Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48041
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Here, I wrote this into an answer because what I want to show cannot be written as a comment.

When I first read your post, it had not yet been formatted by Galastel. That's what I was referring to in my first comment. Here, I reproduced it the way I read it:

Without the edit:

> Breathe— Breathebreathebreathebreathebreathe FUCK! What—exhale— too bright, too fucking bright—can’t—can’t see— Falling. Falling deep. Falling hard. It hurts. Everything is spinning. What the—what’s hap— Stop—stop, it hurts, fuckfuckfuck—

After the edit:

> Breathe—   
> Breathebreathebreathebreathebreathe   
> FUCK!   
> What—exhale— too bright, too fucking bright—can’t—can’t see—   
> Falling. Falling deep.   
> Falling hard. It hurts. Everything is spinning. What the—what’s hap—   
> Stop—stop, it hurts, fuckfuckfuck—

See, both versions have their own qualities, but I liked the first one for the use you wrote you had for it. It felt more visceral. It's a flow, a frenetic verbal assault which conveys it's own intensity. But, on the other hand, it's also quite disorienting - which is also how the character feels, so it's not all bad.

But...

Writing is, in a way, a form of telepathy. It's a mean to share a though from one person to another one, sometimes through a lot of extra steps. The clearer the writing, the better the communication.

Sometimes, a writer may want to sabotage this clarity for a specific reason, a reason often related to feelings. As an example, several authors will play on the meaning of words to add something to their texts, whether it's for the laughs or some non-literal poetry.

In your case, it's not the words which are confusing, but the amalgam they compose. The reader is pulled forward by this frantic writing without beginning nor end.

In controlled dosage, this can be very efficient.

If you overdo it, reading your work becomes laborious instead of exciting. The reader should never have to re-read a passage because it's written in a way which makes it confusing. Then, you get Maldoror, by the Comte de Lautreamont, and as much as it's a work of art, it's still an hard read, not worth the work in many people's opinion.

I found that a way to achieve balance between frantic rushs and readability is to alternate short "inner dialog" bursts with visceral feelings and actions.

One last thing: this is debatable, but I think that a writer shouldn't sacrifice the content for the form. An understandable text always wins over some nice piece of art which, meaningful as it is, doesn't convey it's meaning to the reader.

Original score: 0