Writing: Trust the reader's imagination

[elfs]

I've just spent the afternoon proofreading The Free Worlds, the first of a couple of stories with a futanari setting in the Journal Entries, and one of the things I did was hunt down every ellipse, m-dash and italicization, and kill most of them. I did this because of an experience I had about a year ago. I had read the entire Vorkosigan Saga in e-book format and absolutely adored them. They were justifiably famous for their content, style, and humor.

I then re-read them, this time in paper, and was disappointed. The e-format had disposed of a great many things that had been in the print edition, most notable of which was Bujold's excessive use of italics for emphasis. I felt as if Bujold was trying too hard in some cases to make a literary exercise into a cinematic one, giving the actors in my imagination more stage direction and less freedom. Believe me, Miles needs his freedom for self-expression!

I have become much more rigorous in my use of any such writer's tricks, and much stronger in my assumption that the reader can be trusted to know what's going on if I write well enough. I have given up trying to draw pictures with ellipses, dashes, italics, and boldface, and turned to crafting scenes with words instead.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There are tools for the writer, and there's a gap between over-use and throwing them away.

And I do know what you mean about how some writers do over-use them, especially when it gets to the scenes where nobody seems able to complete a coherent sentence -- the sort of scene you write, as it happens. Anyway, as Kipling was using em-dashes, and he got the Nobel Prize for literature, I figure that they are still permitted.