[stylist] stylist Digest, Vol 81, Issue 17

[Kerry Thompson]

Bridgit,

Style is very much an individual thing. It seems to me, though, that to 
some extent too, it is generational or at least goes in cycles, not to 
say fads. As far as I can tell, white space rather than actual, written 
transitions, came into widespread use only in the last thirty to 
thirty-five years or so. Sure, I use it occasionally, but being a 
conservative old fogy, I tend to look for more, hmmm, organic 
transitions. As you say, it's purely a matter of style.

I still think, though, that white space needs to be handled with care. 
Unless you actually print out the piece yourself, you have no way of 
knowing how or whether the mail reader or web browser or fax machine you 
send the manuscript to will render it as you intend. And, how can you be 
sure, when your piece is published, that your white space will fall just 
where you intend? What if it falls at the end of a page? The reader 
won't even know it's supposed to be there. I guess all I'm saying is, 
white space is in fashion just now, but it hasn't always been and won't 
always be. As with any fashion, you need to approach it with caution and 
employ it with moderation.

 From a purely writerly point of view, I personally prefer written 
transitions. It goes back to clarity, I guess. The tried and true, 
"Meanwhile, back at the ranch..." type transition leaves no doubt in the 
reader's mind that a transition is coming. You can gussy it up a bit, 
integrating it into the narration like this:

Janet sneezed again as she glumly stared out her window, wondering how 
Billy would manage without her.

At that moment, he was shimmying over Mrs. Jones' back fence. He 
waspleased and excited to be on his own, but sorry Janet wouldn't be 
there to see his triumph.

As to your story specifically, some sort of tying together of the high 
school thread with the police station thread would be helpful IMO. Is 
this the same school the retiring cop attended fifty years ago? Is it 
the school his granddaughter attends? Is there some connection between 
him and the blind girl in the first section? Again, I know the 
kaleidoscopic style, where none of the storylines of a story or novel 
ever intersect, is fashionable just now. But, I like connections. To me, 
a story with connections is easier to follow and more enjoyable to read 
than one in which each storyline is isolated from the others.

As to your question about how much, as blind writers, we should pander 
to the needs of screen readers: That's not how I look at it. We as blind 
and visually impaired writers perceive the world in a fundamentally 
different way than do fully sighted writers. Even those of us with a 
fair amount of eyesight, like myself, and who tend to be pretty visual 
in our writing, also like myself, use nonvisual queues, notice nonvisual 
input that the sighted writer is scarcely aware of. So, why not make use 
of these details? Why not write about the world as we perceive it? Doing 
that, we will not only make our work easier for our blind readers to 
read, whether they access it audibly or through braille, but we will 
also give our sighted readers a richer experience of our created world 
than they might otherwise have.

I'm not saying to make special concessions for our blind readers, I'm 
just saying to be true to our identity and unique perspective as blind 
writers. If that means using more dialogue tags than might currently be 
in vogue, that's fine. If itmeans writing transitional passages rather 
than relying on white space or asterisks, fine. We aren't in competition 
with sighted writers. At least, we don't have to out-cool them with 
their current fads. We have to be the best damned writers we can be. 
And, if that means maybe being just a little old fashioned, just a 
little square but clear, easy to read, fun to read, then that's all right.

Kerry