Streamline Your Writing
Nothing turns away a reader faster than overwriting. Using four sentences to say what you could in one slows the writing down and in the end, makes your story cumbersome and unmemorable. A golden rule of fiction is to keep the story moving forward, so resorting to flowery prose, unnecessary metaphors, and long descriptions weakens the story and ultimately makes it harder for the reader to stay interested.
Besides using too many words to make a point, going off on tangents will also lose the reader and no matter how good the rest of the story is, you won’t get him back. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel is notoriously long winded and although I loved "The Deceiver" by Frederick Forsyth, his later novel, "The Afghan," had so many lengthy flashbacks and side stories that I could never remember what the main storyline was or why I was reading it.
If you’re writing fiction then it’s a given that you need to bring the reader into the scene. Smells, sounds, sights, feelings in the air…all these things are necessary to create a sensory image for the story to take place within. But there’s a fine line between creating the backdrop for a scene and making it so agonizingly long that civilizations rise and fall before the reader can get through a chapter. Here’s an example from my own novel that ended up getting cut because it just wasn’t necessary.
“As much as Ki-Hwa adored staring at the great ocean, gazing out toward the horizon every day left her despairing; memories of the life she’d known seemed as evanescent as foam in the wake of the Kinai Maru and trying to decipher what lay ahead was as like trying to predict hold long the embers of a fire would smolder. Some nights, looking up at the rabbit in the moon, she wondered whether her mother or perhaps Jung-Hwan was looking at it too, wondering where she was. Still, she seldom felt anxious and when anxiety did manage to grip her heart, reason shooed it away. She was homesick but crying was pointless, especially since she wasn’t sure what to cry about anymore.”
Run on sentences can kill a story’s tempo and pace. If a reader has to go back and read a very long sentence more than once, then you’ve failed as a writer. There’s nothing wrong with using periods and breaking up a thought into 2-3 sentences. Here’s one very long sentence from a book I couldn’t finish:
“Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle and not until my ride home, as I began to settle into my bones, and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin.”
Overwriting can also take the form of trying too hard to sound smart. Here’s an example from a book where a woman is trying way too hard to describe the experience of going to her first professional MMA fight:
“My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and Artuad in which ia disturbing ritual – often violent – rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plentitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns.”
In the end, fiction is a fickle beast that is very hard to tame, but overwriting is not the way to do it. Keep the story moving forward, take it easy on the prose, limit tangential story lines, watch the run-on sentences, and don’t try too hard to sound smart. These are only a few tips. There are many more, but I don’t want to overwrite. ;)
Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife
Besides using too many words to make a point, going off on tangents will also lose the reader and no matter how good the rest of the story is, you won’t get him back. "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel is notoriously long winded and although I loved "The Deceiver" by Frederick Forsyth, his later novel, "The Afghan," had so many lengthy flashbacks and side stories that I could never remember what the main storyline was or why I was reading it.
If you’re writing fiction then it’s a given that you need to bring the reader into the scene. Smells, sounds, sights, feelings in the air…all these things are necessary to create a sensory image for the story to take place within. But there’s a fine line between creating the backdrop for a scene and making it so agonizingly long that civilizations rise and fall before the reader can get through a chapter. Here’s an example from my own novel that ended up getting cut because it just wasn’t necessary.
“As much as Ki-Hwa adored staring at the great ocean, gazing out toward the horizon every day left her despairing; memories of the life she’d known seemed as evanescent as foam in the wake of the Kinai Maru and trying to decipher what lay ahead was as like trying to predict hold long the embers of a fire would smolder. Some nights, looking up at the rabbit in the moon, she wondered whether her mother or perhaps Jung-Hwan was looking at it too, wondering where she was. Still, she seldom felt anxious and when anxiety did manage to grip her heart, reason shooed it away. She was homesick but crying was pointless, especially since she wasn’t sure what to cry about anymore.”
Run on sentences can kill a story’s tempo and pace. If a reader has to go back and read a very long sentence more than once, then you’ve failed as a writer. There’s nothing wrong with using periods and breaking up a thought into 2-3 sentences. Here’s one very long sentence from a book I couldn’t finish:
“Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle and not until my ride home, as I began to settle into my bones, and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin.”
Overwriting can also take the form of trying too hard to sound smart. Here’s an example from a book where a woman is trying way too hard to describe the experience of going to her first professional MMA fight:
“My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, and Artuad in which ia disturbing ritual – often violent – rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plentitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns.”
In the end, fiction is a fickle beast that is very hard to tame, but overwriting is not the way to do it. Keep the story moving forward, take it easy on the prose, limit tangential story lines, watch the run-on sentences, and don’t try too hard to sound smart. These are only a few tips. There are many more, but I don’t want to overwrite. ;)
Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man's Guide to Midlife
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