(I claim no credit or blame for this post; an accomplice wrote it, and asked not to be credited by name. Enjoy!)

X Factors and je ne sais quoi

Blake and I were having an interesting discussion recently, which was inspired by some of her recent experiences, and she thought that it might be worth turning into a guest post. However, we had such different thoughts about it that she thought it would be better if I explain myself in my own words. So with thanks to Blake and her lovely colleagues for permitting my ramblings, this is that post.

A common but difficult to explain human experience is that regarding the “X factor” or je ne sais quoi. This can be both a boon and a problem for the working writer.

On the downside, it could be argued that nothing exists in our world except what we get down on the page, and there are many things which might at first glance be confused with an intangible, but in fact are just things that are tangible but little considered. I actually greatly enjoy introspecting about such things, or capturing the essence and mechanics of something I think is little considered, because I think these are the things most likely to stick with the reader long after they put down my work. For example, Terry Pratchett in the Tiffany Aching series has Tiffany ruminate often on the intrinsically onomatopoetic nature of all language, not just words specifically meant to evoke a sound. This might be, to some extent, an example of the art imitating the author—we as writers can’t help but think a lot about the nature of words, the way a visual artist can’t help but think about paint. All of this is to say that there is a fine line between true ambiguity and a latent insight that might be worthwhile, or even occasionally mildly transformative, to explore more deeply.

On the upside, in the same way that the careful use of shadow is important in film, the deft use of the undefined and undefinable is an important part of the writer’s toolkit (I think this concept in general, the importance and deliberate use of what is not there in writing, is of deep enough importance that it could justify an entire blog post in its own right). As regards specifically those things in the worlds we write that are undefined, this concept is drawn on more obviously by some genres than others. As we consider the examples below, there is a theme I will return to repeatedly: the nature of the undefined in writing, of “narrative shadow”, if you will, is intrinsically dialogical. What I mean by that is that very often you as a writer are creating a certain atmosphere and tone that directs the reader to a certain place, and once the person has engaged with it properly, the careful use of nothing whatsoever in those spaces allows they, themselves, to supply the exact thing that will make the story most come alive for them, and they will do so instinctively. And once you understand this idea, what is even more interesting, and perhaps more powerful, is that this effect can be employed even for concepts that neither you, nor the reader, can actually define.

The easiest example of this to understand is in Lovecraftian fiction. This tends to lean very heavily on the trope of things beyond human comprehension—or things that can only be comprehended in a state of madness. Here the “X factor” is explicitly drawn to the fore and used to flesh out the fear of the unknown. To extend our metaphor above, it is of a piece with keeping the creature in shadow, showing only hints of certain monstrous traits, and allowing the reader to supply their own deepest fears into the blank. This is a very simple example, of course, since this is one of the best known tools in horror fiction, but it serves as a good starting point for considering this idea. Moreover we can observe in it an interesting and didactic fact—that the particular reader’s understanding of what something beyond comprehension looks like is unique to them, and may not even be something they could put into words.

Using the example of a genre that applies the undefinable in great big Bob Ross sized globs to the canvas, we can then extend the idea to more subtle applications, and realize that the same tool can be used less heavy-handedly in any genre.

The animal attraction that connects two lovers in a romance, for example, may be a thing greater than is definable by mere appearances or behaviors or shared experiences. You understand that, and your readers understand it. You can make reference to that force, which has no discrete set of words to define it and is so poorly understood that it is often ascribed magical characteristics, and despite the fact that you cannot give it a discrete name, your reader will understand what you mean by supplying their own life experiences. Even more curiously, you two will be in some sense thinking of one shared experience, even though what they supply to fill the gap—grounded in their own experiences—may be so different from what you would supply as to have nothing in common.

The je ne sais quoi can give brave knights or military men an air of protectiveness or danger—depending on whether they are a hero or a villain—a feel of competence or a sense of purposefulness. Even though these things may not be things that can be specifically described, taking the measure of someone and inferring these qualities is an experience common to every human being, and what things constitute those qualities, the observer will supply themselves. It can flesh out a wizard with an aura of power grounded in no tangible thing that can be seen or overtly observed by the senses. And on this point I will pause and expound a moment, because this also points up one of the extraordinary advantages that accrues to the medium of writing—namely, that we can reach into the viewer’s head and tell them they are feeling or experiencing something that definitionally could not be captured by any medium fully grounded in the senses. To fully use the X factor, in the final estimation, is to realize first that your primary medium as a writer is ideas, that you are not necessarily bounded to just ideas that you can name and define, and that most curiously, you are not even bounded to ideas that strictly speaking come only from within your own head.

If all of the foregoing craft notes are not convincing, then I can supply you one other reason to consider the concept, in a very different context. Most writers who have approached seriously writing in a new genre have started their journey by reading several stories in that genre, overtly for the purpose of picking up the tropes and the beats. But I would argue that the process of immersing yourself in another genre is training you not just in these things that you can define, but also a broad range of things that you cannot.

To make the concept more tangible, I will digress for a moment into the thing I’m sure you’ve heard entirely too much about lately, AI. But there is something interesting about the nature of AIs—at least certain AIs, that gets at this concept in a comprehensible way. There exists a kind of AI that is built of a multi-layered neural network. On one end there are inputs, on the other end are outputs, and in between are many layers of nodes. Each node modifies any signal it receives and outputs that modified signal. Inputs connect to the first layer of nodes, each layer of nodes connects with each other, the terminal layer of nodes connects with the output. When one trains these AIs, one puts in inputs hoping for certain expected outputs. If the output for a given input is more like what you want, you reward the AI, it reinforces the set of connections that caused that output, and therefore becomes more likely to do it. If the output is less like what you want, you punish it. Now there are many ways of approaching creating the intermediate nodes, but the important thing to understand here is that once a network becomes sufficiently complicated, the way that it parses the inputs—and what each node in the network actually “means”, which is to say, what concept is up- or downregulated when it is activated and modifies the input however it modifies it—can become “uninterrogable”. Uninterrogable simply means that the concept being represented by that node is something that humans have no name for. If you knocked out that node you might stop getting the outputs you want, but you wouldn’t be able to define in what way they were wrong, or the differences might look random and unrelated, even though you know for a fact that that one discrete node, which performs its one discrete operation, is specifically what is responsible. Indeed, in a very simple neural network, this is somewhat the default nature of nodes.

Humans, too, model this behavior to a degree. You could argue that one of the reasons to immerse yourself deeply in a genre before writing it is therefore not just to pick up the overt concepts that you can specify and define, but also to train the uninterrogable nodes in your brain that lay down beneath the surface of what can be described—the things that make the difference between a fantasy that unaccountably feels (perhaps offputtingly to some readers) like science fiction, even though it nominally hits the right story beats (I am thinking here of much of “Glory Road”), and a fantasy that just feels like a fantasy. This is another guise of the X factor, the thing that makes a thing a thing, which extends beyond those things that people can name. The things you learn without ever knowing them, and use without ever feeling them in your metaphorical hands. This is not so strange when you consider that in a way, reading yourself into a genre actually causes physical changes that make you embody it. All learned information causes changes in which neurons fire, how often and when, and what happens at the connections between those neurons. You literally rewire yourself to become more in tune with what you expose yourself to a lot of. It is therefore no great wonder that you reflect what you read a lot of, in the same way that it is no wonder that something cast in the shape of a hammer is good for hitting things.

Ultimately, then, the je ne sais quoi, while definitionally undefinable, has great power not only as a deliberate tool in our work, but as an ingredient in our literary diet that we become after eating enough of it. And even if you already are well versed in its use, perhaps this article might ironically help in better defining it, and describing its behaviors and mechanics in a way that provides insight into how to use it more deliberately in your work.