I’ve been thinking lately about conceptualizing a book as a machine, partly because I was pondering the choice of that word in the message on Woody Guthrie’s guitar, and partly because “machine” is a broad category which is useful for considering the different ways books can work, which is on my mind a lot these days as I release some books and work on others.

A machine is “a device that directs and controls energy to produce a certain effect.” A book directs and controls the reader’s intellectual and emotional energy. It is inert without the reader as operator.

It can be as simple and transparent as a lever or a pulley, and it can be as complex and opaque as a laptop. It can do things other than the manfacturer intended; you can make almond meal in your coffee grinder, and no one can tell you that’s wrong.

Max Gladstone* has referred to a certain quality of prose as “aerodynamic“, which I find incredibly useful, but it also makes me consider what the moving object is.** It might be a ball moving down a slope, which is an intensely pleasurable experience, and has the benefit of being reproducible and unlikely to go wrong. It does not leave something lasting behind, but it isn’t meant to. That said, many aerodynamic objects do leave traces behind. One could, in a certain mood, consider the book as guillotine.

My work, especially in certain books (The Valkyrie and The Chatelaine, I’d say) has a tendency to what Max calls “texture”, in the sense that the sentences tend to snag in the reader’s mind. While The Valkyrie is a short book and absolutely jam packed with action scenes, it continually invites the reader to stop and think, because of the kind of prose and because of the narrative voice. The speed for the characters is not the same as the speed for the reader.

It is possible to have both texture and aerodynamics, as Max acknowledges. This was my goal (even though I didn’t think about it in those words) in The Embroidered Book. It’s still not Dan Brown-fast, by any means, but I did try to use emotion and tension to keep the reader moving along, and some readers have told me it “reads faster than it looks” — it’s a thick book. When I write my Assassin’s Creed tie-in novels, I try to make them immersive (both because that’s the kind of writer I am, and because immersion in a historical setting is one of the strengths of the games.) But I also try to keep them fairly fast from a reader perspective (this was one thing my editor’s wise comments really helped me with in the revision stage of The Resurrection Plot.) The book I’m writing now (The Sharp Sisters) needs to be on the faster end of my personal spectrum, I think.

But if a book is a machine, if it is there to direct energy toward a certain effect, how can we conceptualize those effects? No shade at all on a hair-rising slide down an icy slope, which I love as much as the next Canadian. And no shade on, say, the book as pasta maker, which may only have a few possible outcomes but nourishes people all the same. But there must be other things we are doing, or can be doing, given the heterogeneity implied by the idea of a machine. Can we, really, imagine a book as a machine that kills fascists? Is a book aimed squarely at an ideology (let’s say Nineteen Eighty-Four, for the sake of argument) a weapon that can be turned in any direction depending on who picks it up? I think that’s too simplistic, despite the tendency of fascists to reference Nineteen Eighty-Four these days; I suspect that anyone who reads the book will come away with some questions about totalitarianism. Maybe a book is like a chainsaw, that can rebound if you use it unwisely.

When I imagine my own books as machines, I would like to think of them as something like an 18th century printing press: a little eccentric, shiny but based on older models, requiring a bit of muscle and concentration to operate, but well oiled and satisfying to those who make the effort, and leaving behind something of beauty and purpose that is a bit different every time, and that reflects the operator’s decisions as well as the manufacturer’s. (Side note: I have an unpublished novel that features an 18th century printing press heavily. Maybe I will polish it up and get it out into the world one of these days.)

Could we think about all books as a sort of perpetual motion machine, in which books build other books, the way the nanobots build other nanobots in Michael Crichton’s Prey?

This blog post is full of rhetorical questions, I know. But I am finding them useful to my current writing process; I’m thinking now about drafting a book as building a machine, and asking myself how I want the reader experience of operating that machine to feel, and what I want that machine to produce.

*If you haven’t read Max Gladstone’s work, you’re in for a treat.

**Other interesting thoughts about prose and reader movement lately from Lincoln Michel and Molly Templeton.