🤔 Is it annoying…

Book of TREE 3.51

I’ve read a lot of books and articles about how to write. There’s one piece of writing advice I think is very extremely important which I can’t remember reading anywhere, so I’m putting it here:

Don’t be annoying.

I read a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel recently. The world-building was exceptionally good. The characters were cool. The story was brilliant. I hated the book. The author forced me to wait for page after page while he stopped the story to describe the character’s feelings and tell me about their inner monologues. (Why are you pausing the action to tell me that the main character who is a few dozen or hundred feet under water – you didn’t make that clear – and just had her air supply cut off is scared? While you’re at it, please also tell me that water is wet and heavy. Oh good, you are.)

I read a spy novel in which the author tried to turn manipulating an image in Photoshop into a tense scene. He had the computer hard drives spinning faster than they were made to spin, the computer operators sweating, alarms going off all over the place. It was laugh-out-loud stupid. For the rest of the book I wondered, If he’s this wrong about how image software works, how wrong is he about all the stuff in here I don’t know about?

Dan Brown exists and writes books.

Gobsmackingly, primary school teachers make children start their needlessly festooned paragraphs with atomic-bombingly overblown ‘power openers’ and bury their resplendently solid nouns and bone-wearily hard-working verbs under so many galacticly gargantuan modifiers that there’s no room left on the blue-lined, pen-scratched page for the story.

There are so many more ways to be annoying with writing.

Being annoying is nothing to do with style. Earnest Hemingway stripped his stories down to the bare minimum. Dylan Thomas is effusive. Marilynne Robinson writes slow, descriptive stories. None of them are alike. All of them are brilliant.

You don’t need to be brilliant, just don’t be annoying.

Read your writing back to yourself out loud. If anything feels tedious or unnecessary or too-complicated, change it.

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Here’s a good sense-check for any piece of work:

Is it annoying?

Annoying jerks people out of your story. It mars the enjoyment of the music. It causes people to miss the point. It causes unnecessary offence in communication. It spoils the meal.

Annoying is different from controversial.

Annoying is not about style. Any style can be annoying. Annoying is the pebble in the shoe, the flatpack kit with a piece missing, the ugly garnish.

It could be annoying if it’s

• too complicated

• too clever

• lacking clarity

• lacking necessary detail

• full of unnecessary ingredients

• using decoration to hide flaws

• taking the scenic route to the point, but the scenery is basically west Texas

• sloppy

• smug

• ignorant

• relying on bad-faith arguments

• the storytelling equivalent of that woman in the cinema when I was watching The English Patient who spent the entire film explaining the bleeding obvious to her friend

• timid

You don’t need to run through a checklist, just get some fresh eyes and/or ears and ask, Is anything annoying about this thing I’m making? The fresh eyes and ears can be yours after some time away from the work or someone else’s. If you find something annoying, take the time to figure out why and fix it. The effort is worth it.

—Jeff

Today’s song is brought to you by my daughter, Brieanna’s, obsession with K-Pop Demon Hunters. Not going to lie, the soundtrack is something I will happily jam out to with her in the backseat…or not.

I think it might also be important to add that “annoying” is subjective. This just takes finding the audience that’s…your audience.

Thanks for being our audience.

Grow slowly
Skyler