Graham Storrs

And here is part 4 of  my sci-fi writer’s manifesto: five simple statements intended to guide my writing. This is the full set.

1. Write only about what is real, or about what can reasonably be foreseen based on what is real.
2. Be honest about what is real and what is not real.
3. Do not write if you have nothing important to say.
4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.
5. Look forward and outward from where we are to where we might one day be.

As usual, please remember, I’m not saying these statements should apply to anyone except myself.

4. Write in a clear, simple style, so as to be understood.

This one is very easy to explain. It seems to me that writing is all about communication. You have a story to tell; you tell it. You have a point to make; you make it. There is nothing to be gained by obscuring your text and everything to be lost.

Except some people don’t seem to see it that way. They want to revel in ‘the beauty of language’ and so write flowery, tortuous sentences, filled with obscure words. They want to be poetical, or novel, or ‘clever’, so they write in convoluted, forced, often bizarre and ill-fitting metaphors. They want to be ambiguous, mysterious or ‘challenging’, so they write in an obfuscated, oblique, sometimes impenetrable style – especially at the end of the story for some reason. A lot of ‘serious’ literature seems to be written by people who would rather rhapsodise themselves into an orgasm of technical pyrotechnics, than plainly say what on Earth they set out to say – if it was anything at all.

Science fiction has always been a genre from which the worst excesses of ‘clever’ writing have, on the whole, been absent. That is not to say there have not been some first-class wordsmiths – J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula le Guin and Sherri Tepper all spring to mind. I’d swap you any one of these writers for a roomful of magical realists.

I’m not here suggesting that one should write for a reading age of ten, or to simplify any idea beyond its inherent level of difficulty. I’m only saying that playing around with words, sentences, or larger structures, at the expense of intelligibility, just to satisfy some aesthetic or theoretical notion of the writer, is self-indulgence at the expense of the reader. I believe that I should avoid it. I believe one of my primary goals as a writer should be to write clearly, in the interests of entertainment and of communication.