Simple vs. easy

As some of you may know, I knit. (My current project is a heavily cabled cape [scroll down a bit for the pattern picture] and it’s my first time doing complex cables. I’m about halfway through and having a blast.)

Every so often, I take one of my knitting projects out to work on when I’m meeting people in a public place, and I always get comments. I get particularly nice comments about one project that’s a very simple stitch, done in a self-striping yarn (for non-knitters, that’s just what it sounds like – a yarn that changes color periodically, with long enough runs of each color that when you knit or crochet with it, you get stripes). It’s a little annoying, because people who don’t knit nearly always comment on how nice the stripes look and how hard it must be to do them, when all I had to do to get them was pick the right yarn.

What they almost never comment on is the stitch pattern itself. It’s nothing complex…which is the point. Two of the most difficult things to do well in knitting are plain stockinette stitch, and equally plain garter stitch, which are really basic. They’re difficult because even though they are simple, they show every single problem and every mistake. With cables and lace and color work, you can often hide an error in the complexity of the pattern, or just continue on in the certain knowledge that nobody but you (and maybe a few sharp-eyed other knitters) will ever know it is there. A plain one-color sweater in stockinette is unforgiving.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

Oh, and there’s one more thing: in knitting, certain kinds of mistakes (like accidentally splitting the yarn when you knit a stitch) do more than just look terrible; they also create weaknesses in the fabric. So most knitters will go to great lengths to fix a mistake, even if they discover it many rows back and even if they know that nobody but them will know. (Why, yes, I am a perfectionist about my knitting. This surprises you?)

Writing is one of the many other things that works this same way: that is, some of the hardest things to do are the basics, the fundamental things of which every story is composed, the things that look easy. The things that one might possibly be able to hide under various kinds of razzle-dazzle, but that sharp-eyed readers and other writers will notice (and probably complain about); the things that may weaken the story on some level even if few people spot them on a first read-through, or even a second.

The trouble is that knitting has words for these small but important basics: knits, purls, stockinette, garter stitch. Writing has large-scale general categories that are difficult to put a shape to, and hard to break down into the smaller building blocks where things go wrong. Plot, characterization, setting, and style are all considered writing basics, but each of them can be as complex and ornate as a lace shawl or cabled sweater, or as deceptively simple and straightforward as a garter-stitch wool scarf.

People tend to assume that things that have a complicated appearance are things that are hard to do. Writers are no exception to this tendency. The result is quite often that a writer will notice a weakness in a particular aspect of a story, and automatically assume that the problem is with the most complex parts. They don’t even look at the simple basics – because “simple” equals “easy,” and “basic” means “something you learn when you’re a rank beginner and then you know it and don’t have to worry about it any more,” right? (Also, on some level they know that the “simple basics” are going to be devilishly hard to fix…much harder, in most cases, than slapping on a layer of frosting in hopes of disguising the problem.)

So their plots develop subplots and complexities and complications piled on complications, when the real problem is a fundamental logical flaw or a breakdown in causation or even a key piece of information that never quite got nailed down on the page. Characters get more complicated and develop bizarre childhood traumas, when the real problem is that the writer doesn’t actually know what they want or why they want it. The author generates reams of notes on history and current politics, when the real problem is that there are fundamental inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and implausibilities in the description of the setting. Their style becomes more ornate, or more spare, when the real problem isn’t the length or elegance of the sentences, but their clarity.

But the thing about stockinette and garter stitch is, they’re the basis of everything else in knitting, and if you can’t do a good job on them, nothing else will look quite right or work quite as well as it should. The same is true of the fundamentals of writing – not everything that gets lumped under “plot” and “characters” and “setting,” but the basic what-story-are-you-telling-here, who-are-these-people-and-what-do-they-want, and where-is-this-happening elements. They’re simple, and they’re basic, but they’re not easy.