Writing: Subtlety · 3:57am Jan 22nd, 2016
Like I said in my Bronycon talk, the biggest single thing I've learned from fan-fiction is probably how subtle not to be. Before, when the only feedback I got from my stories was in writers' groups, I thought I was pretty good at being subtle, yet still getting my point across. The other writers understood what I'd written most of the time.
Let me restate that. When people who'd spent years writing and analyzing stories, and were familiar with my style and way of thinking, had an entire week to study and make comments on a short story of mine which I’d usually already talked over with them before writing it, they were able to understand it slightly more than half of the time.
That's not as good as it sounded at first.
Subtlety became a thing in the 20th century. Before that, authors would write in the omniscient point of view (POV), and tell the reader everything everyone was thinking, in long sentences full of clarifying adjectives and adverbs, like Jane Austen. There was little room for doubt about what the characters were thinking.
Then around 1880, Henry James popularized the 3rd-person limited POV, and readers were cut off from the minds of protagonists. This was perhaps necessary after Freud, when characters don't always know why they do what they do, and might respond to the connotations of a particular word or phrase, or to implications not made logically, but by association. It makes it possible to show protagonists who don't realize that they're ridiculous. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (the story, not the movies), the narrator had to keep interrupting and explaining how Walter's fantasies made him feel, and how his wife's micro-management made him feel, and why the sound pocketa-pocketa-pocketa signified masculine mechanical or scientific competence to him, and then explain that actually Walter felt differently deep inside about all of it but wasn't letting himself admit that, though he was dimly aware of how silly he looked to others...
Subtlety means writing down enough cues that the reader who knows how people work can figure out what's really going on, even if it's long and complicated and not really logical, and even if none of the people in the story figure it out.
But subtlety is a trade-off between story power and popularity. More subtlety, even when done right, makes a story more powerful for a smaller number of readers, and weak or forgettable to a larger number of readers.
I was shocked when I started writing for fimfiction that readers so often failed to read my mind. I used to play the blame game, trying to decide whose fault each misunderstanding was, mine or theirs. But eventually I realized that, while I do want to understand why things weren't clear, it's always my fault. It's my fault if a subtle point was ambiguous, but it's still my fault even if it would be perfectly clear to a careful reader, because I knew when I wrote it that readers aren't careful all the time.
Using subtlety is a strategic decision to lose some readers in order to have some extra effect on those who remain. It's a choice I make, not a random reader failure that I have no control over.
The typical famous author isn't even in a writing group. She usually doesn't even read reviews of her stories. She has an editor who spends a year corresponding over details in each book. She probably thinks she's doing well if her famous editor, who's probably analyzed books for 40 years and has spent an entire year thinking about this one, understands it half the time. Without feedback from real readers in the wild, professional authors vastly overestimate how easy it is to understand them. So they're much too subtle. They write beautiful stories that, sometimes, nobody understands.
"The Chrysanthemums": Too Subtle
Sometime in high school or college, I read "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck, published in Harper's Magazine in 1937. I seem to recall my teacher praising the story's subtlety. I thought that was the way to write.
You might want to read the story right now, through this link. It's a good story, and short. I can wait.
You didn't read it, did you? 
Okay, I'll summarize: Elisa is stuck at home on the farm, out in nowhere, by herself, forever. Her husband Henry is a good guy, treats her well, but he has workers to supervise, men to do business with, while Elisa has nobody to talk to all day. She raises chrysanthemums, which as far as we know are the one thing in her life that's hers, and that she does well.
A tinker comes by looking for work. Elisa says she hasn't got any for him, and waits for him to leave. Instead, he asks her about her chrysanthemums. She talks, and warms to him. He takes her seriously, which nobody else has that we've seen. She ends up giving him some chrysanthemum sprouts in a pot, with instructions on how to take care of them.
Now that they're friendly, Elisa has a spot of work for him after all. He mends a couple of useless pots, she pays him 50 cents, and he drives his wagon off down the road. Then Henry comes home to take her out for dinner in his roadster.
The story ends like this. No point spoiler-blotting it, because I'm gonna talk about it in detail after.
The little roadster bounced along on the dirt road by the river, raising the birds and driving the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow-line and dropped into the river-bed.
Far ahead on the road Elisa saw a dark speck. She knew.
She tried not to look as they passed it, but her eyes would not obey. She whispered to herself sadly, "He might have thrown them off the road. That wouldn't have been much trouble, not very much. But he kept the pot," she explained. "He had to keep the pot. That's why he couldn't get them off the road."
The roadster turned a bend and she saw the caravan ahead. She swung full around toward her husband so she could not see the little covered wagon and the mismatched team as the car passed them.
In a moment it was over. The thing was done. She did not look back. She said loudly, to be heard above the motor, "It will be good, tonight, a good dinner."
"Now you're changed again," Henry complained. He took one hand from the wheel and patted her knee. "I ought to take you in to dinner oftener. It would be good for both of us. We get so heavy out on the ranch."
"Henry," she asked, "could we have wine at dinner?"
"Sure we could. Say! That will be fine."
She was silent for a while; then she said, "Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each other very much?"
"Sometimes a little, not often. Why?"
"Well, I've read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I've read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood."
He looked around at her. "What's the matter, Elisa? I didn't know you read things like that." He brought the car to a stop, then turned to the right over the Salinas River bridge.
"Do any women ever go to the fights?" she asked.
"Oh, sure, some. What's the matter, Elisa? Do you want to go? I don't think you'd like it, but I'll take you if you really want to go."
She relaxed limply in the seat. "Oh, no. No. I don't want to go. I'm sure I don't." Her face was turned away from him. "It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty."
She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly—like an old woman.
Now, I love "The Chrysanthemums". I love it so much that I stole its ending in "Fluttershy's Night Out".
But how many of you feel like you understood "The Chrysanthemums"?
First there's that stuff at the end about "the fights". That calls back to this part from the start of the story:
"You've got a gift with things," Henry observed. "Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. I wish you'd work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big."
Her eyes sharpened. "Maybe I could do it, too. I've a gift with things, all right. My mother had it. She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having planters' hands that knew how to do it."
"Well, it sure works with flowers," he said.
"Henry, who were those men you were talking to?"
"Why, sure, that's what I came to tell you. They were from the Western Meat Company. I sold those thirty head of three-year-old steers. Got nearly my own price, too."
"Good," she said. "Good for you."
"And I thought," he continued, "I thought how it's Saturday afternoon, and we might go into Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show—to celebrate, you see."
"Good," she repeated. "Oh, yes. That will be good."
Henry put on his joking tone. "There's fights tonight. How'd you like to go to the fights?"
"Oh, no," she said breathlessly. "No, I wouldn't like fights."
"Just fooling, Elisa. We'll go to a movie."
Then, at the end, she brings up the fights, as if she's thinking about going, thinking maybe she's strong like a man. But his answer frightens her, and she gives up on being that strong, forever. I didn't figure that out. That's what this essay says. I was just puzzled.
This essay says that when Henry admired her flowers, it made her feel a little manly or powerful for a moment, but then he offered to take her out for dinner, and made a joke about how different she was from men, both emphasizing her girliness. That sounds consistent with the rest of the story. The problem is that he suggested she could work in the orchard instead of just with flowers, and she liked the idea, but didn't do anything about it. She changed the subject. She let it drop.
Or maybe he let it drop. If she that he wasn't being serious, that would make all the pieces of the story fit together, and the ending would make sense. But if he was serious and she let it drop, which was how I read it, then it wrecks the story. It makes her isolation with her flowers, and her not being taken seriously, self-imposed.
A lot of essays claim that Henry didn't understand Elisa, her pride in her flowers, her desire for independence, and/or her need to be taken sexually. That would make sense, too, if it were in the story, but I don't see it. He admires her flowers (perhaps symbolizing fertility); he admires how nice she looks, and how strong she looks; he takes her out to town—he specifically addresses each of the insecurities the critics say she has: lack of fertility, not enough femininity, too much femininity, loneliness. He appreciates out loud every aspect of her that's at stake. The only one who could be at fault for him not understanding or appreciate her better is Steinbeck, for not giving him time to say more.
Let’s break it down. Here’s two interpretations of some things Henry says and does:
"You've got a gift with things," Henry observed. "Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. I wish you'd work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big."
Favorable: Henry compliments Elisa on her competence, and invites her to join the working men, a sign of masculine power.
Unfavorable: Henry demeans Elisa’s chrysanthemums, and symbolically, her fertility and femininity, by saying apples are more important.
"And I thought," he continued, "I thought how it's Saturday afternoon, and we might go into Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show—to celebrate, you see."
Favorable: Henry respects and desires Elisa’s feminine side, and also sees that she’s lonely for other people.
Unfavorable: Henry sees Elisa only as a silly woman who desires only pleasure and escape from reality.
After a while she began to dress, slowly. She put on her newest underclothing and her nicest stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her hair, pencilled her eyebrows and rouged her lips. …
Henry came banging out of the door, shoving his tie inside his vest as he came. Elisa stiffened and her face grew tight. Henry stopped short and looked at her. "Why—why, Elisa. You look so nice!"
"Nice? You think I look nice? What do you mean by 'nice'?"
Henry blundered on. "I don't know. I mean you look different, strong and happy."
"I am strong? Yes, strong. What do you mean 'strong'?"
He looked bewildered. "You're playing some kind of a game," he said helplessly. "It's a kind of a play. You look strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like a watermelon."
For a second she lost her rigidity. "Henry! Don't talk like that. You didn't know what you said." She grew complete again. "I'm strong," she boasted. "I never knew before how strong."Favorable: Elisa wants to look nice. Henry says she looks nice, complimenting her feminine side, but also that she looks strong, meaning masculine power.
Unfavorable: Henry says she looks nice, denying her masculine power, and that she looks strong, denying her feminine side.
The critics make Henry's admiration fit their narrative only by always making the unfavorable interpretation: criticizing him for not admiring her masculinity when he admires her feminine qualities, and for not recognizing her femininity when he admires her masculine qualities. He can't win. I don't doubt that the critics are right about Steinbeck's intent, but it doesn't work. If Steinbeck had been less subtle, he would've noticed he was sending conflicting signals. Having her feel insecure both for not being feminine enough, and for being too feminine, can't work on a first reading. You have to read the story iteratively, doing energy minimization over all your interpretations until you converge on a set of interpretations of story elements that all fit together.
It’s plausible. A real woman might feel insecure about being too feminine and not feminine enough at the same time. And she might interpret everything her husband says in the worst way possible. That’s why reality isn’t art. Reality is confused and ambiguous. Art can sometimes be ambiguous, but not if one possible interpretation makes a satisfying story and another does not. In that case the unsatisfying interpretation is what we scientists call “wrong”.
Exercise for the reader: Supposing all of the above unfavorable interpretations, why does Elisa ask for wine, and then say, "It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty."
But how about that dark speck?
How many of you realized what it was? 'Coz if you didn't, the story wouldn't make any sense at all. I'm going to add a comment onto this post for voting, and I'd like people who realized what it was to vote it up, and people who didn't, to vote it down.
Steinbeck probably didn't even realize he was being subtle there. That sort of subtlety on an essential plot point is the kind of blunder that somebody who wrote fan-fiction wouldn't make. They know people will miss it. Maybe he was trying to communicate that Elisa wouldn't say what the speck was, even in her mind, because she couldn't bear to think it. But I can't see how it's worth it. Because I'm going to be surprised if the comment for voting has no red thumbs on it.
"No Place for You, my Love": WAY Too Subtle
Eudora Welty wrote a story called "No Place for You, my Love", published in 1955. That same year she wrote an article for the Virginia Quarterly Review on how she wrote it. The story and her article are both reprinted in the 3rd edition of Understanding Fiction, the book I keep telling you to buy.
The story is about a man and a woman, strangers to each other, who meet at a luncheon among friends in New Orleans. They leave together and drive south, possibly planning a fling. They don't seem to know themselves what they're doing. We find out gradually, across 5000 words, that they are both married; that he is from Syracuse; that she is from Toledo; that they are both almost-thinking about having an affair. They say and see many things. We never learn their names, or if they learn each other's names. Then they come to the end of the road, and turn around to go home. At 6000 words, he stops the car and kisses her once. Then they continue. At the end of the journey, after 7000 words, when it becomes clear that they're not going to have sex, two sentences fall out of the sky, perhaps from some gothic fantasy in a nearby chapter of the book:
Something that must have been with them all along suddenly, then, was not. In a moment, tall as panic, it rose, cried like a human, and dropped back.
Not one word of context before or after illuminates these words. It's a mysterious, sudden injection of personification and mysticism into an otherwise realistic story. It was obviously meant to have some meaning, but none that I could find.
It was meant to have meaning. A whole lot of meaning. It was the point of the whole story. The entire 7000-word journey was an accumulation of minor details and stray thoughts that were all supposed to hint that their relationship was fleeting and meaningless, yet somehow significant to them both—a relationship that would destroy them if they consummated it, and unsex them if they did not, because—
—well, I don't know. Here, let Eudora Welty explain it:
The cry that rose up at the story's end was, I hope unmistakably, the cry of a fading relationship—personal, individual, psychic—admitted in order to be denied, a cry that the characters were first able (and prone) to listen to, and then able in part to ignore. The cry was authentic to my story and so I didn't care if it did seem a little odd: the end of a journey can set up a cry, the shallowest provocation to sympathy and loves does hate to give up the ghost. A relationship of the most fleeting kind has the power inherent to loom like a genie—to become vocative at the last, as it has already become present and taken up room; as it has spread out as a destination however makeshift; as it has, more faintly, more sparsely, glimmered and rushed by in the dark and dust outside.
Okay, that was way too goddamn subtle.
Seriously—they go on a road trip, encounter a shoeshine boy and a family walking down the highway, cross a river on a ferry, meet shrimp truckers, an alligator, drive through a cemetery, see a priest in his underwear, join a party in a beer shack, almost get into a fight—I'm skimming here; lots of stuff happens, and the only purpose of it all was to show that this man and woman were on an adventure together and thinking about screwing, then decided not to and felt relieved but also a little sad about it.
That paragraph of strained, metaphoric explanation she wrote was a point the reader had to understand from those two sentences to make sense of the story. Even though it took her an entire paragraph and was barely comprehensible when she tried to explain it plainly, she felt that those two sentences made it "unmistakably" clear in the story.
If she'd left those sentences out, maybe somebody would've sort of grokked the whole experience emotionally. But with those two sentences from outer space screaming "LOOK AT ME! I'm important!", even the reader who would have gotten it is going to sit there wondering what was with them all along that cried like a human and dropped back when it found out he was going to drop her off at her hotel.
That's a perfect example of what not to do.
My advice is, Try not to be subtle about anything critical to your story. It's probably okay if the reader doesn't catch that Julia's fear of dogs is a symbol for her discomfort with men, or that she has cats to replace the children she never had. It's not okay if the story is about how her discomfort with men has led to her childlessness, and those are the only clues given that she's uncomfortable with men or that she cares about being childless.
In "The Chrysanthemums", the reader has to understand that the tinker threw out the flowers; she has to understand each problem Elisa is struggling with (powerlessness? loneliness? not being taken seriously? not being one of the guys? loss of fertility or sexual potency?); she has to match up each of Henry's lines, and the wine, and the fights, to the correct insecurity, to understand why Henry's kindness and admiration makes things worse rather than better, and to understand what and why Elisa gives up in the end. Miss any one of those, and the story makes no sense.
And Eudora Welty was on crack. I doubt any reader ever understood that story.
Everything is more subtle than you think it is. If you wonder whether something is too subtle, it's too subtle. And every time you're subtle, some readers will miss it. Even if you do it well. Even if they're smart. It's a numbers game. Every critical point not spelled out is a roll of the dice, and even the best reader's out of the game if it comes up snake eyes.
This post took 8 hours to write.
Poll:
Vote up if you figured out, just from the story, that the dark speck was the chrysanthemums.
Vote down if you didn't.
3704113 I voted up... and I usually suck at figuring out subtle implications. but I got this one before you even asked the question.
... but they never had a friend like me!
I think I had to read that story like 15 years ago in high school. But yea, what they weer here is obvious-ish. And subtlety is a challenge. It's something I experiment with constantly in the Writeoffs because I really really like writing twists of some kind. And I don't want to just throw it in the reader's face, because getting the epiphany is super enjoyable, at least for me.
Subtle can be good, but its absolutely something you need to hone like crazy and I still am.
3704113
I only knew what it was because I immediately recognized it from Fluttershy's Night Out. I don't think I would have otherwise.
3704157 Ed?
Did you turn into a bot again?
Let me just check..."; DROP TABLE (SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES)
I was expecting the flowers to be thrown out the moment she got them; the tinker's attitude pretty much telegraphed it.
BTW, more people might read the story if you drop in a mention that it's only 7 pages long. I had skipped over reading it, until your next sentence, which called me on it, and was pleasantly surprised at the length.
Other than anticipating the fate of the flowers, though, I found the story pretty opaque.
The holy grail of fiction writing, of course, is to produce something that works on multiple levels, where people who just read on the surface go "Oh! That was easy to understand and quite enjoyable!" but people who dig a little bit go "No, shit, you don't understand, there's layers. There's so many layers. It's been keeping me up at night! I keep thinking I understand it and but then I realize stuff like 'wait a second, the fourth chapter is written in the same structural mode as ancient Scandinavian sagas, what does this mean' and please help me. I haven't seen my family in a week. The story won't let me."
If you can do that you've got it made.
3704170
The whole passage was becoming so silly it began to sound like a Robin Williams improv. Possibly in Mrs. Doubtfire's voice. Or Elmer Fudd's.
You keep accusing me of being too subtle and I keep wondering who you're talking to.
On a level perhaps more relevant to the goals of the average pony writer, it is also possible, indeed easy, to be too subtle about basic details necessary to tell the surface story. In my own efforts, I found that I was reading my story with too much additional information I knew as the author that did not exist on the page. It's a difficult trick to read one's stories as one who didn't write them, only possible to a degree.
One could think of the Steinbeck story as a story with a message or point to be analyzed. One could also think of it as getting to know Elisa. It is a perspective that might prove clarifying.
Sort of as a corollary to this, I get some of my kicks being subtle about things that don't matter. It's a great way to engage the readers who catch it without leaving out readers who don't.
3704113
I voted it up, but I'm not sure I would have gotten it if I hadn't read Fluttershy's Night Out.
3704200 One reason why I love this fandom. We have a show where pre-schoolers see one thing, pre-teens another, and adult fans yet a third. The only other major media group to do this seems to be Pixar. (Take my money! All of it!)
I'm about as subtle as a crutch when I write. About the only time I really get subtle is when I forget to put something in and everybody promptly begins to guess. I *try* to be subtle at times, but I get so frustrated that if I filmed Citizen Kane, there would be a two minute 'behind the scenes' bit after the credits where I would come out and explain that Rosebud is a sled, and no it doesn't have any real meaning other than perhaps a longing for youth. Even when I'm not subtle, and I try to do something a little off the path such as in Monster where she *thinks* she killed her parents (and is wrong), the comments just floor me.
Anyway, a more substantial response:
This is a great blog post and every writer ever should read it.
How many people missed the crucial final line of Trust, even though it outright states what the story is about?
The fact that people can outright miss stuff like that just goes to show how actual subtlety can kill.
One thing I do think helps with subtlety is increased reader engagement. Things which are more exciting and gripping will cause readers to invest more of their energies into deciphering what your story is about, which is why people spent huge amounts of energy trying to figure out Lost and Gravity Falls. Something which is more grabbing on a surface level will get people to invest more of their mental energies into figuring it out, whereas if the whole story is subtle, they'll bounce right off the surface and just kind of shrug and move on.
3704245
Funny also works.
3704113
I got that it was the flowers, but only because she mentions keeping the pot. Which only makes sense if he threw out the flowers that were in the pot.
3704281
Same here. I had no idea what the dark speck was at first but the repeated bits about a pot clarified it.
On the other hand? Her conversations with her husband read like all her isolation is self-imposed to me, which seems to be the opposite of Steinbeck's intent. So he really did a bad job there, if the general critical interpretation is correct.
BH, what are you getting at?
Oh my God I just realized you double spaced before each sentence and then I went back and looked at some of your other stuff and you have this weird mix of double and single spaces between sentences and it's making me more uncomfortable than it should.
You're a bad horse, Bad Horse.
3704230
If it were a story about getting to know Elisa, you'd still have to wonder why this one, very short story, has been reprinted and analyzed so many times. What makes it that much better than other stories about other people? To answer that, you'd have to analyze what you're learning about Elisa, and why that seems more powerful than most other stories. When people try that, they end up justifying its quality by discovering a coherent structure of meanings that reinforce each other--or, in other words, a message.
People have argued for years over the degree to which meaning is important in poetry, but in a prose story, a claim of quality almost always relies on a meaning. Even if that meaning is another goddamn Hero's Journey, or a shifting, ambiguous, modernist structure, it's still done with mental propositions that snap together like Legos into a larger structure.
Some people have tried really hard to produce stories whose quality lay in their pretty words, their puzzles, or their humorous self-parody, like Tom Jones, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow. They're intriguing freaks, but they don't merit more than a footnote in literary theory unless their techniques can be used by a thousand more books without wearing thin.
3704376 Trick Question has called me back to the One True Path of double-spacing between sentences. But I keep backsliding. I' m certainly not trying to Drive you CRAZY.
3704415 31.media.tumblr.com/8a6244dd441bbaab6c87c6544976294a/tumblr_inline_nhvsvvV4HJ1t44r2f.png
I think this might tie heavily into Magnum Opus Dissonance, actually.
The author sees something so obviously there to themselves, and their audience doesn't, because the amount of effort put in becomes directly counterproductive to the end result.
3704113 I gave it an up vote, but in all honesty I'm not sure I'd have gotten it if I hadn't read "Fluttershy's Night Out".
I knew what they were because I read your story :3
Also, I struggle with subtlety myself. It and its cousin, clarity.
I wonder if this is to some degree a continuation of the blog post I made a short while ago
As you said yourself, it depends entirely who you're writing for. If you want to land in the sweet spot of "popular and critically acclaimed", I think you need layers of subtlety such that readers who don't pick up on those subtleties aren't left behind. There should be an overt forefront to your story in addition to a sufficiently deep well of meaning for readers to dive down.
Figuring out what readers will and will not pick up on just takes a lot of experience and experimentation, and the better you get at it the more you can build things in such a way that... well, I'm not entirely sure how to describe it in writing. You could call it foreshadowing, but it's more particular than that.
In games there's an idea of implicitly teaching the player. You can achieve the same thing with subtlety, themes, and the ideas you're trying to get across. A scene on its own might imply many things the reader can't follow, but given the proper context and history of the story, those things may be clearer.
In your example of "No Place for You, my Love" the line could be made more clear through an earlier description which more overtly characterized earlier, then referred to. If I were to try "fixing" that issue, I might do something like,
Or something along those lines.
I rarely use subtlety as a one-off thing. I think that's where it loses readers, rather it should be a series of things which each may or may not be picked up upon, and all point to one thing. That's the best kind of subtlety in my mind: one that builds.
I should note a common mistake with this kind of subtlety is blunt repetition. Each time the thing should be presented in a new, fresh, yet unmistakable way.
3704411
Agree, but one way of viewing the question is asking why Elisa is interesting and gripping as a person. It's a freeing perspective, retreating from concerns about literature and examining the surface issue of why a reader, upon starting to read about Elisa, would finish reading about Elisa, and be transformed thinking about Elisa. Not the last perspective to be used, nor necessarily the first, and probably not useful to all, but it is one way of clarifying what one is trying to understand, which should aid the literary analysis.
This actually ties nicely with a thing I've been arguing for a long time -- a writer should always have in mind how much the reader needs to trust them to correctly understand the story, and if there are clues or signs that would justify that trust on the first place.
To elaborate: there are a lot of authors out there who put insane levels of detail in their stories. I've always thought that's really, really admirable. If tied correctly with the story itself, it can bring a new layer of consistency to the whole thing and overal boost its quality. But those details have to be clear, or at least it has to be obvious that they are there for a reason.
I'm thinking about stuff like, I don't know. The narrator has bad memory, for example, but he doesn't want to admit that. So he assures the reader that he remembers everything perfectly, but here and there inconsistences pop up in the narration, because he mixes up some details. Later, a plot point relies on the fact that he keeps forgetting stuff, and the reveal is supposed to make the reader gasp in surprise.
And it could do that? But more often than not, the readers won't think that the author has some kind of hidden plan that is going to blow our socks off. They'll just think the author is making a mistake. The entire thing can be solved if the author says something like "No, that's on purpose", but then you're pretty much revealing the existence of a plot twist, which goes against the element of surprise.
Even if the thing makes sense in-story, there's no way for the reader to know if it's there for a reason, or if it's a mistake. You're asking the readers to trust that you make no mistakes and that the story is not only self-consistent, but good enough that anything that might be done wrong is done with purpose.
So when we see that Steinbeck is giving mixed signals, we think that -- it's Steinbeck. He knows what he's doing, so obviously, he was too subtle at conveying the reason why the things in the story happen the way they do. There's a reason, of course, but he didn't convey it well enough.
But in a fic? If that happens, chances are we're going to think something along the lines of "I think FancyPantsu333 here didn't really know what he wanted to tell at all". We don't trust the author, because we have no reason to believe he has any authority or inherent guarantee of quality. We judge just for what we see.
I don't think this is the reader's fault. I believe that subtlety is exactly as dangerous as you said, but there's another layer to it. The better known you are for doing subtle things, the more you need to make sure that everything is clear enough. If you write something that might alienate readers or make them believe that something is wrong, if you do something that makes the story harder to read or forces them to believe there's something off, make damn sure they know that's on purpose from the get-go. That can be done with in-universe explanations, with enough quality, with foreshadowing, or whatever. But make sure that, if there's subtlety, the readers know that there's any subtlety there.
Long story short: the reader has no reason to trust you. I always start stories with that in mind --- the readers won't keep on reading, believing that this stupid passage, or this boring scene, or this strange bit serve a greater purpose. They'll just think I wrote a boring passage because I'm not that good a writer. Unless you guarantee them that everything is there for a reason, they'll assume it's not (and that you just made a mistake).
Once you have a reason to believe the readers will keep on reading (if you're a famous writer, for example, and the story is published and lauded as being great by enough sources for people to assume it's great before it even starts), then you can have a little more leeway... but yeah, you said exactly why subtlety is dangerous anyway.
Main problem here is that "subtlety" sounds nicer than "straightforwardness". It makes the story sound like it's a complicated, cultured piece of literature, and so hey, the subtler the better. I've made that mistake enough times to realize it by now, I hope. God knows it used to be a huge problem of mine.
I caught the meaning of the dark speck. A lot of the other implications flew right ove my head, and I would probably still miss some even on repeated readings.
I also seem currently incapable of seeing Henry actively at a fault here. He may not understand the reaction of Elisa at his words, but he really does seem to appreciate her. Which may be dependant on m not fully understanding the story or on some critics being full of shit.
Considering them having (hopefully) a better understanding of the matter I will for now go with me being oblivious.
shit, now AJ can break the fourth wall! D: WE'RE NOT SAFE!
I agree with your point, but I also feel like I understood both of those stories fine from your explanations. I mean, I got the flowers, and I more or less understood what the two sentences were alluding to. That said, it may very well be that you presented both passages in the context of "here's what happened, these bits are important, and here is some background information leading up to them". Had I been reading the stories myself, I may not have had such luck, because I tend not to with Modernist fiction. :B
Well, I'm pretty sure I don't have this issue. Heck, I've been chastised for author's notes that gave away far too much of the thought process that went into a story. In any case, an excellent demonstration of the dangers of getting blinded by one's own brilliance. Thank you for it, Bad Horse. Also, add me to the group who only knew the nature of the speck because of Fluttershy's Night Out. (At least, that's why I knew. I can't actually know if I would've been able to intuit it without that knowledge because I can't unread your story. Still, given how I missed a lot of the other implications, I probably would've missed that as well.)
3704565
I consider this one of the biggest issues in fan fiction. Without a reputation for competence and skill, any deliberate inconsistency or abnormality is just going to look like an amateur mistake, which means that there's an incentive to avoid narrative innovation that could be mistaken for those mistakes. That's not good.
The flowers can be a symbol for femininity, yes: they are fragile and must be taken care of. The pot, on the contrary, is solid, sturdy, masculine. He does endure without care, and protects the seeds/sprouts that have been placed inside.
The “hobo” discards the flowers, meaning that he has no use for a women in his vagrancy (the flowers in the pot being a symbol of him and her together). As for her last reaction, I don’t know. Maybe she thinks she was too feminine for him and wants to prove herself she has a masculine side, too, but finally realises how futile it is? Here, I must admit this is very subtle.
3704495 My first reply oversimplified. A deliberate attempt to simply present a character and make the reader care about her was Gustave Flaubert's "A Simple Soul" (or "A simple heart"), which is taken today as an influential "realist" story. That means it's supposed to be more like a photograph of reality than a composed painting. It's a plotless recounting of a servant girl's life, but it still ends up having a message--a rather blunt and naive one, in fact, that simplicity somehow inherently produces virtue.
But we certainly stick with a series of books, say Harry Potter, or MLP, because we want to see more of those characters. I was trying to make the point that an explanation of why a story is good has to be given as information which has meaning. I've been reading lots of 20th-century literary theory lately, and I'm ready to knee-jerk against anybody who seems to be saying that stories don't have meaning. But you were making a valid distinction, which I was trying to dismiss as a false semantic distinction.
Applied to The Chrysanthemums, I'd say I can take the themes outlined in my post, but interpret Elisa's isolation as self-imposed. That would give it a different flavor. It would be about a woman who saw freedom and autonomy in everyone else around her, and thought she wanted it, but couldn't break free of her mental habits and conditioned needs, which were perhaps imposed by society at first, but were now part of her nature. (An EXCELLENT and extremely short story with that theme is a Russian short story called "What it means to be free", but I can't remember who wrote it nor find it on Google). That would make it very different from the reading I've found in essays on it, but those essays were all written post-feminism, and were obliged, by the common opinions of literary culture, to take a more blunt, accusatory feminist perspective. More to your point, the story then wouldn't have the classic structure of a protagonist facing external plot obstacles which mirror her own internal thematic obstacles. It would have stripped away the external obstacles and presented only the internal ones. Sort of laid out a bare theme, with structure but without the usual supporting plot, like a nervous system without a skeleton. But the "theme" isn't a message, because it hasn't got a resolution, or a proper moral response. It's just, "This is how things are. Look at how messed-up this is."
3704353 Too subtle?
Agreed! In the case of "Chrysanthemums", I think that was Steinbeck's intent, but the series of things were all "Elisa is insecure about X", which made them so similar that they got in each others' way.
Yep. I run into this more as a reader than as a writer--somebody will write something clever that only makes sense in one particular way, but I don't take the time to think about it. I just assume it's a mistake, and so I don't get the story.
3704727
Yeah, I suppose. I’m a crude writer. A lumberjack: I chop through words like I’d fell timber, with a big axe and awkward fingers.
Others, like you, make splendid marquetry.
It's important to know the limits of one’s skill and recognise others'.
I don't think that there is some trade off between the number of readers who won't benefit and the impact on the readers who will. I think instead there's a question of how to guide the reader to the hidden meaning. Think of a puzzle game, like Portal. Every single puzzle in Portal and Portal 2 has some hints towards the solution. Some puzzles have more hints than others, (to the point where people complain about them being too easy) but none of them simply give the solution away. Compare that to classic point-and-click adventure games where the solution to many puzzles is to try every single combination of items on every single object in the game world. The only way to intuit or logically reach the solution to those puzzles is to have read the creator's minds when they made the puzzle.
In the works above there's very little effort done to do any guiding whatsoever, and worse off these little puzzles of understanding intentionally obfuscate the entire intent of the work itself. Perhaps they were written with the assumption that the subtleties were themselves the keys to their own understanding, but to me that's still asking readers to be psychic. There's a balance between making statements that don't seem to mean anything and explaining every detail.
If communication is a two-way street, than sometimes you have to walk both ways for the other person before they can take a single step.
3704113 While I thought the dark speck was just the caravan in the distance, I did understand that the man threw away the flowers, due to the sentences that followed, where we got a glimpse into her mind. So... not too subtle, I guess?
3704565
Holy carp. This succinctly sums up my struggle with writing The Luna Cypher. I tried to solve it by having Twilight's friends echo the doubts that the readers would be feeling, but despite the fact that many of the characters in the story explicitly said, "There's something wrong with this!" (i.e. "No, that's on purpose.") many readers commented on the story, saying, "There's something wrong with this!" So I guess I undermined my plot twist without alleviating the problem I was trying to address. *head desk*
I guess Bad Horse is right. Subtlety isn't worth it if you want to reach a large audience.
3705177
That's a right solution.
I don't mean it's not worth it. I mean you have to know you're making a trade-off. It might still be worth it.
I found this point eminently obvious. You have a mundane story, in which two people are forming a bond - people who lack the human connection in what is supposed to be their deepest, closest relationship.
And here they are, at the culmination of their relationship, and they let it go. The something was clearly the chance at the human connection they both were lacking. I thought it was clear as a bell. *shrug*
I applaud you in this one, Bad Horse. You've really hit the nail on the head, hard, about something very important. In case you missed that: I agree entirely.
What you've described entirely matches my experiences with writing the few stores I have published here. If I had to say what the big, fundamental, changes between the first and final drafts of Never so Far Away and Muddy Hole were in general terms, it would be calcifications of what was going on. Basically letting a little more of what was going on in my head get down onto the paper. I still remember Ghost commenting at the end of Muddy Hole's first draft "if you think about it, it's almost like you've written a story about Rarity dealing with mental illness [and so you should be more careful about you comedy because you may end up implying things about a sensitive topic that you clearly don't too]" when of course, that was exactly the point and it just hadn't come through.
Also, one of the most memorable passages from Eternal, for me at least:
Device came straight and explained pretty much exactly what was going on in Twilight's head and why. And it was powerful, not because it was the solution to some puzzle but because I could immediately understand what I was like to be Twilight at that point. It may have also helped that I have had a similar experience (not with magic, but after finally breaking down and admitting to a very understanding collage chaplain just how close I was to coming apart at the seams).
I've also been rereading Glim. It's a guilty pleasure: the canon characters are all canon-sues (it's not the the superpowers, its the fact that the world revolves around them more than it should). It's about as un-subtle as you can possibly get about it's themes. It basically beats you round the head with them right from the start and honestly, it's not that much poorer for it. There are bits, mostly in the second half, that cause heart-wrenching degrees of emotion for me. Guess it matters more that I was able to connect and empathise with the minds of the characters than it was to solve a puzzle. Who'd a thunk it?
So yeah, in short, I couldn't agree more.
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I guess it's like so much else in life; it depends on how you do it.
One of the advantages of subtlety is that it lets different readers interpret the story in multiple ways, usually in a way that lets each of them enjoy the story the most. From Chrysanthemums, people looking to write a paper on how early sexual mores left women feeling unfulfilled are happy to interpret the details about Henry negatively, and they enjoy the story. Other people read it and think its the story of an emotionally dysfunctional woman who, despite a kind and caring husband, is fundamentally unhappy enjoy Chrysanthemums as well. Too much subtlety and everyone feels like they didn't get the point, but just the right amount of subtlety and everyone can find their own point to the story.
3704113 I did recognize the reference from your story, but I feel like I still would have, because of that line about pots. We know he was driving off in a car with pots of chrysanthemums, so it seemed fairly straightforward to me.
3704245 Those two examples aren't just exciting, they're also specifically a genre of "hey, we got a mystery going on here, can you readers figure out what's happening before the end?" Maybe making obvious clues and mystery hints at the beginning is the best way to get readers to pay close attention, so they feel like they can spot the ending before the actual ending.
That or just mention at the beginning there will be a quiz at the end.
3705177
For what it's worth, one of my most popular stories, Forever and Again and Again, never outright states two critical conclusions: Twilight is the reincarnation of Celestia's wife, and Twilight has a crush on Celestia, indicating there is still hope for their relationship being rekindled in this life. But while I was subtle in the sense that I never actually told the reader directly what was going on, I did wave a clue bat rather menacingly at them throughout the story. Most readers (as far as I can tell) got it, though there were still some "I don't get its" in the comments.
On the other hand, by far the most popular poem in The Collected Poems of Maud Pie is Farming Rocks, which is the poem which is most obviously not about rocks.
3706090
I haven't read the second one (it's on my list), but as I recall, that conclusion in F&A&A was almost inescapable.
3706179
What is better than unsubtle subtlety?
3706335
In this medium you always have the option to cheat. Write a subtle story then get on another account to post a comment praising the subtle points while explaining it in spoiler text to everyone who missed it. That way everyone gets to understand what you meant, and it seems like it was a great story because obviously a smart, careful reader was able to figure it out.
If the author wrote the full explanation into the story itself it might seem heavy handed or amateurish. A comment from the author explaining everything might come across as patronizing or seem outrageous to expect that the audience was supposed to understand that. But if someone else writes the comment explaining everything, then the audience will blame themselves instead of the author for anything they missed since other readers caught it.
I know my enjoyment of many stories has been enhanced by reading comments afterward. I doubt they were shill comments but I will never know, and I'm not sure it matters.