading is the way to do that. Reading more than anything else.
I’ve never been taught musicality per se and I notice that when I write I can easily get stuck in a rhythm. Duh du-du-du duh duh duh duhhh. My sentences start to sound the same in my head, and part of my process – writing and editing - is to intervene on that, to try to disrupt it. But I know more or less if a sentence has a beat too many, a syllable too few. I know if ‘dull’ is better in a particular sentence than ‘monotonous’, and I know if ‘drab’ is better still because I want the sentence to run up against that ‘b’ and stumble over it, and have to pick itself up.
I learned from a brilliant friend, who is a musician as well as a writer, what is probably some very rudimentary music theory. If a piece of music is played in the key of C, say, that piece will always be trying to get back to C. When we listen to the piece, we’ll always be waiting for it to return to C and, if and when it does – often at the very end - we’ll feel a sense of satisfaction and completion. If it doesn’t, it leaves the piece feeling unresolved. In a sense, then, this is a basic way of understanding the difference between the conventional and the experimental. The conventional goes where we expect and want it to, the experimental not so. But the experimental might take us somewhere unexpected, and there’s adventure in that. I think as readers and writers we’re dealing with these hard-wired instincts all the time. We know where we want a sentence to go musically, or at least we know when it’s taken us there, and we know when it hasn’t. As writers it’s for us to decide if we want to satisfy or to challenge those instincts and expectations in our readers, and that, I think, is a project that’s continually in the making.
SAMANTHA HARVEY is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.
“Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”—The Booker Prize Judges
Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature
Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
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PORTAL, AN INTRODUCTION
YOU COULD SAY THAT HEARING IS A SCIENCE AND LISTENING is an art. Hearing depends on signals received by a functioning apparatus; hearing is measurable and verifiable. But listening is so much more than gathering information with the paired portals of our ears, those supple appendages flanking our faces. We also absorb with heart and skin, our elaborately nuanced nervous system continuously networking.
For an imperfect comparison with the filtering, processing, and discriminating involved through your other senses, consider the distinctions between looking and examining; touching and palpating; tasting and savoring a flavor; smelling and identifying a scent. When we are truly listening, signals are not merely accepted but are fluently interpreted. Transformed into meaning.
Dialogue is happening all around us: over our heads, under our radar, beyond the horizon. Whether or not we decide to call it language, we can call it listening— when elephants respond to news from their miles-distant family members, details they’ve taken in through acoustic sensitivities in their feet. When the searching roots of trees grow toward the energetic flow of water, sometimes tangling themselves in underground pipes— isn’t that too a kind of listening? What about when hummingbirds return to the specific vibration of nectar-drenched flowers? When whales share songs across oceans and recognize the pauses made by one another’s breathing?
Hushed or amplified, implausible yet audible, everything is humming— from quantum to cosmic, from the inner life of electrons to the membranes of outer space. The entire universe is sonic. . . .
.
Theodor Reik, protégé and colleague of Sigmund Freud, developed a method he called “third-ear listening.” He credited Friedrich Nietzsche with the origins of the phrase, although Nietzsche was referring to ways of listening to music. “The analyst, like his patient,” wrote Reik, “knows things without knowing that he knows them. The voice that speaks in him, speaks low, but he who listens with a third ear hears also what is expressed almost noiselessly, what is said pianissimo. There are instances in which things a person has said in psychoanalysis are consciously not even heard by the analyst, but nonetheless understood and interpreted. There are others about which one can say: in one ear, out the other, and in the third.”
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In at least one Indigenous culture, comprehending with a quiet, respectful awareness known as dadirri (an Aboriginal word for deep listening) 2 is a way of being that has been practiced for more than sixty thousand years. Like third-ear listening, dadirri focuses with patience and stillness both externally and internally. “One of the peculiarities of this third ear is that it works in two ways,” Reik explained. “It can catch what other people do not say, but only feel and think; and it can also be turned inward. It can hear voices from within the self that are otherwise not audible because they are drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought processes.”
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As the daughter of multilingual parents, I learned early to attune myself to their sounds and silences, even when they weren’t necessarily doing the same for each other or for me. Within their whispers, I detected spaces between clamor and consolation, between foreign and familiar. Maybe this prepared me for a life of eavesdropping on the world, listening with all of my senses, reaching toward sources of interconnection.
Reflecting on some of my most profoundly transformative experiences, I note that they have centered on the flowing back and forth of sound— whether occurring in childhood or adolescence, in leaving home or returning home. In a lifelong search for sanctuary and awareness, deep listening has become my way of leaning closer, opening wider, taking more responsibility for honoring the music of everything.
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Every time the resonant world enters us, we have an opportunity to reaffirm our relatedness. Today, for instance, a murmuring podcast entices me with the latest studies of complicated, gorgeous sounds too high and too low for my meager human range. The more I learn about acoustic windows in the feet of elephants and in the skulls of whales, I imagine my body reverberating in cellular empathy. These compositions and collaborations taking place among birds, insects, and cetaceans remind me that I belong to a sonically interwoven web. That includes sounds still echoing toward us from the distant past and sounds we are attempting to decipher in order to cocreate a future. It includes frequencies connecting galaxies and microbes, connecting the dead with the living, connecting the beings we might yet comprehend with the beings yet-to-be-born.
I hope that this book can serve as another kind of portal, with a sequence of spaces shaped by its author’s curiosity, questions answered and also sometimes unanswerable. In these pages you will find references to mammals on land, mammals who returned to the depths of the oceans, songs of the air, the forest, the soil. I believe that third-ear listening can offer solace for my/ our existential ache of loneliness. With our ancestrally related bones offering and receiving the news, we can lengthen and strengthen the golden thread stitching together a broken world.
Third Ear braids together personal narrative with scholarly inquiry to examine the power of listening to build interpersonal empathy and social transformation. A child of Holocaust survivors, Rosner shares stories from growing up in a home where six languages were spoken to interrogate how diverse areas of scholarship such as psychotherapy, neurolinguistics, and creativity can illuminate the complex ways we are impacted by the sounds and silences of others. Drawing on expertise from journalists, podcasters, performers, translators, acoustic biologists, spiritual leaders, composers, and educators, this hybrid text moves fluidly along a spectrum from molecular to global to reveal how third ear listening can be a collective means for increased understanding and connection to the natural world.
What a beautifully expressed description of the music in writing. How much of the meaning and communication comes from the rhythm, and the shape and the sound and the speed of the words.
Samantha Harvey has got the ear and the eye. A writer's writer.