Multi-award-winning speculative fiction author Nicola Griffith's guide to prose style
Plus the opening pages of Griffith's novel Spear
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and counselling at a street drugs agency, before discovering writing and moving to the US. In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007), Hild (2013), So Lucky (2018), Spear (2022) and Menewood (Oct 2023). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original short fiction. Her multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition.
Her essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals and media outlets, including the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, Electric Lit, Literary Hub, and Out. She’s won two Washington State Book Awards, the Otherwise/Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Society of Authors’ ADCI LiteraryPrize, the Premio Italia, and six Lambda Literary Awards, among others.
By arrangement with Tor Publishing, we present below the opening pages from Griffith’s novel Spear, which we chose as the best-written book on the Ursula K. Le Guin shortlist. This excerpt is followed by her highly detailed piece on prose style.
In the wild waste, a girl, growing. A girl at home in the wild, in the leafless thicket of thin grey saplings with moss growing green on one side. In this thicket, the moss side does not face north but curves in a circle with its back to the world, and, at its centre, where the branches grow most tangled and forbidding, is a hill. In the face of that hill, always hidden from the world, is the dark mouth of the cave where the girl lives with her mother.
As far as the girl can tell, none on two legs but herself and her mother has ever trod here. Her mother will creep from the cave only as far as the gardens at the edge of the thicket, and then only in summer when the leaves are cloak enough to hide the sun-burnished bronze of her heavy-waved hair, when the hard enamel blue of her eyes might be forget-me-nots; but the girl is at home in all the wild. She roams the whole of Ystrad Tywi, the valley of the Tywi who fled Dyfed in the Long Ago. In this valley, where there is a tree she will climb it; it will shelter her, and the birds that nest there in spring will sing to her, warning of any two-legged approach. In May, as the tree blossoms fall and herbs in the understorey flower, she will know by the scent of each how it might taste with what meat, whether it might heal, who it could kill. From its nectar she will know which moths will come to drink, know too of the bats that catch the moths, and what nooks they return to where they hang wrapped in their leather shrouds as the summer sun climbs high, high enough to shine even into the centre of the thicket. Before harvest, when the bee hum spreads drowsy and heavy as honey, she tastes in their busy drone a tale of the stream over which they skim, the falls down which the stream pours, the banks it winds past where reeds grow thick and the autumn bittern booms. And when the snow begins to fall once again, she catches a flake on her tongue and feels, lapping against her belly, the lake it was drawn from by summer sun, far away—a lake like a promise she will one day know. Then as the world folds down for winter, so too do the girl and her mother, listening to the crackle of flame and, beyond the leather door curtain, the soft hiss of snow settling over the hills and hollows like white felt.
In the cave is a great hanging bowl. “My cup,” her mother calls it, when she tells her stories. On warm days, bright precious days when her mother will venture outside under the sun—beckon a bird to her finger and sing with it its song—the cup is a gift to the laughing, blue-eyed Elen from her lover, the girl’s father with grey-green eyes like the sea. On these days, her mother calls the girl Dawnged: her blessing, her gift and favour. The girl likes this name, and these days when the bowl is just a bowl, and they work together in the garden while her mother tells tales of the Tuath Dé, the sidhe gods who came to Eiru-over-the sea with four great treasures, one each from the four islands of the Overland that drowned. The Tuath are forever squabbling over the treasures.
“There is the Dagda, with his midnight steed. His treasure was the greatest of all, the golden cup—No, not so deep with the beans, Dawnged.” And the girl would push the next bean less far down into its long, heaped line of dirt. “Now, this cup— Do you remember the cup, little gift?”
And the girl would say, “Yes!” and tell of how the Morrigan, whose steed was grey, had stolen it from the Dagda for herself, and how her lover, Manandán, son of the sea and raiser of mists, had stolen it from her in turn. And she would ask, “What else is the Morrigan called?” Or, “What other name has the Dagda?” But her mother would just hug her, tell her never to steal, for stealing wore away one’s soul, then laugh and ruffle her hair and kiss her eyes—“So like them both”—and they would promise each other they would stay together in the cave, always.
On these fine days when her mother was herself, the girl heard tales, too, of Lugh of the shining spear, and Elatha, keeper of the stone. She heard of Núada the king, who held the sword of light—until Bres, Elatha’s son, took it, and Núada must be content with a silver arm. And Bres, Núada, and Lugh each had only one name.
But the stories changed with the weather. On dark autumn days, when the wind moaned and stripped the last forlorn leaves from the trees, when it fretted and worried at their peace, thrusting its tongue deep into their warm cave—trying to lick them out as the girl had seen a badger lick out ants from a tree—on those days her mother grew gaunt and strange. The child would wake in the night to her mother’s dream cries—a man coming to steal her, steal her child, steal her payment—and her mother would not eat, only hunch over the bowl and scry, and follow the girl about with haunted eyes. She would shout at the girl and rant, confusing her, confusing the tales, for now Elen herself was in them. In these tales the cup was not a gift; it was thrice-stolen, it was payment. In these tales Manandán was a cruel trickster who came with his cup to Dyfed, following the raiding men of Eiru, and found Elen, Elen whose magics were fragile and human against the might of the Tuath Dé, and there he took her by force and kept her prisoner, his willing—no, not willing, compelled to be willing—slave, until the day she fled, taking the golden cup as payment. She fled, and hid herself inside the cave of stolen trophies: the cup she stole from its first thief; herself who was stolen, and stole herself back; and the gift she stole that he knows nothing of.
On these days, Elen calls the girl Tâl, her payment. “Because I am owed, Tâl, I am owed. He owes me, yes, for possessing my soul and my mind; and the other owes me, too, because he knew. Oh, he knew what Manandán would do. But they will never find us, no. We will stay hidden, we will stay safe, and they will never know your true name.”
She will never say what the girl’s true name is, or who the other was, and the stories are never the same. And always the cave is hidden.
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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. Does this strike you as correct?
In terms of voice, no. Very no. The voice of each piece is born on the first page, spilling out slippery and alive. It grows with the story. By the end the voice stands proud, distinctly itself—unlike any other, even from the same writer. All editing can do is wash and tidy that original voice, teach it to speak a little more clearly or how to play nicely with others. But the essence is unchanged.
Voice rests on style—the sinuous rhythm or blunt word choice, the metaphor systems and narrative grammar, the choice of what is stated and what left unsaid—and here revision, the series of conscious choices made after the fact, can sharpen and shape the style. To the extent that there is a difference between style and voice perhaps it's that style is conscious, voice more primal.
I'm wary of one aspect of editing: the self-doubt that becomes self-censorship. Doing something new requires an almost psychotic self-belief. But how can we tell when we're following our star to undiscovered country and when we're just wandering the woods, ranting and lost? It can be a tenuous distinction, and never more so than at the beginning.
Beginning feels a little like hearing a voice or glimpsing a shape in the mist, and, with no rational hope for success—only the sudden sense that it's important, it's necessary, it might just be magic—leaping up and flinging yourself into the void in pursuit. Sometimes there's a moment when you find yourself alone on the moor with the mist rising and night falling, and behind you the door back to reality is closing. What do you do? You listen to the still quiet voice inside.
I've learnt to tell when a shape in the mist is real and when it's just an echo, something insubstantial that will vanish on contact, or a misbegotten monster that will torment you for years. I can't tell you how I know the difference; perhaps this is the central mystery of creativity. A wordless knowing. A thing of the body. Visceral.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Spear?
I couldn't tell you. Writing Spear was writing Spear—its own, indivisible action. The language and rhythm, the place and the pace and the prose are entwined, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It's difficult to consider one element independent of another.
What I can do is tell you a Spear origin story—not the origin story, because there's no such thing. (Writers' origin stories are just that, stories, narratives assembled after the fact to try make sense of events. Perhaps this is what art is: rendering meaning from randomness.)
Spear was born from the collision of random events: one, research into the sixth-century beginnings of seventh-century place names for my novel-in-progress, Menewood, and the resulting deep dive into Welsh etymology; and, two, being asked to contribute a 'race-bent, queer-inclusive Arthurian retelling' to a short fiction anthology. I have always loved the Matter of Britain—the wild magic of the landscape, the mist on the moors, Camelot not as a place but a state of mind where people fight for truth and justice and all that's good and bright. What I didn't love was never seeing people like me there. In Camelot there were no crips and no queers, no realistic women and zero people of colour. The legend is after all a national origin story; it orbits a dense core of nativist Manifest Destiny. I couldn't see how a story could escape that gravitational pull yet still feel Arthurian, still have the power to immerse the reader in the sense of myth and mystery, rooted in and belonging to a place. I turned down the request and went back to writing Menewood.
But then an image drifted into my mind: a figure in mended armour riding a bony gelding and carrying a red spear. And between one breath and the next I knew I could sidestep the nativism and remake the legend for people like me. I didn't know how I would do these things, exactly, only that I could.
These visionary beginnings are as delicate as a newly unfurled butterfly wing—a single breath can cripple it—so I didn't stop to think. I closed Menewood, opened a document for a short story called "Red," and leapt. Seventeen days later I returned with Spear.
The style of Spear was born from the need to hold the magical and the possible in perfect tension, to span the mythical and visceral, building the bridge even as I ran across it. It was only when I reached the other side, when both ends were anchored and the whole thing solid enough to stand on, that I could consider what I had made.
How important is style to your characterisation and to the reader's immersion in your writing?
Spear began as a short story and, like a short story, is a single unbroken narrative that, even without chapter breaks, falls naturally into two parts. In the first, the main character is nameless, growing up in a cave wholly isolated from the world, talking only to nature and her traumatised mother. This is a gauzy and dreamlike world of myth and magic and present tense—or at least present participles, and narrative distance, and periphrastic prose—where time flows strangely and reality is fluid. With no name for her sense of self to coalesce around, the main character can't quite solidify.
When Peretur gets her true name and leaves the cave, the narrative pivots around a single sentence:
Outside in the clearing her feet faltered but she walked on, through the thicket, and once on the other side she felt in her heart a snapping, like the parting of a sinew.
She is expelled into the outside world, solid under her feet, peopled with living breathing folk. The prose snaps into past tense, sharp and clear. It's now, with a name to hold onto and a world of people to interact with, as events become linear and cause is followed by effect, that Peretur can accrete experience and begin to cohere. Most of this is achieved using tense and sentence structure, just two elements of style.
Almost all the many elements of my style serve one goal: the creation of narrative empathy, that is, immersion. (My Writer's Manifesto gets to the meat of the matter. My PhD thesis explains at length how I do it. But let me see if I can come up with something better mannered than the former and less academic than the latter.)
Evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that as readers we take the experience—the feelings, thoughts, struggles—of well-drawn characters as our own. That immersion is made possible by triggering a particular set of the reader's neurons, called mirror neurons. These bundles of brain tissue fire when you do something such as pick an apple. The fascinating part is that they also fire when you simply observe another person picking an apple. The mirror neurons reflect the behaviour of the other person, they behave as though you yourself were the one reaching for that apple. You are physically—neurologically, biochemically—recreating another's actions and experience inside yourself. Your body echoes theirs. You feel the apple-picking as intimately as if it were you doing it. In a very real way, it is you doing it. You have experienced picking an apple even though, in real life, you have not.
Part of this is achieved through word choice. The more specific and particular a word is the more likely it is to trigger the memory of touch and scent, the two most evocative senses. For example, if I read ‘rose,’ a functional MRI scan will show the areas of my brain relating to smell lighting up—whereas the more general 'flower' might not have the same effect. Similarly, reading ‘leather glove’ instead of ‘glove’ stimulates my brain in the same way as actually touching leather. So if I read of a character who picks up a fallen glove scented with rose water and lifts it to her face, as a reader I will feel the cool-then-warm of the leather against my upper lip, hear the faint but distinctive creak of the leather, smell that rose: I am right there, not beside the character but inside her, wearing her skin, seeing, hearing, feeling as she does. And when an arrow thunks into the tree by her head I jump as she jumps. I'm not reading, I'm living.
So much of what I do in Spear—sentence rhythm and world choice, tense and metaphor; what Peretur notices and how she responds; the punctuation and paragraph length—is bent to that overarching purpose: for the reader to smell, hear, taste and know Early Medieval Britain as Peretur does; to gradually adopt her mindset and worldview; to think her thoughts and understand her choices. To become her, just for a while.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
I write from the body about the body. My fiction is about the body moving through and interacting with natural and built environments: People in their place, how each becomes aware of and influences the other. Every shocked breath and gust of wind, heartbeat and hoofbeat, work together. And so much of that is in the rhythm, the rise and fall of syllables and phrases, sentences and paragraphs—the music of the prose.
So when I write about the passing of time, sentence becomes stately, paragraphs measured and inevitable as the turning of the seasons. Weather changes demand short words in flicks and flirts. And the feel of a word in the mouth—like a sigh or a thorn—can determine the word I pick to describe the rain so that the reader feels it on their skin.
Tension—the rising fear of a child crouched behind a hedge as footsteps grow closer, or the swell and mutter of a gathering crowd—is largely done with rhythm, at micro- and macro-level. And if you write sentences that lean each upon the other then when the reader begins they can't stop, racing to keep up as the words fall one by one, faster, faster, a radiating ripple of dominos.
Can that musicality be taught?
It can be absorbed by osmosis through reading. Can it be taught? I don't know. Maybe if a musician and a writer taught together. Or— Oh.
It just occurred to me: when I started writing I was fronting a band in the north of England. I was writing all the lyrics, some of the music—certainly my own lyric melody—and even a percussion rhythm or two. And though I've always known that the band and my writing were deeply connected I thought it was about the joy of performance, the intoxication of watching my words sway a crowd. I hadn't thought about the music. The music influencing my prose. How very cool…
Do you read your work out loud?
Not as I write. But when I'm really rocking and rolling and typing fast I can feel myself riding the rhythm of the keyboard. And I hear the words in my head—particularly dialogue—but I don't speak them. Sometimes when rewriting I'll stop and test a phrase, but usually the first time I read aloud is when I'm preparing for a public performance or to narrate the audiobook.
I love performing my work. It's exhilarating to feel words I wrote take flight and soar, clothed in the power of the human voice. Reading aloud has taught me so much about how prose works.
I love reading to Kelley, my wife, too—not my own books, but mutual favourites. Though we do that a lot less now that buying and using audiobooks has become almost frictionless.
Having said that, I don't listen to audiobooks. Partly because the information density is too low: listening at normal speed makes me impatient; speeding it up makes it sound ridiculous. But partly it's that a narrator's choices—accent, tone, timbre, rhythm, emphasis—feel constricting: they are the narrator's interpretation of the text, not mine.
And lastly, the subject we’d like to explore with you in most detail: your stylistic pet peeves.
This applies across genres: most writers do not understand present tense. There's a mistaken belief that present tense makes prose more immediate when in fact it has the opposite effect. Present tense is the language of dreams and childhood. It's unanchored in a specific narrative moment which renders it slippery and indefinite. Think of present tense narrative as a flowing river, flowing endlessly onwards. There's no easy way to slide through narrative time, to go back, which means present tense can only show what is. Present tense is a terrible tool for character development because unless you break the narrative flow—and you will break it if you step out, because you never step in the same river twice—you can't compare and contrast past and present; you can't judge and therefore can't learn.
Think of past perfect narrative as the boat on the river. You can row upstream, or downstream, or stop and tie-off to a tree. You are anchored to the boat, to the narrative reality. As long as you don't get out of the boat you won't break the narrative. And in that boat you have so much freedom: you can glide downstream with the current encountering new things. You can row back upstream and re-examine something you saw earlier but now would like to reconsider in light of what you've just seen. You can tie-off to a tree and eat some lunch while daydreaming about the future. And you can weigh and assess and learn from what you see and hear and feel and remember and hope for.
Present tense, on the other hand, works well for a novel's initial, omniscient paragraph—that opening panoramic survey of the story's sometimes literal terrain. Beginnings set context—here is what we have—with no need for opinion. Beginnings are ideally suited to present tense. Everything else is difficult to do well, and most people shouldn't try.
Any peeves specific to prose in speculative fiction?
Long and self-conscious titles. SFF started to take itself seriously as literature in the sixties and seventies, and titles changed from prosaic but evocative—Fahrenheit 451, More Than Human, The Long Tomorrow—to quotes from classics (of various traditions) and enigmatic phrases trying to sound like blank verse. Novel titles such as Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang or The Left Hand of Darkness work well, but some of the longer short fiction, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side" or "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" make me want to hammer them to rubble. Fortunately that fashion died a quiet death some time ago.
However, I'm sorry to report a recent resurgence. At least this time it is often a pragmatic choice for this world of online book discovery: a unique phrase rises instantly to the top of search results.
Even so, there's something about long titles that makes me wary. Is the writer unable to identify their theme, or encapsulate the central image of their work in a simple phrase? Do they not trust the clarity and strength of their own words?
I can understand why some genre writers might worry about this—our work has been shunned by the gatekeepers of the literary garden for generations. And in literary circles simple is often misread as less—less good, less challenging, less daring, less creative, less radical, less meaningful. This is nonsense, of course, a close cousin to the equally nonsensical notion that misery lit—narratives of pain, trauma, cynicism, oppression, hopelessness, cruelty, and angst—is inherently superior to any fiction rich with joy or hope or the search for solutions.
This privileging of negativity is a human thing. In evolutionary terms it makes sense to devote more brain space, more processing power and long-term memory to the things that can hurt us. But that's all it is, an evolutionary byproduct. Humans are creatures of the body—the whole body, not just the genes that made us and those we might pass on. And the body is made for use—to do all the things and feel all the feels—for struggle and grief, for pain and loss, yes, but also joy, for love and lust, growth and delight and learning, for sharing and storytelling and singing. The point of life is living, not just to avoid death. Our stories should reflect that.
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