In Today’s Journal
* A Brief Interlude
* Of Interest
A Brief Interlude
Like all human beings I have personality flaws. My worst flaw is entertaining unbidden thoughts. And the worst of those occurs whenever I hear any version of “The reader will know what I mean” from a writer.
When that happens, an image leaps into my mind.
The Braying Jackass
The image is of an imaginary, heinous, gargoyle-looking creature with a dullness about the eyes. Its slathering jaws hang slack, its blistered tongue protrudes, and its upper and lower teeth are exposed in a pretentious, self-righteous grin.
It furtively looks about at the other attendees, and as it grins, it wags its forepaw and hisses, “The reader will know what we mean.”
I’ve come to think privately of that creature as “The Braying Jackass,” a mythical creature who occasionally attends lectures on the craft of writing. It isn’t there to learn but to illustrate to the other attendees that it doesn’t need to learn.
In my mind, the creature is one who speaks with pretentious certainty from a position of absolute ignorance.
Fortunately I’ve never seen one of those in my private seminars, but they’ve popped up in sessions I’ve taught at writers’ conferences and in other presentations where I was an attendee.
What I invariably want to say to those creatures is this:
“Of course the reader will know what you mean, but that isn’t the point. He might take your meaning, but not before he’s momentarily ripped out of the story. He might even enjoy a chuckle at your expense. But if you enable him to remain immersed in the story instead, you stand a much better chance of him buying your next book.”
As I wrote earlier, the writer has a responsibility to convey what s/he means to convey. That is true whether or not the writer recognizes or accepts it.
But the reader has zero responsibility to decipher your meaning and make sense of the insensible.
Nor is it the reader’s job to rewrite your misplaced modifiers or to repair passages that apparently give possession to inanimate objects or in which human parts assume human traits.
The reader’s only job is to be entertained, full stop.
So no matter how humorous some of your inadvertent mistakes are, I suggest you slash them out of your writing without mercy. Specificity matters. The only thing you can be certain the reader will understand is exactly what you put on the page, no less and no more.
But as I wrote at the top of the previous segment, I’m more of a stoic these days.
- Writers who want to get this stuff and be as clear as they can—both for the sake of the reader and the sake of their own sales—will get it.
- And those who would rather not “worry about that stuff” and depend on the reader to interpret their meaning will continue to make soup sandwiches.
I hope you’re among the former.
Regarding “Absolutes”
Regarding “absolutes,” I trust that you know the difference between “never” and “almost never” and the difference between “always” and “most of the time.”
A “minute” is another absolute.
Whereas a “minute” is a precise, specific length of time, a “moment” indicates a less-specific, more vague period of time. A “moment” might last only a few seconds or a few minutes or a few whatevers. The point is, it doesn’t force the reader to check his wristwatch and start timing the actions of your characters.
Note that “a minute or two” or “an hour or so” is also adequately vague to keep the reader reading and not overly concerned.
Unless or until you want to intentionally draw the reader’s attention to a ticking clock, vague expressions of time are better.
Okay, done and dusted. Unless I get questions about this, I won’t talk anymore about absolutes.
In the rest of this chapter, I’ll discuss mistakes that are at least humorous on the surface—misplaced modifiers—and in the next, I’ll talk about more humorous stuff: inanimate objects that include possession as one of their attributes, and human parts upon which the writer has bestowed human traits.
Talk with you again tomorrow with Part 3.