Music, Chess, and Atypical Dialogue as Examples of Risky Writing
Sometimes this subreddit gets very down on itself, complaining we're having the same few beginner-level conversations over and over again. I am going to set myself the project of posting a weekly discussion prompt focusing on something I haven't seen on here already that should still apply to almost all of us.
Today's topic? What are the things that are so difficult to write, so hard to convey in prose, so impossible to take what is in the writer's mind and put it in the reader's mind, that it's better just to skip it and do something else instead?
I'm talking about stuff that just cannot be made to work in print. It's not going to add flavour and colour. It's asking the reader to do the heavy lifting in their imagination because you can't reliably get them there through your own words. For the sake of avoiding pessimism, I will try to include an example where a writer did somehow make it work as well.
My three top-of-mind suggestions by way of illustration?
First, it is almost impossible to write music in such a way that the reader is hearing what the writer hears. You can describe the music or the performance with adjectives, but unless you're referencing a timelessly famous tune, no one is going to be able to hear it for themselves, and in that case you didn't make them hear the music. They summoned it up for you. My go-to example of where this was done about as well as it could be done was the Cloud Atlas Sextet from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I never heard the music while reading the book, of course, but when the movie came out and a very talented composer wrote something based on Mitchell's prose, it did resonate deeply with me and aligned with everything I assumed it was supposed to be.
Second, Chess is another one of those things where writers who must use chess write around the actual gameplay of it. Not enough people reliably know all the rules, and far fewer are able to keep a whole board in their mind's eye while reading a play-by-play. If your story involves a chess game, it is almost impossible to tell the reader what the pieces are doing on the board. Off the top of my head, I cannot even think of an example where the gameplay of chess features prominently in a book rather than just saying two characters are playing chess. Instead I will use the example of Ian Fleming insisting that James Bond play Baccarat in Casino Royale. When his editor and publisher insisted not enough people knew the rules to follow the gameplay, he wrote an addendum to the novel explaining how to play that Baccarat International acknowledges is perhaps the best independently authored tutorial ever written.
My final example would be people who speak with a strange cadence or diction or inflection or 'put-on' voice. How would you write a character who speaks like Christopher Walken or John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum or Bobcat Goldthwait or Donald Trump or Gilbert Gottfried without it reading so terribly on the page that readers lose their immersion as they try to apply what you say they sound like onto otherwise normal dialogue? The only example I can think of where it works perfectly was in John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany where Owen Meany SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS to flag to the reader with every line of dialogue that he has an unusually high and squeaky voice. It's jarring at first, but you do get used to it.
So those are my three illustrations of what I'm talking about. What are some of your areas of 'Risky Writing' where it's better to write around it or do something else entirely? Do you have examples where a writer has actually done it well?