There’s hardly anything that upsets a reader more than that, but of breaking the flow between a really interesting novel. This irritation is oftentimes triggered due to external factors such as interruptions between a stranger wanting to strike up a conversation when you’re clearly ‘in’ the book in your hand, waiting for your bus on a stop; or the odd tasks your mother provides you to fulfil when she sees you slacking all day, doing nothing but engrossed in your books, in hopes to put your time to some ‘productive use’.
However, there are a few times that the aforesaid ‘flow’ of the story is broken by the author himself. It’s times like those which are the worst.
Quite a few authors succumb to a major, but unnoticed mistake is that in the process of elaborating the details of their characters and the material in a nuanced and descriptive way, they tend to use obscure phrases and novel words which would stump a non native speaker, and confuse many of the native speakers too.
They use such vocabulary which would impress Victorian nobility, and elucidate with them in depth on points critical to a story, that the poor reader may have to break the flow of reading a story in the middle to understand the meaning behind the sentence just so that they may not miss out anything critical to the plot.
I have come across many such stories, but the latest one that falls prey to this blunder is – “The Pit and the Pendulum”, a Short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar is famous for his works of murder and horror. But in this work, the only thing he seems to have murdered is the attention span of the reader, The real horror is the one that the reader experiences while deciphering each obscure sentence of this short story in order to understand its plot.
Very few of the authors understand the difference between a best seller and a so-so book is how many copies the book has sold, and what makes a best seller is how many people like reading it. You may be writing a fiction that may enchant and pull the author into worlds anew, or imparting golden words of wisdom previously unheard of; but if the reader cannot understand it, it’s like sand slipping through your fingers. Moot, useless.
It is more important that the reader understands what the author is trying to convey, than the author trying to exhibit their literary prowess by using archaic vocabulary and words that might require a thesaurus to decipher. Looking at you, Shashi Tharoor.
Oh well here’s my rant to authors of the present and the future. Get relatable to gain the love of the 99% of audience, or stick to obscure and novel vocabulary in order to impress the 1% of the readers.
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