An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Thirteen -- I felt that I had probably lost narrative certainty

This one is fun. It's about being completely confident in your writing, and erasing what I'm calling your 'narrative uncertainty'. The reason that it's fun is that you have two ways out, one of which is quick and easy and will make your writing slightly better and one which is hard but will make your writing much better, so you get to decide how many damns you give that day.

I'm calling it narrative uncertainty because I found that there was a class of similar problems which didn't seem to have a name, so I gave it that name. It probably has a real name! You can laugh at me when you find it!

Let's start with the easiest, which does have a name, and that's hedging.

Hedge words... are to do with well-manicured gardens, right? Yes! No. They are so-called because they are about hedging your bets. When you use a hedge word, you aren't committing fully to your narrative, and you get wishy-washy with your descriptions. Let's look at some splendid examples which are not in fact splendid. We'll use my in-progress SF horticulture novel, Topiary of Tomorrow.

The garden was about the size of a football pitch.

Here I'm waving my hands about the size. I could just come out and say that it's the size of a football pitch. No one is going to get out a tape and measure it. I said that there were always two way of fixing these. The easy way is simply ditching the 'about'.

But that gets us to why I think writers hedge. I claim that it's because we're mixing our narrator's voice with our character's voice. My POV character, Ensign Sunil, isn't waving a tricorder round, which means he has no idea how big it is. He might glance around, guess that the place was about the size of a football pitch, and not be interested enough to form a solid opinion. Like if you held a phaser to his head and screamed, 'Sunil how big is the damn garden?' he'd be all 'dude who are you? Where did you come from? How do you know my name? I don't know! Leave me alone!'

But we know. We as the writer have a good idea, and we want to tell our reader. So we sort of end up in this compromise, in this semi-omniscient-but-also-limited-yeah-I'm-not-picking-a-side mode. Or sometimes we don't know, but we want to sorta wave that fact way and keep going.

And we hedge our bets. And we get hedging words.

Well I'm here to tell you: pick a darn side. You're either describing in omniscient, in which case you know its every dimension and what every plant is and where the gardener keeps the robo-trowels, in which case you should be very confident in the size... Or you're in limited in which case your experience is the colours and smells and how the alien bugs buzz around and the birds scream at each other. If you commit to one of the two, you can avoid hedging.

Back to the my novel.

It looked a bit like the original on Earth, but instead of a croquet lawn, it had a variety of trees.

'A bit like' is more of the same, and the problem here is how wishy-washy that line is. It's fine to say something is like something else, we do that all the time for adjective substitutes; but if we're comparing a specific thing to another specific thing, then we need to be quite specific, and when we use 'a bit' we are trying to sweep that specificity under the carpet. If there are differences or similarities, we should say what they are. And of course in this case, I don't.

I say it's a bit like the original, you know? No, you say. I do not know. It could be a bit like a garden where it's the same but all the air has been replaced with gorgonzola cheese, you say, that's a bit like the original.