Keep It Simple, Stupid
There’s a design principle referred to as KISS (or “Keep It Simple, Stupid”) that considers the merits of simplicity. The simpler a system, the more effective and efficient it’s likely to be, the less likely it is to break, and the more friendly it will appear to its user. The principle is applied to things like product design and software development; the interface for iPhones often being cited as a great example (since iPhones apparently have a very user-friendly interface, although I’m not sure everyone would agree!) There are similar principles in other fields (such as “Occam’s razor”, a philosophical principle that can be summed up as “the simplest explanation is usually the best one”); it also overlaps with quotes attributed to Albert Einstein (“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”) and Johan Cruyff (“Playing football is very simple but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is”).
This leads me to writing. I would argue that KISS or Occam’s razor, or slight re-imaginings of those two quotes can equally be applied to our prose. The simpler our solutions for how we conjure our storytelling worlds, the more user-friendly our prose will become. There’s always more than one way to peel an onion and I don’t really like talking about the best or the worst approach when it comes to our writing, but over my years of editing, I often come back to the simplest solution being the strongest approach, perhaps not at the level of story or character (since we often want complexity and layers with those), but at the level of words and sentences, more and more I find myself applying the principles of KISS.
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Anchoring
My “Go with the Flow” course dedicates a whole topic to anchoring, which is the term I use for how a writer roots their reader in time and place. The reason for this emphasis is that many writers tend to overlook its importance. They know where the story is happening; they want to get straight into the action. They’re obeying the advice to throw their reader straight into the scene. But without anchoring, a reader will often feel disorientated. Most readers need something to settle them at the start of a piece and for it to be clear every time we shift location or time frame or a new character comes on scene. Simple, introductory phrases like “at the park on a Wednesday” or “two hours later” can do so much to achieve that. We can try to be clever about it. We can try to hint at time or location rather than telling it to our readers directly, but I would suggest that in most cases, the simple approach is the most effective.
Call a spade a spade
Or a cactus a cactus. Or an armchair and armchair. Or a brain a brain. Sometimes we try way too hard to find ever-new ways of describing something. Specificity is good—if it’s important to the story or to setting the scene, then we want to know that it’s not just an “armchair”, it’s a “wingback armchair” or a “lazyboy.” Sometimes, we choose a word that evokes character, time period or voice, so that “brain” in the voice of a scientist becomes “cerebral matter”, or in a more dialectal voice becomes “noggin”. Hey, you might even go full-on creative by describing a pair of handcuffs as a “twine-snake” or a verdict as a “word-truth.” But once you’ve set those terms, they should generally be the ones you use. What I often find in my editing work is something I refer to as synonym-searching. The writer is worried about repeating themselves, so they get out their thesaurus and the “armchair” or the “brain” or the “pair of handcuffs” is described in a different way each time it gets mentioned. Every time I see this, I find myself saying, “Keep it simple, stupid!” in the kindest possible voice.
The power of a simple sentence
In a similar vein, user-friendly, simple sentences are generally more navigable for our readers. A short, simple sentence can do so much. It can emphasise an idea in a much more effective fashion than a long, rambling one. Of course, some writers are expert at those long sentences, but often that expertise comes not from leaning into complexity but from leaning into simplicity. Their sentences are built from multiple simple elements joined together in a clever way. Take this story by Sudha Balagopal, for example. It’s one long, continuous sentence. It looks complex. But when we start to break it down into units of meaning, it becomes far simpler:
The doctor laughs
when my ten-year-old says
her throat is too narrow to swallow the chunky pill for her ear infection,
but I convince him her gullet tightens around the tablet
until she cannot breathe,
so he asks her to open wide,
shines a flashlight,
then says there’s nothing physically wrong
It works wonderfully well, but there are no fireworks here. Its effectiveness comes from embracing the power of the simple.
Don’t be afraid of conjunctions
One of my mentees has an allergy to “but”s. But (!) “but”s are useful. “But”s create logical flow. If something happens but (!) something else then happens to contradict it, a “but” helps a reader navigate that shift. If a character thinks one thing but (!) then thinks the opposite, we tend to need a “but”. If you look back at that long-sentence story from Sudha Balagopal, see how many conjunctions (“when”s, “but”s, “until”s, “so”s, “then”s) you can spot. They are user-friendly. They help create flow.
Block your ideas together
If you look at your writing and think you have an infestation of “but”s then the problem probably isn’t to do with the effectiveness of “but” but (!) rather, it’s to do with how you’ve ordered your ideas. Human brains can be quite scattered in terms of the thoughts they contain (at least, mine can), but (!) transferring that scattered nature onto the page often doesn’t work as well as we hope it will. This is because it’s too complex. It asks a reader to navigate one shift followed by another like asking them to hop on their bicycle and weave between a series of tightly packed traffic cones. Is a simpler approach (having the shifts / traffic cones further apart) more user-friendly?
The problem with pairs
A lot of what I’ve discussed so far comes back to enhancing the readability of our prose, but simplicity can also enhance the power and focus of ideas. Consider this sentence: “An orange-and-black-striped tiger prowled quickly into the small, smelly cage and growled and snarled at the horrid people who were throwing stones and rocks through the bars.” I would call this a “Where’s Wally?” sentence (or a “Where’s Waldo?” sentence if you’re American) It’s the sort of sentence with so much going on that a reader doesn’t quite know where to look. There are lots of pairs here. There are noun-and-noun pairs (“stones and rocks”); there are verb-and-verb pairs (“growled and snarled”); there are adjective-noun pairs (“small, smelly cage”) and there are verb-adverb pairs (“marched quickly”). Do we need all of those things? Or would paring back to something simpler create a more effective image? Do we lose very much if we cut to “A tiger prowled into the cage and growled at the people who were throwing rocks through the bars”?
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It)
Here are two more design principles that can be applied to our writing and feed into that idea of the simple often being the strongest approach. If we’ve told a reader that the sky is grey, we probably don’t need to tell them this again three sentences later (unless there’s a real reason behind the repetition). As we’ve seen above, throwing too many ingredients into a single sentence can create a complexity that doesn’t necessarily do what we want, but the same thing applies to our stories more generally. Think about YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It)—what purpose is each element of your story adding to the overall effect? Do you need it or can it be cut? Do fewer ingredients create a simpler distillation of idea? Is simple more effective?
But then again…
As I said above, don’t be afraid of “but”s! I’ve previously written about my aversion to hard-and-fast rules—nothing in writing is black and white; nothing applies to every writer; every rule that seems binary (show don’t tell, write what you know etc.) is really a scale. And the principle of keeping things simple is also a scale. Where you place yourself on that scale is very much up to you and how you want your writing to come across. Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of simple sentences. James Joyce not so much. Most of us will sit somewhere in between. We will see the benefit of simplicity in places and we will lean into complexity in others. From my point of view, that creates a nice sense of contrast within our prose. If every sentence is overly ornate we can push past a “Where’s Wally?” sentence into a “Where’s Wally?” piece. But on the other hand, too much simplicity can be dull and grey. Consider the occasional highlight within than greyness, the occasional complexity that might stand out.
All of this leads me back to Albert Einstein. “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”—what I take from that is we want to push things to a certain point without pushing too far. And that, of course, is easier said than done. To paraphrase Johan Cruyff, “writing is very simple but creating simple writing is the hardest thing there is.”
Taking things further
Find out more about the principle of KISS in this article from the Interaction Design Foundation.
Want a groovy little video that contemplates the power of simple words? Watch this TED-Ed animated video from Terin Izil.
Recent publication
Strange fish (Trampset)
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