Reader,
Humble scribe here and hello happy holidays. May the great gods bless you always; may the heavens & earth calm your mind.
In pressing these various thoughts into clay, your humble scribe has encountered a problem that— well, to be frank, that he might have foreseen. The problem being that, in undertaking the task of talking (writing) about writing, he has confirmed that, yes, everything connects. He has many "topics"; he's written thousands of words. But every topic is linked in a tumbling landscape of spiderwebbed mess such that any attempt to focus—even upon some quite detailed sub-topic—blunders into engagement with all of the rest. Each post he might write to share with you in this space is a marble that, upon grasping, he finds endlessly linked: to a candelabra, the moon, and the concept of love and a waterfall— oops! Also, it turns out, it is not a marble. The thing he first grasped: not a marble at all. It turns out to be (say) a tiger. The sky.
This makes much of the discussion jumbled and unclear — as if all terms must be pre-defined, understood. Which...being unclear is precisely not the point. But, equally: existing, with respect to these posts, is the point. In fact: the point.
So, Reader, sorry for tumbles of speech and of logic; effort has been made, truly, to keep both to a minimum. And with that let's begin. Let us talk about clarity. In fact, we can start with more focus than that.
Let's start with: frictions.
Definitions are hard. For our purposes here, what "frictions" means is: tiny drags on the Reader's attention; tiny demands made of the Reader's ability to intuit linkages in the text.
The "tiny" part is important. We are not talking about errors, or clear (as it were) failures of clarity — problems that conventional editing will address. We are talking about micro-problems, things an editor might not notice or might, upon noticing, consciously leave in out of deference to authorial 'style'. The trouble being that, over time and in accumulation, these 'elements' make a 'style' that is crappy.
Let's use an example.
There are so many frictions that might screw us up here.
A huge one: the cutesy (dis)ordering of clauses. She'd been "equitable as possible," had she? About what??? Here it is useful to note context: this was the first sentence of a paragraph. So, even if the broad topic and moment in time are (hopefully) clear to the Reader, there is still—by convention—a new thought on offer. A new thought about which the heroine might be, in this case, "equitable." But what is it?
Addressing this brings up our first key point. Because, in fact, the sentence is not unclear. The question of what "she" (we'll get to that: the "she") had been "equitable" about is not, semantically speaking, bungled. There is a comma two words after "equitable"; the four words immediately following that comma explain what it is she'd been "equitable" about. If someone read this whole sentence and were asked, 'So, what was it that 'she' had been 'equitable' about?' they would, in most cases, be able to answer.
Doesn't matter.
be able to answer. , left unanswered: literally the next four words after the comma explicate precisely what it was she'd been 'equitable' about. BUT: how many readers will have that small, tiny snag? How many will experience, however briefly, a momentary jolt of not following meaning, a bump in the road they must take through the tale? One out of a hundred? okay sorry (honestly): One-in-a-Hundred, you may be on your own. 15/100? hm. that...is not good. 32? shit. 40? more? shitting fuck -- sentence: broken.
A similar point could be made about the 'Real talk' frame that kicks off the sentence. It's a stylistic flourish, so it adds something there. But it may not be immediately clear to all readers what exactly it means: why is the talk is 'real'? is this 'real' talk the thing that was just said (above), or what's about to be said? Et cetera. Now, your humble scribe sometimes overlooks some of these questions -- sometimes you do leap, and ask readers to follow. But is precisely why not asking readers to make any unnecessary stupid tiny little jumps is important. So if you love your 'real talk', if that has to be in there: maybe change up the cutesy misordering just after it -- that moment where some readers might not know the answer to 'equitable about what?'
Again, the question here absolutely is not: 'is it clear, soon enough?' This is not non-fiction; it is not argumentative prose. That does not mean it cannot make demands of the reader -- big, surfaced ?s left explicitly unanswered. Or maybe subtle, folded-in questions left not-even-asked. But neither of those categories apply to these frictions; these frictions are drag, they are weight, they are burden. Each creates load in the reader's working brain; load that your humble scribe may want/need for elsewehere, load that you (the reader) may not even acknowledge. You may just know: nah. didn't like that so much.
A fantastic, terrifying further example: pronouns.
if you literally know from the sentence before, and are a supergood Reader (and Reader, if you can put up with my sh1t: you are) — it still
every confusing pronoun
and define: confusing
it does not mean an editor would be — hmmm, to whom does this refer.
it means the reader's brain has to make just this tiiiiiiny leap in connection, because there's been just one or two more sentences, a few more words or one thought too many between the actual noun and the pronoun it refers to. Like how many tiny, tiny little snaggy things make up velcro — each confusing pronoun is one tiny hook.
put a few in, even, just — you really slow your sh1t down at your readers' disservice
Emmy swallowed.
...
Warrior Emmy reached up to—
hWOOP!
rising; onstage.
"nrrf. (hello). Yup." Jake gave Emmy a smile, letting go of her hand. "Yeah just the PSU, but. Zap. Ded rig."
the cuteness with the name, emmy --> warrior Emmy
changing "Jake gave her" to "Jake gave Emmy"
tiny little frictions
not clarity. a lot, a lot, about clarity -- of diction and usage, and then of course more broadly of story. but this is not. I think even a reader who's skimming--generally my enemy reader; the person I am happy not to be writing for--I think even that reader would get that "she" is Emmy, here. Grace (Emmy's big sister) is also in this scene, and she's prominent in the first half, but she's at this stage receded into background and not had her name mentioned or been giving a visual check-in for a few paragraphs.
BUT. even for me, reading -- and presumably i'm paying attention to this text -- it's a TINY bit quicker, easier, less frictious to read "Emmy" and not "her", there -- a tiiiiny bit less work to lock into identity and image of that instant. So: change it.
I think I think a lot about these tradeoffs because I'm aware that, in other ways, I ask a lot of a reader. And I want to "ask" those things that I ask; because those are the things that I value and love as a reader, too, so I want to give those to people. But I think an important/useful flip to that--to "asking a lot" of a reader--is to try to make the easy parts easy, the smooth parts smooth.
a lot of it is just the summation of moments of "ask"
there's a moment of "ask" when I go from Emmy to Warrior Emmy; why is that word in there? I sort of remember it from before, what's it mean? etc.
there's a moment of ask after, with "PSU". a lot of readers won't really know what that is; I'm hoping even those who don't know will quickly gloss it as a "tech thing fine whatever", but it's still an ask. and if don't know or do that (quickly gloss it and put it away) then it's really an ask.
so so far tiny tiny frictions is in here -- so gone when it's done
anything else?
Humble scribe here and hello happy holidays. May the great gods bless you always; may the heavens & earth calm your mind.
In pressing these various thoughts into clay, your humble scribe has encountered a problem that— well, to be frank, that he might have foreseen. The problem being that, in undertaking the task of talking (writing) about writing, he has confirmed that, yes, everything connects. He has many "topics"; he's written thousands of words. But every topic is linked in a tumbling landscape of spiderwebbed mess such that any attempt to focus—even upon some quite detailed sub-topic—blunders into engagement with all of the rest. Each post he might write to share with you in this space is a marble that, upon grasping, he finds endlessly linked: to a candelabra, the moon, and the concept of love and a waterfall— oops! Also, it turns out, it is not a marble. The thing he first grasped: not a marble at all. It turns out to be (say) a tiger. The sky.
This makes much of the discussion jumbled and unclear — as if all terms must be pre-defined, understood. Which...being unclear is precisely not the point. But, equally: existing, with respect to these posts, is the point. In fact: the point.
So, Reader, sorry for tumbles of speech and of logic; effort has been made, truly, to keep both to a minimum. And with that let's begin. Let us talk about clarity. In fact, we can start with more focus than that.
Let's start with: frictions.
Definitions are hard. For our purposes here, what "frictions" means is: tiny drags on the Reader's attention; tiny demands made of the Reader's ability to intuit linkages in the text.
The "tiny" part is important. We are not talking about errors, or clear (as it were) failures of clarity — problems that conventional editing will address. We are talking about micro-problems, things an editor might not notice or might, upon noticing, consciously leave in out of deference to authorial 'style'. The trouble being that, over time and in accumulation, these 'elements' make a 'style' that is crappy.
Let's use an example.
Real talk: she truly had been equitable as possible, sharing the loot out with Bryn and with Raif.
(The sentence above used to be in the story. It no longer is, though its context may still be familiar to some. Quoting it like this—bereft of context—is deliberate, even if that seems to be counter-intuitive. Much of this discussion depends on context, yes. But: the point is to look at a unit (a sentence), stripped out on its own. To imagine the problems it might present, without the contextual clutter that is necessary to assess how bad it really is or is not.)
There are so many frictions that might screw us up here.
A huge one: the cutesy (dis)ordering of clauses. She'd been "equitable as possible," had she? About what??? Here it is useful to note context: this was the first sentence of a paragraph. So, even if the broad topic and moment in time are (hopefully) clear to the Reader, there is still—by convention—a new thought on offer. A new thought about which the heroine might be, in this case, "equitable." But what is it?
Addressing this brings up our first key point. Because, in fact, the sentence is not unclear. The question of what "she" (we'll get to that: the "she") had been "equitable" about is not, semantically speaking, bungled. There is a comma two words after "equitable"; the four words immediately following that comma explain what it is she'd been "equitable" about. If someone read this whole sentence and were asked, 'So, what was it that 'she' had been 'equitable' about?' they would, in most cases, be able to answer.
Doesn't matter.
be able to answer. , left unanswered: literally the next four words after the comma explicate precisely what it was she'd been 'equitable' about. BUT: how many readers will have that small, tiny snag? How many will experience, however briefly, a momentary jolt of not following meaning, a bump in the road they must take through the tale? One out of a hundred? okay sorry (honestly): One-in-a-Hundred, you may be on your own. 15/100? hm. that...is not good. 32? shit. 40? more? shitting fuck -- sentence: broken.
A similar point could be made about the 'Real talk' frame that kicks off the sentence. It's a stylistic flourish, so it adds something there. But it may not be immediately clear to all readers what exactly it means: why is the talk is 'real'? is this 'real' talk the thing that was just said (above), or what's about to be said? Et cetera. Now, your humble scribe sometimes overlooks some of these questions -- sometimes you do leap, and ask readers to follow. But is precisely why not asking readers to make any unnecessary stupid tiny little jumps is important. So if you love your 'real talk', if that has to be in there: maybe change up the cutesy misordering just after it -- that moment where some readers might not know the answer to 'equitable about what?'
Again, the question here absolutely is not: 'is it clear, soon enough?' This is not non-fiction; it is not argumentative prose. That does not mean it cannot make demands of the reader -- big, surfaced ?s left explicitly unanswered. Or maybe subtle, folded-in questions left not-even-asked. But neither of those categories apply to these frictions; these frictions are drag, they are weight, they are burden. Each creates load in the reader's working brain; load that your humble scribe may want/need for elsewehere, load that you (the reader) may not even acknowledge. You may just know: nah. didn't like that so much.
A fantastic, terrifying further example: pronouns.
if you literally know from the sentence before, and are a supergood Reader (and Reader, if you can put up with my sh1t: you are) — it still
every confusing pronoun
and define: confusing
it does not mean an editor would be — hmmm, to whom does this refer.
it means the reader's brain has to make just this tiiiiiiny leap in connection, because there's been just one or two more sentences, a few more words or one thought too many between the actual noun and the pronoun it refers to. Like how many tiny, tiny little snaggy things make up velcro — each confusing pronoun is one tiny hook.
put a few in, even, just — you really slow your sh1t down at your readers' disservice
Emmy swallowed.
...
Warrior Emmy reached up to—
hWOOP!
rising; onstage.
"nrrf. (hello). Yup." Jake gave Emmy a smile, letting go of her hand. "Yeah just the PSU, but. Zap. Ded rig."
the cuteness with the name, emmy --> warrior Emmy
changing "Jake gave her" to "Jake gave Emmy"
tiny little frictions
not clarity. a lot, a lot, about clarity -- of diction and usage, and then of course more broadly of story. but this is not. I think even a reader who's skimming--generally my enemy reader; the person I am happy not to be writing for--I think even that reader would get that "she" is Emmy, here. Grace (Emmy's big sister) is also in this scene, and she's prominent in the first half, but she's at this stage receded into background and not had her name mentioned or been giving a visual check-in for a few paragraphs.
BUT. even for me, reading -- and presumably i'm paying attention to this text -- it's a TINY bit quicker, easier, less frictious to read "Emmy" and not "her", there -- a tiiiiny bit less work to lock into identity and image of that instant. So: change it.
I think I think a lot about these tradeoffs because I'm aware that, in other ways, I ask a lot of a reader. And I want to "ask" those things that I ask; because those are the things that I value and love as a reader, too, so I want to give those to people. But I think an important/useful flip to that--to "asking a lot" of a reader--is to try to make the easy parts easy, the smooth parts smooth.
a lot of it is just the summation of moments of "ask"
there's a moment of "ask" when I go from Emmy to Warrior Emmy; why is that word in there? I sort of remember it from before, what's it mean? etc.
there's a moment of ask after, with "PSU". a lot of readers won't really know what that is; I'm hoping even those who don't know will quickly gloss it as a "tech thing fine whatever", but it's still an ask. and if don't know or do that (quickly gloss it and put it away) then it's really an ask.
so so far tiny tiny frictions is in here -- so gone when it's done
anything else?