I recently read a lovely example of avoiding the problem of described as “a drunkard is looking for his keys under a streetlight. When a passerby attempts to help, he explains he lost them in a nearby dark alley, but he is searching here, because it is where it’s easy to see.”
To quote in part:
Because of the fact that the majority of dinosaur remains from Victoria are single bones and teeth, their identification has proven to be extremely difficult.
However, the very incompleteness that can be so frustrating does serve an important function: it prevents you from doing the same kind of study over and over again. In order to get the most out of the specimens being analyzed, you must constantly be thinking of new approaches to gain the most insight about them.
…
In a field where missing data is the rule rather than the exception, we had to take advantage of the unique circumstances of fossil preservation we encountered. To do that, we had to be ever on the alert to the possibility of such occurrences.
As a consequence, we sometimes gained truly unique insights. Those are among the sweetest fruits of the scientific enterprise.
When one finds primarily isolated limb bones or fragments of skull, as we did, it is almost impossible to identify most specimens by referring to published descriptions. The quite understandable literature bias toward giving detailed descriptions of those parts of skeletal anatomies that are most informative worked against us.
…
Therefore, we found it absolutely essential to go where the most extensive collections of dinosaur bones are located and examine actual specimens in order to discover what the features are of a particular fossil.
Recognizing features that often had never previously been considered to be of significance in the bones we were studying sometimes unexpectedly enabled us to identify their affinities.
From “Dinosaurs In Darkness: In search of the lost polar world”
I recently watched a discussion that’s usually very dense on grammar technicalities, POV, plotting, etc, completely founder on a simple question: “What is a writer’s Voice, and how do I develop it?”
The answer was “It’s how their writing is unique. You get it by writing a lot.”
And I thought, “That’s interesting. The information density dropped to near-zero. People that can go on for three thousand words about comma placement and when to or not to use a semicolon have no useful definition for Voice, and with the complete lack of definition, no measurements or path for acquiring it.”
Dean Wesley Smith didn’t give a path, though he started defining the path by noting where it was not. To wit, roughly paraphrasing: “Don’t edit your work over and over, or you’ll polish the Voice right out of it, and it’ll end up sounding utterly the same as everything else.”
Thus, we can see that Voice is, in part, intentional departures from grammar rules as a stylistic choice.
Grammarians are very good at telling you the rules. They are not good at telling you when to break them. You’ll have to step away from the streetlight of Strunk & White to find your Voice.
Then there Gaiman’s statement in Make Good Art. Roughly: “The urge, starting out, is to copy, and that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of others.”
This tells us where the alley is: in the works of other authors.
When we start reading not for pleasure, but to take the tools the grammarians have given us and start to analyze the writers that stand out… we see they don’t even follow the rules. Here, where the rubber meets the road, away from the literature analysis of the most easily analyzable parts, we start studying the bits that don’t fit, and making discoveries.
Larry Correia’s combat scenes include paragraph-long sentences which do not slow the action down at all, but instead make it more vivid and intense.
Writers don’t even follow the rules named for them. Hemingway wrote long, convoluted, evocative sentences, too.
Iconic standouts in the storytelling field don’t even follow the rules that people studying their success distilled them into…. Casablanca does not slavishly follow the 3-act structure.
When do you break the rules?
If you break the rules for the sake of breaking the rules, congratulations, you’re avant-garde, and if you’re not the bleeding edge of doing that, or amazing despite doing that, nobody’s going to notice you or remember you.
So, break them when necessary to tell a good story. Never let the rules get in the way of conveying the emotions, the stakes, and the character of your world and its people to the reader.
And how do we break the rules?
First, by example, and then by practice: see how other people have done it, and try it for yourself. Sometimes you’ll fall flat on your face, and sometimes you’ll fly. With practice, you’ll not only learn techniques, you’ll also learn how to break the rules best to express yourself, and your stories, and your worldview…. and those breaks are where the story shines through the words.
Rule: You must always introduce / describe the protagonist up front! No unexplained pronouns! No talking heads in a white room!
Voice: “The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “Information Density”
Let’s make that exit line above into the first line of a story. Here are a handful of the infinite directions the second line can glue into place to further an introduction to the character and the situation.
“The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
—-
“Hell, I don’t even carry matches anymore.”
“No one warned me what was behind that door.”
“Well, damn it, what did they pay me for, then?”
“Wait, is that something moving behind the window?”
“That damn demon has a lot to answer for.”
It is the first line of a story: Blood Rites by Jim Butcher (One of his Dresden books)
Thought it sounded vaguely familiar, but that was many years ago. Just wanted to illustrate the infinitely complex branching structures that can spring to life in a variety of directions, rules be damned. That’s what makes it a great “hook”, since you really want to see what’s next. 🙂
I love your “Rule/Voice” summation so much that I turned it — properly credited to you and Mad Genius Club — into an Instagram post.
“The information density dropped to near-zero.”
We see this happen a lot when we’re discussing difficult topics, like a “good” movie vs. a “bad” one. What’s “better” about Terminator 2 than Terminator 1?
You can talk about all sorts of detail about framing and shots etc, but it really comes down to being about the story and the characters. Talking about “story” becomes a pretty short conversation, we all know what we like but its hard to say why we like it.
Ask me about why I -don’t- like something, I can go for an hour. ~:D
If you can go on for an hour on why you don’t like something, then avoiding those things won’t make a story you like. That’s under the streetlight.
If you can’t explain why you like something, then that’s where you need to look for how to make good stories. That’s the alley.
If you start exploring that, you’ll find the ways to make a better story that you don’t yet know exist, because you haven’t analyzed, visualized, or verbalized them.
The definition of voice I’ve used is approximately this: The choices of words, phrasing, and detail that are unique to the author or the character often both. They are usually not concerned with the rules of grammar (or more accurately, they can use the rules and breaking the rules to create a particular ‘sound’ to the piece), and operate within and inform style.
For something strong with both voice and style see Kipling’s Just So Stories/the Jungle book, then compare them with, say Kim. You can see the voice through his adoption of the Indian style of story telling for the first and it echoes in his prose in a different style. (And in his poetry.)
If you play the same notes on a piano, they will sound different than if you play them on a harp because the sound qualities of the instruments are different. Heck, two different people playing the same piece of music on the same instrument will often sound different. Exhibit A: James Galway and Jean Pierre Rampal (For something they both played: Flute Sonata in E Major, BWV 1035: 1. Adagio ma non Troppo) Galway is looser and breathier, Rampal is crisper, more precise but leans into the flow less (and both are absolutely top notch Flute players.)
Exhibit B: If you have ever seen the movie White Knights, Watch the scene where Mikhail Barishnakoff and Gregory Hines are dancing side by side. They are doing the exact same moves to the exact same music at the exact same times yet each has a very different ‘feel’ to them. Barishnakoff is crisp, precise, and powerful in his movements. Hines is fluid and flowing. You can believe Barishnkoff could hang in the middle of stage and defy gravity for a 10 count because the music called for it. Hines would persuade gravity to play along… Very different ways of achieving the same thing, and they have an impact on the visuals.
Voice is difficult to define because it is less about rules and strict guides (which are always easy to opine and argue about) and more how you lean into or out of those rules. Crisp precise grammar creates one feel. But what flavor of crisp grammar? What flavor of words are you using. Crisp, precise grammar with simple halting words is one thing. The same crispness and precision to the grammar when used in complicated intricate sentences and a bunch of perfectly used 10 dollar words creates a very different feel and texture for the audience. Each of those is different than the halting words used in fragmentary sentences or complicated intricate ramblings.
I’ve noticed a lot of folk tend to focus on the mechanics without really groking how those mechanics impact the audience beyond ‘sounds like plain oatmeal, forgot it as soon as I read it.’ Or they limit it to “this makes action scenes feel more fast paced”.
When push comes to shove, all those bits and pieces are tools… Voice is how you, personally, use those tools to create an effect, and like a signature it will be unique to you and you won’t always be able to say quite why it works that way.
I’ve written quite a bit on the subject of voice, since it is one that many new authors struggle with. I see it as a conversation between the person who is telling the story (who is not the author, and may not be one of the characters) and the person who is listening to the story being told (who is not the reader.) A story should be told by someone, to someone, and for a reason. Authors who neglect this groundwork end up with a story that sounds like it is being told by nobody.
It’s possible to have all sorts of Voices without departing from the rules of grammar in the slightest. Vocabulary choices. Sentence length. Sentence structures. Paragraphing. Variations in all four.
Dean Wesley Smith didn’t give a path, though he started defining the path by noting where it was not. To wit, roughly paraphrasing: “Don’t edit your work over and over, or you’ll polish the Voice right out of it, and it’ll end up sounding utterly the same as everything else.”
Ah, but as a new writer, how much is too much polishing, and can it help to develop your voice?
I’d say that too much polishing is when your characters use absolutely perfect grammar, without any sense of individuality or regionalism. If dialogue could be used as a textbook reference for Proper English, then you have probably over-polished. With the huge caveat that you might want to have a character who does speak Perfect English – for a reason. (Or as in one example I read, the writer had edited and polished until every character sounded exactly alike, all with perfect sentence structure.)
For one example of voice: in some of my books, I tend to toss in sentence fragments when a particular character is reading people’s emotions through their scent, instead of saying, “He smelled [emotion] and [emotion].” It isn’t good grammar, but it fits how he thinks and operates. In other books, (Shikhari), I do something similar with the pheromone-based communication system of the natives, but there I work it into the sentence most of the time. But those books also have a different style, more formal and reminiscent of Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and those writers.
I see. I know I don’t have all the characters speak the same way, unless they’re the same social class.
It’s good grammar. One smells nouns.
Or, metaphorically, emotional adjectives:
“He looks mad / He smells mad
Different meanings there, because of what is scented.
How much is “too much”?
Given “too much” is such an incredibly subjective, ill-defined term, so low information density, that’s not one that can be easily answered, just like “voice.”
The best you’re going to see are scattered examples of “this point is too far, in this case.”
My best attempt to define it is: when the edits you are doing lose their focus from making the story clear, immediate, and visceral to the reader, and instead focus on making the words “better”.
That’s not the only way of doing too much, but it covers a lot of ground.