Chasing down clarity

[Challah Rajni]

Instead of pestering the heroes in the critiques section with another quarterly dose of ornate and impenetrable prose, I'd like to see if I can get a discussion going about clarity.

Have any of you written something that flowed well, sounded great, but when handed to enthusiastic readers, you are handed back the story with a response that boarders on universal audience confusion?

So I must ask the main question: what does clarity in writing mean to you?

What steps do you take to make sure that the idea that you have in your head gets to the reader?

What is your approach to writing? Do you want the audience to pick up on everything instantly? Or do you try to hide things, hoping to dazzle a careful reader?

I'm sure that clarity goes beyond immaculate grammar. Do you adjust sentence structure not just to character and story, but also for the audience?

 

[The Judge]

Discounting the reactions of my other half, no, I don't think I've had universal confusion (except for my 75 worders, but that's another (short) story). When I have had confusion it's tended to be in minor matters which have been easily amended, eg who exactly is speaking, where they are standing.

I try to cultivate a style which is easy to read, since I do want everyone to follow what is going on. I'm writing for people who enjoy reading but don't want to spent hours on a single page deciphering what I'm getting at.

My feeling is that I should work hard at my prose so my readers don't have to -- I don't want them to have to read things twice in order to understand, but if they do read things twice they will pick up references, clues, links which might not have been evident on first reading. So yes, I do most certainly hide things also, but hidden in plain sight as it were. At a minor level, I love word play, so (provided the context allows, obviously) I will sometimes choose a word which has a double meaning just to raise a smile if someone gets the ambiguity/possible pun. eg in describing someone's reaction to a character's unexpected hair colour I refer to it as "a shock of gold" -- the pun being that he is shocked/surprised at it, but also it's a nod to the expression "a shock of hair" (though hers isn't wild and unruly at that moment).

I think grammar has a good deal to do with clarity; punctuation certainly has. A couple of my characters talk in long, convoluted sentences at times, and the only way to keep everyone on board is to ensure the commas and semi-colons etc are properly used.



PS It occurs to me this isn't a Workshop matter as such, so I'll move it to the Aspiring Writers general section.

 

[Xelah]

Instead of pestering the heroes

That almost sounds like I have a fan. That's close enough for me. As my first act as a celebrity, I demand you begin making harassing phone calls to publishers for me.

As for writing something confusing, all the Emm Effing time. Usually I can go back and make it all make sense, unless I'm emotionally comprimised and Kirk beams back onto my ship somehow and then taunt me about my... wait, I'm not Spock. No, my writing is flawless.

 

[ctg]

Clarity is that you write what you know, but it doesn't mean that if you're a lawyear or a Dilbert that you write a piece of lawtext or a manual, as those things doesn't really interest the common man.

So, what you write is what you know; you put in, or actually drop in the facts but you won't go on forever about those facts no matter how appealing they are to you. Those what you drop in has to appeal the ideal reader, but not in the boring way.

Therefore the clarity is about the expocition, the action and the pacing, but it doesn't end there, as in the real life your prose has to flow clearly. It has tell one thing at the time in such a tempo that your ideal reader isn't bored to the death. But it also has to tell these things in such a way that its clear that what you're telling, you're telling because a) it is needed to be told in that particular point b) it's what you character sees, feels, hears and c) it is part of the story.

Rest, you can forget. Simple as that.

 

[Toby Frost]

Crass as this may sound, for me clarity simply means putting in the right amount of the right words in the right order. I recently read a story by someone (nobody here) who wasn't writing in their natural voice but what they considered a writer to sound like - it sounded as if it had been put through an online translator and translated back. That said, I remember thinking that Neuromancer was a great novel that had had a fifth of its words removed at random, in that it was well-imagined and simply impossible at times to work out what was going on. Perhaps it had been hard boiled for too long. (Or perhaps I wasn't concentrating enough).

But there probably is a time for vagueness. Often, especially in a moment of drama, it's necessary just to give ideas as appropriate to what the characters might notice in a scene. Say the hero is running away from a man, who then pulls a gun and starts shooting. It may be of importance that he's holding a revolver, in which case it ought to be made clear. But otherwise, it doesn't much matter, and would the hero note anyway?

Perhaps this just goes to show how useful it is to wait a bit before re-reading. My own innate feeling is that the reader should usually know exactly what's going on at the time, but the broader details can be dripped in as necessary. So, it's vital for the reader to know how Jim is going to take out the guards and escape, but not vital to know what the car is like he's going to escape in, or quite why Jim was captured, until it comes up in the story. (Usually.)

 

[Nik]

Too often, my readers didn't have a clue what I was talking about.

Several justifiably savage critiques helped with that...

 

[chrispenycate]

I suspect – and I haven't mastered the skill, so I can't be sure – that, just as characterisation involves more than looking at your protagonist from the outside, requires entering his skin and seeing through his eyes, that clarity involves much the same technique for your readers.

While generally held to be incomprehensible, I don't deliberately obfuscate (well, all right, sometimes in welcoming threads); it's just that my mental processes rarely align with those of my potential readership. Something that seems totally straightforward to me is apparently convoluted in the extreme to the bulk of humanity.

Obviously my choice of vocabulary doesn't help; but it is the thought form behind it that is alien. Part of which is due to the fact that I spend half of my time thinking in a different language, but my thought processes or weird to them, too. So a large part must be that I see the world differently; and to coney that difference I must understand the POV of someone more conventionally aligned to 'reality' (or the consensus of what that must be).

Do I want to? There have been the Ballards and the Delanys who wrote outside the box, and were accepted even so; but I can't compare my writing to theirs. On the other hand, I've no intention of trying to live from it; perhaps two or three people who appreciate what I produce would suffice?

Be that as it may, however far my writing might stray from the conventional, to me it's still totally clear, as long as I'm not expected to cut it down to some ridiculous total like seventy-five words.

 

[J Riff]

Concrete/abstract. Ambiguity vs. specificity. Neologism not barbarism.
75 words is a normal sentence for Chris. )