Skip to main content

Wonderworks - Angus Fletcher *****

If you are interested in both writing and science this is an unmissable book. Reading can not just impart information, but can influence the way that we feel. Angus Fletcher describes 25 literary techniques (many also applicable to film and TV), ranging from those known to the Ancient Greeks to modern innovations, that can have a particular influence on our feelings and state of mind. Interestingly Fletcher describes this as technology - devices to make something happen. But rather than being a purely philosophical exploration, what lifts the book significantly is that for each of these techniques, Fletcher describes how studies of the impact on the brain show the physical effects occurring in different parts of the brain as a result.

The chapters (one for each technique) end with a faintly self-help feeling bit - for instance, how you can use the 'clear your head' technique by reading certain texts, but that really isn't the point. This isn't a self-help book, it's a chance to explore the nature of storytelling and how narrative techniques influence the brain. As a writer, I found the storytelling technology part most interesting, but there's no doubt that having the science part gives the whole idea more weight.

Some of the techniques are fairly obvious, and some may be very familiar to those who have studied literature at university level - but there will be some surprises for almost everyone. There's a real feeling of recognition of something that suddenly makes sense (itself arguably one of the techniques). In fact Fletcher, presumably consciously, does make use of many of the techniques in the book itself.

I did have a few small issues. Some of the techniques felt a bit samey - I would have preferred a shorter list with more distinction (it would also have made the book a bit less chunky, as it seemed to go on too long). Fletcher also has a tendency to state as if fact things that are possible but uncertain (or even downright inaccurate). For example, he says that there is no evidence for human pheromones where in fact there is evidence consistent with pheromones, but (if they do exist) the pheromones have not been definitely identified. He also has Galileo looking through telescope at the sun (there is some dispute as to whether he did and his telescope was too weak to blind him or he projected the image) and seems to suggest Galileo was the first to discover sunspots, which he definitely wasn't.

Again, possibly using one of the techniques described himself, Fletcher's language sometimes was unnecessarily flowery, overusing, for example, double-barrelled adjectives. In fact, one thing he really didn't cover, which would have been interesting, was circumstances where a writer who thinks they are cleverly using a technique to influence our emotions or state of mind, instead irritates the reader, or makes them give up reading entirely (I've done this with three books in my time, one of which was a supposed classic) and/or makes them throw the book across the room.

This is a book that is fresh and inspiring. I'd definitely recommend that anyone who writes (or wants to write) should read it, but also anyone with an interest in how the brain is affected by surprisingly subtle influences. A real find.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more