A masterclass on prose style by Christopher Cokinos
Detailed discussion of style in nonfiction by the author of Still As Bright ^ Plus our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction
Photo by Silas van Overeem
Firstly, an apology for that email mistakenly sent out an hour ago. Not quite sure what happened there.
In today’s issue:
—’How many nonfiction writers are, for example, consciously or from muscle memory, using the connotations available to them in slant rhyme?’: expert discussion of prose style by Christopher Cokinos, whose Still As Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow we chose as the best-written recent release in nonfiction.
—’He was kamikaze mode, pumping iron, all Sun and Steel sending hearts <3 <3 <3 to his Saint Wilgefortis, darling, starving, holy hikikomori virgin femcel holed up in her Serial Experiments Laincore bedroom’: our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. Our previous picks, and the list of books considered, are here and here.
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CHRISTOPHER COKINOS ON PROSE STYLE
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
It started with my becoming aware of nature writing after having read the poet Robinson Jeffers in my 20s. I started with Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which has some lovely writing and big ideas. It’s one of the most important and consequential books of the 20th century. From there, I found more recent writers, especially Barry Lopez, whose work is a model of lyrical reportage and meditation. Barry was something of a mentor for awhile. Linda Hogan’s Dwellings was another important influence. I read the Greatest Hits: Dillard, Williams, others.
I have a distinct memory of being at the library in Manhattan, Kansas, after I had started stargazing with a 90-millimeter telescope, where I was looking for observing guides, I guess, and stumbled upon Chet Raymo’s The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage. It’s gorgeous. His ability to weave facts and lyricism about the cosmos is unparalleled. That’s a forever book.
That’s a small genre, by the way, the “writing about space in a non-pop-sci-gee-whiz way” genre. It includes Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies, Wyn Wachhorst’s little book, The Dream of Spaceflight, with which I have arguments but to which I return for lovely sentences and, again, big ideas. Later, I found Loren Eiseley’s The Invisible Pyramid: A Naturalist Analyzes the Rocket Century. There too—incredible range of subject, lyricism, meditation. Eiseley’s work as a whole has a ruminative, melancholy tone in which I can readily dwell.
Other nonfiction giants to me include Erik Larson, for his research chops in scene reconstruction, which virtually no one knows how to do well. I’m sure some snobs will sneer at this. Scene reconstruction based strictly on factual material is something I cherish and do. Richard Rhodes is a genius at this and, well, everything he does. Diane Ackerman. Carl Sagan is on my list. His writing crosses the line into popular science writing, right? Yet he has a gravitas, a mastery of rhythm and a cross-cutting mind.
I have to add, though, that after a heavy immersion in my 20s and 30s, I mostly started to read outside nonfiction. I’d been a poetry reader till then as well. Certain poets, like Robert Hayden, continue to resonate. I love the surreal gothic heartbreak in Joshua Maria Wilkinson’s work, the thick forest of sound in Sylvia Plath and Kimberly Johnson.
But when I was editing Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, the last thing I wanted to do was come home and read more of the same. That was in my 40s, in the early 2000s.
While working on The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, and, in particular, while on an expedition in Antarctica, the scientists kept bringing up science fiction, which I’d loved as child, as so many children do, but which I’d largely left behind except for pulp and arthouse movies.
So I began reading in the genre and found some just terrible writing, I mean, just slap-your-forehead-bad, like Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.” Brilliant premise (look it up). Abysmal prose. I had to ask why this stuff mattered to SF readers. It really forced me to think hard about genre and literary values. I was hooked, even as much the writing was less than, oh, cosmic. Asimov was always the worst. I took two summer courses at the University of Kansas with the esteemed critic, writer and editor James Gunn, reading in his Road to Science Fiction series.
I saw immediately that “nature writing” and “science fiction” privileged sweep and setting—indeed, setting as protagonist. Ideas as heroes, to invoke Kingsley Amis’s phrase from, I think, New Maps of Hell. And, lo, there were literary values in some science fiction. Ray Bradbury’s early work. Theodore Sturgeon. The incomparable Ursula LeGuin. In Samuel Delaney, a sense of verve and experimentation.
But without question the biggest influence over the past few years has been J.G. Ballard.
Why Ballard?
He’s honest about the largest questions of the human condition without being a character-realist as you would find in most literary fiction, a genre that bored him and bores me. Ballard’s protagonists are versions of himself—no surprise there—and that’s not always great. There’s certainly some misogyny there. But Ballard’s characters live on the surface tension of a bubble called civilization. His tales are cautionary. Yet when the circumstance is overwhelming, they give in to it. We may not like it but it’s vivid as hell. When the sun gets too hot in The Drowned World, Kerans heads toward the south, toward the hotter part of the Earth, and doesn’t pretend there’s an escape, as one would find in typical science fiction.
But here’s the main thing. Ballard was a descriptive genius. He saw landscape, environment, natural forces, fetish capitalism, violence, the subconscious, the disparate, fragmented media-technosphere as characters themselves. Everything is vivified. He is a master of the simile. Like this, taken from opening of The Crystal World: “At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilions of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.” Damn. I love Ballard.
In some respects, there’s a direct line from H.G. Wells to Ballard. Wells, by the way, was regarded as a giant in the late 19th and into the early 20th century before his nonfiction, journalism and discussion novels tanked his reputation unfairly. I’m reading all of Wells—and it’s a lot—and everywhere I look there are brilliant passages. Two or three of his early political views did him in, shorn of context, of course, and never mind that he wrote The Rights of Man in 1940, which was a big influence on the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
Read Experiment in Autobiography, along with some his lesser-known pieces, like Russia in the Shadows or The Wonderful Visit or In the Days of the Comet. He is capable of terrific prose in both his fiction and nonfiction. Here’s his famous passage about seeing statues of Marx all over Russia:
“About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast, solemn, woolly, uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance…”
Adam Roberts and Bill Cooke are helping to recover Wells for this century, helping us to better understand the world’s first literary superstar, who was also a terrific writer and prophetic public intellectual.
In this dark time of renewed fascism, we need to read Wells and the writers of the early 20th century to help guide us.
Please quote a favourite sentence or passage from one of these and describe what you admire about the writing.
My students, if they read this, will recognize the opening to Chet Raymo’s essay, “The Silence,” the first piece in his book The Soul of the Night. The core is what I call a “scale move,” in which the dynamic sublime and/or the mathematical sublime is made closer to approach—and that sounds nice but read it:
“Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.
“All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope. It was like that.
“During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her half a mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement.”
It's so startling, this opening. The scale moves are incredible, the way Raymo puts the flight of the child, which is horrifying, into this cosmic context, which is both disturbing and factual. It rolls off the prose with grace. The child’s situation is still tragic but what a wide frame now! His syntax, alternating between longer, complicated sentences and short, declarative ones. Repetition and variation. Even the soft sounds, the bass tone of “gray wool of the November day.”
I’ll never forget reading that for the first time. It showed me what one could do in prose.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
No, because AI is a form of generative plagiarism.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Still As Bright?
Connotation in the memoir sections. Feeling out how much to share and how much to imply.
The hardest issue was blending literal and figurative language to describe a landscape—the Moon, through the telescope—that most people haven’t seen, let alone experienced. This was where Ballard’s influence really moved me. For years, I kept an observing log for the Moon and at the same time I kept a metaphor journal—really just a yellow note-pad with ongoing scribbles. As I encountered a new mountain or rille or crater, some new, small, weird lunar detail, I would free-associate and test-drive metaphors and similes that might both vivify the place and tie the description back to the themes of the book, themes like wildness, mortality, home, caretaking.
I also tried to blend lyricism with rhetoric and explanation via allusions.
How important is style to the reader’s immersion in your writing?
Vital. Style is a form of thought. It’s not decorative. It’s not performative. Or it shouldn’t be. It is a way to express connotation, yes, but in doing so, style—for me at least—also taps into and speaks to intellectual themes. How many nonfiction writers are, for example, consciously or from muscle memory, using the connotations available to them in slant rhyme? How many of them can scan a sentence and manipulate where the stresses are falling not only to affect mood but to tie certain patterns together from other parts of the work, making, as it were, a subtle argument? I may not be very successful at that. But I try.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
Richard Hugo’s famous line, if you want to communicate with someone, get on the phone. That’s fine. If you want a sentence to linger with a reader, to vivify to embody thought and perception, then make that sentence sing.
I don’t know how not to be a maximalist.
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?
Absolutely can be taught. Or one can learn it on one’s own, which is my journey. I was trained in journalism and poetry in college. That combination has been a blessing for the kind of nonfiction I write. But I was, in fact, a ham-fisted surrealist then a boring, moralizing pastoralist as a poet. Slowly, I began to read more carefully for slant rhyme and meter. That changed everything. I was bowled over by Plath’s ear. I taught myself scansion. Not one creative writer teacher taught me to pay attention to musicality. Unbelievable! It comes more naturally now but, of course, I work on it, especially in openings and closings and passage of particular importance. I even imported some large chunks of a long poem into the book as prose.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
Really important. Especially early and late. I sometimes had the computer read passages back to me, as well.
Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.
I have not. But it raises the possibility of ASMR audio nonfiction books.
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
Not entirely. I think it emerges more from a whole self that is not rooted strictly in one’s genre, emerging from a more capacious engagement with the world, and from the muscle memory of literary technique wedded with an intellect and heart.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
Never close to head-butting, but a lot of sighing and pacing can happen. I mentioned some of the style issues that were important to me in the book—will always be so—but I also had to sit with where to blend personal material into larger historical and scientific narratives. That raises, always, questions of when to leap and when to transition. Here, too, the training in journalism and poetry helped me sort that out. I’m not claiming pure success, of course. If I were to go back now, with fresh eyes again, I might make some other decisions.
Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?
I don’t know. Maybe? I tried to give my nonfiction students a bit of the education I never had: Look, this is iambic pentameter! Look, you can use internal slant rhyme too! Look, certain sounds have connotations! Use that!
Younger writers lean on their standpoints, their social media accounts and the subjects of the moment—which can be and often are, of course, important—but it can lead to clunky prose, fragmented essays that masquerade as Brilliant Mosaic, an inability to craft a narrative, and factual laziness. There’s a lot of incestuous self-promotion now vs. paying attention to craft. Which is sad. Lots of missed opportunities to connect the personal to the wider world. The Hold Steady sing, “Let this be my annual reminder: That we can all be something bigger.”
Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Read Kati Standefer’s Lightning Flowers, to take just one example. I was lucky to have several terrific students at Arizona who combined intellectual and factual ambition with stylistic reach and heartfelt material. So watch out for Matt Morris, Hannah Hindley, Thomas Dai and Hea-Ream Lee, among many others. Kati was a student as well.
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
Oh, yes. That’s one reason for the fragmented, “lyric” essay model. And for a failure of scope. And for staying entirely within a genre instead of knowing more outside of it.
In terms of science writing, we now have a lot of disposable, pop-sci, golly-gee-whiz books. I guess they have their function. But they are not literature.
And lastly, the subject we’d like to explore with you in most detail: do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?
Well, I’ve discussed a lot of that earlier, but I’d add long, parallel sentences.
Any tips specific to creative nonfiction?
Don’t read it. No, I’m joshing—partly. Read outside the genre, frequently and in-depth.
I believe in reading old to write fresh.
Get into Stephen Pyne’s books on writing if you want to know how to do fact-based narrative nonfiction.
The best prose style book is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. I used to make my grad students imitate the passages in that book—it’s a kind of syntax anthology—and it was hard, but they learned a lot from the experience. It’s a great tool for generating prose and, well, artful sentences.
Read anthologies. I believe now what Borges said is true—“read what you want” or “read what you love”—but don’t do that until you’ve read enough to know what you love. Anthologies have guided me all along. I leaned into them for poetry when I was younger. I leaned into them for science fiction. Now I’m leaning into them as I read philosophy. From there, you can dive.
Go the library and shelf-read. Hold and savor actual books. They give your muscles a sense of legacy.
Christopher Cokinos is the author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. MHisy articles, poems and essays about space and astronomy have been published in Sky & Telescope, The Space Review, Astronomy.com, SkyNews and the Los Angeles Times, and other works has been featured in NPR’s “All Things Considered,” USA Today, People, Science, The New Yorker, Nature and Michio Kaku’s “Science Fantastic.” He is the receipt of awards and fellowships from Rachel Carson Center in Munich, the Whiting Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the John Burroughs Prize for Best Natural History Essay, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and more. He is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona in their MFA program and lives in hills above Salt Lake City, Utah.
LITERARY FICTION RECENT RELEASES
Our next pick is
Love Story
honor.baby/lovestory
Password: iloveyou!
He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiiii. It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his.
They viewed each other’s bodies, disembodied, laid out still, frozen shining cold in blue light, Liquid Crystal Display. He was posting physique, gym selfies, Bruegel landscapes, oh look how wide his lats look, he’s growing angel wings. Flexed, he could flap right up to the sun. She was posting thinspo, puppy-dog-filter webcam progress shots, Bosch triptychs, wow you could put a whole stained-glass window in that thigh gap, the crucifixion maybe. Through her cathedral thigh gap you could see the sky where right-winged Icarus went flying by. He was kamikaze mode, pumping iron, all Sun and Steel sending hearts <3 <3 <3 to his Saint Wilgefortis, darling, starving, holy hikikomori virgin femcel holed up in her Serial Experiments Laincore bedroom.
She was posted up, sleeping beauty GIF, a maiden in an unmade bed, posting, Just A Girlboss Building Her Empire, I’m Rotting Here.
Why? he replied.
IDK, and she did decay like a time-lapse of a rotting fox GIF. If he were there with her, a wandering knight on a white horse taking secret refuge in her convent deep in the dark forest, he would kick around the empty cans of White Monster on her floor and she would say, Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever.
He wanted to tell the whole World Wide Web how he felt: She’s so hot I want to clean her room, rescue her, white knight defend her in comments and battle. He was in his /a/ poster arc, Why Is She So Perfect? but he’d have to play it cool, chill sigma, no simping. Alcibiades, that’s me. The last samurai, I’m him. I’m literally him. I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver. He’d stand above her, tall and strong. She’d stare up at him with her shining anime, no her shining animal eyes, her real eyes, realize real lies. Wondering what he was thinking. He’d stare into them and then he’d sit beside her, very close, take a breath and say, Damn Bitch, You Live Like This? like Max to Roxanne from A Goofy Movie (1995) from the meme (2016).
They would smile. There would be butterflies. She’d kiss his cheek, his real cheek, not the marble one, the pink one with the acne scars.
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Good Morning America, W, Nylon, SheReads, and LitHub
“We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy . . . does so with special bite and élan.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book marks the arrival of an electric new talent. Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in Generation Z. Never far from a digital interface, her characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched society on the brink of collapse.
Inventive, ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. One protagonist accompanies a girl with too many teeth through an abortion, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, a third reminisces about other sunsets that were “pinker, like way pinker,” and another encounters God in a downtown arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?
What a trippy challenge, I love it!
I know Chris from the Western Literature Association. Glad to see him getting some attention here!