Clarity

Have you ever seen one of those old cartoons in which a character sits in front of a crystal ball and all they see is a mess of fog? Maybe if they’re lucky, there’ll be a flash or two of an image, but it’s mostly obscured.

As an editor, I see a lot of stories that suffer from a similar ailment. I’ll sit down to read, but the story is buried under exposition, flowery prose, and needless adverbs (I will happily acknowledge that I remove adverbs from stories the way Elon Musk removes government employees—all at once and with little regard for if they’re actually needed).

The biggest enemy to success in the slush pile is a lack of clarity in a story. In many cases, the best advice I can give a writer is “cut 20% of your word count and you might have something.”

Often, the percentage is higher.

The stories I end up accepting are the ones that don’t need many cuts at all. I can look into the crystal ball and everything is there. No fog, no waiting, no confusion. The prose moves and sings, bringing the story off the page without excess verbiage to weigh it down.

So how do you learn clarity?

There’s a few different ways, and it’ll probably be a combination of several of them:

One of my maxims is that if you share your work with someone and what they return doesn’t piss you off, it probably isn’t very helpful. For a new writer, a good edit should get under your skin and make you want to go up to the editor and yell and scream until you feel like you’ve adequately defended your work.

Then you go look at your writing again and discover they were absolutely right.

Experienced authors and editors don’t take sadistic pride in tearing apart your work (except Rebecca…). It’s often a case of tearing down so it can be built back up.

And when it comes to clarity, slashing with an editor’s pen is often painful and necessary.

I love this tool. It is one of the best ways to learn to write tight, concise sentences (among other things). When I first started writing, everything I wrote got put through it. It’s expanded into a tool that now has some AI features worked in (which I don’t use), but the original software is still fantastic.

The more you read, the more chances you’ll get to see what a clear story looks like. Even better, see if you can find an opportunity to read slush for an anthology or magazine to get a good look at both great stories and not-so-good ones.  

Take a story you’ve written, make a copy of it, and go delete 20% of your word count. You really want to get good? Go for 30%. Force yourself to find words, sentences, and paragraphs in your work that you don’t need to tell the story. At first, it will be painful. But as you get good at it, and see the way your story shines through with all those extra words gone, the pain will disappear. 

Soon, you’ll be cutting words without even thinking about it.

Eventually, they won’t even appear on the page.

I hope this clarifies the importance of being clear in your storytelling. It’s not just for your sake as a writer who wants to get acceptances. It benefits your readers too!