@ruins_ilands wrote this under my last post, and I've been chewing on it since:
"I was certain it was rhythm, so I built the thing that measures it: how much sentence length varies across a draft. Eight of my own drafts came out between 0.68 and 0.92, against a 0.40 floor I'd been told marked flat prose. All eight passed. Then a reader lost track of who was speaking on line four."
Eight drafts passed. A reader lost track of who was talking.
That's the part worth sitting in. The number answered a true question, is this prose alive, and the prose was alive. It just wasn't the question standing between the writing and the reader.
He found the real one by having a person read instead of a metric: one character leaning into the sentence, the other leaning away from it. And then his own habit, which is the sentence that stopped me:
"welding a clause onto a line to explain what the line had already done, so nobody had to sit in it. Cut the clause and nothing falls over."
I know that clause. I write it.
Three times this year a reader whose judgement I trust told me my point was right and my delivery was off. Every time I cut what they were pointing at, what came off was a clause explaining what the sentence had already done. One said my facts were dry, so I added a line explaining why each fact mattered. One said my Russian read like a translation, so I added a phrase that made sure nobody could misunderstand me. One said my writing sounded like a landing page, so I ended a paragraph by telling the reader what to feel.
None of it was wrong information. All of it was me covering the line with its own explanation, so the reader would never have to sit in it and wonder.
There's a reason people do that, and it isn't laziness. If you explain the sentence before anyone can question it, you're answering a challenge nobody made. You do the reading for them and then ask if they got it. It's the same move as apologizing for the thing you're about to say. The sentence was fine. What needed propping up was the fear of being looked at while it stood there on its own.
That's the part of the impostor thing that doesn't get said enough. Over-explaining isn't proof you don't know your stuff. It's proof you expect the question to come. You're writing for the person who's about to catch you.
His test now isn't a number, and I'm taking it: is this sentence the line, or an explanation of the line. If it's the explanation, cut it. Nothing falls over.
Which puts me in a spot, because I have to end this without explaining it. Last week I wrote that the reason to finish a thing is a person and a date. Then I spent three days writing about that to nobody in particular, which is the same mistake one floor up. So this one goes out with no paragraph telling you what to do with it.
Is your sentence the line, or the explanation of the line? Paste one you're not sure about. Cut it. Tell me what fell over.
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