The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a series of literary awards conferred annually by Yale University. The awards are accompanied by a week-long festival with talks and interviews, film screenings, and a keynote lecture from an eminent writer. Collectively, the keynotes are published as the Yale University Press series ‘Why I Write’. I started reading this series accidentally last October in Port Douglas, a holiday town in far north Queensland with beaches and crocodiles. I’d found Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation in a second-hand bookshop, which I’d always meant to read, and I’d packed one of the Dune novels and the 2023 lecture What Nails It, by the music journalist Greil Marcus. I’d actually never heard of Marcus before – couldn’t tell you what he wrote, let alone why – but it was perfect beach reading. I sat on an enclosed balcony with the sun slipping over palm trees and endless purple sky, and fell through the pages. More recently I’ve picked up the 2024 lecture, Into the Weeds, by Lydia Davis – again, with apologies, never heard of her, don’t know what she’s written. This one’s been fairly slow going. They’re not long books – maybe 150 pages, these half-height hardbacks you could fit into a jean pocket – but I’m really bouncing off it. I don’t like the voice. It’s got too many commas – it reads like falling down the stairs.

“The story went on, almost of its own accord, one part naturally inviting the next, to remember friends of mine, since deceased, who, being lonely, I suppose, once fell into the habit, where they used to live, in Germany, during World War II, of putting out food for a housefly who would join them at mealtimes, and then mourned the fly when it died on Christmas Day.”

Sometimes when the substance of a book is interesting you can overlook the style, but the problem with the ‘Why I Write’ series is that it’s all style. As we’ve discussed before, with Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run, there isn’t really a simple answer to the question of why somebody writes. At best there’s a sequence of glancing non-answers. And you know that going in – you’re not really reading to find out why people write. The appeal of this type of book is in watching skilled writers freestyle for a hundred and fifty pages. Brian Dillon’s Essayism, for example, while stylistically more experimental, similarly riffs on the concept of writing rather than making a concerted effort to answer any questions about who or why:

“Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at ‘therefore’) at the level of thought.”

If you don’t like the style, there’s not much there for you. That’s the problem I find with Lydia Davis: I don’t like the style. The ideas are all fine – again, following normal practice for books about writing, Into the Weeds focuses mostly on different types of reading. “When I was invited, last fall, I wanted to be willing to set out to talk about my writing, but I found that I was thinking about reading – reading the writing of someone else.” Davis talks about reading John Clare, James Baldwin, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and The Wheelwright’s Shop, by George Sturt. That last one is a bit of an anomaly – The Wheelwright’s Shop, Davis says, is “a very thorough account of the wheelwright shop that Sturt inherited from his father and his grandfather before him.” It contains “extremely technical detail” about how farm wagons are built: at times, Davis says, it’s “tedious”.

There’s something quite loaded in that word, especially how Davis uses it. It makes me think of the Goodreads competitor Storygraph – in the review area, Storygraph has an option to list the pace of a book as either fast, medium, or slow. You’ll often see non-fiction books listed as slow-paced, even when they move fairly briskly. A Very Short Introduction to Classical Literature is listed as slow, and it’s a pretty swift overview of eight different classical genres in 125 pages (about fifteen pages each). It barely has time to mention all the key texts – it doesn’t linger. That rating seems to say more about the readers than about the book itself. Terms like ‘tedious’ have a similar hidden meaning. Tedious means boring, which is to say that it doesn’t deliver what someone is looking for. It’s an indicator of attunement. In his book The Upside-Down World, Benjamin Moser talks about Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as if it was a religious painting: “no Christ in the whole Louvre captures the pathos of sacrifice like this carcass.” It’s such a compelling section – it made me want to learn more about the painter. So I picked up a Taschen book, Rembrandt, by Michael Bockemühl, and found it almost unreadable. Bockemühl talks about the same history, many of the same paintings – but I hated it. It didn’t talk about the things that attracted me to Rembrandt in Moser’s telling. It was – so to speak – tedious.

There are obviously intersecting issues here – books can be well written or poorly written, they can be more difficult or less difficult. The Book Leo talks about how she found Jane Eyre intimidating: English was her second language, and so reading in a second language for entertainment had a different cognitive load – particularly as it pertained to reading classics, which often have more old-fashioned or unfamiliar linguistic structures. While books can be inaccessible for a number of reasons, the specific charge of tedium implies an ill-suited reader. For writers, like Davis, it also touches on a doubled question at the core of much writing. Does anyone want to read this? Do I care if they don’t? Writing is a form of communication, but sometimes you’re working through something just for yourself. Davis observes that sometimes she writes because something’s bothered her. “The reason I write a particular story may be because something – which I call ‘material’, as in ‘raw material’ – bothers me until I ‘do something’ about it.” In that context, the concept of tediousness expresses the writer’s anxiety that they’ve been bothered by something inconsequential. Davis writes in one passage about a couple of animals in her field of view. “The little cat is asleep, stretched out on her side, pressed up against me. A dog, not my dog, is asleep outdoors, stretched out on his side in the shade.” She immediately reflects on her reasons for writing about those animals, and frets about whether to leave the passage in. “I want to write this, and have written this, but whether I will include it in the essay I don’t know. It is one thing to want to write something, and go ahead and write it, and it is sometimes another thing to want to show it, and in what form.” That editorial function is the spectre of tedium. Is this boring? Will anyone read this? If they don’t, will I care? Do I think it’s important enough to exist regardless? Every writer knows that cycle. I have 1800 words on Satisfactory sitting in my drafts – I started a new game again, and wrote a bunch about starting over, the practice of knowing and planning, and I’m sort of not convinced there’s anything good in there. I don’t know that it’s interesting. I also have a 12,000 word structural analysis of the Horus Heresy – the final article in my Horus Heresy project – and partly I’m sitting on it because I’m not convinced it’s in the right format to go up here online. Does anyone want to read this? Do I care if they don’t?

What we see with Into the Weeds is that writing is a type of reading. That’s obviously true of criticism or analysis, but maybe it’s true of other forms as well. I think a lot about Rod Mengham’s Midnight in the Kant Hotel, a book of art criticism from a curator at Jesus College. I made a little joke about how he crammed references to Robert Frost and the Odyssey into a three-line excerpt – typical academic behaviour – but it stuck with me. It says something about what writing is, how it works. Since February, I’ve been trying to write about Tiny Bookshop, a cozy game where you decorate a caravan, fill it with books, and drive around a seaside town, selling to all and sundry. It’s special because you actually see titles and descriptions for every book you sell. There are little challenges where people ask you for recommendations based on their interests. One person asked for a scary book, and I gave them Watership Down, which they said wasn’t scary enough, which – yes it is? The joy of Tiny Bookshop is the joy of touching all these books, leafing through a shelf of titles to make a recommendation. It’s a writerly game. It’s a game about the network of literature, about reading, about connecting people to titles that they’re coming to for the first time. It’s writing in its most explicit form – giving out the books in themselves, and not just the secondary structures that have built up around them. It’s facilitating the process of discovery. Tedium, in that context, is the residual fear that what you’re sharing won’t be taken up. It’s a natural fear – you’re never going to have everybody love what you do – but not enough to make us stop.