On the Use of Absolutes, Part 1: Regarding My Ungenerous Assumptions

Since many of the people who contract me for editing and writing work do so online—without me having ever met them in person or vice-versa—I wonder about their qualities and characteristics. 

Like, who are these people?

I find myself making assumptions based on their books themselves. For instance, when a novel comes across my desk about a regular guy whose wife is increasingly distant, and who is then found out to be having an affair (a surprisingly common plot line!), I tend to think this occurred in the author’s life. Or if, say, all or most of the female characters in a book written by a woman have curly hair, then I think it’s a fairly safe bet to say that the author has curls herself. Or, more generally, if a number of different characters in the same novel use the same word or phrase in their dialogue, I assume that word exists in the author’s daily, or lived, vocabulary.

I find myself making assumptions based on their books themselves. For instance, when a novel comes across my desk about a regular guy whose wife is increasingly distant, and who is then found out to be having an affair (a surprisingly common plot line!), I tend to think this occurred in the author’s life.

This curiosity is very strong when I come across a book that is filled with “absolutes”: like, “always,” “all,” “none,” “no-one,” “never,” “constantly,” “only,” and “endless,” but also nouns like, “everyone” and “nobody,” and phrases like, “in any way,” “never again,” or “everybody knows.” 

When I see prose littered with such words, the judgements I begin to form are not particularly generous ones. The use of these words suggests absolutist thinking which, in turn, strikes me as being a sign of an infertile mind, one that is not comfortable with complexity, or “shades of grey.”    

Before I say anything more, I should note there is a curious danger in writing guidelines, or rules, about absolutes. I want to exhort: never use absolutes! But that would be ridiculous. This danger lies in defining any rule on style. Indeed, I’ve written elsewhere about how cheap and unnatural it is for writers to use italics for emphasis… but see what great effect I’ve just achieved in the sentence above! 

The use of these words suggests absolutist thinking which, in turn, strikes me as being a sign of an infertile mind, one that is not comfortable with complexity, or “shades of grey.”  

At the very least, every time you find yourself writing an absolute like “always,” or “never,” really question whether or not it is true. This is because the use of words like this makes it easy for you to contradict something you've already said. More generally, it suggests disorder, muddled thinking, and frankly, a lack of self-awareness. Without self-awareness, be it positive or negative, an author can create little empathy. As a brilliant writer once said to me, “I can’t like anyone who doesn’t hate themselves a little bit.” 

Care must be taken to employ these words in an accurate manner. There is little excuse for writing, as one memoirist I edited did, “I have not been materialistic in any way since.” Only to write a few pages later, “His house is in this awesome part of Kuala Lumpur that has big houses (most of Kuala Lumpur is apartment complexes) that have indoor/outdoor living to perfectly suit Kuala Lumpur’s tropical weather.” Notice the words that I’ve placed in bold. Surely, the author’s drooling over the “big house” suggests at least a certain level of materialism; a house, of course, being a material thing. 

Just as there is little excuse in writing, as one historical novelist I worked with wrote, of his hero, “…Everyone close to him seemed to die.” When, only a few pages before, the same author had described how the hero’s grandmother—who had not only raised the hero, but with whom he had been happily living when the story began—was still alive. Indeed, these kinds of contradictions destroy the illusion of authenticity that the author is seeking to conjure in their writing. 

These are dramatic examples. The effect of absolute words and ideas can suggest more subtle contradictions that engender a reader’s doubts in the veracity of the text, which in turn, can be somewhat jarring. 

Take these lines from a novel I recently edited, describing a married couple, “He’d spoken his mind and heart to her; and she’d spoken hers to him. They always had. They'd never lied to each other or excluded each other.” In my editorial letter to the author, I wrote, “Was there never one little white lie in their marriage? Or some minor deception? Indeed, life is long.” 

Here’s another example, “But, until this moment, father and son had never met as Pau and The General.” My note to the author was, “Watch out for the ‘never,’ here. Also, is this really true? If so, it’s a big thing, and it should inform the entire plot.”

Of course, in both cases, these sentences may well be true. But I find it telling that these sections jumped out to me for comment. Perhaps, if I had felt them to be true from the context of the rest of the book, I probably wouldn’t have flagged them. 

But this, as well as my note on the second example, also suggests the fix. Instead of, or in addition to, writing the line that contains the absolute word or thought, you, the author, should suffuse the rest of the story with the idea behind it, thus rendering the need for the absolute phrase almost superfluous. In the first case, the reader should know from the story that the two have had a rock-solid marriage until that point; and in the second, up until that moment, the reader should know that the father and son have hidden their true natures from each other. 

Indeed, the use of “absolutes,” in both of these cases, should correspond with major plot points. This makes sense. The word “absolute,” by the way, is defined as, “not qualified or diminished in any way; total.” In other words, when you use an absolute in such a manner, you are describing a total change; again, this is not one to be taken lightly.