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Topic : How can I learn subtlety? I'm a journalist, and my writing work often involves writing reviews. Similar work in the field often focuses down on the mechanical, objective qualities of the thing - selfpublishingguru.com

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I'm a journalist, and my writing work often involves writing reviews. Similar work in the field often focuses down on the mechanical, objective qualities of the thing being reviewed and that's been my approach for many years.

Now, however, I'm starting to try something different. I want to take a more subtle approach which implies things for the audience, rather than spelling it out to them.

I've started to do this by writing narratives about my personal experiences with products, rather than the more traditional objective, third person assessment. So, for example, in a recent piece I wrote:

Soon, I'm surrounded by small stacks of cards. Shortly after that, two hours have shot by into hyperspace and I'm sated with my own cleverness and creativity. I haven't looked at the internet once.

Wheres once upon a time I might have written:

Making a deck with a limited selection of cards has unexpected charm. Everyone just copies ideas from the internet nowadays. But without everything I needed, I had to plan my own instead, and it proved surprisingly satisfying.

The trouble is that I don't really trust what I'm writing to get the point across. When I'm editing my work, I find it difficult to resist the urge to take my narrative and hit my audience over the head with the point I'm trying to make.

This isn't a matter of not trusting the audience, it's a matter of not trusting myself to write prose that achieves the intended effect. What can I do to learn better, or to evaluate my attempts at subtlety so I can be more certain they'll get the point across?

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I feel that what you're talking about is shifting from straight nonfiction to narrative nonfiction. It's a hot sub-genre right now, and a lot of journalism is heading that direction. However, I think you've misdiagnosed what you need to make that transition. Instead of adding subtlety, what you really need for narrative nonfiction is to add a storyline. Essentially, you'll be writing a short story, but a fact-based one, that carries an extra burden of carrying useful information.

I think your second quote, the one you would have originally written, is still okay. You just want to surround it with some context.

I've been an internet addict for several years now. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with my own creativity. I needed something to get me out of my rut...
Making a deck with a limited selection of cards had unexpected charm. Everyone just copies ideas from the internet nowadays. But without everything I needed, I had to plan my own instead, and it proved surprisingly satisfying... And that's how a deck of cards saved my relationship with my family.

Obviously the elided parts are the important parts, but the idea is that you give your reader a little personal storyline to help them understand this product --and not necessarily that you replace the hard facts of your story with tone poems.

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