589 – Making Narration Easier to Read

Reading is an activity that takes effort, usually more effort than watching or listening to something. This is why it’s harder for you to get feedback on your novel than it is for your artist friend to show a bunch of people their cool new drawing. But authors can make choices that affect how difficult their work is to read, and that’s our topic this week. We’ll talk about how to construct paragraphs, when details aren’t enough, and why random strings of characters and numbers are hard to remember. Isn’t that right, U-3125?

Show Notes

• Conlang
• Cognitive Burden 
• The Marvelers 
• Mystery Stories 
• Information Management 
• The Blade Itself 
• There Is No Antimemetics Division

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

[opening song]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now, Oren, I was thinking: I’m just very proud of this new conlang that I created, which may or may not be mangled French, and I’ve decided I’m just going to write the whole story in my conlang. What do you think?

Oren: Well, it’s a little unoriginal. They already speak a mangled version of the Quebec language in some European country called France. So I wouldn’t… I don’t know, man, I wouldn’t do that.

Chris: But see how authentic it will feel. It will be like an authentic, real-world document.

Oren: Well, if you say it’s a real document, then all criticism goes out the window. Sometimes people write real documents badly, so it just makes sense.

Chris: Yeah, sure! So yeah, this time we’re talking about making narration easy to read. Conlang is not the primary reason why manuscripts are difficult to read. It is a problem with conlangs in general.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, conlangs are a reason that a manuscript can be difficult to read. They’re far from the most common, although they are one of the most noticeable.

Chris: Yes.

Oren: If a conlang is making the narration hard to read, you will be able to tell. This is just a big old flare over all of these fake words that the author is making up and that you’re desperately trying to understand.

Chris: Yeah. Whereas otherwise, I think a lot of times writers don’t know that their work is hard to read. So first of all, what exactly do I mean here? I mean, it should be obvious, it’s hard to read, but basically, if people have to stop and think to understand what is happening in the story. So it just becomes a huge mental effort and it is quickly exhausting and just burns the reader out, just because of the effort that it takes. We’ve seen manuscripts where this happens every paragraph, or even during most sentences. When it gets bad, you will have trouble just getting feedback, because people look at it and it takes them work to read, it takes them a lot of work to read, and especially if you’re used to really nice people who just don’t want to give critical feedback, ’cause some people are really timid about that, they might have a hard time telling you, you don’t see the problems, so you’re expecting people will just read through and comment on the story itself. It may be hard to tell you that, “Well, I haven’t been able to actually look at the story because the prose itself is just hard to absorb.”

Oren: Assuming that anyone listens to this episode beyond our main group of hardcore fans, I’m sure that there is someone out there who is thinking that they want people to stop and think about what happened, to try to figure it out.

Chris: Somebody who’s outside of our normal listeners.

Oren: Yeah, you know, someone who doesn’t quite share our philosophy on that, and, like, I would say for that, okay, that’s your prerogative, but like, let’s be aware of it, right? Let’s at least know what’s happening so that you can go into that with your eyes open and not do it by accident.

Chris: It’s enough mental effort that people will exhaust their brains, like burn out, trying to read it. So if you want people to sit down and relax and focus on a chapter, they may not get through a chapter, right? if it’s too much work. It’s just like lifting weights: if you make it too hard and people feel tired after one page, it’s just going to be hard for them to read your book. So it has a bunch of different causes. It’s not one thing, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer. To be clear, basic writing skills can be a cause. Basic writing skills is in grammar, spelling, you know, those things that we are all taught in grade school, but we’re probably not perfect at, even as professional writers. Paragraph breaks can be a big one that makes a surprisingly large difference. If your kind of grammar and spelling tends to be a little rough, right? obviously that can create this problem, but you could also have perfectly polished writing skills in other contexts and still have this problem in your fiction.

Oren: Yeah, I occasionally have clients who… their emails are perfectly legible and I can totally read them, and then, when I open the manuscript it’s like, “Oof, this is hard.” The sentences are just put together in odd ways that it’s hard for me to explain what exactly the problem is.

Chris: Besides just, you know, those basics, other common causes of narration that’s difficult to read is the fact that you don’t know what you know. Storytellers tend to overlook the basic information that they have and they kind of take for granted, but that readers need. Basic things like, “Okay, where is the character now? How much time has passed?” And a big one that I see a lot, that is kind of abstract, so it’s a little hard to explain, is: “What does this thing you’re talking about now in this sentence have to do with the last sentence?”

Oren: The sentences end up feeling kind of disconnected.

Chris: Right. That connective tissue, the flow of ideas and how they relate to each other and build on each other, that can get lost really easily and it’s just very disorienting, and then readers have a bunch of little ideas and don’t know how to place them together. And if they can’t place them together, they also can’t really remember them very easily.

Oren: That was the problem with The Marvellers, which was a magic school story that I read a little while back, that I bought a copy for you to take your own look at.

Chris: Yeah, The Marvellers is a fascinating case. It really is.

Oren: Because it had a lot of really neat details about what the environment looked like, and other kind of sensory notes, but I couldn’t for the life of me put any of them together, right? Like, I couldn’t tell how they related. It just became like a blur. It was like watching a collage on fastforward.

Chris: Yeah. So if anybody wants to see a published example, usually manuscripts that are this hard to read do not get published. Usually they just get filtered out. We see it in manuscripts and student work. We don’t usually see it in published works, but in this case, The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton, the prose is so lovely and has so many beautiful details that I think that whoever published it was like, “Okay, well, it’s hard to read, but it’s also so lovely.” So it made it out. I think that probably the book would’ve done better if it had been clarified a little bit, and that’s a pity because it is really lovely, but you can look at that as an example, and it’ll have some of the different things that we’re talking about that make manuscripts hard to read. Again, the relationships between things in The Marvellers… for instance, there’s a thing that happened in the beginning where they have this envelope of coupons, and the coupons are really fun because they’re like magical and they’re like auctioning against each other in real time, and that’s very fun. But it’s a little startling. You have to, like, “Wait, where did these coupons come from?” Because the envelope that they came in was mentioned like a while ago, and that connection between “Oh, these coupons came from the envelope” was only maybe weakly hinted at. Again, the big picture when it comes to your description: a really easy way to make sure your description is clear is to first describe the broad strokes or the big picture of the scene, and then add fun details to it. But in The Marvellers, that big picture description is often just missing. So when an airship shows up, I had to kind of guess it was an airship because Clayton describes all of the pieces of their ship, and again, her description is very, very lovely, but doesn’t describe the whole airship or tell us that it’s an airship. So you have to, like, “Okay, what could this be?” It’s like having a box full of beautiful puzzle pieces, but every page you’re trying to figure out how those pieces fit together.

Oren: Or like seeing an animal, but only seeing it at like 500x zoom and trying to figure out what it is. It’s like, “Okay, this is a neat thing. I’m seeing the fur follicles and everything,” but I don’t know it’s a cat because I’m never given an image that is recognizable as a cat.

Chris: It’s like, “Okay, so it has pointy ears over here, and over here I’m seeing some brown fur. I think it has sharp teeth,” right? And then eventually you have to piece together what the animal is.

Oren: I’m, like, inventing a cat from first principles here.

Chris: So that basic information, one thing that, again, I can see a lot is just being overly ambitious with your prose style. Which I sympathize, I have been guilty of this myself. So if you use a lot of fancy words, fancy metaphors, and are just trying really hard to impress, sometimes that actually makes… they’re very hard to read. It’s like too forced, and you just kind of ease back and be a little more laid back about it. I typically see this especially at the beginnings. The beginnings are very tricky, and we turn to work very hard in our stories’ opening, and so I’ve definitely noticed this is a problem when I see that the opening of the story is hard to read, but then it clears up. There’s other books where they have really beautiful style at the opening that kind of goes away, as the writer is not trying as hard, but if the beginning is harder to read than the middle, then that’s a big sign that it’s just being a little overly ambitious.

Oren: Yeah. One problem that I encounter quite a lot among my clients who are writing mystery stories is missing context. Like, they will introduce a new twist. It’ll be like, “Here, we’ve discovered that Mr. Paddington was at this location,” and the characters will go like, “Whoa!” I’m like, “Okay, okay, that’s cool. But can you remind me why that location was important?” I do a Control+F, and that location hasn’t been mentioned for like 50 pages, and I don’t remember why that location was so critical, because it was kind of a background thing. So remind me: Why does it matter that Mr. Paddington was there? You know, that sort of thing.

Chris: I mean, that’s a whole kind of information management issue. Obviously, information management is a complex art in itself, and you get better as you practice.

Oren: That’s why you have a whole series on it.

Chris: Yeah, but I mean, related to that, just keeping on too much complexity is also a common one, right?

So you know, this is the principle of cognitive burden. Ideas aren’t actually free, ’cause the reader has to spend their brainpower comprehending them, and they have limited space in their working memory to hold onto ideas. If your readers are mixing up names or titles, or can’t remember some things that were previously introduced, that’s a big sign that you might have too much complexity. Maybe you just need to remind them, but mixing up names often means there’s a lot of characters and a lot of names being thrown around, more than they can keep track of. Spatial information is a big one that is very hard to communicate. Don’t try to communicate a visual. I see a lot of writers that are like, “Hey, I have this beautiful picture or this beautiful drawing. Now how do I communicate that in words?” It’s like, “Nope, nope, you can’t, can’t do it.”

Oren: Pictures are way too information-dense to get the whole thing across with words. That’s just not going to happen.

Chris: You can only create vague impressions or, you know, important points. Again, getting back to the conlang, things that are unfamiliar add a lot of complexity and a lot of brainpower figuring out what they are. So if you have a lot of strained world things, throwing in or conlang terms…

Oren: Using multiple terms for the same thing is always a tricky one. And that one’s tough, because you want your world to feel real. And in the real world, we usually have multiple terms for the same thing. Like, we don’t always call it a car. We would also call it a sedan or a ride or a taxi. You know, we would call it lots of different things, but the more of those you introduce to things that the reader isn’t familiar with, the harder it is for them to keep up. Like, I always remember The Blade Itself had the Shanka and the Flathead, and I took me forever to figure out those were the same thing. Just because it gives no indication that those are the same thing. It just uses the terms interchangeably. And so I eventually decided they must be the same thing, ’cause otherwise there would be two things that Logan was fighting and he only seemed to be fighting one.

Chris: It also felt like Abercrombie was not going to any effort to tell readers what they needed to know in that opening.

Oren: Right. I mean, that opening had serious, like, not quite White Room Syndrome, because he did sort of describe the area, but like, who Logan was, there was no context for that. And the fact that his name was Logan, which sounds kind of modern. As I was reading it, I was like, “Is this a sci-fi story?” Like, “Is this guy like a sci-fi pilot who crashed on a fantasy planet?” No, that’s not what it is. I was just wondering, because there’s no context for who he is in that opening, nor is there any description of what the creature he’s fighting looks like. I just get the impression that he’s fighting like a white void in front of him.

Chris: Yeah. Another thing is just, again, when it comes back to the style of your sentences, it can really matter. So sometimes we do want to tighten and make our words efficient, but sometimes tightening too much can, again, get rid of important information or keep us from stepping through what’s happening a little bit more carefully and building those connections between ideas and taking one thing at a time. And so you get something that feels kind of disorienting and a little jumbled just because you’ve tightened so much that you’re kind of missing transitions and things that you need. And then the other thing that I really want to cover, and I have an example, is sentences that are doing too much, ’cause I see this a lot, and I think it’s really hard for people to recognize themselves. This is when we have sentences that are just too idea-dense, right? They’re introducing too many new things in a very kind of long clause. And it’s not that you can’t have long sentences, I’ll talk more about that, but long sentences have to be constructed in a particular way to keep from being kind of confusing and disorienting. So here’s an example of a sentence that is doing too much: “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery exit were immediately halted when a cart bumped her from behind and sent her hurdling into a display of apples that were on sale.”

Oren: Oh, okay. Yeah, something was happening there, for sure.

Chris: But I see sentences like this all the time. Here’s a notable thing. Again, when you have a long sentence, they can work if each piece of the sentence builds on the last one in order, so that the reader can kind of understand as they go and they don’t have to hold on to the beginning of the sentence, and this sentence, just what we have here, “Sylvia’s attempts were halted,” that’s kind of like the base main clause of the sentence, but it’s broken into pieces. So what it actually says is, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery store exit were immediately halted,” right? So, to understand that “were immediately halted,” you have to go back to the beginning of the sentence, where it says, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way.” And that jumping back and forth makes it impossible to assemble the whole picture ahead. You have to like hold on to the very beginning as you absorb more and more words and hold them in your working memory. That’s what makes it so hard to deal with: it requires holding the beginning in your mind and the end, and then, like, putting them together. The other thing is that it has a lot of elements that I did not previously introduce before I read the sentence. So we don’t know where Sylvia is. She’s trying to get out of the way, and then I introduce a family. Oh, there’s a family here. And by the way, they’re heading out of a grocery exit, so there’s a grocery exit here, and then she’s halted beca