A Post Where I Feature a Comment I Made About Car Accidents

Writers love to hi-five each other with permalinks instead of dollar bills in our hands, then we return to our dens and badmouth others’ sentence structures and word choice into half-empty coffee mugs. This post is different because I’m referencing a comment that I made and liked, posted on someone else’s site. Mike Duran’s blog will remain nameless but I will still speak ill of my own talent because it’s not hard to do.

Good writing is like car accidents. The writer constructs a scene of metal and glass and bodies gone wrong. There are certain brute facts about it, and as the god of the book’s universe the writer knows them all, but everyone who sees the accident, the readers, witnesses those brute facts different. Writers do a disservice to their readers when they hammer every detail out in plain language, leaving no room for engagement.

Readers should be confused enough about the violence of your story to need to think about how not to be confused, but not so much that they believe the effort is not worth the return. For people that see books as a drug fix while in between reality show seasons will not understand this—having to do thinky things while reading? That’s for like, school—but that might be preferable to being told the backstory of the auto industry or worse yet, how we should think of and feel about the accident.

Photo by the Seattle Municipal Archives.