Preserve Difficulty, Remove Needless Confusion

“124 was spiteful.” Toni Morrison opens Beloved with a number and an adjective applied to a house, and a reader who knows nothing yet is already inside the house’s temper. In her foreword she says she wanted no lobby into the house and no introduction into the novel. She wanted readers thrown into an unfamiliar world without preparation, as the book’s characters had been taken from place to place without it. The opening is disorienting by design. It seems to us not confusing, because the first sentence is short and concrete and the reader can say exactly what they do not yet understand: what would make a house spiteful, and why a house has only a number.

Difficulty is a demand on attention, patience, background or tolerance for uncertainty that the Work chooses because its subject requires it, such as a long sentence that holds an unresolved thought, a structure that withholds the reason for its first scene, or an argument that needs three terms held at once. It can be what the Work is for. Needless confusion is an obstacle that exists because something the writer knows is not on the page, or is on the page where the reader can’t use it, and it is almost always an oversight.

Steven Pinker calls a frequent cause the curse of knowledge. It doesn’t occur to the writer that readers can’t see steps that seem too obvious to mention. Pinker raised it about academic prose, and we extend it to fiction, where a novelist who knows exactly why a character flinches at a name, and never shows the reader, has the same problem.

From inside, the two can’t be told apart. Withheld information has a place where it will be paid out, whether in a plan or in a revision that finds the payoff, and missing information has none. To the person who already has the answer they feel identical, because that person silently supplies it (Practice 92 describes the same effect at the scale of the manuscript). So the test has to be empirical, run by a reader who is not the writer. Can they say what they do not know?

The test is bounded by the promise the Work made (Practice 16). What bewilders a general reader may be ordinary to a specialist, and a text can be perfectly navigable and still wrong for its audience. Some forms keep an irreducible ambiguity, a poem or an ending that settles nothing, and should. A Work can also fail by being made too easy, so that the thing that made it demanding is gone.

Practice. Take two consecutive pages of a current Work, read them as a stranger would, and mark every place where a first-time reader might pause. Sort the marks into two kinds. “Owed” means the text signals that an answer is coming, or that it is deliberately declined. “Unsupplied” means the answer exists only in your head. For each unsupplied mark, give the information, move it earlier, or add the signal that makes it owed. That part takes about forty minutes. Then give the pages, for whatever time it takes, to someone who has not seen the Work and ask them to mark where they said “wait.” Where their marks meet yours, you have found needless confusion. Marks on passages you meant to be hard, which read the way you intended, are difficulty doing its job.