Developing precision in writing

For all that writing is wonderfully creative and artistic, it can also be quite a precise discipline. It requires us as writers to write what we mean and to be exact in our writing. It’s a skill that can take time to develop – I’m sure we’ve all got early attempts of stories hidden away somewhere that are filled with vague prose and wishy-washy plots that never quite made it into life.

It’s certainly a skill worth working on, though. It could be argued that fiction shouldn’t always be too precise; there are times when you don’t always want the meaning to be entirely clear, or for certain plot points to be open to interpretation.

Yet there is still a kind of accuracy involved in these situations. Take crime fiction, for instance. You might write a scene in a crime novel where it is supposed to be ambiguous as to whether or not a particular character is guilty of a crime. For that reason, there are certain things you can’t be precise about (their guilt, to name an obvious one).

However, as a writer, you still have to choose the best and most appropriate means of conveying what you want to convey. You have to make sure that the words you choose are the right ones, and that they lead the reader where you are trying to lead them. You might, for example, want to make them believe that the character is guilty before revealing them as innocent later on. You might want to describe their motive in such a way that leaves the reader confused and unsure.

Whatever your intent, you need to be careful in how you do it. That’s where the precision comes in. A lot of the time, making sure your writing is as precise as it needs to be might not even be a conscious things. It’s just something that happens automatically; you decide you need to write a scene about X in order to achieve Y, and the accuracy you need comes out as you go.

There are times though, when in order to achieve what you want to achieve, you do need to give a bit more thought to how precise things are – tricky plot points that could easily end up appearing holey if you don’t handle them properly, for instance. The editing process is another time when it pays to look more closely at all the little details to make sure everything is just so.

Being precise doesn’t mean taking the creativity or fun out of writing; it just means being aware of what you’re writing and how it is likely to come across to the reader. In many ways, it’s a background issue, something to keep in the back of your mind along the way that should shake itself out in the end. But if you’re ever in doubt about how your writing is coming across, it might be worth looking a little more closely and making sure that absolutely everything is exactly as you want it.