Accessibility

One of the most overlooked writing skills is accessibility. This is the quality that makes it easy to read and that is precisely why it is overlooked. Critics in particular imagine that a writer whose prose is easy to read is simplistic in thinking, has a small vocabulary personally, and is simply writing down uncritically what is to hand. But the ability to convey complex ideas and backstory, to use dialogue that feels real and is easy to understand, to show just the right detail in just the scene—these are skills that not every writer has and are proof of talent, not luck or lack of thought.

In particular, writing science fiction and fantasy with high accessibility is one of the most underrated skills of the current day. Young adult fiction demands this skill, and it is almost universally seen as a sign that young adult science fiction and fantasy is dumbed down for the younger audience. The assumption is that the writers and editors of this fiction are similarly incapable of understanding the more “complex” adult versions of science fiction and fantasy. What a backward idea it is to assume that someone who can make the rules of a science fictional world understandable to a wide audience must therefore be unknowledgeable.

I frequently tell writers of sf/f in my writing classes that I have a rule that you can only use one “new” word per page, especially in the first chapter of a book. I use this rule for adult genre writing as well as for YA, because I think accessibility is a skill that more genre writers should cultivate. Throwing ten new words (whether they are made up in fantasy or are simply dictionary words in science fiction) shouldn’t be the way to prove that you know your chops in the writing world. If you truly understand your world and the rules of your world, you should be able to explain them to a very small child using words of single syllables.

I also have a rule that you are not allowed to make up a word (or use a four syllable one) if there is already a word in English that would be perfectly well suited to the meaning you intend. Ditto for spelling words “dyfuruntlee” in order to show that you are writing science fiction or fantasy. This is a massive pet peeve of mine, since the meaning is the same, but if the spelling is different, you are going to make readers stop and have to think before they move on. This decreases accessibility and will make some readers put down your book. If you are using “magic” in your world, then say “magic,” not “torble.” You can explain your magic perfectly well using an ordinary word.

I spent years in academia, specifically in a literature program, and believe me, I know a lot of big words that are used for simple ideas purely so that the writer can prove that they have read all the big names in modern criticism. It took me several years to recover from that program and to start writing again so that normal people could understand my meaning. In criticism, you use terminology that links back to other critics and you are writing only to an audience of similarly trained readers, which is honestly about two hundred people in the world. So, your accessibility to a wider audience isn’t very important. No other readers are going to care about a nuance of meaning you’ve discovered in a Goethe poem that no one has ever read, in the original German dialect that it was scribbled down in Goethe’s own hand. But real people don’t talk like that.

In writing programs, you frequently hear of students being given the assignment to go out and actually transcribe real dialog, to hear what it sounds like. Well, doing this is a great exercise in linguistics, but I don’t know how useful it is for writing. If you write down as many “um’s” “you know’s” and simply incomprehensible incomplete sentences that happen in real conversations, you may feel like you’re being authentic, and you may even get some great critical reviews, but I suspect you will also have very few readers.

The funny thing about writing accessibly is that it appears to be transparent. You are deliberately erasing yourself as a writer from the act of writing. You take out any details that your pov character would not notice. You immerse yourself in the mind of your protagonist, such that it may appear to critics that you have become your protagonist. This is never true, but it’s a criticism that is often leveled against women writers, because of course, women can’t write about anything but what they experience themselves.

If you’re interested sometime, go look at how many best-selling women authors (for instance, Stephanie Meyer) are accused of simply writing about their own lives or experiences in a way that best-selling male authors aren’t. Writing with a prose that erases you as an author is something that is deliberate and allows your readers to experience a book more immersively. It is a style choice. It isn’t a sign of bad writing. I suspect it is a sign of humility, a decision not to use your writing as a way to insist that you are a good writer.

The more I see writers “showing off” by using big words, flowery descriptions that don’t fit the pov character they’ve chosen, or giving long explanations of things that aren’t necessary, the more I am happy to sit back, invisible, and write books that lots of people want to read and think that I just write unconsciously, letting the words flow from my fingertips without considering every one of them as carefully as someone who uses fancier words. I suppose I would say it’s like someone who cooks a meal that has ingredients that no one has ever heard of. It doesn’t mean that you’re a better cook than someone who cooks with all the ingredients your average family will have in their refrigerator at home. It just means you’re more interested in making a show than in people actually enjoying their own food.