Umberto EcoWriting Style

A horse has gone missing and the monks are searching the wrong slope. William of Baskerville, still on the path up to the abbey in The Name of the Rose, tells them which way the animal went, where it is standing now, and what it is called, and he has seen none of it. He worked from hoofprints in the snow, horsehair caught on a bramble, the way the branches were broken, and the fact that a logician of that century would call any horse in his examples Brunellus. Then he lays the reasoning out for Adso, step by step, so the reader can check it.

That is the offer. Evidence first, in full, then the meaning, at a price. Eco described a story as a lazy machine that gets the reader to do part of its work, and his novels are built to collect that labour, which is what the catalogues and the disputations and the long quoted documents are for.

The bill comes due at the end. William names the killer, then admits that the pattern he followed, the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, was not the killer's plan at all. He reached the truth through an error he can reconstruct. Readers who spent the whole book assembling that pattern have it taken away from them, and the taking away is the argument of the novel.

Writers come to Eco when the material has grown heavier than the plot. More research will not fix that. What fixes it is a schedule: who may know what, in what order, and what a wrong reading costs. The schedule transfers. It works on an abbey library and on a family argument over a will.

The catalogue with one live entry

The abbey owns a catalogue of its library, and the plot lives in the gap between the catalogue and the shelves. A list buys two things at once. It makes a world look furnished, and it gives one clue somewhere to hide, because a reader who is counting is not weighing at the same time. Eco wrote a whole book on the poetics of the list, separating the practical kind, which can be completed, from the kind that gestures at more than it names. The craft sits in the completing. Write the list so it could be finished, leave out the entry that matters, and let a character notice the gap for a reason of his own.

A narrator with an archive instead of a memory

A stroke leaves Yambo, in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, able to quote every book he has read and unable to recognize his own wife. The split is the tool. Knowledge and feeling lie separated inside one head, and the reader has to do the joining, which produces more grief than a paragraph about grief would. A smaller version of this fits into any draft. Give a character complete command of a body of material and no access to the one fact that would place him inside it.

The counter-story a character writes

Marooned on a ship in The Island of the Day Before, Roberto invents a wicked brother named Ferrante and writes a romance about him, and the invention slowly starts explaining his own life to him. A story inside the story lets you dramatize interpretation without a narrator's commentary. The reader watches a man decide what his evidence means, watches the decision go wrong, and the narration says nothing about it. Give your character a document he writes himself. Then let the plot answer it.

The clue that also does the killing

Monks in The Name of the Rose wet a finger to turn a page, and the pages have been poisoned, so the book at the centre of the investigation is the weapon as well, and the motive, and the reason the abbey burns. One object, four jobs. Interpretation turns physical there: reading the wrong volume kills you. Look for that overlap in your own material. The document your characters argue about should be able to hurt one of them without anybody reinterpreting anything.

Believers inside the book

The Plan in Foucault's Pendulum finds its audience among the authors on the vanity press's files, the ones who arrive with manuscripts proving the Templars run the world. A joke acquires stakes the moment somebody in the room needs it to be true. That is a structural insurance policy, because it moves the reception of an idea inside the fiction, where the idea can be tested by consequence rather than by argument. Whatever theory your story carries, cast the reader who wants it. Then let him act.

One image left uninterpreted

Belbo remembers standing as a boy at a graveside in the hills, holding one long note on a trumpet, and that stays the single moment of his life which resists being turned into a symbol. Every other page of the novel converts things into meaning. This one does not, and the whole machine needs it, because a reader with no fixed point stops believing in the moving ones. Keep one image out of the system. Refuse to gloss it, refuse to echo it in a pattern, and let it be what the book measures its own cleverness against.

The frame that doubts its own source

The Name of the Rose opens on a preface about a manuscript that was found, copied out of a French edition of a Latin edition, lost, and then partly reconstructed. The reader is handed a document at several removes and told as much. The hedge pays twice over. It licenses the digressions, since a chronicler of the fourteenth century would write that way, and it holds every detail in question, since the chain of hands is on the record. Eco argued in his Norton lectures that no feature inside a text proves the text is fiction, and that the work is done outside it, by the cover and the jacket copy and the word novel. His prefaces play along that seam. A frame of this kind earns its keep when it can withhold as well as reveal, and when the reader can feel the hand that chose this version over another.

Borrowed pages used as evidence

In The Prague Cemetery, Simonini assembles his forged conspiracy out of scenes lifted from Dumas and Sue, and it persuades its buyers because it reads like novels they have already read. There the allusion is a working part, with a user and a purpose. Adso performs the harmless version of the same move. Describing the girl in the kitchen, the only language he has for desire is the Song of Songs, so the borrowed verses become his characterization. Keep the test simple. An allusion a character deploys, to convince somebody or to hide from something, is doing work. An allusion the author deploys in order to be recognized is a signature, and signatures move no plots.

The pattern that dissolves on a second look

The office joke in Foucault's Pendulum is a world conspiracy, and three men at a Milan publishing house build it by feeding fragments to a word processor called Abulafia and lifting the rest from the manuscripts their vanity imprint receives. Then Lia takes the founding document of the whole edifice, the one from Provins, and reads it as a tradesman's delivery note. Same words, another frame, and the Plan is gone. The reversal lands because the reader was given every scrap of it in advance, so the effect is embarrassment rather than surprise. Diotallevi, dying, calls it a sin against the letters they shuffled for fun. The device costs nothing in plot machinery, and it works on a reader once, which is why it has to be built in as load-bearing.

A labyrinth with a floor plan

William works out the shape of the library from outside the building, by counting the windows of the Aedificium and then stepping off the length of every wall, and the arithmetic tells him that a room exists which cannot be reached from any room he knows. Adso, at the same hour, is lost inside it in the dark, in a chamber whose mirrors bend his own reflection into a monster. The pair of experiences is the design. A maze in Eco can be solved, and the reader is given the means to solve it, which keeps the dead ends from feeling like cheating. Compare the maze with no plan behind it, where a reader stops working and waits for the author. Give yours a sum the reader can do.

Piling up research and calling the pile depth

Eco's pages look encyclopedic, so the reflex is to gather more before writing. He also wrote a manual for students on producing a thesis, and its advice runs the other way: narrow the subject until you can finish it, and treat the notes as material to cut. The novels were built like that too, out of a card index most of which stayed outside the book. On the page the difference shows up as removability. Lift a passage out and see what breaks later on. If nothing breaks, you had research. If a decision two chapters along loses its ground, you had structure. That test is the only way to tell, because a passage looks learned wherever it sits.

Copying the long sentence without the chain inside it

The Island of the Day Before is written in a seventeenth-century register because the man narrating it belongs to that century, so the ornament has a wearer. Ornament without a wearer produces a familiar failure. The reader cannot locate the claim. Every clause arrives at the same volume. The eye slides off. Take each long sentence you mean to keep and mark three things in it: the claim, the support, the consequence. Two of the three missing means the sentence is furniture. Eco's periods survive that test, which is why they read as thinking rather than as prose.

Wearing irony as a coat

In his postscript Eco describes the position of a man who can no longer tell an educated woman that he loves her madly without the phrase sounding secondhand, so he says it and hands it to Barbara Cartland, and the attribution lets the declaration through. Irony there repairs a sentence that had stopped working. Worn permanently it does the reverse, because a reader who has learned that no statement will be honoured stops attending to any of them. The discipline is arithmetic. For each ironic move, one thing in the next scene gets paid for at full price.

Building a puzzle that costs the characters nothing

Belbo dies at the end of Foucault's Pendulum because he will not hand over the secret of a plan he knows to be invented, and Casaubon spends the last pages in a farmhouse waiting for them to come for him too. The interpretation had been a game the three of them played after hours. It ends with one of them hanged from the wire of the Pendulum. Before you write the reveal, name what the wrong reading destroys. A puzzle with no answer to that question is a crossword, and readers put crosswords down without resentment, which is worse for you than being argued with.