The magic of enthralling prose

The enchantment of resonance visualized

(5 min read)

“The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder. How do we know that? Because the books and stories and poems that mean the most to us are the ones we want to read again, to re-experience and reconsider.”

— Peter Ruchi, A Muse and a Maze

The intangible qualities of our favorite books is something most of us don’t have to think much about. But if we’ve been lucky enough to experience what Ruchi describes as “a place of wonder,” how do we repeat the experience? How do we find that place of wonder again?

My best guess is that these kinds of books and stories — the ones that lead us to a place of wonder — come across our radars in tragically random fashion.

Algorithms determining our wonder

In some ways, the question of “the best stories and novels” is answered for us. It has to be. Tens of thousands of new books are published each year (is the number knowable?) Thanks to the democratization of publishing, those numbers are sure to grow exponentially.

And I’m not forgetting that many of us obtain our knowledge — discover a sense of wonder — almost exclusively on alternative channels (hello Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Netflix and other existing, national, and still-in-development monolithic challengers).

Because there’s so much noise in the datasphere — all that noise on all those different channels — we get really good at:

• blocking out most of the noise (cave-man-era interruption-marketing noises)
• skimming through the noise (whether daily or weekly or on an as-needed basis) in search of frequencies meaningful to us personally
• getting a bit “lucky dip” about the frequencies worthy of our time and attention

Because there’s so much to skim through, we have no choice but to rely on word-of-mouth and happenstance, returning to a few reliable sources, media outlets and cultural curators, but mostly leaving it up to algorithms to decide what we might be interested in on those multiple channels.

Explainers, elucidators, enchanters

Cultural curator Maria Popova has devoted a great deal of time and energy seeking out those kinds of “books and stories and poems that … we want to read again, to re-experience and reconsider.”

In one particular infographic published on Brainpickings.org, she created what she called a visual taxonomy to “dismantle the magic of enthralling prose” especially in regards to science writing, where she proposes “the stakes are even higher” because “the standards of truth and beauty are such that the precise and the poetic must converge in order to yield both comprehension and enchantment.”

 

Popova first defines in those outer rings, the important foundational requirements for an effective transference of knowledge:

Explainers make information clear and comprehensible. Good textbooks are the work of good explainers.

Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding …

 

Then she gets to the golden chalice, the glowing core, of the characteristics of certain kinds of writing:

 

Enchanters do all of the above, but go beyond the realm of knowledge and into the realm of wisdom. They don’t work merely toward superior levels of understanding, but toward a wholly different order of meaning…

She expounds:

 

Enchanters bend the beam of illumination through a singular lens that furnishes something richer and greater than the sum total of knowledge — a kaleidoscopic view of previously hidden layers of reality, or an integration of previously fragmented insights and shards of awareness. The result is nothing less than a firmer grasp of one’s place in the universe, producing in turn a transcendent enlargement of being.

It seems that Popova is proposing that we — at least some of the time — would rather be enchanted than merely informed or even equipped.

My theory, from ten years of dedicated reading and seeking and searching, is that while we appreciate explanations and elucidations, while we’re delighted by novelty and moved by the emotional (in books and other media) a good many of us would swim in a heartbeat towards a frequency that spoke of “a transcendent enlargement of being.”

It lights up all the best parts of our brains.

So long as it’s from a trustworthy source.

We long to enter into a state of wonder, guided by an artist or innovator who has invested a great deal of emotional labor to create something worthy of our time.

 

But how do we even begin to “dismantle the magic of enthralling prose”?

How do we even begin to untangle the wildly subjective nature of our unique receptivity to different signals? And the difference between our own receptivity and that of our reader’s?

How do next-level communicators enhance their unique frequencies with the magic of resonance and nuance?

And why even try to unravel these things?

I have been asking some really big, audacious questions for the past few years as my personal literary pilgrimage evolved into something much bigger than myself.

Some of the research has led to observations similar to the above, that books that come across our radars can fulfill needs for explanation (good) and elucidation (great) or enchantment (good plus great, and much more).

And because my research has been around big idea nonfiction (not solely science writing) as well as reader-focused nonfiction — this is one way I’ve come to visualize the good and the great frequencies:

But the stakes are higher. It’s easier than ever to get lost in the noise.

So what of enchantment?

What of wonder?

How might we evolve our understanding of “the magic of enthralling prose”?

How might we harness even more resonance to connect with those we seek to serve?

Big questions that might take a lifetime to explore.

(This is the fourth in a twenty part introductory series exploring the intersection of frequency, resonance and nuance, first published on Medium.)