BY MERILYN OBLAD
My high school English teacher liked shocking her students in any way that she could. She was an ardent KISS fan (picture a five foot nothing 56 year old woman dressed in full KISS regalia and makeup for Halloween). But that was just for physical effect. She enjoyed throwing mental conundrums our way, too.
The little gem I’ll never forget: language is a barrier to communication. I really think she liked the head-scratching this elicited as much as the attempt at thoughtful response that came after it.
Much to my surprise, she wasn’t the only teacher I heard this from; my choir director later corroborated the same idea by quoting to us statistics about how people communicate ideas and thoughts. Words alone come way down the list at some ridiculously low percentage like 10- or 15%. The rest of verbal communication is conveyed by facial expression, tone, and body language.
I’m sure both teachers would be shocked to know that I still remember those brief lessons, never mind that I’ve processed them and am now using them here. But that’s beside the point. My point is that language actually can be a barrier to communicating our thoughts in the way we intend them to be communicated. I’m certain you all have experienced this, though you may not have put it precisely that way, because let’s face it, we all think differently. And therein lies the problem.
Miscommunication happens most frequently on social media, but it isn’t the only place where written shenanigans abound. Your stories, your creative babies, are also misunderstood. How do you take the vision in your head and effectively put it on paper? Start by asking yourself some questions: what emotional atmosphere am I trying to convey? What are the goals of my characters? What do I want my readers to take away from this particular scene?
Make sure you have a good beta reader with whom you can hash things out. In order to really get your point across, you must have feedback from another person. One of the traps of writing is that you know what you mean, but other people do not know what you mean, making it difficult for you to see where the holes in your work are. They see your story through their own life experience, which means they interpret your words differently than you do. So, check with your beta readers on how they perceive some of the sticky scenes and passages you’re stumbling over.
Don’t be afraid to embrace descriptors, for they make all the difference. “The mouse ran across the road,” has no particular feeling to it, but, “The mouse bolted across the hot asphalt in a desperate attempt to outpace the voracious cat stalking it,” gives the sense of urgency I want to you to feel, with some nice undertones of futility and time of day for added measure. The first is technically correct, but the second is emotionally evocative. If I wrote the first, but meant the second, then my very words have become a barrier to communicating what I really mean to you, my audience.
Some of you more experienced and talented writers may be rolling your eyes at all of this because it’s all old hat advice. But I have two very particular reasons for exploring the idea of breaking down the communication barriers.
First, I just finished my part of the judging of our recent fantasy anthology competition. One of the trends I noticed is that we had several technically correct submissions that were not as well-told as they could have been. In other words, the writing was excellent but the storytelling was lacking. Flat characters and stilted action do not a good story make. I want to see in my mind what you writers see when you envision your tales. I want to feel what you want me to feel.
And I don’t mean just lovey-dovey girly feelings. Fear, anxiety, stress, anger, bewilderment, frustration, hatred, and anticipation are as much a part of the human experience as love and loneliness. Your characters ought to be dripping with humanity, tangible examples of what we all face, feel, and endure. The settings might be extraordinary, even impossible in real life, but your characters should have all the multifaceted complexity of a real person.
And second, even experienced writers fall into dull and repetitious traps. I have a weakness for Pride & Prejudice variations. Some are beautifully written tales that do justice to Austen’s immortal characters, offering insight into the originals while weaving a masterful new tale. Others, not so much. One well-established author in particular frustrates me with her inability to explain/show stress and frustration in more than one way. She has her characters constantly grabbing, pinching, or touching their temples. I want to yell at her, “There are a MILLION different ways to say that! Get a thesaurus, for Pete’s sake! ARGH!!!!,” in my more calm moments.
Her repetition thus becomes another barrier, because that’s only one way to describe frustration. It ignores the nuances of helpless, angry, bemused, or end-of-your-rope frustration that all evoke different feelings entirely and create a richer story, even providing a turning point to move the plot along. (Think angry frustration leading to a passionate determination to do something about whatever situation is causing the frustration.)
Be imaginative when you want to repeat an idea. I know you can, because you’re a writer. And for the sake of my judging sanity, PLEASE invest in a good thesaurus. Synonyms are our friends. Do not shirk them. The Emotion Thesaurus and its companion volumes The Negative Trait Thesaurusand The Positive Trait Thesaurus, all by Angela Ackerman, are excellent resources.
So if your readers are tripping and falling on communication hurdles, please take a step back and examine your language. You may be underselling your ideas through your word choice, not delving into your personal bag of human experience enough, or laying on the repetition too thick. In spite of what my English teacher told us, language can be a glorious gateway into another reality and not an impossible to overcome obstacle. So leave the barriers behind and tell me what you really mean. I promise I’ll understand.
A lover of all things historical, MeriLyn Oblad (pronounced Mary Lynn) has both a BA and MA in History, the former from the University of Nevada, Reno and the latter from Brigham Young University. She brings more than a decade of document analysis, an eye for fine detail, and seven years of writing local histories to the Xchyler table.
MeriLyn’s first project, Legends and Lore: An Anthology of Mythic Proportions, will be released October 18, 2014.