Explain It Like You’re Five

Communicating complex ideas is hard. People want to understand what you’re telling them, but they don’t want a complicated lecture. This is where “explain it to me like I’m 5” comes from. Use simple language, and frame it in an everyday context.

However, the failure mode of this approach is condescension. The very premise is “talking down.” There’s a good chance some readers won’t care for how that makes them feel.

One way to adapt to this in fiction is by having a literal 5-year-old request the explanation. That way readers don’t feel that the simplified language is being aimed at them. We discovered it’s even more fun to turn that inside-out and make the 5-year-old the one explaining things. The main weird aspect of our story world is part of normal life for this kid’s family. He’s always known how it works, so to him it’s other people not getting it that feels weird. Looking at it through his eyes, and expressing it in the terms he would use, helped us check our own understanding of what we’ve created.

Using this technique to get explanatory/expository passages into the text relies on having a qualified and suitably precocious youngster around. That does limit the viability of applying it in certain settings and to certain topics. (A know-it-all whippersnapper doling out sage strategy in the trenches of WWI might not be in keeping with your desired tone, for instance. Then again, feel free to use that.)

Meanwhile, we’ll be in the Writing Cave huddled around our edits on Son of Music Novel. Quarantine, you say?