Don't Break the Spell...

 
Imagine you’re relaxing, listening to an amazing piece of classical music. Lights down, headphones on, eyes closed. Wine may be involved. You’re so into it you don’t even register the sound as music anymore. All you know is you’re in a meadow on a gorgeous spring day… the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you’re on a blanket with a gorgeous companion and a picnic basket. Wine may be involved.
 
Then during a pause in a delicate birdsong you hear a quiet cough, and…
 
Crash!
 
You’re jerked back into your surroundings with the sudden awareness that no, you’re not in a meadow, those aren’t birds, and that isn’t sunshine. Instead you’re instantly reminded it’s merely an aural illusion created by people who were assembled in a concert hall to perform a piece of music they were hired to play. Perhaps in Philadelphia. Perhaps in 2014. And one of those people coughed, which somehow made it onto the final recording, leading to the dissolution of your sublime listening experience.
 
Ouch.
 
The same thing can happen with our writing if we’re not careful.
 
I was speaking to a group of writers recently and we were discussing why self-editing was important before sending a manuscript to an agent or editor or whatever the next step is. I briefly outlined the self-editing technique I described in the Seek & Destroy blog post, then tried to explain why it was important to avoid—among other things—unintentionally repeated words or phrases in your writing.
 
Fiction depends on the “willful suspension of disbelief,” as the phrase famously goes. When I’m reading a well-crafted work of fiction, it’s a total tête-à-tête—just me and the story. There is no author to that story anywhere in the room, and at its very best, the book itself disappears, much like the listening experience described above. Everything is story, and story is everything. This is magical, and the last thing you want to do as an author is destroy this spell by reminding the reader that the story they’re experiencing is a manuscript written by a real, live, imperfect human being. Perhaps one sitting in their family room in sweatpants a couple of years ago. Perhaps in Hoboken. Or maybe Albuquerque.
 
And using the word “actually,” for example, on every other page is precisely the sort of thing that will remind the reader that this book has an author. So is having characters tell each other things they both already know. So is having your fifteen-year-old protagonist sound like a thirty-something woman with an MFA. Who listens to music that was popular when said woman was in high school. And so on…
 
Another spell-breaking issue is transparency in the writing. Or lack thereof. After the above writers’ meeting was over, an attendee came up to discuss adding a bunch of metaphors to their manuscript in order to make it seem “more writerly.” Personally, I can get behind the (subtle, and occasional) use of metaphor to reinforce the theme of a work, but deliberately trying to sound “writerly” is probably a mistake. As a reader, nothing reminds me there’s a person on the other side of the text as much as coming upon a patch of over-wrought prose that yanks me out of the story. There are obviously exceptions to this, but writing that’s fairly transparent and stays out of the way of the story seems to do the best job of allowing the reader to remain immersed in the work.
 
Writing and storytelling are two separate aspects of creating fiction. Sometimes a strong play is best presented on a simple stage without a lot of extra props and window dressing cluttering things up.
 
So yes, we will absolutely cough on occasion during the creation of our story. That’s unimportant—everyone does. The important thing is to find and remove them before anyone else hears them, breaking the spell we’re trying so hard to cast.