Here’s a scenario. You’ve been reading since you were a kid. You love books—novels, short story collections, poetry, nonfiction, etc. You get the point. Every year you buy more books. Dollar rack at your local, independent bookstore? Ten books for ten bucks. Amazon selling books you want to read, books that won National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, The Booker Prize, the Pen/Faulkner award? Buy buy buy. Well, if they’re between .5 cents and a few dollars. You know, they aren’t going to break the bank and what the hell? They’re cheap! (Except for, maybe, the shipping costs, which is how the seller who sells them for peanuts makes their money. You go to books signings. Conferences where all your favorite authors are, and you go a little nuts, buying novels, collections, poetry, and now you’ve met your literary heroes and they’ve personalized books for you, which you treasure. Unless they’re a dick. But you still keep the book, XYZ winner of bla bla award signed your book! (It could be worth something for your grandkids down the road).

And then. One day. When you’re a big girl or boy, you have your own library. Your house or apartment is large enough that you’re able to put in more shelves than you need. You hit Home Depot and buy weird pipes and 2x6x10 lumber and you go to town, so much so that it takes you twenty seconds to go from one end to the other. Jackpot! You’ve made it! But then you think, I’ll never read that book. Or, I have two copies. Or, I’ve put War and Peace down thirteen times, but hopefully, because I’m older and more experienced now, the fourteenth time will be the one. Alas, that’s not always the case. But why? Is it your fault? Are you just not that experienced that you’re missing what everyone else isn’t? Psst. Maybe. But it’s more likely it’s a little more complicated than that.

That, my friend, is where we begin our short journey into readability. Readability, according to Wikipedia, “is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.” Sounds simple enough. Until, like everything else in fiction and literature, you dive a little deeper into what that really means. So, let’s get some examples going of readability vs, according to the devil that is AI, the opposite of readability, which is “unintelligibility or incomprehensibility, describing text that is impossible or very hard to understand.” – Google’s AI Overview. Sorry, it was difficult to find a definition that didn’t include legibility, which ain’t the same thing. (Legibility refers more if you can make a letter or word or numbers that are written down by some sloppy scribbler, such as myself, etc.). FYI, you want your fiction to be “readable.”

When Hemingway came on the scene, he punched the flowery, verbose writing that came before him. His writing was lean, direct, subtle/understated, and, as he put it, he knew the “ten-dollar words.” He was responding to criticism from William Faulkner. Faulkner claimed “that Hemingway ‘had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.’” To which Hemingway replied, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." Burn! PS: I like Hemingway’s work better than Faulkner’s. Anyway, what’s readable when it comes to fiction, in particular novels?

Let me list a few novels people (novelists included) have found difficult to read:

War and Peace. For me, other than, say, Joyce’s Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, (yeah, James Joyce is tough!), Melville’s Moby Dick, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Blood Meridian (and I LOVE Cormac McCarthy), Lincoln in the Bardo by the super friendly literary superstar George Saunders, The Overstory by Richard Power, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, William Burrough’s Naked Lunch.

Obviously, this list is subjective and, truth be told, there are plenty of readers who don’t find them unreadable. I wasn’t one of those people. I remember once, when I was in a graduate class when I was getting my MA in Literature in English, and there was this one guy in my class who, I’m guessing, was a genius. At least when it came to literature. The guy seemed to know everything, so much so that he’d point out errors in books, and he was correct! It was maddening. But I digress. So, what makes these books unreadable, in my opinion? Let’s start with Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses.

Joyce was probably quadruple the genius than homeboy in my lit class was. I’m guessing probably more than that. Let’s start our unreadable list with four novels I (and a lot of people) find unreadable, before we get into the 5 tips to make your novel readable with Ulysses.

Ulysses

Ulysses is a modernist novel (a novel that focuses on fragmented plots, inner thoughts, a focus on the ordinary, potentially uses stream of consciousness, and whose themes often include the passage of time, disillusionment, and alienation) that takes place over a single day in in Dublin, Ireland. That date is June 16, 1904. The structure of the novel mimics Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey (yeah, the one Matt Damon sort of/sort or didn’t destroy). Here are the first ten opening lines:

SPEAK MEMORY

Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again

After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

            SPEAK

Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, The suffering deep in his heart at sea As he struggled to survive and bring his men home

But could not save them, hard as he tried—The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, And that god snuffed out their day of return.

Not that difficult to understand. Yet. For me, it’s just the epic poem part. I get dragged down and can’t go on for 500+ pages or so.

Lincoln in the Bardo

Saunders is one of the hottest writers today. He’s on late night shows, hundreds of people wait in line for his signature, he’s won a trillion awards, and so on. You get the gist. I loved Tenth of December, one of his collections of short stories. The others? Not so much. I found Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize, unreadable (I tried, desperately, to complete it but couldn’t do it). I almost found it torturous. Characters come in and out and it’s difficult to figure out who’s speaking, has a weird structure, on and on. A lot of people think it gets easier to “read” after about 50 pages, but by then I’m sort of disinterested, i.e., I found it unreadable. Here’s an excerpt.

XXI. Mouth at the worm’s ear, Father said: We have loved each other well, dear Willie, but now, for reasons we cannot understand, that bond has been broken. But our bond can never be broken. As long as I live, you will always be with me, child. Then let out a sob Dear Father crying    That was hard to see    And no matter how I patted & kissed & made to console, it did no You were a joy, he said. Please know that. Know that you were a joy. To us. Every minute, every season, you were a—you did a good job. A good job of being a pleasure to know.

The Overstory

What. The. F? Yes, it won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. The novel has trees, characters who interact with trees, activism, extensive research by the author, Richard Powers, and focuses the reader on the interconnectedness of nature, in particular plants, trees, logging, and so on. Me personally? I couldn't see the forest for the trees (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

Something in the air’s scent commands the woman: Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now? 

Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. 

To the Lighthouse

I also read To the Lighthouse in grad school. And I sort of just stared at the text and listened to the prof about why the novel was so important. The novel has no major conflict, marathon-level sentences, and uses stream-of-consciousness. Trying to read it was like climbing a ten-foot wall without a ladder. Here’s an easy, “readable” passage:

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.

Naked Lunch

I love beat literature. Kerouac’s On the Road got me writing and traveling across the U.S. Naked Lunch made me want to jump off a cliff. In my opinion, it was a puzzle where the pieces were all from different puzzles, but smarter people than myself were saying it’s incredible. Lunch is a postmodern novel (pastiche, ironic, uses metafiction and fragmentation), etc. I’m not a fan of speculative fiction, unless there’s rhyme and reason to it. But it’s a cult novel, and I sort of understand.

‘Selling is more of a habit than using,’ Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other …Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) – borrowed from beatpatrol.wordpress.com

Got it?

5 TIPS TO MAKE YOUR NOVEL READABLE

I enjoy realist novels. Not saying you can’t enjoy speculative fiction, or modernist fiction, romantasy, science fiction, or any other type of fiction. But don’t you want to have the most readers possible read your novels? I know I do. And I get being original. Cool. But I want to write stories people enjoy, narratives readers draw emotion from, are desperate to get back to reading, and think about later on because they were touched somehow, or learned something, that sort of thing. So, here are my 5 tips to make your novel readable.

Use shorter sentences 

Yes, I think it’s worth writing some longer ones to mix it up a little, but like a well-placed adjective and even the dreaded adverb, you want it to work. The reason Hemingway’s style changed literature is because that’s what he did; he made literature easier to read. Sure, some of his work is unreadable for plenty, but the flowery bits he pushed aside allowed readers to get to the point. Less words, easier to understand.

Have a plot

Most readers want to be invested in a heroine’s/hero’s journey. They want to watch their protagonists go for something they want badly, and they want what happens to make sense in a narrative that’s about causality rather than being episodic. The killer killed his wife’s murderer. So, he goes to prison. Where he meets the real murderer, etc. So, this happened because this happened, and so this happened. That’s causality. We need that or all we have is people running around doing things with no rhyme or reason. And that isn’t fun to read.

Don’t try to be overly clever or sentimental

Like Hemingway said, we know the ten-dollar words. It doesn’t mean we need to use them. Sure, sprinkling some words into your narrative, especially technical words that are intrinsic to the subject matter of the novel—medical terms, scientific terms, and so on, is probably necessary to tell the story in a believable fashion. But being clever or sentimental because you think readers will eat that up ain’t always so. The pitfalls of being clever is that if you get something wrong, you’ll lose the reader.

In terms of being sentimental, I’m referring to you, the author, forcing unearned emotion, either through exposition or trying to push sadness or happiness or lust or whatever down a reader’s throat. Characters should show that they’re happy or sad or lustful through their actions. To a limit. If, say, you’re having a character walking around crying all the time, lamenting their lost love on every page, you’ll turn your readers off. Often, less  is more.

Make your characters believable

You don’t have to have fully developed characters for every character in your novel, but you do want to make sure the things your characters do, how they act and interact with other characters, makes sense. Life is stranger than fiction, not the other way around. Fiction has to make sense. Can a woman in Oklahoma somewhere grow wings and start flying around? Sure. But that’ll likely only work in fantasy, or magical realism, or children’s lit, and like that. Which is fine. It just won’t make sense in political thrillers, crime novels, and genres where flying women don’t really exist. I’m not saying it’s impossible, only that it’s improbable. And you better be really good at pulling it off. So, ask yourself, if I put Sam into this situation, what would they do? Would that action make sense for Sam to do? Or would her past trauma lead her to do something else? As readers, we need things to make sense. Surprises are great, but they still have to make sense.

Put the work in

A first draft is something to revise; it isn’t the final product. A lot of authors, in particular self-published authors, think the first draft is the draft. That that’s all they have to do and now it’s a book. Well, technically it is, but it’s likely not going to be a very good book. Revising your novel, having beta readers provide constructive feedback, editing and then revising again, maybe making an outline so you know what’s what, if you have a plot, if anything is left unfinished, that comes through editing your novel. The tell of an amateur is not putting the work in to making their novel the best it can be. You’ve put so much time into your book, why leave it undone? Put the work in, and your readers will keep coming back for more. At least, that should be your goal.

Cully Perlman is author of The Losses. You can reach him at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

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