A masterclass on prose style from the multi-award–winning Lavie Tidhar
Part 1 of our in-depth piece from the author of The Circumference of the World
British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Award–winning author Lavie Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming, The Escapement, Neom) is an acclaimed author of literature, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, and middle-grade fiction. Tidhar received the Campbell, Xingyun, and Neukom Awards for the novel Central Station.
Publishers Weekly chose his novel The Circumference of the World as one of their best books of 2023, and we chose it in October as the best-written recent release in speculative fiction.
Below we present Part 1 of Tidhar’s unique in-depth discussion of various aspects of prose style. We’ve just published similar pieces from Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch and Eskor David Johnson, and have pieces on style coming up from:
Anna Della Subin, whose Accidental Gods has been named a Book of the Year 2023 in The TLS, Esquire, The Telegraph, and the Irish Times, and an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times.
Nicola Griffith, whose Spear has been nominated for many of 2023’s major speculative fiction prizes.
H. Gareth Gavin, whose Never Was was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s prize for innovative fiction, and may be the best-written book of 2023 in any genre.
Fitzcarraldo/New York Review of Books author Patrick Langley, whose The Variations we chose as the best-written recent literary fiction release.
Lev Parikian, whose Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing we chose as the most beautifully written science book of the year.
Ryan O’Connor and Rob Doyle, whose The Voids and Threshold respectively we rate as two of the best-written publications of the century to date.
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
You have to understand that, although I write mainly in English, my first language was Hebrew, so my influences would be somewhat different than if you were asking an Anglophone writer (as much as I am one today). So on the one hand, I read a lot of books in translation. On the other, my exposure to literature would have been to Hebrew literature, and I suppose the first answer that comes to mind, somewhat oddly, is the Hebrew Bible. And the reason for that is, it’s a book that permeates Hebrew literature, and it’s a book you study from a young age, whether you’re religious or whether you, like me, grew up in what was essentially an atheist, socialist commune. So it’s a book that imprints itself on you, and it has the most extraordinary writing. It’s also surprisingly “genre” – monsters and world ending events, smoke and fire on the one hand, and then it’s also very grounded, like the story of King David, which reads like a violent soap opera in a way. You can find really the grounding of a lot of Western literature in there. Not to mention the poetry, which is magnificent, like Song of Songs or Deborah’s lament. So in a way, everything else is always measured against that (and found wanting).
Now, that’s also why I can’t quote you a favourite passage – it’s impossible to translate into English without losing a lot of the beauty of the language. I think the King James version comes closest in terms of being a poetic work on its own terms, but without being very accurate. When I was writing Maror, which is a literary novel (or historical, or crime, depending on how you want to categorise it – I’m not big on categories!), one of my rules for it was not to have any literary references, with the exception of Cohen, the shadowy figure who moves through the book, who picks up an affectation for quoting bits of the Bible at people. And I ran into a problem there, that I could never find a translation that worked for me, and I’d end up looking at multiple versions, and finally doing my own translations, pretty much, from the Hebrew.
I don’t want to sound too highbrow about this! I grew up on a steady diet of translated children’s books first (a lot of wonderful European stuff, from the Moomins, which I still adore, to Michael Ende’s work like Momo, which I love) and then a lot of classic science fiction and crime fiction, which intersected handily in a little nook in the library. Then I discovered poetry. I was the sort of teenager who read the literary magazines and supplements! So I fell in love with Hebrew poetry, and only later with English poetry, as an adult. In a way, when I turned to fiction at last it was as a failed poet. My first book was actually a Hebrew poetry collection, Remnants of God, which came out a very long time ago. I don’t think I’m a bad poet, by any means, but neither was I ever going to become a great one. So fiction was second-best. You can’t attain perfection in fiction, so there’s less pressure there. I’m still questing to write one great poem, which I think is all a poet can ever hope for, if they’re lucky, but I’m not holding my breath that I’ll get there. I suppose it would be nice to do a collection of my English-language poetry one day, but I’m not in any great hurry for it, and never write very much. There’s a handful I’m fairly pleased with.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
Well, to answer this, I’ll have to put on my other hat, you know, where I pretend to be knowledgeable about the future and technology, which I get to do sometimes when I become a science fiction writer! And it’s great fun. So firstly, there’s no real A.I. in the sense of artificial intelligence. We have some very clever systems – Large Language Modules and so on, which are neural networks trained on a large dataset. And they’re very interesting because, in a way, we train them on the worst parts of humanity – on the Internet. And what happens when you do that, is they immediately become incredibly racist, sexist – so much so that the companies had to put filters on them to block them from answering in that way. All it is a mirror of humanity throwing our reflection back at us.
Now, copying style, doing pastiche – I’m very good at that, to some extent. It’s not a great skill. What marks us as humans though is a point of view, and the systems we have don’t have that. There is no art without that unique point of view, and it doesn’t matter how good those systems can become at imitation. When I started writing, you know, I was submitting stories, knowing that I was competing with thousands of other writers for one or two slots! But what I had going for me was I had my own unique perspective. I couldn’t write a story set in America, but I could write a story set in the world I came from, and stand out. I had to have my own vision. So I’m never very worried about competing, with either other writers, or with machines – I can only write my stories, and no one else can do that.
The other thing that occurs to me when I think about that process of writing, you know, is how accidental so much of it is. You don’t write a book by inputting all your previous experience into it and then pressing a button to process it. Writing is a slow process, and you constantly feed randomness into it. I had that with my new literary novel, Six Lives. A weekend visit to Ireland led to me putting in an entire section set in nineteenth century Cork, and reading a writer friend’s book while I was writing led to another section dealing with a young B-movie star and her coming of age. It’s a much more organic process, where you’re writing as you’re living, you have to keep feeding new information in and it changes everything as you go.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of The Circumference of the World?
It’s a good question – which is what you tend to say when you just don’t know the answer! I suppose each section, each voice in the book needed its own style, and it was a question of which one was most suitable. You know, with writing, it’s not so much about the style, it’s about trying to find some honesty, some core truth in the story. And of course as a writer, you professionally deal in falsehoolds, in make-believe and – what did I call it in the book? Occlusion? I think an interesting one, in terms of getting to the core truth of a thing, is the section featuring Delia, which is set on Vanuatu. You could call the style magical realism, I suppose, which I think is a bit of a rubbish label. It’s too indiscriminately used and I think it can be a bit dismissive. It drives my friend Silvia Moreno-Garcia nuts because it just gets applied to anything Latin American, like an entire continent has produced nothing else in a century. But I digress! I think what it does do, in that section, firstly it leans into Bislama, which is the common tongue of Vanuatu, which began as a contact language, a pidgin English that evolved, and which I find quite beautiful. I actually ended up writing short stories in Bislama which were published for one year in a column in the Vanuatu Daily Post. I tried to translate them into English at some point but again, you lose a lot in the translation. But that section – Storian Smol Blong Delia Welegtabit – captures I think the sense of life on the islands, in terms of the language and how the language reflects, for example, the sense of time. So Bislama only has the present tense as the default. Everything happens now, in a sort of ever-lasting present. You can apply future or present tenses, but you have to make an effort to do it. It’s also a fascinating language in terms of the current debate on pronouns – Bislama only has the one pronoun, “hem”. But it’s also, what I think that section does, is it captures the loose line between the “real” and the mythical. In the sense that you’d be having tea with a traditional magic practitioner, a kleva, and he’ll tell you – very matter of fact! – all about turning into a bird and flying to the hill of the dead to find someone’s ghost, because the dead man was supposed to leave some money for his wife but he’s hidden it. So the kleva goes off to find the ghost and the ghost tells him where the money is hidden. It’s stuff like that.
And then if you look at the face-blind detective section, which is a sort of hardboiled pastiche, I think it’s also really heartfelt, because it’s set in this vanished 2001 London book world, and it was a world I inhabited, and I loved, and it’s not there anymore. So it was a way of recreating that love. I think that sort of runs through it. The characters’ obsessions are mine, Lens’ love for science fiction and Hartley’s more love-hate relationship with it, they’ve got facets of me in them. And Lens’ section is a sort of othered, detached dream-existence in style, very distancing, while Hartley’s is an epistolary encapsulation of an author’s life, from the Golden Age of the pulps to starting his own religion to going back to being a writer. He’s not a nice guy (nor based on a particularly nice guy) but there’s something poignant about achieving all your dreams (as ludicrous as they seem) only to realise you miss who you once were, and turning your back on that perceived success and trying to recreate a more innocent time in your life.
How important is style to your characterisation? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?
So to build up on what I just said, I think that’s sort of the key, the style is there to reflect the characters, and that’s why it also changes, it mutates, as the character does. Different books require different voices or styles. With Maror, I wanted it to be very plain, very direct. I think one of my rules was “no similes”. for example. I like similes! But for that book it needed to be very unadorned, very clean. In The Violent Century I wanted to create a layer of distancing, which was by ditching speech marks for that one book, and using the present tense throughout, which was a way of capturing the way the characters move, unchanged, through the shifting twentieth century. But you lose people with that sort of othering, because a lot of people want immersion in fiction, and I like to often jolt you out of that experience, remind you of the artificiality of the text. In Unholy Land I did that thing where there are three narrations, in first, third and second person. I’m obsessed with the role of the narrator in books, which I partly blame on reading Mieke Bal at an impressionable age. Her work on narratology kind of blew my mind. So in Unholy Land we start in what seems to be traditional third person, but then it intersects with the actual narrator, Bloom, who refers to himself in the first person, and then we realise he’s addressing a third person, Nur. It was an interesting experiment. I think it worked. I was inspired by Graham Greene for that.
Did your editor suggest anything that improved The Circumference of the World’s style?
This is a rare book for me that started quite big and got pretty small! And originally, it had this overarching sort-of-detective plot, and my editor hated it. And she pointed out it was far too long – I think it was three times as big as any other narrative – and also, boring! And she looked at all my fragments and drafts, and there was one where I had the detective element done in first person, as a sort of hardboiled parody/pastiche. And she pointed out this was much more fun, that it came alive in the way the original didn’t. I thought she was right! So I took that whole thing out, and wrote the Daniel Chase section from scratch, as a first person, hardboiled parody sort of thing, the same size as the others, and it was much better. This book took far too many years to get into shape, but I’m really pleased with how it finally turned out.
It was the same with the 1960s sci-fi novel element of the book, incidentally – originally it was spread out throughout the book, and the thing is, it’s not very good science fiction, it’s meant to be this sort of pulp sci fi novel. And it was! And what happened was, when I finally put it together into one whole narrative, it worked much better. It was just enough to give you the flavour without overstaying its welcome. The funny thing is, I’ve seen reviews that don’t like the rest of the book much but love the sci fi novel element and wish there’d been a whole book of that instead! But what can you do?
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
I mean, as a writer, as an artist, you strive to say something about the world, ideally about reality, and to do it in the best possible way you can. So of course, yes, I want to do it well, and to keep challenging myself to try different ways, to push myself out of my comfort zone, even if I fail as a consequence. And then, too, there’s the inevitable ego. No one has an ego quite like a writer. It’s both huge and fragile. One minute you’re the greatest thing in the world and the next someone didn’t like your book and you’re a wreck, you know? I try not to be that guy but that’s just being human, having that vanity. But I try to just let the work be the work, and put myself apart from it. I’m a pretty ridiculous person really. I’m a serious writer, but not a very serious person. I’ll die over a comma, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that I want a Booker, but at the same time, I have to go take out the trash. Even doing this interview, at this length, you know – it’s pure vanity, isn’t it? But there’s something so... addictive, I guess? About the power of writing. If I can make someone laugh – and then make them cry – that’s all I could possibly hope for. That’s what I want. And occasionally I get to achieve that with the books.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
That’s another interesting question, which I think comes down maybe less to point of view and more to the way one’s sentences form. It’s something you achieve by writing a lot and then, and I can almost pinpoint the moment, it happens, something crystallises. It’s when you can tell a piece of prose is by someone based on the way it’s constructed. So it’s that – it’s the way you write in a distinct form – coupled with the point of view, that unique vision. If you can get both of these, you’ve got something.
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?
It’s nice of you to say that! Rhythm is important to me, but I never see anyone mention it, and I suspect partly the rhythm is in my own head, and it flows from the Hebrew language part of me, and sort of gets imposed on the English. I think the book where it really runs all the way through is By Force Alone, which has a constant rhythm in the way everything’s written. It was very hard to do the copy-editing and so on on it, because you can’t change words around without affecting the “music” – even if it’s only in my head! I guess, when you come from poetry, then that sort of stuff is built-in by the point you get to prose. Funnily enough, I’m not very musical but I’m finally trying to learn the guitar and write little songs, and it’s so much fun, and a really interesting way to think about structure. I’m not subjecting anyone to my attempts just yet though!
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
No! Very rarely I’m forced into doing it in public, or once or twice for an audio recording. I can’t bear to even listen to the audiobooks of my own work. To me, writing’s on the page – unless, and that’s a big unless, I’m writing it for film. I’m fortunate to be working on very strange animation projects with my friend Nir, under our Positronish label, and that’s a rare case of me writing dialogue specifically for actors to voice – and it’s strange! And of course I hear it one way in my head, and the actors do their own spin on it, so even that’s kind of painful for me – I find myself shouting at the screen, No, no, the inflection should be going on this word! Why did you say it like that! Ha! They’re wonderful actors, but it’s also a case that if I’m writing a novel, I’m God, but if I’m doing anything collaborative – a graphic novel, say, or an animated film – then I’m the least important part of the process, and it’s the graphic artist, or the voice actor and the director, who have the final say. I actually do love collaborative work like that. I just do my part and then I’m done! And it’s up to far more talented people to do the rest.
But, sorry, I got sidetracked. The short answer is no, I never read it out loud. The words live and die on the page.
This masterclass continues at the page below.
We receive no commissions for purchases made through our site, so would be grateful if you could support us by sharing Auraist with your friends.
Have we missed any especially well-written recent releases in literary fiction, speculative fiction, crime fiction, or nonfiction? Email us at auraist@substack.com, quoting the first 300 words of your recommended book.