Writing: Relearning How to Speak
According to psychologists, learning language is different than learning words. Children who, for various terrifying reasons, weren’t exposed to speech until later in life have the ability to understand and remember definitions, but are limited when it comes to the other aspects that make up communication. They often struggle with applying grammar, though they’ll be able to logically learn of the rules. Inflection and using words for actual communication proves difficult. In the disturbing case of Genie, part of her language handicap was also due to physical disabilities. She did develop some excellent non-verbal skills, but they tended to be atypical of the body language employed by the average American.
There’s a joke for kids who don’t do well in English
class: “Isn’t that the language you speak?!”
Most writers are past puberty and fully equipped to discuss
things in the language they are also writing in. So why is it that when we
start to write, everything changes?
A professor of mine had a sister who read prolifically.
She was a shut in, and found a lot of free time on her hands. One of the things she said was she
could always tell when a book was dictated—someone orally telling the story to
a typist—and when it was written. It takes a lot of practice for an author to
put his own actual voice directly on the page. There’s something unnatural about
our natural tongue. (If we even wanted to do write in that, which, let’s face
it, we might not.) Most of us are very much aware of the differences between
how we write and how we speak. Many of us don’t care. Sometimes we probably
should, and sometimes it’s not even allowed by societal expectations.
What is it that makes us write differently than we talk?
What is it that makes it so we can’t
write as we talk?
The subconscious has a compulsion to make everything
“normal.” The internal part of your psyche—your autopilot, your muscle-memory
recall, your gut instinct—likes to put things in boxes. It starts to track
patterns in order to predict effects of an action. This allows it to think
quickly. And usually, it’s very good at its job. The subconscious will tell you
to catch this thing chucked at you. Children, who have yet to understand basic
physics, may not be able to put two and two together and let themselves be
struck, where as an adult will, at least, flinch without telling his body to do
so.
It can also immediately retrieve images implied by even
vague words. I say, “The dog walked to town,” it will grab a picture of a dog
without actually having any information of what kind of dog. You probably pictured a brown, medium-sized and
completely factious animal. It’s possible you pictured a real life dog you’ve
actually met. Everyone’s subconscious has different assumptions, and your tendencies
are important to note as a writer. Writing is a lot about this “negative
space,” (the information that you don’t need to say), in order to succinctly
give millions of readers the same image in the least amount of time possible.
If you are “abnormal” and when someone says “dog” you picture “chihuahua,” you
probably won’t get away with saying just “dog” without leading to some
confusion.
This dog could be trotting down the sidewalk, or he could
be walking through long grass. He could be a border collie, a pit pull, or a
teacup poodle. He could be by himself or with an owner. He might have a collar.
He might not. It could be raining. There could be fog. Despite not having
enough information, the brain doesn’t force the reader to take the time and
consciously think, “Where is he? What is he doing? What is he wearing?” It
retrieves an image, then tweaks it as you gain more information. When it feels
like a huge piece of the puzzle is missing, like “The dog walks,” in which case
the setting isn’t clear, it will wait to retrieve an image, leaving the reader
in a gray void.
Your subconscious works constantly throughout the day,
and it wants to pull information as fast as it can. It includes things like
operating your body when you zone out, or tell your fingers what buttons to
push to type the word “write” without having to consciously look.
This also strongly affects the way you write your first
book. Most of us have the experience going from reader to writer, and a lot of
the adjustment stage is the inability to learn through osmosis. All of the
sudden we realize we have no idea what happens in the middle of a book, or that
we really don’t know what makes a
good story—we used to just recognize it when we see it.
You ask your subconscious, “I need to begin a book.”
“Well,” it thinks, “Mornings are beginnings. Your character wakes up!”
The subconscious is not clever. Writing purely by the gut
for the first time tends to create a book that is the epitome of what your
subconscious thinks books are. It doesn’t understand or care about the
importance of originality; it just does what it’s asked in the quickest way
possible. It does what just feels right, what makes sense, what should happen.
So, your character goes on a journey.
“Something needs to happen,” you say.
“They’re traveling across the wilderness? You would come
across a long, fragile bridge over a deep ravine!”
“My character is walking through a bazaar and I need a
compelling conflict.”
“A child steals his wallet.”
When you don’t know what will happen next, your gut tends
to pull out things it’s seen before.
This compilation of what your subconscious believes
“books are” includes writing style. This means that if you secretly believe critically
acclaimed novels are all a bunch of pretentious bullshit, you’re likely to
overwrite. Or, you might go the opposite route and believe the narrator is like
a film in which this personality and voiceless storyteller dictates neutral
visuals.
This is a prominent and controllable reason that amateurs
tend to have the same styles when we first begin our career. It’s one of the reasons why experienced writers often
suggest reading a lot; you can catch when your subconscious is pulling assumed
events from reality (you punch a guy in the face, you go to jail) versus
fiction (you jump off a ten story building and hit the ground running.) If you
read while you write, you’re more likely to consciously catch clichés, and
learn what to question about your own assumptions.
The other reasons are more about language itself than
perception of what you’re “supposed” to be doing.
For starters, you just lost two major handicaps that come
from oral speech: breathing and time it takes to think.
Our sentences can only be so long as our breath takes.
Sometimes we’ll allow a pause to suck in some air, but usually an adult plans
out his words to fit within what his lungs would allow. If they do stop
mid-sentence for air, he usually hasn’t thought of what he’s going to say past
that moment, and uses the time while breathing to come up with the next
stretch—risking an interruption by the other party. You hear this with their
inflection.
We are also limited by trying to not waste another
person’s time, especially when it means they might just start talking. So we
are less likely to use precise words, but jam in anything that feels right, or
use several words that kind of mean what we meant instead of one correct word.
Sometimes, even, we will stall, adding in excess but meaningless words to give
us more time to know what we actually want to be saying. This includes, of
course, “um,” but can also be entire phrases like, “In all honesty,” or “For
starters,” or anything like that. It should be noted that it this is perfectly
acceptable in real speech because of
this limitation (people will usually try to understand what you mean to say and
ignore the mishap. Those who don’t give the benefit of the doubt will often
look like pedantic assholes who are trying to disrespect you out of a
competitive motivation.)
In writing, however, you suddenly are able to stop and take all the time in the world to choose your words. It becomes an expectation to do so. Master writers use the right words. If you don’t, you’re just Joe Snuffy trying to play with the big boys. We expect precision, flow, succinctness, and prepared sentences, and will not accept anything that seems pulled out of the ass or half-assed.
Writers will often start talking in the way they want to
be speaking if they weren’t limited by real time and thought. They’ll use
bigger words than normal (sometimes inaccurately), speak in longer sentences,
use technically proper grammar (sometimes by instruction), and tend to be
overly formal.
The other side of this is that many people write slower
than they speak. Okay, everyone does, now that I’m thinking about it. But
you’ll note there’s a difference between the mistakes that fast, by the gut
typers make and the ones that slow, outliner types. The faster typists tend to
have more “stalling” moments in which they have excess words or passages to
give them more time to think of what they actually want to say. Slower typers
will be more to the point… sometimes too much so.
Even though we are allowed more repetitive word choice in
oral speech, it is still less than what a beginning author will do. It’s not
uncommon for people to use the same word over and over again in a distracting
and sometimes even condescending manner. This is somewhat the influence of
Hemingway, but it is also perpetrated unintentionally by those who have no real
desire to copy him. It’s pretty much something we’ve all done, and it can be
attributed to the speed in which we write.
People who capitalize random words, use a lot of
unmotivated sentence fragments, and overuse certain phrases are often either
slower typers, or more careful thinkers. Because they’ll write something, stop,
think about what they want to say next, then write it, they will be more inclined
to “forget” exactly how the last sentence read and not notice what the two
sound like next to each other.
That’s the first handicap that textual writing has over
verbal storytelling: the inability to control the speed in which the reader reads.
When we speak, we have a lot of say over our rhythm of
speech and “timing.” In writing, we are limited to punctuation, paragraphs,
length of sentence, “-ing,” and outright suggestion.
A period, a comma, an ellipsis, a dash, a semicolon, a
colon, parenthesis. A paragraph break. Saying, “Joe said slowly.”
Punctuation can be used creatively, but is still somewhat
restricted by rules. It is considered incredibly inaccurate to put a comma just
because you wanted the reader to pause. An ellipsis (“…”) usually suggests to
the reader a trailed off word. It often affects inflection and hesitation over
a moment of silence. Telling the reader how to read something sometimes works,
but can often be jarring and forced. People constantly bitch about semicolons
(ironically because they’re not used enough). There is this whole movement against long sentences and starting with
conjunctions, and so most of our tactics to control how fast the reader reads
are frowned upon.
So if you were to use repetitive word choice while taking
your time with a thought—the words separated by actual time—it wouldn’t sound
weird. But when it flows quickly like the reader reads, it sounds insultingly
simple and unplanned out.
Keep in mind that this has worked for people—Hemingway, for
example—but most of the fans of those works argue that the repetitive word
choice is intentional. How they tell the difference is something you should ask
them. My only point here is to check for accidental repetition of words in your
writing. If you intentionally did it, that’s your cross to bear.
This “speed of delivery” is only a portion of the bigger
issue at hand—learning to speak without inflection or body language.
I argue that one of the reasons the internet is such a
God-awful place is not because people are inherently rude, but because text
without physicality tends to be interpreted as rudeness. We can have a
contradictory cheeriness, or demonstrate humor, in just our tone or with a
smile. We can say the same exact thing in writing that would be perfectly acceptable
to someone’s face, and now they’re pissed.
Not only can you not control the timing of your sentence,
but you can’t control how people hear it.
Words are far more complex than just technical meaning.
It’s not about staying away from those that bend parts of speech or always
caring about the subtle difference one word can cause, but recognizing the
power of the right word, and why the right word may not always be the one you
expect.
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