Everything Is an Argument, and How Knowing That Will Make You a Better Writer

This is an automated transcript of the original recording. It may contain small errors, and anything the episode points listeners toward is no longer active.

Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 30. Today we're exploring a technique of looking at the world from a new perspective that will result in more engaging writing. I'm going to try to prove to you that everything is an argument. And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.

My name is Brad Reed, and I am so glad that you're spending some time with me to talk about writing today. As I'm recording this, it's mid-August and the start of another school year is just around the corner. There's always kind of a bittersweet time of year as those long summer days full of plenty of time to write and research and read and watch great films turn into those hectic and grading-filled days of being a high school teacher. I mean, it's always great to see the kids again and get back into the classroom, so I'm looking forward to that, but it's hard to give up the life of a full-time writer that teachers sometimes get to live in the summer times.

So this year I'm trying a new experiment. I'm actually not teaching full-time. You see, I've cut my hours back to make time to finish the novel I've been working on since last summer and devote time to this podcast and the other resources we've been creating over on our Patreon page. It's something I'm really excited about, and I'll be sharing a bit of how that's going as the year progresses. I'm more than a little worried about getting that balance right between life as a teacher and life as a writer slash podcaster, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity to give it a shot.

So I wanted to give you a little update about the latest book too. I'm getting close to finishing the process of tearing down my first draft and piecing it all back together in an order and a sequence that works better. It's been a lot of work, and I've been able to cut out a whole bunch of scenes, more than I ever thought possible, that just turned out to be not that necessary. And I feel like I've got a much better story to tell for my full second draft. What I thought was going to be largely just polishing up existing material is going to end up being not necessarily a page one rewrite, but something close to that. There won't be a single sentence that doesn't get reworked to some extent as I'm writing the second draft.

And that's really the way I'm thinking of it. It's not an edit of the first draft, not a revision, not a proofreading. This is largely rewriting the story with scenes and characters and settings that just plain work better than they were working in the first draft. You know, it's always a daunting task, jumping back into basically recreate a story that you've already written, but it is so worthwhile. I have no doubt that my final draft is going to be heads and shoulders above my rough draft because of the work I've done tearing it apart and rebuilding it, putting it back together to work better.

Now, a lot of this has been done using the techniques of Sean Coyne in the StoryGrid. If you're not familiar with it, I highly recommend that you check it out. I'll warn you that it overwhelms some writers, maybe even most writers, but it is so worth doing, or at least some modification of it that works for you. Probably the number one question that listeners of the show have for me is, how do I revise, right? We learn how to draft. We kind of understand what it is to sit down and write the first draft of a novel.

But when we get to that place where we're editing, where we're revising, it gets a little murkier. And that's where most of my listeners have those questions. And the StoryGrid is one of the great places I can point you to to give you a system to look at a rough draft and figure out what you need to edit, what you need to cut, what you need to revise.

Introduction to Argument in Writing

So I encourage you to check that out. So, all right, enough of all that stuff. I'm excited to get into today's topic, so let's get to it. My goal today is to change your worldview. And at first, it's going to sound like kind of a negative worldview, but stay with me. I think we'll discover by the end that it's a worldview that will not only change the effectiveness of your writing, but it might also make you a better processor or reader of the real world around you.

So today I'm going to try to convince you that everything is an argument. So back in episode 18, it was the one about rhetorical devices. We talked a little bit about this concept of everything being an argument. In case you haven't listened to that episode, or maybe it's just been a while, let's start by quickly reviewing it so we have that concept fresh in our minds as we explore another aspect of it today.

So I'm borrowing the title that I'm working with here, Everything's an Argument, from a textbook that I use when I'm teaching persuasive writing at the college level. Now, that class is all about academic writing, right? Not the kind of writing we typically talk about here on the podcast.

But we're taking some of the elements from the world of persuasive writing and bringing them into creative writing to discover some really important techniques that will strengthen how you build characters, how you construct scenes, and how you bring tension and conflict into your stories. So here's the basic idea. Everything around you, well, at least everything created or manipulated by humans, is making an argument of some sort. And when I say argument here, I don't want you to be thinking about, you know, fighting or debating or anything like that. When we use the word argument today, we're using a much less aggressive definition of argument.

So an argument for our purposes is anything that is communicating an idea or opinion to other humans. So argument for us today isn't a fight. Argument really just means an attempt to convince someone else to believe something, anything.

So with this definition of argument in our heads, I think it's easier to accept the premise that everything is an argument. So think about it. The clothes you're wearing right now are an argument. Whether it was in the front of your mind or not, you were thinking about how you want other people to see you when you chose to put those clothes on today.

So maybe you wanted people to think you're laid back and cool, right? So you're sporting maybe a hoodie or shorts and sandals or something like that. Or maybe you wanted others to see you as a professional person today.

So you chose a suit of some sort for the day. Even if you didn't give any thought at all to what you wore today, you just woke up and threw something on. I'll bet you did give it some thought when you bought those clothes. At least some portion of your thought process was given to how others would interpret you, how others would understand you or read into you when you wore those clothes.

So in essence, the clothes that you wear are an argument attempting to influence others' opinions of who you are as a person. That's the kind of argument we're talking about today. Although the fight kind of argument you'll see is going to fit in with this concept really well as well.

So let's look at a few other examples of things that aren't usually considered arguments, but clearly are once you look at them a little more closely, just so I'm sure we have this concept down. Now I sometimes have students challenge me on this idea and they'll look out the window and point to a tree, right? And they'll say, that tree isn't an argument.

But is that true? Is that tree somehow an argument? So if it's a tree that was manipulated in some way by a human, meaning it didn't just naturally grow there based on the laws and kind of randomness of nature, then yeah, that tree is an argument because somebody somewhere made all sorts of decisions about that tree. They thought about what kind of tree would it be, right? What tree is best here? Was that tree chosen for its beauty or for its shade or maybe even for its resources?

It's an apple or a cherry tree. And why was it placed and planted where it is, right? These are all very intentional decisions that a human made when placing that tree where it is. And I think it becomes very clear that someone placed that tree there with intention to at least in part influence how other people either felt about him, right? The person planting the tree or maybe the building that it was next to or the piece of property that it sat on.

So in other words, there is still some element, however small, of intended influence, even in the tree that you might be looking at right now. Here's an example I usually use on the first day of my classes just to kind of throw my students off a little bit. I bring in a toilet seat and I introduce it to the class as a valuable piece of art.

Now, if you're familiar with Marcel Duchamp's 1917 piece of ready-made art called The Fountain, you might have a better understanding of how this relates to an English classroom, but maybe not. Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch, even in class. But what I'm doing with this toilet seat is I'm actually introducing it as an example of how art serves to defamiliarize us with a world we've become familiar with and have kind of stopped noticing.

Now, I talked about this much more in depth on a very early podcast on the show, somewhere between episode 5 and 10, I think. So there's this toilet seat that I bring in, right? And it serves that purpose of talking about what art does and how English or language arts is an art form.

But an element of that is the exploration of the intentions of the people behind even something like a $5 toilet seat from the Home Depot. So is a cheap toilet seat an argument? Well, think about it, right? Someone designed that thing. Someone chose the curve of the edges, that the thing they thought of is still a form of argument.

But if you think you've got an example that disproves the theory, I'd actually love to hear it because this is something I talk about every year with my students. You could share it with us over at the Talk to Us link on BradReadWrites. com. It's a great way to get in touch with us.

Understanding Argument in Everyday Life

But even if you do come up with an exception, I think we can agree that it still stands that virtually everything you see in the world is someone's argument, someone's attempt to influence the way we see either them or the item that's in the world. And that's enough of an understanding for us to build on today. So what difference does any of this make, right? When we're sitting down to write a story, what difference does it make that a toilet seat or your clothes or a tree is an argument? Well, the difference is really twofold, and we're going to explore each one in succession today.

So the first difference it makes is that we as humans are interpreters of intention, whether we know it or not. So I'll get into that more in a second. The second difference that we'll explore after that is that we can use the smallest of details to powerful effect when we use them intentionally as part of the arguments that our characters or our settings are making.

So let's explore that first aspect that we as humans are expert interpreters of intention. So even if you've never thought about how everything manipulated by humans can be thought of as an argument, that's essentially the way you've been operating in the world. So we are experts at reading other people's arguments.

So take the job interview, for example. Studies have shown that first impressions are formed within the first seven seconds of meeting someone. I mean, at that point, you haven't even gotten past the handshake and the hello my name is portion of a job interview, yet already you've sized each other up and you've formed that first impression.

So how does that work? What information are we reading in those short seven seconds? Well, what we're doing is we're reading each other's arguments.

So your clothes in a job interview make an argument, right? We've already talked about that. The expression on your face makes an argument. Are you coming in with a big smile on your face or is it maybe a serious face, right? That's making an argument. Like it or not, your weight, right, makes an argument.

Your hairstyle and your posture, maybe even the way that you smell, right, makes an argument if that person is especially sensitive to that. So you haven't really even said a word yet, but tons of communication and inferences and judgments have already happened. Those arguments are already being read. And we actually do the same thing with places, with settings.

So let's say you're in a new city and you're driving around looking for a place to eat, a nice restaurant. And everything around you, every building that you see, every restaurant is making some kind of an argument. So think about what other businesses are surrounding the restaurant that you may drive by and look at.

So if you have a restaurant that is next door to a fancy hotel, that's going to make a very different argument than a restaurant that has a strip club out back, right? Even if the two restaurants look exactly the same otherwise, their arguments are very different based on those things. You might look at what kind of cars are parked out front.

So if you've got a restaurant with a parking lot filled with luxury cars, that's a very different argument than the restaurant filled with Harleys, right? So how about the sign, right? The sign that has the name of the restaurant on it. Is it clean? Is it legible? Is it professional?

Or does it maybe look like it was put up there 50 years ago and never thought about again, right? So all of this, all of these details are arguments. All of this is changing the way you perceive the place and it's happening for the most part subconsciously, even if the differences are much, much more subtle than the ones I've just used as examples here.

So it's important to understand that we are always reading the world this way. That's just naturally the way we function, whether we're aware of it or not. We're always reading and making inferences about the arguments we see in the people, the places, and the things of our world. We can't help it. I mean, it's how we evolved to survive, I think. Read the little clues and interpret hopefully successfully what they mean.

Interpreting Intention in Characters

So now the second part of this important lesson is that we as creative writers can hijack this overwhelming desire to read the arguments of our world for use in the stories that we're writing. And it starts by looking at everything in your story as something intentional, right? Everything is there for some purpose of intention.

So your characters don't just wear the clothes they're wearing because it's the first thing you thought of when you wrote the draft, or at least hopefully that's not the case, right? They, just like you, have chosen the clothes they're wearing in an effort to get other characters to think or feel about them in a certain way. And your reader, because they're so used to seeing the world as a series of subtle arguments, are going to be reading into what those characters are wearing for clues about who that person is, right? What do they believe in? What are their insecurities?

So dress your characters intentionally. Put yourself in their shoes with their goals, their insecurities, and their budgets, right? And discover what argument they should make in the scene you're writing and how you can do that through the clothes that they're wearing. Think about what car they drive, right? Is it the, just happen to be the same car that you drive, right? Or maybe a car you used to own because it's easier to describe.

So that's a terrible reason to choose a car or, you know, however your character gets around a horse or a spaceship or a dragon for that matter. What your character chooses to use to get from place to place says boatloads about who they are and what their arguments are trying to make, trying to say about the world around them. Where do your characters live? Is the place that they live, does it grow from their argument, right? Think about what vocabulary they use. This is huge when it comes to argument, right?

Does the vocabulary, does the word choice that your characters use grow from the argument that they're trying to make about themselves in the world? So a person who uses and, you know, maybe even misuses big words is making a very different argument than someone who just kind of grunts out single syllable words, right? So choose each of these things with intention, taking into account who the character is. And do the same thing with your settings too. Make your settings have an argument. Somebody designed that place, right?

Somebody chose the decorations. Somebody is in charge of the upkeep or maybe the lack of upkeep. And your characters must echo some of that argument if they've chosen it as a place to live or a place to meet or a place to attack, right? Or a place just to chill out.

So often as writers, we feel like we have to hit our readers over the head with things to get them to understand the worlds and the characters that we're writing about. So maybe we come right out and tell them something like, Dave was the biggest jerk in the world, right? Now you've just done every single bit of work for your reader if you've written something like that. And readers kind of like to have work to do. In fact, they don't kind of like to have work to do. Readers love to have work to do when they're reading a book.

Even if we don't recognize that's what we're doing. They like to figure out your story. They like to piece things together. They like to make inferences and connections. I mean, it's how we operate in the world all the time. We're experts at that.

Or, so let's hope you're a better writer than that and you've learned your show, don't tell lesson and you know that there's a better way to do it than just to tell us Dave is a jerk, right? You're going to show it to us. So instead, you show us by having Dave walk through the door of his office. He hits on the young receptionist. He insults the intern. And when he sees his business partner, he tells him to go fuck himself, right?

So your reader has to do a little more work here. You haven't come right out and said Dave is a jerk, but they don't have to do much more work, right? You might as well have come out and just told them because you've hit them over the head with so much blatant kind of obvious argument.

But what if you instead talked about the way Dave always takes up two parking spaces when he parks his Hummer in the crowded parking lot? So something like that might be just a single sentence in your story, but it allows your reader the opportunity to discover Dave's argument, to discover what Dave is trying to get the world to see about him. And right from that single example, we kind of can figure out that Dave thinks he's better and more important than everyone around him, right?

So we begin to see his insecurities. We get to see what his argument is. And we honestly get to see what a jerk Dave is without coming right out and telling us.

So your reader has figured it out and now they're invested and they're reading your story world like they read the real world through those small little details. Maybe you have Dave come in and he doesn't say anything at all when he comes into the office, right? And he leaves his sunglasses on until he gets behind the desk. Subtle, right?

But what a jerk. If a guy did that, that guy's a jerk. So it's subtle, but this guy's sending the message that he doesn't even see the people around him or at least doesn't want to.

So now that we can see Dave in If they go out to eat, they go out to eat at Applebee's or something, right some boring place. But when I'm revising, after I've come to really know these places and these characters, I know their insecurities. I know their kind of secret goals, secret desires, and I know how they want the world to see them, then when I'm revising, everything needs to start being a part of that argument.

So this has everything to do with making your world and your story feel real, something we call verisimilitude. And isn't that what we're always going for in our fiction, in our writings? We want the reader to have a real, authentic experience in the world that we've created.

Creating Realism Through Details

So how do we make our stories feel like real life? How do we get our readers to engage so deeply that they get sucked into the worlds and the stories that we're creating? The secret to that lies in knowing that everything is an argument and using that knowledge to your advantage and finding those key details that work underneath the surface to make the arguments of your characters and your settings.

So one last caveat before we finish up today. There's a temptation, once we understand this concept, to want to throw tons of details into our story. I mean, it gets kind of fun, right?

So if one or two compelling details are good, then five or 10 or 20 must be better, right? So in truth, it's actually the opposite. And I want you to remember that seven-second rule that we talked about for establishing that first impression. Keep that in mind when you're writing as well. What you want to do is come up with one or two of the most effective, most telling, most compelling details you can and then let your readers fill in the rest of that work. With a correctly chosen, compelling detail, your reader can fill in the rest.

We'll actually save our example of this for what I mean of this for our wise word coming up next. Today's wise word comes from Stephen King, and it goes hand in hand with what we're exploring today. It's a short one. He says that an overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

So I want you to picture that scene in your mind, right? You're in an abandoned neighborhood, and there in the gutter is an overturned tricycle. Really feel that moment in your gut. And what you're doing is you're reading the argument of that setting in just those few details. And feel how the questions start to come to your mind and how they begin to reveal an argument of this scene.

So questions like, how long has that tricycle been sitting there? Whose tricycle was that? How did it end up in the gutter? I wonder, did somebody just leave it there on purpose or did they have to get away quickly for some reason? And that's why it's still there. And what happened to the kid that was riding it?

Right. So this this is all happening subconsciously as we're using our natural skill of unpacking the world of reading the argument of the world. So we know the tricycle is there for a reason. Right. The author put it there and your mind starts flipping through the possibilities trying to make sense of it. You've done all that work as a reader and Stephen King just gets to sit back and let you create the horror and the suspense of that moment on your own.

What he's doing is he's tapping into the way that you read into the details. And you can do the same thing with your writing. And notice how much he's accomplished with one well-chosen compelling detail. His reader fills in all the rest of the detail in their own minds because the argument of the scene is so strong. I mean, can't you see that whole neighborhood now? If you closed your eyes and imagined it, can't you see it all in your mind based on that one little detail?

I sure can. Right. In my mind, there's the streets are dark. I can see the shutters hanging kind of akimbo from the windows. I can see front doors ajar. I mean, I can almost feel the cold wind tumbling the trash down the broken streets.

Right. It's all there in my mind based on that one detail. And maybe it looks different in your mind. Right. Maybe you took that detail and made a very different abandoned neighborhood. And if you did, that's perfect.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Right. That's the trick of engaging a reader. Stephen King here in that one sentence has got each one of us building our own version of his world in our heads. The power of a single well-chosen detail. And time for our weekly challenge. Our challenge this week is going to get a little weird and it could even, I guess, technically be illegal in some states.

But this week, I want you to try to record a conversation, either literally record it on a phone app or something like that, or at the very least, write down as much of what is being said as possible. Now, this could be a conversation between people, you know, right? Family, friends, workmates, or it could even be strangers at a bus stop or in the food court at a mall. Right.

So find a conversation that you can record. And what we're doing with this is we're exploring the thesis of today's show that everything is an argument. And I want you to see how it works in real life so that you can better use it in your own writing. I actually recommend that you do a combination of both. Right. You're writing and you're recording if possible.

And while you're recording the conversation, while you're getting the audio, you're writing down as many details as you can about the scene, about the characters. So maybe you're jotting down what the people are wearing. Right. You're making notes about how they're standing or sitting. Right. What is their posture?

Can you capture something about their facial expressions or their body language? All of this is argument too. And once you've done that, and hopefully haven't gotten yourself arrested for it, I want you to spend some time with it, thinking through it, listening to it again and again, and figure out what each person is arguing for. It might be something very subtle, but it'll be there even in what sounds like a friendly kind of off the cuff conversation. And it's often what they're arguing for is not the actual topic of the conversation. You want to go deeper than that.

Often they're going to be arguing things like, I want you to value my opinion or I want you to pay attention to me. While the other person's argument might be, I'm too busy to fully listen to what you have to say. Or I've got better things to do than to talk to you right now.

So try to go deep with this. I mean, some of you might actually capture an argument happening. If that's the case, make sure you go deep there, right? What is the subtext of the argument? What's really going on under the surface in this relationship? If you're bold enough to try this, I think you're going to have a lot of fun with it.

And you might even find that you want to do it again a few times because you're going to learn something nearly every time that you do it. In fact, you'll start to become an expert on how a subtle wave of the hand might carry more weight in the argument than the words that are actually being spoken. So give it a try this week. Let me know what you discover. I'd love to hear from you. You can go to BradReadWrites.

com and click on the Talk to Us link to let us know how your weekly challenge went if you're bold enough to give it a shot. So that's going to wrap it up for us this week. If you're enjoying the podcast, I would love it if you'd tweet about it or mention it to some of your writer friends and maybe even leave us a review over on iTunes or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. It's a great way to help spread the word and give us the ability to keep producing these for you.

So until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do and I hope you're off to do the same. Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.