Removing Narrative Doubt from Your Writing

"Seem," "apparently," "appeared." Words that express doubt in the information they are conveying. I see these words pop up frequently in the works I read. The question is: what purpose are these words serving, and do they need to remain in your manuscript?

While you may feel like you need to indicate that your narrative voice is infallible, most of the time you do not need these words. They indicate doubt in your narrative: you are both telling your reader information and informing your reader that this information is in doubt. Does the character have the traits described, or does she only seem to have those traits, but is a completely different person underneath? In a place that is described as “apparently safe,” are we as readers supposed to suspect that it is not?

With most narratives, that can be a very complicated position to put the reader in: their only avenue of knowing the narrative world doubts its own veracity. And to describe something in the language of doubt is to insert that its total opposite as also a vague, but not ruled out possibility. If a character “seems pleasant,” it does not rule out that that character contains Lovecraftean horror underneath. In fact, it’s a little bit more possible than if they “are pleasant.”

If you are playing with this, I applaud you, by all means, go forth and conquer, but I would wager most of you doubt your narrative voice without being aware of it.  You are used to working in a world (this one in which we all operate) where others can test the veracity of our perceptions.  Such doubting language may be a good defense against someone who will butt in and say “but that isn’t right.” It’s easy to back off of. You weren’t invested.

But guess what? This is your world. Your creation. You are the genesis of this world, unless your narration is grounded within a very unsure character, write with certainty.  If your “seems” are there because of your own fear, then they really need to go.

“But what about unreliable narrators?” I hear some of you ask. Wouldn’t these words be great for them? While you could use this for an unreliable narrator, even there I would say resist. There are ways to communicate doubt without using "seem," and the some best unreliable narrators are the ones who think they are reliable, but that give away clues that they are not. Those are the ones that don’t even know doubt if it was pointed out to them in the dictionary.

                                   

I’m not saying never use these words, but become aware of when you use them.  Use them too much and they undercut you as author. You tread lightly with your words, in a world that you have created. Go boldly into that world. No one is going to say you have observed your own world wrong.

Go forth; revel in your writer-god status. Strike down those “seems” and those “appears.” Be definitive.