Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop FAQ: Q. But My novel is written in the first person, and my character is not supposed to be especially well educated or formal. I intend for my character to be casual and informal. The tone I want will be spoiled if I revise my character's loose expressions, won't it?

Q. But My novel is written in the first person, and my character is not supposed to be especially well educated or formal. I intend for my character to be casual and informal. The tone I want will be spoiled if I revise my character's loose expressions, won't it?

A. In a word: no.

Reading engages the reader's synthetic intellect.

When you write "Melissa brushed out her long black hair," you cannot possibly describe every hair on her head and every stroke of the brush. When the reader pictures your scene, he has to fill in the missing parts. Did you mention where the light in Melissa's room comes from? That the sunlight was coming through the window or she had turned on the lights? Don't worry. If it is obvious that your character can see what she is doing, the reader's mind will assume that there is some source of light so Melissa can see what she is doing. If Melissa is blind or is dressing in the dark, the reader knows you would have mentioned something so important.

Because the reader's synthetic intellect is engaged, the effect of your writing is magnified.

Have you ever read a transcript of a conversation between people who do not know their remarks are being recorded? Transcripts are deadly dull. Transcripts of real conversations are not like dialogues in fiction. No one could stand to read a novel if they were.

If you write in a conversational tone that is much like most real conversations, you will put readers to sleep. The looseness, the mundane asides, the weak and thoughtless expressions of casual conversation, when magnified by the reader's synthetic intellect, are unreadable. Your unconscious mannerisms will taint your narrator's expressions and will be blown up to blemish-revealing size in the reader's mind.

Using imagination to fill in the parts that must be left out of writing is an essential skill of reading. Without it, no one would have much hope of understanding what he or she read. The reader is not conscious of using the synthetic intellect any more than he or she is conscious of the individual letters that form familiar words. Of course many kinds of writing engage the imagination in other ways -- the reader tries to imagine how the prime culprit could have committed the crime, or what it might be like to be transported through space on a light beam -- but the basic skill I am talking about here is automatic in accomplished readers and is just as essential to understanding technical manuals as to understanding novels.

Few beginners need to worry about writing too strongly. You are highly unlikely to squeeze the blood out of your narrator by removing weak expressions from his or her story. In the unlikely event that you did over-revise, you could always put a few loose and characteristic expressions back in. But you would do so in a considerate manner and you would have eliminated your own unconscious mannerisms which, perhaps, you did not mean for your character to inherit.

The most vivid characters in fiction are not created by copying exactly and word-for-word from their models in life. Instead, their authors have suggested the salient features of the characters' ways of expressing themselves. Readers' synthetic intellects have reconstituted the characters from the authors' suggestions.