Writing Tip #13: Be Clear/Be Real/Connect

Great writing is clear writing. Clear writing isn't fancy or even that "smart" but the intelligence of well done writing becomes obvious when we read it and more obvious when we attempt to write that way ourselves. Writing in the clearest way possible is hard. When a writer nails that clarity, a direct and penetration connection is made with the reader.

Here are a few examples of clear writing that connects.


The girl next to me on the Portland city bus is bone thin and has mouse brown hair. Her crooked horned rimmed glasses—the temple on my side held together with oily Scotch tape—hang at the end of her nose. The coat she's wearing is two sizes two big, three sizes, so she's rolled the sleeves halfway up her arm's and she's using ragged fingernails to pick an exposed knob of wrist. I'm guessing she's sixteen year old, give or take a year and I know she's coming off a drunk. Either that or a bad high. She's got sallow skin, half shut eyes, hunched shoulders—but mostly it's her smell. When I lowered myself onto the vinyl seat next to her, I got the first whiff, the air around her so pungent it tasted of drugs and booze and smokes and daze. The dried-urine, state-ashtray stench of a binge.

I turn away and glance around the crowded bus. Is anyone else troubled, disgusted even, by this girl, this child, and her obvious downfall?

~ From the memoir Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

Do not set foot in my office. That's Dad's rule. But the phone'd run twenty-five times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless it's a matter of life or death. Don't they? Dad's got an answering machine like James Garner's in the The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But he's stopped leaving it switched on recently. Thirty rings, the phone got to. Julia couldn't hear it up in her converted attic 'cause "Don't You Want Me?" by Human League was thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldn't hear it 'cause the washing machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty rings. That's just not normal. S'pose Dad'd been mangled by a juggernaut on the M5 and the police only had this office number 'cause all his other I.D.'d got incinerated? We could lose our final chance to see our charred father in the terminal ward.

~ From the novel Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my louse childhood was life, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't; feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all—I'm not saying that—but they're all touchy as hell.

~ From the novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


I was born with water on the brain.

Okay, so that's not exactly true. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skill. But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctors' fancy way of saying brain grease. And brain grease works inside the lobes like car grease works inside an engine. It keeps things running smooth and fast. But weirdo me, I was born with too much grease inside my skill, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works. My thinking and breathing and living engine slowed down and flooded.

My brain was drowning in grease.

But that makes the whole thing sound weirdo and funny, like my brain was a giant French fry, so it seems more serious and poetic and accurate to say, "I was born with water on the brain."

~ From the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part -Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

As I wrote these examples, I couldn't help make note that three are novels and one memoir. "Why did I do that?" I wondered. The most obvious answer is that these were the books by my bed and what I grabbed on my way to write this post. But I also picked this collection of examples because they are good. Here we have, in each example, clear writing that makes a connection.

Alexie's narrator is a young kid who went through brain surgery but lived to tell the tale and the reader is assured—right away—that there is one heck of a story being unfolded by the facts of this boys birth.

Gwartney, in her memoir, tells the story of being on the bus with a stranger—a young stranger—and we are being told that this is a story about her feelings, observations and situation in relationship to young people and abuse. She hasn't told us—in this example—that two of her own daughters were this young girl and that she had to survive (as the mother) a stunning long run of blows as her girls fell into that world of drugs, drink and street living, but all this is coming soon enough. The concrete example of the girl on the bus, the stranger, lets us get close but remain distant in the way the narrator wants to be distanced as well. We feel her conflict in being next to the young girl, we are connected.

In Black Swan Green and Catcher, both books told from the perspective of a young male narrator who uses a good deal of slang and casual conversational tone, we are drawn into the way a kid thinks and talks. We are part of their world—right away—by the fact of their word choices. They are not pretending to be someone they are not. They are just being kids and they are also showing through the word choices and the focus on the adults in their life, that they are young. Both of these books are considered coming of age novels. In fact, Black Swan is called the modern Catcher in the Rye and we see why. This narrator in Black Swan has the same youth, the same slang and the same focus. But he also has that clear speak of a narrator who is going to take you somewhere and is fully in charge of the story.

And that's another reason to write with total clarity. You, as the writer, initially have to surrender most of your control in order to follow the mystery of where the story wants to take you (memoir or fiction alike) but once you know what you are going to write about, once you have your beginning, middle, end in a drafted form—it's time to let your craft take over and that's when you polish, shine and work your writing to be this clear. Crystal clear.

WRITING PROMPT: Now you try. Talk to me. Write a paragraph that is clear but also casual. Work on a conversational tone—relaxed—but also moving forward toward a goal. Let your narrator take me somewhere.

Here is my example (this took me about two minutes to write)

So Jennifer Lauck, this fancy memoir writer who has this crazy blog called "Prolifically Raw," says, "write me a clear and conversational paragraph. Go!"
It's a Tuesday, early in the morning and I'm at my desk at Sell It Fast Reality. I'm supposed to be typing up a form that will sell the Johnson house but I'm not typing. I don't type unless my boss—Mr. Crabby Pants—is on his way toward my desk. When that happens, I am a flurry of "get the job done" activity. Until Crabby Pants gets off the phone and comes my way, I surf the web and do my best to learn from fancy memoir writer Jennifer Lauck. It's my Tuesday habit, my Tuesday routine, my Tuesday lifeline to something better than being a form-typer-upper here at Sell it Fast.

If you want to read reviews of books, CLICK HERE and you'll see some titles I highly recommend for memoir writers.