On Beauty and Its Opposite: Writing Toward Aesthetic Force

This is part four of a five-part series on the craft of writing by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante.

True beauty in literature isn’t ornamental. It isn’t a lyrical flourish on the surface of pain, or a reward for rendering trauma with the right degree of humility. It’s what Sarah Lewis, in The Rise, calls “aesthetic force”—a quality that stuns, alters, destabilizes, and lodges itself in our memory not because it comforts us, but because it insists that we see something differently than before. In writing, as in life, the beautiful often travels with its opposite.

In our classes and in our forthcoming book from W.W. Norton, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre, we’ve noticed students eager to portray darkness—pain, trauma, disillusionment—thinking that to be serious is to be bleak. That’s believing that a dark piece has to be dismal in both what happens (catastrophes!) and language. But what’s more difficult, and often more powerful, is finding beauty in that darkness. We’re not talking about tidy catharsis or moral uplift. We’re talking about work that engages readers in contradiction and shows them something previously invisible, even if they don’t want to see it.

Lisa Bellamy’s poem “Thank You for the Tulips,” highlighted as an example in The Lab, does just that. The poem’s speaker, a mother, receives flowers from her adult daughter. The occasion is seemingly benign. But Bellamy uses this gentle gesture to open a torrent of confession: “I am sorry I was a drunk when you were a kid…I am sorry you fell out of your stroller when you were a toddler because I was hungover and forgot to buckle you in.” The tulips—a conventionally beautiful image—anchor the poem. But the force comes from the interplay of image and admission. The speaker’s regret is so palpable that the reader, rather than recoiling, leans in.

Beauty here isn’t a mask. It’s a lens. The images the poet uses: iridescent tulips, the daughter’s flecked eyes, the hipster vegan donuts—all emerge in relief against failures of care and memory. By the time the poem ends, “You were a delicious baby,” readers feel something like grace—not because the speaker is redeemed, but because we’ve been invited into the complexity of her love and guilt without being told what to think.

We often ask our students to go small—focus on an image, a gesture, a line of dialogue—and to let it bloom in meaning rather than pin it down.

This is an example of how we might think of aesthetic force as a generative tool in our creative writing. It’s not about what the piece claims, but what it does. And it’s something that often occurs—not in moments of resolution—but in the tension between what’s shown and what’s withheld.

In her novel Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s narrator returns home to find his lover dead from an overdose. The prose is quiet, almost resigned: “Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind.” No breakdown. No soaring elegy. Just observation. And yet the drama in the language is matched by tenderness. In the scene, the narrator dresses his girlfriend’s naked body before anyone sees. Later, when he observes who shows up to the funeral and who doesn’t—the hypocrisy of the community, the tragedy of addiction and loss of young life emerge along with the narrator’s fragile dignity. This combination delivers so much more feeling than a hardened (or weepy) version of death ever could.

It’s not just what’s described, but how it’s rendered. That’s what we ask our students to notice in the writing that moves them most. The syntax, the diction, the tonal shifts—these are tools for creating aesthetic force.

In a conversation at the New York Public Library with Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Lewis described aesthetic force as something that slips past the gates of logic and hits us emotionally before we can explain why. That’s what happened when an Apollo 8 astronaut turned his camera back toward Earth and captured Earthrise. It wasn’t just a technical marvel. The photo of the blue sphere awed those who saw it, moved them beyond the thinking mind, and stunned them with its floating blue display of our planet’s glory and fragility. Historians say the image helped launch the first Earth Day.

In literature, that same force can arrive through a perfectly placed image or an unexpectedly intimate moment. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, the narrator speaks of gambling in a way that reads almost like theology: “We gamble with the hope of winning. But it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.” The voice doesn’t explain. It seduces.

We often ask our students to go small—focus on an image, a gesture, a line of dialogue—and to let it bloom in meaning rather than pin it down. In one anonymous student piece, an arm severed in a school shooting is described as “the pink of a cherry blossom…a flower just starting to unfurl.” The horror is obvious. The beauty is unsettling. And that’s the point.

When talking about the visual arts, Lewis says esthetic force can make us gasp. In writing, aetheric force can cause us to stop reading, close our eyes, hug the book to our chests and breathe. It sharpens our attention. And it reminds us, again and again, that a beautiful sentence doesn’t have to describe a beautiful thing. It just has to reconfigure the way we see.

Our advice to writers? Find what dazzles you and describe it, even if (especially if?) it also frightens or disgusts you. Make the image clear. Resist easy resolution. And don’t underestimate the power of beauty—not as decoration, but as revelation.

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