Understanding the Pyramid of Abstraction (The Basics)
Levels one and two. And something about a quaint little scene from Pixar's "Inside-Out".
One of the best writing tricks I've ever learned came from one of Brandon Sanderson's lectures, a lesson on the Pyramid of Abstraction.
Utilizing the pyramid as a tool while you're writing and editing will instantly level you up as a writer. But it's got a lot of nuance many writers tend to overlook.
LEVEL ONE
Here's how it works: Everything you write lands somewhere on the pyramid, be it higher or lower.
Your first goal is to write with enough concrete detail to keep your story grounded in reality. Adding specific details helps add verisimilitude (believability) to your story.
And once you've anchored your story and immersed the reader enough, you'll have earned the right to be a little more abstract... for a little while. That is, the reader will be primed to entertain a little upper-pyramid antics, more willing than they would've been at the beginning of your tale.
Let's start with a very simple example.
Abstract (higher on the pyramid): The animal
If you just say "the animal", readers picture some vague placeholder animal-like form. Could be big, could be small. No two readers will picture the same thing.
Middle ground: The bunny
If you say "the bunny", readers get beyond the gray goo of a generic placeholder and picture their idealized image of a bunny. Many will picture something archetypal, like a jackrabbit. Others might think of a specific rabbit, such as a pet they had as a child.
Concrete (lower on the pyramid): The long-haired lop with the brown patch over its left eye
The more specific you get about the animal, the more concrete it becomes. And the less variation there is between what readers picture in their minds.
By sharing a few smaller, quaint details about a room, it not only makes your world feel less abstract and more "lived in", but it provides characterization - What a character notices when walking into a room can tell you a lot about him. The state a room is in can also tell you a lot about the owner of that room.
But one can certainly overdo it. Robert Jordan, much as I love him, is often criticized for going overboard with description.
Landing in the upper-middle of the pyramid:
The room was small and cluttered, with a single bed in the corner.
Still in the middle of the pyramid, but lower and more grounded:
The small room was crammed with mismatched furniture, including a rickety wooden dresser, a wobbly nightstand, and a narrow bed shoved against the far wall.
Closer to the bottom of the pyramid (Note how more details start to tell the reader more about the person who owns this room and more about the person observing it):
The cramped bedroom was a jumble of worn-out furniture and personal belongings. The dresser, scratched and chipped, leaned precariously against the wall, its drawers slightly askew. The nightstand, a wobbly thing held together by tape and goodwill, featured a cracked lamp with a frayed cord. And there, wedged between the dresser and the wall, was the bed - a narrow, sagging mattress atop a metal frame, its thin blanket wrinkled and stained.
So low on the pyramid and so concrete, we're overdoing it:
The claustrophobic bedroom was a chaotic mess of secondhand castoffs and personal detritus. The dresser, an antique from the early 20th century, bore the marks of a thousand battles - gouges, scratches, and stains of unknown origins. Its drawers, which were slightly misaligned due to a missing roller on the bottom, groaned in protest whenever opened or closed. The nightstand, a hand-me-down from the neighbor down the street, wobbled precariously on its uneven legs, threatening to topple over with even the slightest nudge. And there, in the far corner, was the bed - a vintage army cot from the Korean War era, its canvas cover sagging and its metal frame creaking ominously with every movement. The thin, moth-eaten blanket was adorned with patches of indeterminate origin, and the pillow was a lumpy, misshapen thing that had clearly seen better days.
In the first example, the room is described in broad strokes, leaving a lot to the imagination. There are times when you want a quick impression from a bit higher on the pyramid, such as during a frantic chase scene.
*Sometimes it's easier to write a rough draft higher on the pyramid, especially when you're struggling to complete a tough scene - More details can always be added during the editing phase.
As the level of detail increases, the room comes into sharper focus, with specific details about the furniture and overall atmosphere.
However, in the fourth example, the level of detail becomes excessive, overwhelming the reader with minute, often irrelevant information that actually detracts from the overall impact of the description.
*A good editor could easily turn that fourth paragraph into gold through selective omission. Plus it's not wrong to write a rough draft this way, trimming back the unnecessary details later.
LEVEL TWO
Okay, so you made it past level one. Not bad, kid. Welcome to level two.
Abstract language tends to be more emotional and introspective. The highest third of the pyramid focuses on ideas and concepts such as thoughts and feelings and love and dreams.
When a character is inside his own head daydreaming, waxing poetic, or reflecting on recent events, this is called "navel gazing", and readers tend to have a low tolerance for it... unless that moment has genuinely been earned.
This time we'll start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up:
Concrete (lower on the pyramid):
Max's fluffy golden retriever ears twitched as he sniffed the air, his tail wagging furiously.
Middle ground:
Max was always eager to explore, his curious nature driving him to investigate every new scent and sound.
Abstract (higher on the pyramid):
The unconditional love and loyalty of a dog, like Max, is a reminder of the purest form of companionship.
Pay special attention to that third example. Have you ever read a "stream of consciousness" story?
I'm sure the tragic teen who wrote it has connected strongly with his own story... But he can't seem to get anyone else to care and doesn't understand why. He's loaded it with tears and tragedy and being so sad. Why doesn't anyone want to read it? It's so full of meaning about the human condition and the pain of existence. Why won't anyone feel sorry for him?
The answer? The abstraction wasn't earned. (That's part of why good poetry is so difficult to write.)
The short story I shared the other day, One Last Dream, features many abstract concepts, such as dreams, love, mythological creatures, magic, and the afterlife. That's why I spent time building verisimilitude.
The very first paragraph starts with concrete details of a room and a serious situation, illustrated with relatable, real world analogies. And a hook.
Before we ever enter William's dream, it's establish that we're in Victorian England circa ~1850s, more specifically Dartmoor (a region well known for ghosts and fairy sightings), and that William suffers from TB, a very real and serious disease.
The world within the story is already becoming more concrete.
The paragraph where the doctors try real world period-accurate treatments is very much there to ground the reader and stand contrast to the upcoming dream sequence.
...sent to an upper class sanatoria where doctors prescribed leeches to draw the evil humours from his body.
This concrete groundwork allows the reader to more easily believe a sylph could have been in the room with this family.
Even the sylph's brand of magic is grounded in reality throughout the story, utilizing wind in realistic, tangible ways. And her powers are limited, lending an extra dimension to its realism.
Of course, William wanted Cora to be more than just a figment of his imagination.
...searching the rippling curtains and dancing drapes for shimmers and whispers, catching glimpses of what he swore were flowing hemlines and windblown tresses.
He wanted her to be lower on the Pyramid of Abstraction, so he made her less abstract the only way he knew how:
Through sketches and scrawlings, he gave her form, coloring in the vaguest details of a face that only his dreams had conjured.
Adding realistic detail not only helps immerse your readers, but like I said it lets you earn the right to be more abstract later. This is part of why portal fantasies like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - which have their grounding in the real world - work so well. It's also why writing fiction set entirely in a different world tends to be much more difficult.
During the movie Inside-Out, Joy, Sadness, and Bing-Bong stumble their way into a Thought Abstraction Chamber. With each passing second, they ascend the Pyramid of Abstraction.
This is a fascinating scene for several reasons: Joy and Sadness are themselves abstract ideas, emotions anthropomorphized to make them more concrete, more human, and more likeable. So if their likeable human attributes were suddenly lost to abstraction, it would feel tragic to the audience. And rightfully so. Something of substance would be lost.
On an even more concrete level, it would be a tragic loss for the young human main character Riley, as losing her real world ability to feel core emotions like joy and sadness would leave her an anhedonic automaton, robbed of her warm personality forever.
At first, Joy and Bing-Bong think the chamber is kind of neat despite Sadness' warnings, but that's the boiling frog effect’s trademark “canary in the coalmine”. The situation quickly becomes a crisis they almost can't escape. Removing concreteness devolves them into abstract art, and soon enough they begin to further unravel.
The highest point of the pyramid, the very tippy-top, is utter nonsense. "The animal" becomes "werklzvjilkxcj". Meaningless noise.
This is the same path the art world has taken, and it's indeed a crisis. When trash and feces start being celebrated as high art, and when rusty nonsensical sculptures are erected in your city's "downtown riverfront revival project", it's a sure sign you're in a dystopic, fallen society. There's nothing concrete left to support the culture. At least Joy, Sadness, and Bing-Bong had access to an easy exit door, but we do not.
The toothpaste was out of the tube with the advent of the Modern Age and continued leaking through the Post-Modern Age. Unfortunately, all we can do now is strap in for the bumpy ride known as the MetaModern Age.
Hopefully our children's children come out the other side better for it. Better enough to avoid this vicious cycle the next time a beautiful society is miraculously born from the ashes.
While we wait, we can continue creating art to a meaningful standard. The fact that indie artists strive to create beautiful things everyday is perfectly normal at this stage of societal decline; it's reality itself protesting because things have gone too abstract.
Fortunately for us, time heals all wounds. Thanks to the power of immutable truth, normalcy will one day be restored, and it will be partly in thanks to indie artists like us.
We've only scratched the surface of the Pyramid of Abstraction, so I hope you'll join me next time as we plumb the secrets of its inner depths.