The Elements of Miracle
Writing Lessons from E.B. White's other book about writing
My earliest memories of Charlotte's Web come from the animated film, which I saw as a child. I remember Wilbur crying as the baby spiders went ballooning away. I was almost as delighted as Wilbur was when he discovered that three of them were going to stay with him, when I read it years later and discovered this terrific, radiant, humble, masterpiece of a book. Chapter XI: The Miracle is perhaps one of my favorite chapters in all of fiction. Not surprisingly, I was also moved by White's depiction of Charlotte as a wordsmith. So in the spirit of his Elements of Style, (an essential book for me, in learning and re-learning how to write), I decided to make a list of some writing lessons I learned from E.B. White in Charlotte's Web, and from Charlotte A. Cavatica herself.
1. Learn how to use dialogue.
“Where's Papa going with that ax?” Said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
— page 1
The first sentence of Charlotte's Web is a perfect example of the imaginative power of dialogue. E.B. White could have started by describing the Arable's farm, or kitchen, or barn, (all of which might have been more picturesque or dramatic) but he starts with dialogue. This initiates the reader's imagination without bewildering it — forcing them to imagine a speaker who has a Papa, and that that Papa has an ax — so that when we learn who Fern is in the attribution, we are already in line with her perspective. Notice that our mind is not filled with miscellaneous details about Fern's appearance or the color of the house or what she had for breakfast. The first sentence perfectly pulls our imagination into the scene precisely because it is only dialogue. There is no extraneous noise, only the words of Fern in the kitchen. Our imagination supplies the rest.
2. Learn how to use detail.
“Below the apple orchard, at the end of a path, was the dump where Mr. Zuckerman threw all sorts of trash and stuff that nobody wanted any more. Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild raspberry bushes, was an astonishing pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken bottles and broken hinges and broken springs and dead batteries and last month's magazine and old discarded dishmops and tattered overalls and rusty spikes and leaky pails and forgotten stoppers and useless junk of all kinds, including a wrong-size crank for a broken ice-cream freezer.”
— page 97
Learning when and how to use detail is perhaps the second most difficult skill to learn in writing fiction, second only to learning when and how to use dialogue. If you overwhelm the reader with detail they will get exhausted quickly, and your book will end up with far too many pages. But detail is how you build worlds and scenes and characters. E.B. White, in Charlotte's Web, likes to use lists like the one above, that are as entertaining as they are effective. They work because his descriptions are so sparse elsewhere. You will, if you look, find hardly a detail describing the appearance of any human, but we have no trouble imagining their faces.
Writers whose imaginations have been, for better or worse, shaped by film and television, might find it difficult to learn the skill of selecting details because television is a medium defined by extraneous detail. A filmmaker cannot choose not to describe the color of the room that their subjects are standing in, but a writer can choose not to describe the room at all. This is why detail is the glory and shame of fiction, and E.B. White teaches how to use it well. This list at the dump does not just describe the dump. It gives us insight into years of life on the farm, and it does so in a mere two sentences.
3. Learn when to break form.
Mr. Zuckerman had the best swing in the county. It was a single long piece of heavy rope tied to the beam over the north doorway. At the bottom end of the rope was a fat knot to sit on. It was arranged so that you could swing without being pushed. You climbed a ladder to the hayloft. Then, holding the rope you stood at the edge and looked down, and were scared and dizzy. Then you straddled the knot, so that it acted as a seat. Then you got up all your nerve, took a deep breath, and jumped...
— page 68-69
In this passage E.B. White describes what it is like to swing on the best swing in the county, and quite possibly the world. Note how he transitions seamlessly to the second person: “It was arranged so that you.“
The second person point of view is the least popular point of view in fiction because it is so intimate and yet so alienating, because no one likes to be told what to feel or think. To use the second person point of view in a children's novel that up to this point has been entirely third-person omniscient would seem unwise, but E.B. White is a good writer, and good writers know when to break the form of their work for brief but powerful effect. I will remember this paragraph for the rest of my life.
4. Learn how to repeat yourself.
”...We have received a sign, Edith — a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm. There is a large spider's web in the doorway of the barn cellar, right over the pigpen, and when Lurvy went to feed the pig this morning, he noticed the web because it was foggy, and you know how a spider's web looks very distinct in a fog. And right spang in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig.' The words were woven right into the web. They were actually part of the web, Edith. I know, because I have been down there and seen them. It says, 'Some Pig,' just as clear as clear can be. There can be no mistake about it. A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”
— page 80
This technique is the subtle cousin of the famous “set up and pay off,” but it is just as essential. Great writing will often echo itself. In this speech from Mr. Zuckerman, E.B. White is echoing his own beautiful description of the miracle, which he opened the chapter with. Then throughout the chapter, as more and more people come to read the words on the web over and over and gaze at Wilbur over and over, so too does the reader read the words over and over and gaze at Wilbur and Charlotte over and over. The scene has the effect on our mind that a real miracle experienced in person might have. We examine it from all angles and marvel on it repeatedly.
No book is read just once. We re-read it in snippets and phrases as it echoes in our minds. When a good writer discovers a truly great miracle, whether it be a scene or a thought or a climax, they know to iterate on it and connect it with fine threads to the rest of the story (usually by extensive editing and re-writing) — So that the central miracle is woven throughout the story with threads of words much like the threads of a spider's web, so that the echo in the mind of the reader is all the louder.
5. Say what is True.
”... I love blood,” said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant.
“Don't say that!” groaned Wilbur. “Please don't say things like that!”
“Why not? It's true, and I have to say what is true. I am not entirely happy about my diet of flies and bugs, but it's the way I'm made. A spider has to pick up a living somehow or other, and I happen to be a trapper. I just naturally build a web and trap flies and other insects. My mother was a trapper before me. Her mother was a trapper before her. All our family have been trappers. Way back for thousands of years we spiders have been laying for flies and bugs.”
“It's a miserable inheritance,” said Wilbur, gloomily. He was sad because his new friend was so bloodthirsty.
“Yes, it is,” agreed Charlotte. “but I can't help it. I don't know how the first spider in the early days of the world happened to think up this fancy idea of spinning a web, but she did, and it was clever of her too. And since then, all of us spiders have had to work the same trick. It's not a bad pitch, on the whole.”
— page 39
Writing fiction is a strange and barbaric occupation, full of so many fogs and pitfalls, that a writer will inevitably fall prey to all manner of schemes and compromises. Whether it be writing for praise, writing to follow a trend, writing to indulge a fetish, writing to show off, writing for fame, writing to change culture, writing to please a lover, writing to please a crowd, writing to eviscerate an enemy, writing to sound clever... So subtly attached to the human condition are the ways to go wrong, that even a conscientious and well-intentioned writer quickly gets lost. So what do we do?
Maybe the answer is not to answer at all, but simply trust our ancient instincts and do. No one told the first storyteller how to tell a story. They simply told it, and writing even a bad book of fiction is so very hard that anyone who writes without passion is quickly discouraged. Just as Charlotte does not question her miserable inheritance, we should not question ours. Writers of fiction inevitably feed on the people and events that get stuck in their webs. The “trick” is to trap those thoughts and stories and feelings that are true, wrap them up, and study them: Sometimes devouring them to sate immediate hunger, sometimes saving them for a special occasion, sometimes knowing when to let one go. A spider is not taught how to spin a web, or where. If they must learn they learn by spinning, and writers learn by writing.
This does not mean that a writer should shun all criticism and advice. Sometimes, you will know when, you will need help. This may come in the form of a nuts and bolts book like The Elements of Style, or it may come from another work of fiction, or the perspective of a trusted beta reader, or, as it did for Charlotte, a soap advertisement. The key is to know what helps your pursuit of truth and what does not. You are and always will remain the ultimate authority on your writing. When Templeton brings Charlotte words like “Crunchy” and “Pre-Shrunk,” she knows that they are not what she needs and she rejects them, because they are not true.
But how can a work of fiction, which is categorically untrue, be true? The confusion comes because we do not have enough words for Truth. Facts are true or untrue, but they are not true in the way people are true or untrue. And sometimes a true fact, far from illuminating the subject, obscures the full truth. If Wilbur were fried up into bacon, it is certainly true that he would be crunchy, but Charlotte sees beyond Wilbur's appearance and traditionally sanctioned doom. She, “loyal and true to the very end,” sees that his soul is radiant and that she could take this truth buried within Wilbur and make him and the world grow into that truth until it bears fruit — and she does so by writing what is True.
6. Be a true friend.
“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.”
“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.”
— page 164
Writers are bloodthirsty, like spiders. We feed on our experience and the experiences of our friends and family and anyone else we catch in our web, for meaning and inspiration. Not one of us can say exactly why. Heaven knows it is hard enough, and heaven knows it makes a writer's life something of a mess. But in struggling to be a true friend a writer learns to be humble. They learn their own weaknesses and strengths. They learn empathy. A humble writer is more likely to seek to improve their writing, and not plateau forever at a half developed style. A writer who knows their strengths and weaknesses is less likely to write thinly disguised self-insert characters with very little diversity. An empathetic writer is more likely to allow their characters to make real decisions and say real dialogue, instead of treating them like wooden chess pieces in the service of an idea or a plot or a turn of phrase.
7. Your magnum opus is for you.
“What is that nifty little thing? Did you make it?”
“I did indeed,” replied Charlotte in a weak voice.
“Is it a plaything?”
“Plaything? I should think not. It is my egg sac, my magnum opus.”
“I don't know what a magnum opus is,” said Wilbur.
“That's Latin,” explained Charlotte. “It means 'great work.' This egg sac is my great work — the finest thing I have ever made.”
— page 144
So much has been made of writing that I believe it is almost impossible for a writer to sit at a keyboard for an hour without dreaming of bestseller lists and legacies at least ten times unless they are exceptionally humble, or never plan to publish. I remember reading over some of my earliest work and being utterly crushed because it did not resemble the work of my heroes, and if I am honest with myself that pride has never truly gone away. I have just accepted that it is not important. What is important, in writing, is honesty, truth, and love.
The difficulty is that it is the readers, not the writers, who ultimately decide whether the books have any merit — and which books will go down in history as “great”. This greatness is so alluring that many of us end up stuck in its web, but we must remember that it is an illusion. It is an illusion that could bleed us dry if we are not careful. It is a sticky half-art: A story that we tell about stories because we will never be able to satisfactorily articulate what great stories mean to us; just as we will never be able to fully articulate deep and faithful love in words alone.
Charlotte's magnum opus, which contains five hundred and fourteen future spiders, can teach us a better path to greatness. Writing, by the nature of its birth, is always written first for the writer. Always write to satisfy yourself first. To take your writing, and then twist it and conform it either for a trendy profit or for hero worship, would be like trampling on your own offspring. How dangerous and powerful the winds of culture are, and how selfish and pathetic our egos, that writing an honest word meets so much resistance. It would seem that honest and good writing is as fragile and powerful a miracle as a humble spider's web.
Text taken from Scholastic Inc version of Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, original text © 1952.
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