34 WYSIWYG

Levels! Layers! These are traits of good writing that can be hard to talk about. I read a book this past Friday that drove me wild with its constant WYSIWYG 1:1 saying exactly what message it wanted to get across. Maybe it was a little more profound than that, but it was on the level of a grade school skit about bullying. Here's what bullying looks like. It's bad. Don't do it. 

I know WYSIWYG is a coding term and has a specialized meaning there, but writers use it to refer to scenes that are extremely on the nose and say things flat out in ways humans very rarely do, but especially not in fiction, where it's so boring and bland and even embarrassing. 

We like more complexity than that in writing, truly. Even in middle grade chapter books there is more complexity and more of a nuanced presentation of material. We like to participate, which means interpretation. We're really not passive absorbers of information from fiction. We enjoy the tricky puzzles of it, the complications, thinking out what comes next, considering lies and half-truths and mistakes and all.

Also? Don't preach at your readers. Nobody wants that. We don't get persuaded by preaching. Either we already agree or we get defensive and resentful and don't listen. Most preaching is to the converted, as it turns out.

Even a preachy story like a parable can make people defensive, though less so than this WYSIWYG type of writing. 

Suppose someone really is wicked racist. Are you going to talk them out of it by showing them scenes of the people they hate not doing the things they say they do? Or scenes of racists being racist? The logic is a problem. They'll just agree with the racist people and they'll argue that those people do those things when we're not looking. 

It's a hard job! So many ways to do it wrong. I'm not even sure how to do this right, and can't think of any examples offhand that do, except maybe The Almost Year, a chapter book that I loved and own in hardcover. Good book. Maybe next week, since this turned up as a theme in this week's random oh this is on my phone, why did I dislike it again reading.

Well, a rhetorician would be able to convince someone that it's in their own best interests not to be that way, but I'm not sure that translates into fiction.

Mentioned in podcast: this brilliant taxonomy of Yankee Candles, 100% applicable to on the nose writing and flat scenes.