This one is fun. It's about being completely confident in your writing, and erasing what I'm calling your 'narrative uncertainty'. The reason that it's fun is that you have two ways out, one of which is quick and easy and will make your writing slightly better and one which is hard but will make your writing much better, so you get to decide how many damns you give that day.

I'm calling it narrative uncertainty because I found that there was a class of similar problems which didn't seem to have a name, so I gave it that name. It probably has a real name! You can laugh at me when you find it!

Let's start with the easiest, which does have a name, and that's hedging.

Hedge words... are to do with well-manicured gardens, right? Yes! No. They are so-called because they are about hedging your bets. When you use a hedge word, you aren't committing fully to your narrative, and you get wishy-washy with your descriptions. Let's look at some splendid examples which are not in fact splendid. We'll use my in-progress SF horticulture novel, Topiary of Tomorrow.

The garden was about the size of a football pitch.

Here I'm waving my hands about the size. I could just come out and say that it's the size of a football pitch. No one is going to get out a tape and measure it. I said that there were always two way of fixing these. The easy way is simply ditching the 'about'.

But that gets us to why I think writers hedge. I claim that it's because we're mixing our narrator's voice with our character's voice. My POV character, Ensign Sunil, isn't waving a tricorder round, which means he has no idea how big it is. He might glance around, guess that the place was about the size of a football pitch, and not be interested enough to form a solid opinion. Like if you held a phaser to his head and screamed, 'Sunil how big is the damn garden?' he'd be all 'dude who are you? Where did you come from? How do you know my name? I don't know! Leave me alone!'

But we know. We as the writer have a good idea, and we want to tell our reader. So we sort of end up in this compromise, in this semi-omniscient-but-also-limited-yeah-I'm-not-picking-a-side mode. Or sometimes we don't know, but we want to sorta wave that fact way and keep going.

And we hedge our bets. And we get hedging words.

Well I'm here to tell you: pick a darn side. You're either describing in omniscient, in which case you know its every dimension and what every plant is and where the gardener keeps the robo-trowels, in which case you should be very confident in the size... Or you're in limited in which case your experience is the colours and smells and how the alien bugs buzz around and the birds scream at each other. If you commit to one of the two, you can avoid hedging.

Back to the my novel.

It looked a bit like the original on Earth, but instead of a croquet lawn, it had a variety of trees.

'A bit like' is more of the same, and the problem here is how wishy-washy that line is. It's fine to say something is like something else, we do that all the time for adjective substitutes; but if we're comparing a specific thing to another specific thing, then we need to be quite specific, and when we use 'a bit' we are trying to sweep that specificity under the carpet. If there are differences or similarities, we should say what they are. And of course in this case, I don't.

I say it's a bit like the original, you know? No, you say. I do not know. It could be a bit like a garden where it's the same but all the air has been replaced with gorgonzola cheese, you say, that's a bit like the original.

So what to we do? I think in this case, I'd say explicitly how it was like. Let's do that.

It was laid out like the original on Earth, but instead of a croquet lawn, it had a variety of trees.

Better? Yeah. Best? Nope!

What are 'a variety of trees'? What they are, my good reader friend, is a total shirking of my responsibilities as a writer. But, yes, I know, researching trees is hard! It's the kind of thing that can take you down a rabbit hole for an evening. Which if I'm going to be completely honest, I'd be fine with because I'm a massive nerd, but not much writing would get done.

So, back onto my original hobby horse. I think that I'm in this mess because I'm skirting on the edge of omniscient mode. This is a thing which happens in descriptive mode. And I keep hedging because it requires me to understand, well, everything. Which means as soon as I try to describe space gardens, not being a gardener from space, I'm lost.

I have like an entire paragraph of this stuff. Maybe I should reset. I think I'll try again from the beginning.

The garden took Sunil's breath away. The path and summer house he recognised, but everything else was new. Instead of the croquet lawn, there was a thicket of unfamiliar trees: they looked like willows, although their long trailing leaves were pink, and covered in tiny grey flowers. The fountain had been replaced with a sculpture of tiny floating silver cubes, which shimmered in the still air. Where there had been flowering plants, the borders were packed with long ochre grass. The air was heavy with the scent of thyme.

And above it all stretched the grey dome, a constant reminder of Sunil's imprisonment.

I took a step back and tried to make it explicitly from Sunil's POV. Did I succeed? Maybe. Maybe not. I focused on micro details rather than macro, and that meant I was able to give you concrete things which Sunil experienced.

It's worth saying at this point that hedging isn't always bad in writing. Scientific papers are many hedges for every presented fact. That's because you can't just say that eating cars kill you: you have to say that in the studies conducted most accidental deaths involving the consumption of vehicles appeared to indicate a positive correlation within statistical significance. I hedge constantly in this book, because really there's no right answers and plus I don't want to look like a dick who's ordering you around and that softens it a bit.

Of course, hedging for comedic effect is a thing. Making something absurdly unclear is the source of many classic jokes: look at the tea gag in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

But in fiction, no: unless you're doing it for the funnies, don't hedge.

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Here's another type of narrative uncertainty. What do you think of this?

The bird hopped down to Sunil's feet and made an indescribable noise.

This isn't hedging. This is flat out saying, nope, no way I know anything about this, so I'm not writing it at all! I've totally committed, but I went the wrong way. The cosmic horror writers were a big fan of this technique. It kind of stinks because it's just not bothering to paint a picture.

I don't know what this is called, so I'm calling it narrative collapse.

Again, I think we get this because we mix our narrator's and our character's voices. Sunil may have never heard anything like the territorial call of a lesser throated sand gurner, and I'm trying to express that, but the writing style looks like a detached omniscient narrator's voice which gives the impression that I'd given up.

So how to fix? You zoom in closer, or you pull out further. Here's in:

The bird hopped down to Sunil's feet. I hope to hell that thing's not venomous, thought Sunil.

It screamed at him, and he jumped back in surprise. He'd heard nothing like that before, ever, and it chilled his blood. His hand dropped to his phaser.

I tried to go more into Sunil's head! This is still a fairly distant limited third, but I've used the POV to explain that he's never heard the sound before, and so I didn't describe the call but I also didn't lose narrative certainty. I'm not sure I like it. You could tinker with it.

Here's out:

The bird hopped down to Sunil's feet. It cocked its head to one side and then made a noise like a pinball machine exploding in a meat locker, all staccato metal rattles on wet flesh.

Sunil jumped back, alarmed.

Sunil is an ensign on the USS Secateurs, and in his future world they don't eat sausages or play pinball. But it doesn't matter, because I described the thing from my omniscient position.

This is a thing that a certain kind of comic writer does a lot. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett constantly broke POV from limited third into omniscient to make jokes about their worlds. They always had narrative certainty because they never shied away from panning the camera right out to show a 'meanwhile, over here' gag if something was going to be difficult to explain, and often that's where their best stuff comes from.

Narrative collapse! Man, I wonder if I'll ever see that in a dictionary.

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The third and final piece of narrative uncertainty also doesn't have a name that I could find. I'm calling it hyper filtering.

You remember filtering? We were all so young and innocent back then, weren't we? If you don't, that's when we unnecessarily filter our reader's experience through our character's senses. If you still don't, you could go back and read the chapter?

Well, hyper filtering is when we common or garden filtering, but on top of that there is no narrative certainty around what our character is doing. Get it? Nope. This will clear everything up.

Sunil felt a smile creep onto his face. He realised that he was holding his turbo hedge-trimmer.

We have filtering there – 'felt' and 'realised'. But looking beyond the filtering, this is kind of strange. It heavily implies that poor old Sunil doesn't have full control of his body and mind. Now, if he's been stung by a green-leaved fly chewer and the neurotoxin has just kicked in, well, fair enough. That's a reason to keep filtering words, because, as you remember, if it's important that we know what a character is experiencing, that's not filtering.

However, let's be honest. We sometimes use this sort of phrase because we don't really want to commit to an emotional state or action: as a result our characters suddenly find themselves doing things. We've abandoned narrative certainty about their motives.

I think I'd rewrite as follows.

Sunil couldn't suppress his smile. The turbo hedge trimmer thrummed in his hands, forgotten in his delight.

Much nicer.

But... I've seen this in published fiction! So for this one you can wave paperbacks at me and tell me I'm a moron. Although please don't do that if, say, I'm at a funeral. Have some respect, damn it.

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Narrative (un)certainty! Don't look it up, I made it up.

Hedging: 'a bit', 'about', 'sort of', 'probably'... either delete the word or commit to a narrative style.

Narrative collapse: 'indescribable', 'impossible to describe' and so on. Either go in, so describe it from your character's POV, in which case you can directly reflect your character's confusion; or go out, in which case you can describe it using things your character has no familiarity with.

Hyper filtering: like filtering but turned up to eleven. Why has your character lost control of their faculties? Is it important or are you being unclear? Fix by being certain.

Be sure to tell me what you think!