Skip to content Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, […]
‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’ is one canto (the seventh) from a much longer work of poetry, In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). The poem shows Tennyson revisiting the home of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose untimely death in 1833 inspired the […]
Whatever you write, you want to get your thoughts across in a clear and effective way — that’s the first thing you need to know about how to improve writing skills.
If you’re a novelist, you don’t want awkward word choices or repetitive sentence structures to distract your readers from the story.
As a freelancer, you don’t want your work to seem sloppy or poorly edited.
When you blog, you don’t want readers to switch off because you’re far too wordy.
Want the good news? Even if your writing skills aren’t as strong as you’d like, there are plenty of straightforward techniques you can use to improve them.
Here are some suggestions on how to write better.
No matter how much of an expert you are, all writers can stand to pick up a few tips to learn how to write better. The same way a piece of writing is never “done” being edited (there’s always something), the work to improve your skills doesn’t end.
Whether you write articles, blogs, social media copy or research papers, here are 10 techniques to use to help you write anything well.
Here are two paragraphs that say the same thing. Which one is stronger?
Example 1: In my opinion, the majority of freelancers should probably avoid working for free (or for a nominal sum) unless they are at a very early stage of their career and as yet have no pieces for their portfolio at all.
Example 2: Freelancers shouldn’t work for free unless they’re just starting out and don’t have any pieces for their portfolio.
The second clearly states a stronger case, especially since it reaches the main point with fewer unnecessary words you don’t need in a sentence.
If you write a blog post, most readers will assume it gives your opinion, so you don’t have to state that. Mastering brevity is an easy way to improve writing skills. Simply be clear, firm and direct.
Some phrases are so familiar they’ve lost their impact: they’ve become clichés.
For instance, “In my opinion,” from the previous example is a phrase you can always cut. Here are a few others:
It can be tricky to spot these in your own writing, so take a quick look through this huge list of clichés to avoid here on the Be a Better Writer site.
When you edit, you don’t need to cut every cliché…but check whether it might work better to rephrase.
In dialogue, or in a first-person narrative, clichés can be a helpful way to characterize someone’s speech or thought patterns — but if you want to improve your writing skills, make sure you’re careful and deliberate.
Although this isn’t appropriate for every form of nonfiction, bloggers and freelancers often write directly to the reader as “you.”
This is a great way to make your writing better, direct, conversational and stronger.
Blog posts and articles quite often use “you” or “your” very early on, in the title and/or introduction. For instance, this post on The Write Life:
Freelance or Full Time: Which Journalism Path is Right for You?
Want to work in the media industry as a writer?
You generally have two options: You can seek employment as a staff member of a publication, or look for freelance writing opportunities.
(Emphasis mine.)
Or this one about book formatting:
How to Format a Book: 10 Tips Your Editor Wants You To Know
Unless you prefer your friends to be story nerds or those who lean toward obsessive-compulsive tendencies when it comes to grammar, you shouldn’t necessarily seek to befriend your editor.
Similar to these examples, use the singular “you” and avoid phrases like, “Some of you may know”. Yes, you (hopefully!) have more than one reader, but each reader experiences your piece individually.
You can also use “I” where appropriate (e.g. to give an example from your own life) — though, usually, it’s best to keep the focus of your piece on the reader.
What’s wrong with this paragraph?
You should write regularly (not necessarily daily). You should aim to write at least once or twice a week (I recommend a total of 3 – 4 hours per week). You may find it difficult to keep this up at first (especially if you’ve not written much before).
There’s no question the advice it shares is sound and reasonable. Plus, there’s nothing wrong with the actual words used. Still, the structure of each of the three sentences is very similar: each one starts with “You” then a modal verb (“should”/“may”), and each one ends with a phrase in parentheses.
When you have several sentences in a row that follow the same pattern, they stand out…in a bad way.
Sometimes, it’s appropriate to structure your sentences like this — e.g. in a bullet-pointed list — but in regular paragraphs, it’s often unintentional on the author’s part, and it seems artless and poorly edited to the reader.
For more help with sentence structure, check out, “It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences,” by June Casagrande.
If you write blog posts, articles or sales copy, subheadings are crucial.
They break up long pieces and help readers stay focused; they also offer “signposts” to readers who may skim for specific information.
When you craft your subheadings, think about how to:
It’s rare that you’ll want to write something deliberately indirect! That would be the opposite of better writing. Instead, you’ll want your words to come across clear and strong to the reader.
This means avoid the passive voice like the plague — advice most writers have heard before as they learn to improve their writing skills. In case you need a recap, here’s a quick rundown:
Active voice: John threw the ball. ➜ Succinct and clear.
Passive voice: The ball was thrown by John. ➜ Wordier and less direct.
The passive voice omits the agent (the person who performs the action) from the sentence altogether: The ball was thrown. See?
This small detail can be useful in many ways to make your writing better; for instance, you might write about something where the agent is unimportant, or where you want to conceal the agent. (“Mistakes were made” is a classic example here.)
A good rule of thumb is to always write in a direct, straightforward way.
Make it as easy as possible for readers to engage with your ideas or your story.
No one’s first draft is perfect, and the above six suggestions should help you rework yours.
Often, it helps to go through your piece at a slow and methodical — many writers find it helps to read aloud since it highlights the cadence of your words.
If you prefer not to read aloud (or if your colleagues, family or cat would give you funny looks if you tried it), then print out your draft so you can edit it on paper.
Use a different format to make it easier to spot typos and repetitive phrasings.
At times when it isn’t practical to print, I’ve also found it helpful to convert my draft digitally: that might mean I turn a Word document into a .pdf, put a novel manuscript onto my Kindle or preview a blog post so I can get closer to the reader’s experience.
Confident, powerful writing will help your message (or your story) have its full impact on your reader.
If you have a serious desire to learn how to write better and don’t have access to an in-person editor, consider using a grammar checker tool.
It’ll help you fix grammar and replace common words with more unique options. Some tools even tell you why you should make a certain change, which is an added bonus because it helps you further learn and improve your writing skills.
(But remember, don’t write and edit at the same time!)
Adverbs are the pesky parts of speech that can be tough to eliminate from your writing.
Because they’re descriptive words that modify verbs, adverbs that end with -ly constantly find their way back into sentences. Since people use them so commonly, they sneakily manage to influence our vocabulary.
Did you notice all the unnecessary adverbs? Here’s another way I could’ve written that sentence:
… adverbs that end with -ly always find their way back into sentences. They’re easy to use in conversation, so adverbs are sly in how they influence our vocabulary.
To improve your writing skills, tighten your copy and clear your blog, novel or article of -ly adverbs you can replace with more descriptive verbs. The first way I wrote the sentence isn’t incorrect, but the second version is less wordy and complex in comparison. Plus, it contains less fluff.
Rather than write, “She drove quickly down the street,” focus on the action to help your reader: What’s the driver doing? Speeding, so you could write, “She raced down the street at lightning speed.”
It’s a small change to swap out adverbs, but the impact is huge when you do so to better your writing with powerful verbs and less fluff.
Your amazing story won’t reach your readers if it’s not composed with sentences that pace well, have proper punctuation and vivid details to enhance the reader experience.
If someone has to read your sentences more than once to grasp the main idea, that means your writing lacks flow.
To improve your writing and create more flow, incorporate this checklist of sentence structure elements in your writing routine:
Besides these 10 effective tips to use to be a better writer and improve your skills, the one thing you have to do is write. (Then, don’t stop.)
This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.
Photo via Alissa Kumarova/ Shutterstock
The post How to Write Better: 10 Straightforward Techniques to Try Today appeared first on The Write Life.
We love writing; we love dogs; so why not enjoy nine bones of writing advice with dogs? If you need some great writing advice and fun images of dogs, you’ve found your online destination. Enjoy!
Last week, we shared 9 lines of writing advice with cats. It was pretty amazing, but we also love dogs on the Writer’s Digest team. So yeah, we’ve collected nine bones of writing advice paired with fun images of dogs.
(Yes, Virginia, you are a writer.)
It’s helpful if you’re a writer, comforting if you’re a dog lover, and nearly perfect if you fall into both categories. Enjoy!
*****
Enter Writer’s Digest’s 90th Annual Writing Competition!
There are many reasons to enter the Writer’s Digest annual writing competition, including more than 40 total cash prizes spread across nine different writing categories, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. But the top reason is the Grand Prize of $5,000 cash, an interview in Writer’s Digest magazine, and more!
*****
From “7 Steps to Creating a Flexible Outline for Any Story,” by K.M. Weiland
From “6 Tips to Choosing the Right Point of View,” by Nancy Kress
From “The 5 C’s of Writing a Great Thriller Novel,” by James Scott Bell
From “The 7 Rules of Picking Fictional Names for Characters,” by Elizabeth Sims
From “6 Secrets to Creating and Sustaining Suspense,” by Steven James
From “The 9 Ingredients of Character Development,” by Tom Pawlik
From “7 Ways to Perfect Your Writing Tone,” by Adair Lara
From “Ian Haydn Smith: Be Distracted By Your Subject,” by Robert Lee Brewer
From “10 Ways to Hook Your Readers (& Reel Them in for Good),” by Ann Garvin
*****
Of course, you can just click on the Free Downloads button at the top of the page to check out all our free downloads for writers. But here are a few of our favorites:
Writer Sarah Hagi is said to have originated the highly relatable, often quoted, and even merchandised tweet, “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” It is a phrase that many women have muttered to themselves in the midst of a bout of imposter syndrome, when some sense of self-doubt creeps in and we wonder, how do white men have the audacity? Where do they get the sheer nerve?
Ijeoma Oluo in her new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, takes a deep dive into the motivations, expectations, and the root cause of why so many white men move through our society with extreme confidence and righteous entitlement. Mediocre reveals not only how dangerous it is for women and people of color to be on the receiving end of such entitlement, but how failing to meet the ingrained and deep-seated expectations sowed into the white male psyche for generations has proven to be a tragedy for white men also. Fresh off of the success of So You Want to Talk About Race, through a historical, political, and sometimes personal journey, Oluo attempts to answer one of the most mysterious questions of our time: Why in the hell are white men so mad?
I spoke with Oluo about exactly that question, the ways in which America can move away from the white male supremacy design, and if it is human nature to align yourself politically with others like yourself.
Tyrese L Coleman: A central theme is that America is stuck in a system that is designed to uplift and reinforce white male supremacy, and that in doing so, everyone suffers, including white men. I’m curious as to whether or not you think our reliance on this design can or will ever be undone. And if so, will it be in your lifetime?
Ijeoma Oluo: Absolutely. I think it can be done. I think that right now, we are seeing with the changing racial demographics in this country is this mad, really intense effort to entrench these systems, even in non-white spaces. And so that’s something that we’re going to have to work extra hard to resist.
But, what I’m more likely to see in my lifetime is not that the system’s gone, but seeing pockets where we’ve disengaged from it and are working and building. I think it’s gonna be piecemeal and local. The system didn’t just land on us all of a sudden, it was built up, and it’s gonna have to be torn down piece by piece. What I’m hoping people see in this book are the reflections and the choices they’re making in their cities and towns. We can start making better choices in our workplaces, our towns, our churches to start dismantling these systems all over the country. That’s how the system was built. That’s how it could be taken down.
TLC: Do you think we are moving towards a place where this is actively happening as we sit here right now?
IO: I think that in some places it is. Well, first, I wanna be very clear, there have always been activists, right? And even people within the system fighting to try to do this work for a very, very long time. So, yeah, I do think that we see bits and pieces of it. The “defund the police” effort is a huge part of it, the fight to de-weaponize one of the more violent tools of democracy in this country. We’re seeing it in some school reforms around the country. We’re seeing it even in the election and leadership of people like The Squad in congress, you know? And so I think that it’s absolutely being done. People have been dedicated to this effort for the entirety of human history.
But if there’s one thing that the book shows is that as hard as some of us may be working, there are other forces working just as hard to try to take back any gains we make. So, it really is going to take a larger level of awareness and a lot more dedication in order for us to make changes last.
TLC: History has shown us that, in times where this country takes steps towards the social and political progress that you mentioned, moving outside of this white male supremacy design, we then take five steps back. For example, we saw this after the Civil War during reconstruction. We saw it in the 70s and 80s after the Civil Rights Movement. We saw it with Trump after Obama. What is your take on why this happens? Why do we revert back to the status quo? Is it—and I hate to say this, but for lack of a better word—a comfort level?
White male identity is—right now and has always been, as far as the history of this country—a reactionary identity, not a proactive identity.
IO: I think there’s a couple of things. One, for people, for many people of color, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a comfort level. But I would say there is a deep fear of the unknown. We have history to show us that pushing too far means the backlash would be even harder or that there’s really a limit to what can be accomplished. And I think that we saw a lot of this in this election where people knew we absolutely needed to get Trump out of office but also, I think that many people of color had this pragmatic idea that white people were only gonna vote for so much. But also, I think it’s really important to recognize that Black America has bought into a lot of these white male ideals.
But I would also say it’s really important to recognize, and it’s something that I hope that the book can make clear, that white male identity is—right now, and has always been, as far as the history of this country—a reactionary identity, not a proactive identity. And that means that, where it feels like it’s being shifted or pushed or threatened, it’s stronger than it ever is. And what we see is a direct backlash when something is shifting. If your identity is only based, comparatively, on what someone else is doing or what or how much further ahead of others you are, that means that every bit of progress is a threat.
TLC: You use a quote from Woodrow Wilson, “the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” And that goes to what you were just saying, the self-preservation instinct. Is that driving the reactionary response?
IO: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s driving not only the reactionary response on the right, but also the reactionary response on the left, where we immediately start hearing that things have gone too far. The immediate fear. Even now, when we talk about why there wasn’t a bigger landslide [during the recent Presidential election] and people are saying, “Oh, well, you know, you said defund the police too much.” “Things don’t center us anymore, so that must be why things are the way they are.” And so it’s not only a response on the right, it’s a response across the board that is incredibly reactionary. And that also doesn’t get investigated, because the moment white male identity isn’t under threat, it goes dormant. No one stops and goes, “Why, why did a Black man get elected and I freak out? Why did that happen?” No one does that.
So, I think that’s the real danger. But also the fact that we then treat that response as an excuse to not push further. If we don’t push further, we don’t get the backlash. Then what? Well, then we’re stuck where we are forever, right? But people pretend like it’s not a natural response that’s going to keep happening every time we make progress. People like to pretend there’s a way to make progress that won’t threaten white male identity. And there simply isn’t. So, in order to move forward with a society that isn’t stuck in this design, we have to actually confront the white male mediocrity that is in power.
TLC: That reminds me of your chapter sections on Biden and Bernie. The theme I got from those sections was that, “white man is gonna white man.” They’re going to align themselves with those that are like themselves. There’s always this argument that we should move away from identity politics but that, in and of itself, is an example of identity politics, especially when you are aligning yourself with the policies and the legislation that help your particular identity. But is that a part of human nature? Isn’t it natural for them to do that?
IO: I would say no. I would say what is natural is to see affinity. And when we pick who represents us, often affinity is what we choose. Whether this person represents our interests and represents who we are.
But there are two things I think that have been deliberately constructed. One is how white men view community and their best interests. And it’s very exclusive. Who we view as community, who I view is community, and whose futures I tie to my own is important. But also are your definition of well-being, your definition of best interest and what those interests are deliberately constructed to be harmful? That can make a huge difference.
I can look at someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is not Black, and see affinity with her because I can see the way she is fighting for poor communities. And that’s how I consider my community because my community is about bringing people together and solidarity. It is not about being on top and being more powerful. That’s where the danger is. And politically, that’s what we have with white manhood as a political construct, an identity based on power and oppression. And that means that you can never actually find an identity that reaches beyond that. You can never actually find cooperation or shared interest if it would threaten your power.
And that’s really the difference. It is completely natural to find affinity with people to say “this is us, and you are you.” But if what defines it means that, even when it’s in your best interest, you can’t expand, you can’t bring other people in, you can’t find shared interest because your interest is always about doing better or having more than, then we have a serious problem, especially in a democracy.
TLC: In thinking about the process of transferring power or equalizing power, you write, “…yes it will offer some real benefits for you, but it will not always benefit you. Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you enjoy are threatened.” Do you think that in order to create equality, there has to be a giving up of something in order to benefit others? Or is there another way of looking at it that could make it feel less like giving up? Do white men, in order to come to a reckoning with history, have to do the work of giving up some level of power in order to equalize things?
IO: I think, no matter what, the power has to be given up. When everyone is doing better, you do better, no matter what. We all do better.
But there isn’t a one for one replacement for an identity built on being better than everyone else. And so that means that it will at times feel like a loss that has nothing to go in its place. And the only way you can value what replaces it, is if you let it go. You can’t hold on. You can’t say, “I’m gonna hold on to this power while I get used to not having power.” It doesn’t work that way. And so that’s the part that’s important. And it’s also important that we recognize this because we can’t keep saying we’re gonna wait until white men are comfortable and ready because that in and of itself is upholding white male supremacy. Their comfort is so important that we’ll continue these systems that are literally killing people because white men aren’t ready yet. We haven’t found a way to convince them yet. That in itself is saying a lot about, respectively, how we value white men compared to everyone else.
TLC: For a long time, the default has been “white” and “male.” For example, when you think about the terms “fiction” and “women’s fiction” to differentiate genres. The fact that one has to differentiate “women’s fiction” means that “fiction” is not for women. But I feel like we’re heading into a world where white men are being specifically identified as “white men,” highlighting them as individuals, whereas before, it felt like they were a conglomerate.
You write about how angry white men are, and I’m wondering if part of the desperate anger that we see and that you experienced in your personal life as a result of white men is related to a spotlight on them as individuals, so that they’re now being required to show their worth rather than relying on being a part of the default?
IO: I think of it somewhat in the opposite, which is that there was never any light on the system. The system was fully operating for white men and yet we had this idea that each white man was an individual and never responsible for what he did collectively. We weren’t saying, “We have a white man problem.” It was, “No, no, no, no, no. We have a problem with this one man. And this one man.” Collectively as Black people, we were always saying, “Look, white people are gonna do this shit, right? This is fucked up.” How many times have you been asked if people are racist and you say, “No, you have one racist person. People aren’t racist.” Or asked to seperate? “We’re not all bad.” Even when we talk about the police. “No, we have one bad cop. We don’t have a systemic problem.”
The problem with that is that it absolves white men from accountability. It also stops them from seeing how the system is screwing them over because it’s invisible. The system that they are a part of that is supposed to magically make them all happy, successful and powerful is invisible to that. All they know is that they’re failing.
I do think we are seeing increased accountability in the last few years. Talking about #MeToo, talking about race. We’re seeing white men who’ve been doing what they’ve always been programmed to do, feeling like they’re being cheated. But not only are they not getting rich and famous, not only do they not feel successful, but now they’re being punished for doing what they’ve been programmed to do. And I think that, for them, it feels incredibly unfair. It feels like they’re being targeted and maligned because, as a society, we have allowed white men to not be responsible for how they participate in systemic oppression. And now that they’re being held responsible, they’re basically like, “Oh, since when?” This is a tragedy. They’re allowed to center themselves because we haven’t moved far enough away from the narrative. It’s still all about these white men. They don’t get that it’s not all about them.
I think that’s part of what we’re seeing, this mix. White male power got to be ubiquitous for so long. It got to be the air we breathe. And now there’s suddenly some accountability. And I think white men, too, have always been angry and bitter by the failures that have been placed upon them. They aren’t as successful. They’re not as successful and powerful as they were told they should be and because we never talked about the system, they weren’t told why. And so they were told to blame us, blame women, blame people of color. And now, on top of that, they’re like, “I’m already miserable and you want to yell at me for grabbing someone’s ass at the workplace? Since when?” We’re seeing this anger and desperation because they aren’t conditioned to accept responsibility. They have refused to learn how they participated in systems of violence.
TLC: I mean, it’s funny how the stereotype is of an angry Black woman, right? But what I’ve read in Mediocre is the angry white man archetype. I can’t help but think, “What the hell do they have to be so angry about?” They’re still ahead of everyone else when you look at employment, pay, housing, education, everything. That’s what you were just addressing, this unrealistic level of expectation and then being slammed down by reality. Even yet, still, most of the world is like, “okay, and…”
IO: I can understand so much about whiteness, but I can’t understand what it would feel like to be 40 and realize that you’re part of an unfair system. You know what I mean?
We need to recognize that we have been programmed to view harmful white male ideals as leadership and step away from it.
The difference is that white men have been so coddled that they don’t know they can survive this knowledge. They can grow past it. We have. We are living examples of going past the knowledge that this system sucks. We still do what we can. We still care for our families. We still try to find happiness.
But there’s this idea that a white man shouldn’t have to, and they have no practice in it. And I’m sure that’s a huge existential crisis to realize you’ve striven your whole life for something you were never ever, ever gonna get. You know, when I was a kid, no one said to me, “You could be president one day.” But we were told to strive and try our hardest, because we had to take care of our family. Because we had to be something. But not “it’s coming to you.”
White men were told they could be president someday. No matter what. Even if your kids hate politics, don’t pay attention to anything, is a total asshole. There’s still someone telling them that they could be president someday, and they will become president someday.
And there’s almost a cruelty to it—the lie that’s told to white men—because only so many of them can be president. Only so many of them can have their own company. Only so many of them are gonna be rich. There’s limited resources in the system that siphons up the majority of profits for business owners and investors. So it is a childish, oversensitive place that white male America often finds itself in. And I don’t know what it’s like, and I can’t imagine what those growing pains are because it’s just a luxury that so many of us never had.
TLC: What can those of us who aren’t white men do to help move our society forward so that everyone benefits? Specifically, how can we disrupt the design?
IO: One is we have to be really aware of where we uphold it. This is where we do the self-audit and say, even for me as a Black woman, where do I, and in Black culture, define success as a dude, putting on a suit and talking a particular way instead of accomplishments that may be divorced from white supremacy and patriarchy? Where am I spending my money? What am I consuming? What am I supporting? What conversations am I having around that to free myself and my family and my community?
But then also it’s really important for us to look at systems that were born in these ideals and then continue to uphold the status quo and fight for change. Starting in your school district and going through your kids textbooks and see what’s in it. Look at school funding. Look at teacher recruitment. Look at what we can do at a local level because, obviously, that’s where the impact of everyday life is but it’s also the breeding ground, the training ground for our national politics.
These national politicians don’t just appear out of nowhere. They come up through the systems and are told what to expect. I think it’s important that we look at our systems and say, “Okay, you know what? Maybe I can’t influence what’s happening in D.C., but I can influence what’s happening in my city council. I can take a look at what’s being promoted there. I can look at what businesses I’m supporting locally. I can look at what I’m saying to my kids about terrorism and manhood and how it’s being defined. I can have those conversations.” I think that that’s really where we have to start doing the work.
And then, of course, where we do have power on a national level, where we can vote and support and make our voices heard, we have to. We have to really check ourselves and recognize that we have been programmed to view harmful white male ideals as leadership, and we have to learn to recognize it and step away from it.
The post Ijeoma Oluo on Dismantling White Male Privilege appeared first on Electric Literature.
Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air was published this year by Granta Books. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the collection explores states of airlessness, from ghostly asphyxiations to the toxic environments of extractive capitalism, and ensuring consequences both psychic and ecological.
Granta spoke to the poet about the zoonotic diseases, ancient processes of inoculation and resisting totalising metaphors.
The title of the collection is ‘Life Without Air’ – a reference to the eighteenth-century scientist Louis Pasteur’s term for fermentation. It’s a strong image. What drew you to it? And why does it introduce your collection?
Air and airlessness were already emerging as themes when my editor Rachael and I were sorting through material to include in the book, but finding the phrase in Pasteur was serendipitous, as I was reading his work in relation to my PhD research on pathogens. The duality of the phrase immediately startled me; it seemed to be a riddle at the same time as a clear, scientific description.
From various accounts I’ve read Pasteur held some pretty unsavory views – he was a huge germaphobe and this seemed to go hand in hand with his hatred of ‘the masses’ and distrust of democracy. Apparently he put his family through an ordeal every dinnertime, at which he would sit and silently ‘search’ his food and wine glass for traces of dirt or contamination. His discovery of the interaction of bacteria and yeast in fermentation overturned the classical theory of Spontaneous Generation, which held that life spontaneously appeared out of dead or decaying matter – which explained, for example, the products of fermentation, or the appearance of maggots on rotting meat.
So I imagine that Pasteur in some sense would have been less than happy to discover ‘life without air’ – unquantifiable mobs of microscopic life that wallow at the bottom of a so-called ‘chain of being’. As I turned this phrase over I began to realise how much of the book it pulled together – an idea of life or liveliness persisting where it ‘shouldn’t’. For me this opens up a way to think about nonhuman life oppressed and overlooked by human domination, of human resilience under systemic conditions of patriarchy and capitalism, and more intimately in the experience of abusive relationships.
I also see the phrase as pulling macro and micro environments together across time – the earliest life on the planet was ‘life without air’, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to ‘pollute’ the atmosphere and create one that would be breathable for eventual animal life. I’ve read that what most closely resembles these early planetary conditions is the interior of the human body, which obviously coexists with a myriad of viruses and bacteria. I think this is what’s happening when the fictional narrator of ‘Fossil Dinner’ points to her open mouth and says ‘the natural world is in here’ to her cartographer husband (who definitely has a shade of the dinnertime-Pasteur).
Today we know Pasteur for his contributions to the principles of modern vaccination. In fact he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. Given you wrote this collection pre-pandemic, is this just a coincidence? Where did that interest come from?
Kind of a coincidence – I started a PhD focussed around zoonotic diseases in 2016, the first few years of which involved a crash course in contemporary epidemiology, and which I supplemented with research into the history of medicine and disease more broadly. A lot of this was new to me, although it grew from an interest in ecology, the nonhuman, and relations between species in my previous studies. Life Without Air isn’t my PhD project but I think my research and experiences of the latter probably account for the references to contagion, quarantine and things generally ‘infecting’ each other throughout the book.
My research has also fanned an interest in pre-Enlightenment, and non-Western practices of medicine and healing, and how so many of these have been historically coopted, and then rebranded as Western scientific developments. Your mention of vaccination is an interesting case in point, because vaccination built on the much more ancient process of inoculation, practiced for centuries in India, Africa and China. It was introduced to the West in the early eighteenth century by an English aristocrat, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived for a while in Constantinople, and there witnessed the miraculous results of smallpox inoculation. When she tried to bring the practice to Britain it was widely deemed ‘barbaric’ and ‘un-Christian’. But despite these origins, it was Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch that went down in history as the ‘fathers’ of vaccination in the centuries that followed.
And looking at the collection mid-pandemic, do you find new connections in the work? ‘have you ever festered / in your own quarantine, afraid / that your toxins would spread’ – most people were not thinking about quarantines, diseases, infections and ‘chronic abjection’ in the years before 2020. Your collection is teeming with these things. Has your fascination with these things evolved?
For one thing the title has definitely taken on a whole new set of associations; Rachael and I settled on Life Without Air pre-Covid and back then our only concern was that it potentially sounded like an end-of-life memoir . . . Which I think ties in to a broader anxiety that attends the newfound connections you mention: the work having a kind of currency I hadn’t prepared for. That line you quote, from the sequence Dredging the Bataou Lake, was written in 2015, which makes it possibly the oldest poem in the book. But it’s probably the page I’ve seen shared most on social media, I suppose because it seems to encapsulate the affective mire of prolonged lockdown(s).
While I’m really glad that it resonates with people this way, I guess I feel uneasy about it being read as written about this quarantine, which is so particular, real, and unevenly distributed along lines of wealth and race. I haven’t really written any poems since the pandemic started, and while long periods of not writing poems are usual for me, it feels odd to publish what appears to be a pandemic-themed book, while not yet feeling able to write about lived experience of the pandemic at all!
The book presents a series of toxic environments (pollution, patriarchy), and the parallel dangers to climate and psyche. There’s also a sense of faith in the power of resilience that threads through the book. Would you describe the collection as hopeful?
Part of what appealed to me about Pasteur’s term is that it seemed to imply survival in spite of a perceived lack – which is obviously more to do with a human misconception of the conditions necessary for life. Many forms of life do thrive in airless conditions and ‘anoxic waters’, so I am interested in thinking about what perspectives are at play in our terminology. For me ‘life without air’ is a cipher for holding space for what lives beyond our comprehension at any given moment.
I really appreciate your phrasing – ‘the parallel dangers to climate and psyche’ – as this is so much what the book encapsulates for me. There’s a reductive line of thinking where any sense of emotion or psychology in writing about the nonhuman is immediately dismissed as ‘anthropocentric’. Anthropocentrism is undeniably the way we live in – and harm – the planet, but I can’t get behind the idea that pushing aside our humanity is somehow innately more attuned to the nonhuman. To me that only serves to reinforce the idea of a human/nonhuman divide and smacks of the myth of objectivity.
I really like how Wendy Wheeler, a biosemiotician who sadly passed away this year, defends the Romantic poets against accusations of dangerously ‘romanticising’ the nonhuman, by reminding us that they were actually the first wave of resistance to the Enlightenment’s mechanistic view of nonhumanity as a set of soulless resources. A romantic, experiential view of the nonhuman is obviously far from perfect and rife with anthropic projections. But it might also offer a partial way back to what was largely excised from Europe, but which still exists in other cultures: a sense of all forms of life being innately connected, mutually dependent and vulnerable, moved and gathered by a principle of cycles, rather than hierarchy or linear progress.
On an experiential level, I think of trauma sustained in relationships as being, in a very real sense, environmental experiences, which exist within a much broader and impersonal environmental crisis. I don’t want to make these things seem equivalent to each other, or claim that they have the same roots, but I suppose I see language as a place for exploring the experiential, in which resonances and slippages between categories and scales, or the personal and the impersonal, can occur.
I’m glad that a sense of belief in resilience and hope comes through the book! I wanted it to stay with difficulty without collapsing into hopelessness, which I don’t believe is a helpful political outlook in terms of climate crisis, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppressions we face. That said, I don’t see the book as a clear-cut manifesto. My relationship to writing (thus far, at least) is that it’s a place for moving through the murk of what I don’t understand or know how to articulate, rather than what I do.
At times you move into an archaic and ecological register, a botanical mode. The language feels as if it’s from another era. What does this register offer you? (You also seem wary of the past, e.g. the ballroom ‘doused in morally dubious nineteenth-century light’.)
I feel quite susceptible to different vernaculars and ways of doing language in general – moving around a lot as a child meant that I picked up a range of accents, which has now flattened into one that I can’t locate in any one place. I still catch myself slipping into other people’s vowel sounds and lilts, and I suppose the same thing happens in writing.
The different registers and modes usually come from what I am reading or thinking about at any given time, a kind of linguistic or syntactic texture that works its way into the writing. Writing poems has always been a side pursuit to what I am supposed to be doing academically, and so I think at times it has acted as a kind of slough or marginalia, a place for the unprocessed language and imagery that isn’t finished with me yet, or that I feel wants to ‘play’ in some way that it can’t in its original context.
And in relation to the last question I find poetry a way of experimenting with a sensibility in language – how do we think/speak/write of the nonhuman, without losing sight of how inescapably human we are? I love how different registers open up different ways of looking at the familiar. For example, the live culture of some fermenting processes is often referred to as ‘the mother’, which may etymologically come from the Middle Dutch for ‘dregs’. This opens up a different kind of familial scene, a way of thinking through those relations as metabolic – what can and cannot be digested by certain members, what is the necessary ‘waste’ produced by being in relation.
That said, I’m wary of too-neat or totalising metaphors which then end up drawing attention to themselves as conceits – instead I’m attracted to that murky state between, where you’re not quite sure if something is literal or figurative, and the polarity of those two things is itself called into question. I’m a fan of how Mary Ruefle describes metaphor as ‘the philosophy that everything in the world is connected.’
Read ‘Fossil Dinner’ by Daisy Lafarge, from the collection Life Without Air published by Granta Books.
Image © Sophie Davidson
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