TIPPING THE BLARNEY

by James Lincoln Warren

BLARNEY. He has licked the Blarney stone; he deals in the wonderful, or tips us the traveller. The Blarney stone is a triangular stone on the very top of an ancient castle of that name in the county of Cork in Ireland, extremely difficult of access; so that to have ascended to it, was considered as a proof of perseverance, courage, and agility, whereof many are supposed to claim the honour, who never atchieved [sic] the adventure: and to tip the Blarney, is figuratively used telling a marvellous story, or falsity.

—A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Sir Francis Grose, 1785

This being St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday near and dear to my racially Celtic heart, it struck me that blarney would be a worthy topic. I did kiss (not lick) the Blarney Stone when I was a teen-ager in the summer of 1970. It was very touristy (touristish?) even back then. To reach the stone, you had to lean over backwards on a sheepskin and kiss it upside down, above a sheer drop. There were two strong Irish young men there to prevent you from falling to your death, although the iron bars covering the hole in the parapet were almost certainly sufficient to the task. Afterwards, I was given a certificate as proof. I have no idea where the hell that certificate disappeared to in the intervening 38 years, so you’ll just have to take my word for it (something you should never do with someone who has kissed the Blarney Stone).

But that’s just by way of establishing my bona fides.

What I really want to write about today is imagination.

There’s a trick I use in writing my stories. I call it, “making the reader do the work.” That’s not an entirely accurate description of what is meant, because getting the reader to do the work takes a lot of, well, work. It’s kind of like trying to get an overweight pet to exercise — you tend to burn off as much weight as Fido does. The trick is for Fido to forget that he’s exercising because he’s having so much darn-tootin’ fun.

Likewise, “making the reader do the work” is only my description of getting the reader’s imagination to kick into gear to fill in the blanks. I read an excellent description of this not too long ago in an essay by Neil Gaiman concerning the dangers of revisiting books one loved as a child:

… as you grow up you carry with you, for example, the memory of our heroes’ terrified flight through the forest that awful night, the way the wind whipped and howled through the oak trees, the way the rain soaked through their clothes; you remember the water dripping from their faces as they urged their poor exhausted horses on through the night, the twigs that slashed and cut their terrified faces, the steam that rose from the horses’ flanks …. And then you go back to the book, years later, and you discover that the whole sequence was a sentence along the lines of: “It’s jolly wet tonight,” said Bill to Bunty, as they urged their horses through the dark woods. “I hope they don’t catch us.” You did the rest of it yourself.1

What I try to do is spark the process. Here’s the beginning of my story “The Iphis Incident”:

Alan Treviscoe stepped with as much stealth as he could muster down the stairs leading to the common room of the old Shropshire coach inn. The hostelry was well over two hundred years old, having probably been built during the reign of the last Henry, and the steps were prone to creaking. He stepped slowly and lightly, favouring the edge rather than the centre of each sagging tread, wincing at every soft moan of the ancient wood. Not that such sounds would carry far: the wind whipped and whistled around the building, tugging at the shutters and making them rattle against the windows.

Now, I intended this passage to be visually evocative — but if you read it, you’ll see that there isn’t any visual description at all, except for a nail-on-the-head reference to the age and location of the inn. (And by extension, the reader is informed that the action takes place 200 years after Henry VIII’s time, viz. in the 18th century.) By providing the reader with the sounds of the worn out stair treads and the whistling of the wind without, the reader’s imagination steps in and supplies the images.

Accomplished prosateurs warn us never to offer too much description, and then by way of explanation bury us in examples, usually with passages that never actually describe what a principle character looks like. Roger Zelazny always said that he limited character descriptions to three things. But writers rarely offer up such advice in terms of describing place. If we have no idea of what Ishmael really looks like, we do have interminable descriptions of life aboard the Pequod at sea. An accurate idea of place, after all, is what puts everything else in context. So why is terseness stressed for character descriptions but not for setting the scene?

Because such advice is intended to convey the importance of maintaining narrative pace, and not the importance of directly engaging the reader’s imagination. Pace is very important. A book like The Da Vinci Code relies exclusively on its breakneck pace to hold the reader’s interest (certainly the dialogue is pedestrian and the characters two-dimensional at best). But pace is not all. When I’m reading Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, I’m enjoying the witty and stylish prose so much that the mystery really becomes secondary and I almost feel a pang of disappointment when Lord Peter reveals the truth, because it means the story is over. Likewise with Patrick O’Brian, who was a master at fast-paced action scenes when called upon to provide them, but whose best yarning invoked Maturin’s endearing awkwardness and Aubrey’s infectious ebullience.

Either way, however, economy is important, and almost all advice given to writers is based on the premise of getting the biggest lexical bang for one’s lexical buck. So what I would say is this: give the reader just enough data so he can sketch the rest of it in himself. Instead of listing every flower in the garden, remark on the profusion of color and scent. Do not bother with the shoes if you have already described the stockings. If your hero’s eyes are steel gray, it’s not necessary to describe the hard slash of his mouth.

There is a danger in minimalism, however, to us mystery writers, and that’s Chekhov’s gun: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” To a mystery writer, this advice is not particularly good, because it means that the reader, detecting the pistol in the first act, will know in advance what the murder weapon is. Such a setup is frequently viewed as clumsily telegraphing one’s punch. No, better to have the gun there less as a touchstone for the reader’s expectations than as a means to engage imaginative musings about its owner — a 17th century wheelock dueling pistol is owned by a different character than a Colt Gold Cup competition .45.

The best blarney hints at the blarney not there.

1. Introduction to Fritz Leiber’s Return to Lankhmar, Borealis, 1997 [↩]