Why Did Writers Use Formats That Were Difficult To Understand?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Reply past Laura Copeland, a curious person

Say you're hosting a dinner party.

Moments before your guests are due to arrive, you're putting the finishing touches on a fine-looking platter of bruschetta. You saved yourself an actress piece, of form, which yous pick up and bite into.

Hmm.

The bread needs something, y'all call up. Yous can't say exactly what. Better olive oil? More tomatoes?

Alice Waters, whose recipe you're using, suggests using a shallot to liven upward the flavor. But you just have a minute earlier your friends arrive -- at that place's no time for peeling, dicing, and macerating. And y'all're not even entirely sure you lot take a shallot.

Instead, you ditch the tomatoes and bandy them for strawberries, pulling from a chopped agglomeration reserved for dessert. You scoop a dollop of ricotta from a tub in the fridge and spread that on, too. Then you add a splash of balsamic -- the 10-dollar kind -- and a swirl of honey.

The issue is incredible. It takes all your willpower not to consume every piece of this new strawberry-honey-ricotta bruschetta.

Crisis averted, y'all're merrily welcoming your guests in brusque club.

"How's the bruschetta?" you inquire your Italian friend Sophia subsequently she's had a few bites.

"Delizioso," she says. "Very good. I can't taste the olive oil, though."

"The strawberries really steal the show, don't they?" y'all say, trying to hibernate a proud smiling.

"The whole thought of bruschetta is to taste the new olive oil as soon as it comes out of the printing."

Only those strawberries are from the Ferry Building farmers marketplace, y'all recollect. Organic. Artisanal. Hand-picked. Free-range. Grown sustainably, even, on the same farm that supplies berries to famed chef Stephen Rothchild's Michelin-starred restaurant! How could she not capeesh them?

It'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to write off the person who asked this question as simple-minded. And who knows, maybe that'due south correct. Maybe she's a third-grader trying to tackle Infinite Jest. Some things are exciting by blueprint.

But oft, more than often than writers like to admit, readers struggle to become through a piece because of the writer. Readers come to u.s. expecting a skilful story and instead get a mouthful of strawberries.

Whether the reader likes strawberries is irrelevant. She's hither for the olive oil, and she can't sense of taste it.

Consider that the asker is a real Italian who knows her bruschetta. Someone who can tell when she's being fed bullshit coated in sugar extracted from açai berries foraged in the Brazillian rainforest. Someone who knows you didn't use good olive oil.

In our defense, fine writing is a luxury. Writers don't oftentimes have the time -- or the humility -- to wait to review a piece with fresh eyes. It's unsettling to look at something y'all wrote and realize that it needs a rewrite; that the olive orchard has been infested with a fruit fly, so to speak, and volition need replanting and another v years to reach maturation.

It's easier to feed you strawberries. Or in my case, spices:

A shifty-eyed guy at the coffee shop the other day opened his glaze and showed 'em to me. "These'll brand you a real juggernaut on the literary scene," he promised. I took a couple abode for 10 cents apiece.

Now I have a ready-made remedy for sentences like this one:

It looked similar a storm was coming.

The grammar is sound. The words get the job done. But it's nothing special, nor is the rest of the essay from which it was lifted. What to do?

I know! Those words could use some synonyms.

Let's endeavor some:

There was a bouquet of petrichor in the air.

Petrichor! The smell of rain on the world! That is exactly what I wanted to say!

My spice rack has saved the day once again, I think, until I read this:

The heaven above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead aqueduct.

That's the opening line to Neuromancer. It'southward simple, works well, and isn't gimmicky.

I don't know William Gibson, only from personal experience, I tin can attest that a good judgement like that takes fourth dimension -- not time in a thesaurus but time in your head, thinking and thinking and trusting the process.

Hemingway and Alice Waters have it right: Uncomplicated is better. But simple isn't easy. Elementary takes time.

And it'southward much faster to pick a strawberry than it is to grow new olives.

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