Trimming the Fat

When I was in college I took a creative writing class in my junior year, mostly to soak up a credit or two, but also because I thought it would be a fun class to take. I mean, I had already been writing most of my life, so this would be an easy A, right? Wrong. The class was a bit of a disappointment, taught by a teacher who was overly pompous for someone who had only really had poems published in a handful of publications none of us had ever heard of. But I did walk away from that class with a few new things learned.

The biggest one I learned is that less is more. I know you’ve heard that axiom, but have you ever thought about it? Or taken it to heart? You might think you have, but chances are you really haven’t. Don’t worry, it happens to us all.

As writers telling a story we have these images and ideas in our head that we think about and ponder on so much so that we can describe them in every way imaginable. But the problem is that we shouldn’t describe them in every way imaginable, just the ways that get the points across the best. No reader wants to get mired in miles of unnecessary prose and description; the reader just wants to experience the story.

Recently I just finished reading Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, the seminal writer of alternate history fiction. While I enjoyed the book, I was continuously taken out of the story by a few things. One was Turtledove’s insistance on putting in many of the facts that he researched, even when they weren’t necessary to the moment. It felt like he was saying, “See? I know what I’m talking about.” I didn’t care that he did the research, I wanted to care about the characters and the story. And the characters were another problem. In what I assume was his attempt at fleshing out the characters, the writing goes off on tangents about the characters that do nothing to advance the plot or their growth.

Let me state that the last point I made there is an important one in writing – whatever you write about in your story should advance either the plot or a character’s growth. That’s a whole post in itself.

Two weeks ago I finished the draft for the sequel to Dark City, Dark Magic. The whole first chapter is a set-up for the story, but once I finished everything and went back to reread it, I was suddenly struck with the question: Is it necessary? I could just start the story in medias res (“into the middle of things”) and drop in the necessary facts where I could, and it would not only start the story off a lot more interestingly, but it would trim quite a bit of unnecessary (and possibly) boring prose.

As writers we need to have the skills to find the writing to cut and the will to do so. It’s tough, because we tend to think that everything we have to say is worth reading. We want to make sure that the reader gets everything they’re supposed to. But try not to underestimate your readers; they’re probably just as smart as you are.  After all, they’re reading your writing, right?

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Going Against Your Grain

As writers, and as human beings in general, we tend to fall into a comfort zone of what we like writing and what we feel we write well. This tends to lead to our stories having many similarities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being an author with a certain “formula” that people enjoy will bring people back again and again. For example, one of my personal favorites is Dean Koontz – his books are usually very similar in style and formula, but I love reading them and always try to get more when I can.

My novella, “Dark City, Dark Magic”, was an effort to write outside my comfort zone. I had originally started the story on a lark, never intending it to be more than a goofy detective/fantasy story. As I wrote it, I decided to try a handful of things that I usually tend to stay away from – writing first person narrative, writing a despicable character (although I did write him as a lovable despicable character), and writing a genre – mystery/detective – that I had never tried before.

The end result? It ended up being one of the best things I’ve written to date. Most of my writing does tend to be the same – generic fantasy with likeable characters who tend to get happy endings. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing stories like that, but I feel that by stepping outside my comfort zone and trying something different I not only opened doors that I never knew about, but I feel that it helped my writing in ways that I can use back in those other stories.

The bottom line is to occasionally go against your own grain. Write something that you’d never write, create characters that you don’t like (personally; I’m not talking about badly written characters), use language that you don’t usually write, etc. You might be surprised with what you come up with.

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