A Little Less Epic Clever, Please

 

Last week I encountered someone behaving…let’s call it “unprofessionally” at work. The behavior snowballed throughout the week and took on a kind of arrogance, and it affected a number of good, hardworking people. Incensed, I devised this elaborate metaphor for what this person had been doing. It was something to the effect of a toxic spider spinning a web of bullshit and needing someone to come along to be both a boot and the anti-venom to stop these antics and squash the perpetrator.

 

Then someone asked what I thought of this situation, and all I could manage to say was “pissed. poop web.”

 

Which brings me to my next – only? hardly a? – point: don’t spend forever concocting a metaphor or description of such mythologically-proportioned cleverness that it’s either unintelligible or sends readers skimming onward to escape it.

 

I’m guilty of it and, perhaps worse, I’m exceedingly aware of it with other writers. I recently finished an acclaimed fantasy by a very good author telling a large story rather brilliantly. Well, the first half of it anyway. The second half devolved. Less forward progress with the large cast of characters. Most authorly tricks and twists of language. Did that make the story better? The first one or two might have added. By the tenth, I’d grown weary and irritated.

Never let the words get in the way of a good story.