Simpler is Better

Relative to my post above, is “good” writing really simple writing? My Mighty Brain objects, “No way! I’m too smart to write simple prose!” But, maybe simpler is better.

To wit:

Recently, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy – at the suggestion of a writing buddy. I read The Road and No Country For Old Men  and loved them both. The writing was, well, simple – and satisfying. Now, one of my rules is that when I find a new author (new to me, at least), try to consume three of his/her works before passing judgment on the quality of the writing. Well, the third McCarthy book I picked up was All The Pretty Horses. I hated it! In fact, I put it down after about 10 pages (and you should know that one of my other rules is that I never stop reading a book I’ve started). I did more than put it down. I put it in the garbage. No joke. So . . . I thought: I wonder how All the Pretty Horses scores on my readability stats listed in the post above. Here’s a section from All the Pretty Horses:

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys  naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail in the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Here are the scores for this section:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  30.5

Percentage of passive sentences: 25%

Grade-level: 25.5

Now, I don’t even think there is a 25^th grade. Well, maybe for my brother-in-law the liver transplant surgeon. That guy was in school until he was about 35. Anyway, All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award, so what do I know? I know what I like, and it’s simple writing.

What Makes Good Writing "Good"?

Ask five writers and you’ll get five different answers. It’s so subjective. (I was reminded of this recently at a critique group. I had just shared a piece of my writing that I was particularly proud of, and one of the people in the critique group said, “I don’t want to offend you, but that’s so bad, I can’t even talk about it.” Yow! I’d hate to hear what he would say when he was trying to offend me! ) Objective measures do exist, though. Here’s what I’ve developed over the years:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  56 or higher. Rudolf Flesch designed this readability formula in the 40s. It measures the average sentence length in words and the average word length in syllables. The higher the score, the easier something is to read. The Gettysburg Address is a 65. The average insurance policy is a 10.

Percentage of passive sentences: Single digit. Perhaps it’s impossible to totally eradicate passive construction from your writing (particularly if you’re writing for a corporate audience, which I am during work hours). But you can get close!

Grade-level: 8^th grade or lower. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “I’m smarter than an 8^th grader!” No doubt. Consider this: The average adult reads at a 9^th-grade level and most popular fiction is written to a 7^th grade level.

The good news is that you can easily check how your writing matches up to these standards. In Word, use the “Spelling and Grammar” check under Tools. When the software is done analyzing your writing, it will give you a grade in Flesh Reading Ease, passivity and grade level.

Give it a try!

Thinking like a storyteller.

There's an episode of the Simpsons in which Homer is charged by Marge with finding a suitable suitor for her sister Selma.  So . . . it gets to the point that Homer's "mission" is all that's on his mind. He interprets everything he encounters in light of that mission. So when he encounters Principal Skinner, a template comes up in his brain: name: Principal Skinner. Positives: Uses big words. Negatives: Possible Homer Sexual. I find that something akin to Homer's situation has become the case for myself. That is, I interpret everything I encounter in terms of Story Theory. What's the conflict here? What's the inciting incident? What are this character's motivations? So . . . as you can imagine I can seem somewhat detached at times. Oh well. My point in bringing this up is this affliction is particularly pronounced when I see movies. (Another writer's example of this phenomenon can be seen in a recent edition of Storyfix.) I often see movies with my pal, Mark Monlux, illustrator extraordinaré.  Last year, we saw Suckerpunch. My son, Matthew tagged along. Below, you will see Mark's comic for Suckerpunch. (You see, he produces a regular strip called The Comic Critic. You should subscribe.) I have appended his strip from Suckerpunch below. (The whole point of this post was for Mark, who is sitting at my elbow, to teach me how to do a blog post with links and attachments.)

I’m still alive!

I’m reminded how everyone takes their writing personally. Even people who really don’t deserve the tag “writer,” will take real offense if you criticize something they’ve put to paper. And the real writers? They’re no better. It’s a sort of righteous indignation. It’s a conscious choice, I think, to listen to someone criticize your writing and take it to heart. The critique group I’m part of, they will be brutally honest with people. We’ll see how I do when the time comes for me to read something to the group.