Eloquence: Making Your Story Not Suck
Most writing sucks. Mine does—I haven’t won a single writing award in my life. Yours probably does too.
There’s a reason that the average self-published book only sells 250 copies. Because it sucks. Maybe it doesn’t suck to your friends and family, who love you and want to see you become somebody in this big wide world and want a share of your inheritance when you die—but to the rest of the country and the world, there’s nothing special about your writing. Boring mediocrity—bad, but not bad enough that it’s good. And if there’s nothing special about it, why go out of your way to read it, much less find it?
So if someone does get their hands on your writing, heave thanks to whatever god, probability model, or eldritch magic you believe in: against all odds, someone found you.
Now for the actual hard part—getting them to stay. Because now you face disaster: your reader opens your story, reads a few lines, and drops it and forgets about it.
Just like that. Your life—forgotten.
You have precious little time to capture your reader’s attention and interest. They could be doing a million things right now—getting buzzed at Wildcat, having sex, smoking a fat joint, taking a nap, eating cheese while listening to Mozart, whatever. Every minute someone spends reading your story is every minute they are not doing those immensely pleasurable things.
So how do you tell a story that people actually read? Like, all the way through? That people willingly give up booze, sex, weed, sleep, and cheese for? A story that’ll leave people full but wanting more?
Eloquence. Which, according to Merriam-Webster, is “discourse marked by force and persuasiveness.”
I admit that the previous paragraph reads a bit like middle-school Speech and Debate. What the hell do discourse, force, and persuasiveness have to do with your semi-autobiographical cishet teenage romcom fanfic?
Everything.
Because the fact is, every story is an argument—an argument to the reader that they should keep reading. And all too often, the argument to keep reading for stories is, But it’s my story! And that makes it special!
Haha. Everyone thinks they’re special, bud. But most of us really aren’t. Most of us will never be.
But some people are. Some people will be. And if you want to be special—if you want to be somebody who sells more than 250 copies of their book—you need to unsuck your writing. You need to persuade your reader that reading is the one thing they should be doing, and that, at least for now, you are the one person they should be reading.
I’m by no means an expert on this—remember what I said about my sucking? But, in spite of my super-Asian name, I graduated with an English major and with a Professional Editing minor, I served as the prose editor for a literary magazine in college, and I’ve worked with everyone from students to government agencies to make their words sparkle.
These are small potatoes in the context of the more than eight billion people living right now and the more than one hundred billion people who have ever lived, but I’d like to think that I suck a little less than a lot of other people. And I’ve come up with a three-step process that you can follow to make your writing more eloquent and, in turn, more likely to hit the big time:
- Define your goal.
- Entertain, persuade, and inspire.
- Purge, purge, purge.
Define Your Goal
The first step in crafting a compelling argument in favor of your story is to define your goal.
- What do you want to tell your reader?
- How do you want your reader to feel?
- What do you want your reader to do after reading your story?
These may seem like simple questions, but all too often I find that writers don’t have clear answers to these. And the result is flabby, uncompelling prose.
Take this passage:
I got home at exactly eight forty. I sighed and flung my coat on my raggedy recliner. It was getting dark, so I flipped the lights on and paced around, wandering to the window to close the stupid venetian blinds. I caught a breath of the evening air: cool and crisp, with a faint hint of autumn. I saw some cars outside with their incessant horns spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and I envied them.
Now, this passage has a lot of potential. But it just doesn’t know what it wants to be.
- Is it someone grappling with loneliness?
- Is it a PSA against venetian blinds?
- Is it a parable of environmental degradation?
- Is it just a guy getting home from work?
It seems like it’s all of these! Everything’s just crammed together.
Instead, how about we focus on just one goal? We’ll go with the guy grappling with loneliness because that seems the most straightforward (and everyone loves to write about heartbreak, so if you’re gonna do it, you might as well do it well). Here’s a modified version:
I got home and flung my coat on the recliner. It was getting dark, so I flipped the lights on and walked to the window to close the blinds. I caught a breath of the evening air: cool and crisp, with a faint hint of autumn. I saw some cars outside with their incessant horns, and I envied them.
You’ll notice that I got rid of a lot of the details: “eight forty,” “raggedy,” “paced around,” “venetian,” “carbon dioxide,” and so on. That’s because I’m only focusing on one goal in this one paragraph: showing that this person is lonely.
You can see how I might expand on this goal in future paragraphs, perhaps even by reintroducing the other goals that I discarded earlier. But do not expand until you have established a solid foundation. At this stage, all the other details are just noise: they tell your reader, Look at me!, and while worldbuilding often demands many details, showing too much too early can tire out your reader before they have a chance to get invested in your world.
As Stephen King says in his memoir, On Writing, “Kill your darlings.” You might have written the best sentence in all of human history and the world, but if it’s not serving the goal of your story, delete it. Or save it for another story.
In other words, after you’ve written the first draft of your story, read through it again and ask yourself, Is this detail absolutely necessary to my goal?
Entertain, Persuade, and Inspire
Alright, you have your goal, which is the first step toward eloquence. But now that you’ve gotten your reader through the door, you need to stop them from walking right back out. That means answering another question: How will you entertain, persuade, and inspire your way to your goal?
Good stories have at least one strong aspect when it comes to entertaining, persuading, and inspiring. Great stories do all three, and they do it without your ever realizing it. Fail to include these aspects, and you will end up describing—that is, writing an essay instead of a story.
Some stories play this description straight: the SCP Foundation, an ever-expanding collection of community-written tales comprising “declassified” reports of various supernatural phenomena, is one of my favorite examples of how to do this well.
But, especially if you’re just starting out as a writer, it’s much easier for things to go wrong with description than for them to go right. Here’s what I mean:
As Farby looked from side to side, she realized that there was nothing more for her to do. She was an artist; and no one wanted an artist. Everyone wanted scientists—they were the true pioneers. She was here to witness the end of loveliness. She stopped shivering as she gazed at the empty sea. The lamp above her seemed to dim as she stowed away her boarding pass. It was getting late, and maybe she’d just stick it out until the sun rose, or maybe she’d wait until the ship came. But the ship wasn’t coming; she knew that it was already too late.
This is another passage that has potential. But it needs some work.
It doesn’t entertain all that well. There’s a lot of telling: “there was nothing more for her to do,” “everyone wanted scientists,” “she was here to witness the end of loveliness,” and so on. Telling is giving someone a blueprint of a house, describing the width of the cabinets, the number of bedrooms in it, and the square feet it has.
Showing, on the other hand, is giving someone a tour of the house, pointing to the way that the sunlight slants through the window as the pine leaves outside are still wet with dew. As Mark Twain once said, “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
This passage also isn’t that persuasive. We know, the world sucks. But if you didn’t already believe that the world sucks, would you be convinced by this passage? Do you really feel that the world sucks, or are you just nodding along politely?
And inspiration? Well, I think it’s fair to say that this person is screwed. And, hey, she’s not alone—as artists and writers living in a world of scientists, we’re all screwed, aren’t we?
That’s not to say that you can’t write stories with downer endings, but you must at least leave a shred of a silver lining for the reader to grab onto. Sure, the character is screwed, but maybe the reader, if they heed the lessons of your story, doesn’t have to share that fate. Things can change—but only with the reader’s help.
Let’s rewrite this passage so that it entertains, persuades, and inspires its way to a goal. Let’s keep the goal simple—show that Farby is screwed—but change some things.
“We’ve gone to the Moon,” Farby said.
She was shivering. Sea empty. No ship. She looked up.
And she looked. She looked up at that snow globe. She looked and thought of artists and pioneers, of scientists and loveliness, and thought of them tucked away in a novelty shop in Nevada or New York like the landscapes and portraits she might paint with acrylic, or oil on wood, or pasta sauce, or whatever the hell she could swipe with $11.67 in her bank account.
“We’ve gone to the Moon.” Her voice was a whisper. The lamp—that hideous, hissing creature—in her way. The Sun.
She straightened herself. Sea empty. No ship. She looked down.
The ship wasn’t coming.
She put away her pass.
This isn’t perfect, of course. But I think it’s a big improvement.
Purge, Purge, Purge
You have your goal, and you have the way you’re going to entertain, persuade, and inspire your way to that goal. Now it’s a matter of execution. And for a lot of people, this is the hardest part of eloquence.
So let’s talk about minimalism.
People often mistake lots of writing for better writing, because, wow, look how much time you’ve spent writing all these words! Except, no, that’s not true at all: more words just mean you don’t really mean all your words. It means you haven’t really spent any time editing your writing down to what you really want to say. How many times have you read sentences that sound like this?
In spite of the fact that a large proportion of parents are at this point in time of the opinion that schools need trained professional nurses, there is a serious danger that funding for these jobs will be eliminated altogether in the not too distant future.
Why not just write it like this?
Although many parents now believe that schools need nurses, funding for these jobs may soon be eliminated.
Look at that! We’ve cut the length of this sentence from forty-six words down to sixteen. That’s almost a threefold reduction! (These two examples, by the way, come from Any Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz’s Copyeditor’s Handbook, 4th ed.)
And be wary of adjectives, adverbs, and big words. Do you really need them in a sentence? Or are you just using them because you’re afraid that your nouns and verbs feel a bit naked without them?
After I hung up, I stood there dazed, staring blearily into the empty darkness of the dimly luminescent metro, trying not to break into sobs. I think I was angry then too. I was angry at the people around me, at the circumstances. I had just bid farewell to my soulmate, and I wasn’t ready to part with him just yet. I needed more time with him.
This is juicy drama, and drama leads to more reads. But it’s so wordy. Let’s see if we can prune some of the words.
After I hung up, I sat there dazed, staring into the empty metro. I think I was angry. I wasn’t ready to part with him yet.
There’s a lot more we can do here to show instead of tell, but look at what we’ve already done! We’ve gone from sixty-seven words to twenty-six.
So, edit, edit, edit. Purge, purge, purge. Be economical with the words you use. Restraint is powerful; don’t show all your cards to the reader; leave something to the imagination. (At this stage, it’ll also be helpful to start thinking about giving your punctuation a once-over.)
Now, you may think that being draconian with your words deprives you of so much of the English language. And it’s true—every word serves a purpose. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist, because no one would use it.
But the question you have to ask yourself is, Does a particular word serve your purpose? Does it serve your story? Every word has its time and its place, and you must be ruthless in figuring out what those times and places are.
If we go back to the two passages we looked at in this section, we reduced the word count by almost 300 percent—and the only thing we lost is a ton of baggage! It’s magic!
Now think about if you filled your whole story with sentences like these. Same story, but readers finish it thrice as fast, which means they’re much more likely to finish it in the first place. Or, you can use that extra space for thrice as much character, thrice as much plot, and thrice as much moral as you would usually fit in.
Examples
Here are some great examples of minimalist and eloquent writing from The Shortest Story, which is a project by writer and webcomic artist Peter Chiykowski.
You don’t need three thousand words to tell a story. You just need three hundred. You just need thirty.
The End
Set goals; entertain, persuade, and inspire your way to that goal; and use only as many words as you need to get there.
Do these things, and you will have taken the first steps toward eloquent writing. Do these, and you may just argue strongly enough for folks to set aside their booze, sex, weed, sleep, and cheese and read what you have to say.
These are not big things. But it’s in the little things that give life flavor. That person who says hi to you as you’re walking down the street, minding your own business. That smell outside after it rained for the first time in a long time. That 10 percent Tuesday discount on bananas at your local grocery store.
Try this: write a story using the three principles I discussed in this post. With one twist: you cannot use the letter e. That’s because e is the most common letter in the English language, clocking in at a whopping 11 percent of words. I don’t hate the letter e, but getting rid of it forces you to think very carefully about every single word you’re using in your story—which you should be doing anyway.
That is the power of restrained and elegant writing: you bring joy and resolve to your readers. And maybe—just maybe—someone will remember you.