Fungible Convictions

From Marilynne Robinson and her apologia for fiction “You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True”:

I know of no way to parse that phrase, once upon a time, in terms of English usage—it seems sui generis. In the same way the Latin writers used the word olim, to mean, paradoxically, you need not doubt what I say because it is not true. It may be that, in acknowledging fiction as fiction, the readers or hearers divest themselves of a kind of self-interest. We are normally protective of our sense of reality—we want to see ourselves, and to be seen, as competent judges of the truth of things. This is how we retain a faith in our own sanity, among other things. Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness—in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled.

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In the United States, we are a solitary bunch, and we have very few of what can be called purely social values—that, for example, families should live in the same town, that an unmarried daughter should take care of her mother in her mother’s old age, that a church’s mission is to minister to the weakest everywhere, not just those in attendance on Sunday. We Americans lock our doors, and we watch or read the news whose slant we’re prepared to agree with. We’re individualistic, awfully so.

But fiction rallies against individualism. It forces the reader to believe in a world he is not—can never—be fully a part of, because it belongs to the writer, lives in her mind. To read fiction, you must be humble, you must be social. You not only suspend your disbelief; you suspend beliefs. To that effect, fiction, to the militantly individualistic, is a powerful, terrifying weapon.

Congratulations to editors Brigid Hughes and Diane Mehta on the official launch of A Public Space!

My copy arrived in the mail today, and the only break I’m taking from it is to write them an e-mail and to write this post.

It’s got a beautifully designed two-color layout, and the second piece—Rick Moody on the James Frey controversy—just kicked my butt. An excerpt is warranted:

When I blame the culture entire for this mess, what I blame the culture for is its phobia at the sweet labor of reading. I do it myself occassionally (to my shame and regret): make do with the sketchiest acquaintance with a book as though I knew what was inside its covers. This won’t do. Reading requires a persistent, engaged, long-term relationship with a book. It requires passion commitment and patience, that most unfashionable of contemporary virtues. Books that are slapdash and careless about these ideals of the reading experience, books that are made for the television market, or in order simply to be review-worthy, do not, in my view, have that much in common with the kinds of books that lie around for decades and contribute to history. But books that are anything less reek with the perfume of mendacity.

Here’s hoping A Public Space lies around for decades. Subscribe here.

Or as someone who isn’t Yogi Berra would say, when you’re publishing longer readings—like short stories or feature articles—online, take care to design your text for easy reading on a screen.

We still don’t have a generation of lit buffs who prefer to read literature on a screen rather than on a page. But the Internet offers low production costs, free distribution, and instantaneous sharing, so until technology like Sony’s Reader becomes commonplace, we all need to follow design standards that aid readability:

1. Use a sans serif typeface for blocks of text.

Serifs (the small additions to the lines of certain letters) help your eyes quickly identify similarly shaped letters and make blocks of text easier to read—but only on paper! Even the best computer screens don’t have resolutions fine enough to render serifs in a clean way; thus, at smaller type sizes, text with serifs looks noisy and strains the eye. Sans serif types—Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial, and others—are rendered on a screen with much more fluidity, and are thus easier to read.

Here’s an example . . .

The website for new literary journal A Public Space just posted a piece by Charles D’Ambrosio as a preview of their first issue. Compare the legibility of the original piece (using the serif type Times) vs. my change (using the sans serif type Verdana):

Less legible original, using Times (serif typeface)

More legible modification, using Verdana (sans serif typeface)

Certainly you’ve seen respected online publications, such as NYTimes.com and Salon, use serif typefaces, but they happen to know that you should . . .

2. Always set a comfortable font size and leading (line-height).

Though the Times and Salon choose to use serif types, they greatly increase readability by using good-sized fonts and giving each line of text some room to breathe. Again, let’s play with A Public Space:

Less legible original

More legible modification

Of course if you’re going to take font size and line height seriously, you must . . .

3. Try to use relative units of measurement, like percentages, ems, and pixels, but never absolute ones like centimeters or picas.

Why? Because when people don’t think you’ve used a comfortable text size, they can and will resize it:

Using sizes that are relative to what came before guarantees that all text elements resize in proportion to one another—and in proportion to any elastic layout elements you may have used. Press Command+ or Crtl+ to see how that can affect static-column sites like Fungible Convictions.

Having text—and, if possible, a site—that resizes seamlessly is important to all users, but it is especially important to anyone with failing vision. Hopefully if we all design our text well online, that will include fewer of us.

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Want to change how sites are rendered in your browser too? Download the Web Developer extension for Firefox. Anyone know of something similar for Safari, let me know at andrew.whitacre [at] fungibleconvictions.com.