11

illustration [ TOO LITTLE, TOO MUCH ]

We've spent ten chapters now looking at ways to make your descriptions better and your settings stronger and more realistic. So now let's take some time to consider some things that you should not do.

I thought about calling this one Minimalism versus Excess. But, in addition to its sounding entirely too technical, it implies that all we're about to discuss is short sentences like some of Hemingway's as opposed to page-long ramblers like many of Faulkner's. That perception would be misleading, since there is nothing at all wrong with using very short or very long sentences, as long as you use them correctly and well. And this chapter will be about things in your writing that are wrong and need to be made right.

By too little, too much I mean the wide pendulum swings of not giving the readers nearly enough to bring them into the story or understand it and giving them considerably more than they need, or want, to know. Your job as a writer is to stay in the middle ground, and sometimes that proves to be a delicate bit of maneuvering.

DEALING WITH CLUTTER

In Stephen King's On Writing, he tells about a sort of epiphany he experienced in high school when he got back a page of copy from the old newspaper editor who had just hired him. Much — perhaps half — of the text was crossed through, and what was left was exactly what he (King) had intended to say in the first place. The editor then imparted this gem of wisdom:

“When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

If that precept could be somehow injected into everyone who intends to write, then we'd have better writing, writing teachers would have fewer headaches, and editors would either have considerably less to do or be out of a job altogether.

Let's look now at some elements of writing that are rich loam for “all the things that are not the story,” and at some ways to avoid letting that clutter creep into your fiction, especially into your settings and description.

Dialogue Tags

These little fellows — … said Mary, … he answered, … she replied — are often necessary, but not nearly as often as many writers seem to think. They carry enormous clutter potential.

I have two rules regarding dialogue tags that I try to pound in tomy students:(1) if there is any way not to use them, don't, and (2) keep adverbs out of them.

Regarding the first one: If you have two characters in a scene — even in a scene that is dialogue driven — you shouldn't need more than a grand total of two dialogue tags. It's necessary to distinguish who's talking at the start of a conversation, but then the reader should be able to keep up. It gets trickier if more than two speakers are involved, and more tags will be required. Even with several characters babbling, if you've done a good job of describing them, giving them unique personalities and voices, then readers will know who is speaking by what they are saying, and they won't need tags very often.

Now, about those adverbs. Not much that a writer can do will put me off faster than constantly using them in tag lines to describe something or someone. Listen:

“My goodness,” Eloise said, hopefully, “that is good news. Don't you think?”

“Not really,” John responded, sadly. “It all might come to nothing.”

This conversation is quickly coming to nothing, as far as I'm concerned. If the writer wants Eloise to be hopeful and John to be sad, then she should have them do hopeful and sad things. Or describe them as hopeful and sad. Better yet, let their words stand for themselves; Eloise's dialogue is hopeful and John's response to it is sad. The reader can discern both moods without being told what they are.

When writing, you should be as watchful for things to leave out as you are for things to put in. Things that don't have to be there — like useless tags — do nothing more than slow readers down and divert their attention away from the story you're telling.

Cliche´s

As we discussed in earlier chapters, where cliche´s are concerned, fewer isn't good enough; you should aim for none. To say in your fiction that a landscape is pretty as a picture or a character is as quiet as a church mouse or running around like a chicken with its head cut off is just bad writing, top to bottom.

Using cliche´s in dialogue sometimes works. A character who spews them out might add a little needed comic relief in your story, but having more than one do it is a bad idea. And for you to use them outside of dialogue will lose you many a reader.

If the image conveyed by a cliche´ is one that will be useful for your description, then come up with other ways to say the same thing. There are plenty of alternate — and better — ways to say or show that someone is inebriated than resorting to saying they are tight as a tick or three sheets to the wind.

Creative writing should be creative, and there is nothing creative about using cliche´s. They're nothing more than crutches that keep you from having to conjure up your own descriptions. So, unless you're going for the film noir voice of Mickey Spillane — “She leaned against the file cabinet, her face like a mile of bad road” — you'll need to avoid cliche´s.

Repetition

We talked about cadence in chapter three; now let's spend a minute or so on how to avoid its evil nemesis: repetition.

It works its way into our writing quite naturally, since most people tend to repeat themselves in conversation, and if something is weighing heavily on our mind, we rerun things over and over in our thinking. In writing, repetition stands out (if I hadn't just delivered that little diatribe regarding cliche´s I'd say like a sore thumb).

Perhaps the most common culprit is the adverb, which seems to be drawing considerable fire in this chapter. Please understand that some of my best friends are adverbs; I use them all the time in my writing. But the problem is that they are so useful. They are just too handy and sometimes keep us from giving a better description. Most often, since they are very telling modifiers, they keep us from showing a trait in a character or place or situation. For instance, if you say that a character quickly ate her dinner, that might be all you want to say about it and it will certainly suffice. But if the fact that she is shoveling it down at breakneck speed is important to your plot, then you should show her doing just that, in as much or as little detail as you feel is needed for the scene.

One adverb in particular — very — is quite possibly the most common single-word violator of the clutter rule. We are in love with this word in our language and tend to use it when other words or phrases, or the absence of them, would work much better. If we want a house in our novel to be larger than most houses, we say that it is very large. For a writer purporting to write well, that is very bad. There are so many ways to show the enormity of a house other than resorting to using a description that is too generic to carry much useful imagery. Needless to say (I hope), the way to make that house even bigger is not to add yet another very, making it a very, very big house. Following that formula, you could tack on six or seven more verys and have yourself a house of gargantuan proportions, and a bit of description that is abysmal.

The most common repetition that lifts its ugly head in manuscripts — it's regularly ferreted out in critique sessions (peer workshops) — is when a writer uses a word or phrase that has just been used. For instance, if you say that a character ordered the smoked salmon for lunch and, in the same paragraph, that he smoked a cigarette while waiting for his check, that's using the same word too often too closely together. Granted, the first smoked is an adjective and the second is a verb, but the reader hears the same thing both times, and that repetition keeps your story from flowing as smoothly as it could if you changed the second smoked to had.

Even words that sound alike, or almost alike, can be repetitious. Donald Westlake once said that if he had known that his character Parker would work himself into an entire series of crime novels, he might have chosen another name for him. Because over the years, Westlake has had to grabble many times with how better to say Parker parked his car.

In addition to being always on the lookout for common words and phrases that you've repeated, be just as diligent when looking for the uncommon ones — like scatterbrained — which will work only once in a great while, probably only once in an entire novel. Smoked popping up here and there is fine, but scatterbrained is too unique to be effective more than once. And be careful to not let phrases reemerge in your dialogue. “Oh, my God!” has been uttered, screamed, or barely whispered in more novels and stories and movies than perhaps any other. When your character says it, if it fits in your story, then join the parade, and it will probably work just fine. But if that character says it again, or others use it, then your reader will stop seeing those words and start seeing a cliche´.

Didacticism

More than a few professional writers are also teachers, and sometimes it's hard to keep teaching out of our fiction. If it does creep in and becomes too apparent (that is, if the object becomes instruction rather than storytelling) then it's given a name: didacticism. Which is, you should note, not a commendable trait in fiction; it's certainly not a word that you want mentioned in your reviews.

Let's say your historical romance is churning along nicely and you need your reader to know that right about here is when Thomas Becket is slain in Canterbury Cathedral. Now, first of all, unless it's important for your readers to know this in regards to your story, then it's not your job to tell them. Let her go to T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral or a history of England for that. But if that event is essential to what's going on in your fiction, then you'll need to find another way of imparting it than stopping the flow of the story and giving a lecture about it. Maybe one of your characters can learn about it from another one — in dialogue or perhaps in a letter. Or you can make references to it in your narrative. Another option is to set one of your scenes right there in the cathedral on that blustery December night and have the martyrdom become part of your plot. Ken Follett does this very thing, with this very event, in Pillars of the Earth.

Remember, readers of historical fiction expect to be given bits and pieces of history. But they don't want, and probably won't tolerate, history lessons.

Another thing readers aren't likely to abide is being preached to, which is a form of didacticism. Unless you're aiming for a particularly specific audience, like readers of Christian fiction, then you'd do well to leave out anything that might come across as a sermon.

Ethical teachings or implications are like symbols when it comes to writing. If they need to be there, or if the reader wants them, they will emerge naturally from the story. It's not your job to point them out. Summing up your story or novel with either some character or the narrator cataloging the virtues of a person or the rightness of an action or situation is much too over the top; you might as well conclude with “and the moral of this story is …”

The moral of this story is don't tell the moral of the story. If there really is one, show it — in the story itself.

Verbosity

Verbose, along with didactic, is another of those words that you'd rather not find in a review of your fiction. A few of the many synonyms for verbose are wordy, longwinded, and rambling; none of which are good references for an author.

Whether your writing is clear or verbose depends on your individual writer's voice. And yours should lean toward the former. We're not talking about using a lot of words here, which is the common misconception of what verbose means. Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove is a huge novel that consists of one heck of a lot of words, but the story is told in a crystal clear voice. So it is not verbose. Another writer might write a short, short story in which he is much more intrigued with the beauty of his own language than with the story he is telling, and that brief offering would indeed be verbose.

Becoming enamored with grandiose descriptions and language is a pitfall that modern writers should avoid. Many first time poets and writers of fiction think back to those things by the romantic poets and Charles Dickens that they read in high school and they try to squeeze their poems and stories into antiquated structures and phrasings. Then they'll flop around in them long enough to finally realize (I hope) that their fiction just looks silly dressed up like that.

Two centuries ago, a writer might have said that a character “may have taken the exaggerated view” but, today, you'd better just say that he is lying. Unless you're writing historical fiction in the narrative voice of that era, your readers will not likely tolerate having to swim through your wordiness. Your readers want a story nicely told in language and description that is, at least sometimes, beautiful and moving. But what they mostly want is clarity.

Another type of verbosity that should be avoided at all costs is the use of the passive voice. I don't know who is responsible for perpetuating the myth that intelligent sounding things get delivered in this odd vehicle, but they should be punished harshly for it. Nobody in their right mind is going to wander up to the gathering at the office water cooler on Monday morning and seriously say “a fine football game was watched by me yesterday afternoon.” Neither should you use passive voice in the telling of your story or in your dialogue.

So, leave out alas, lo, suited the action to the word, a fine time was had at the ball, and rambling sentences that are obviously meant to impress the reader with your vocabulary. The reader knows that if you are a writer you are in possession of a thesaurus, so using big words is not going to be nearly as impressive as you might think.

Wandering Offtrack

I believe that it is essential for you to know, in every scene of a story or chapter, what it is you should be up to. When writing scene three of chapter six, you should have no doubt that this is what you want to happen, this is who you want it to happen to, and this is the result. In terms of setting and description, this means that you are always aware — at every stage of your story and your writing of it — of the specific time and place and of what needs to be carefully described and how you intend to do it.

Then, when you've determined that you've strayed off your course, which you almost certainly will, you can avoid wandering off in the wrong direction. But bear this in mind: It might not be the wrong direction. It's quite possible that the straying will turn out to be a good thing. I've had interesting characters and places pop up that I hadn't planned on at all. If this isn't the case, then you'll have some clutter to deal with. It might be well-written, clever clutter — “a rose by any other name,” etc. — but it still has to go.

I suggest that you become something of a packrat when it comes to things that you discard. There's an interesting story regarding Rogers and Hammer-stein, the collaborative authors of some of the finest works in the American musical theater. I can't vouch for its accuracy, since I heard it from another writer at a conference, and writers, given the nature of our profession, sometimes fabricate at will. True or not, this one is instructive. When writing South Pacific, either Rodgers or Hammerstein wrote a peppy little song called “Getting to Know You” for a young Navy lieutenant to sing to his Polynesian lover. The other member of the writing team thought it was a ridiculous thing for a naval officer to be singing so they scrapped the song and wrote another one. But they saved the first one, which ended up working perfectly in a later musical The King and I.

So don't be too quick to throw things away. That long description of a child waiting for a school bus in the rain might not fit at all in the story you removed it from, but it may be just what you need in another one.

Useless Information

The light blue phone in your story or novel shouldn't be light blue unless it matters what color it is.

Description simply for the sake of description is clutter. Any details that you provide should be ones that will help your reader better see a character, place, or situation. That ornate china cabinet that you inherited from your grandmother might be an absolute joy to describe, and you might do it extremely well, but unless it serves to move the story along, it has no place there.

Remember, elaborate description of a person, place, or thing — especially in work intended for readers of popular fiction as opposed to literary — can stop a story dead in its tracks. And good stories and novels never stop; they keep moving.

Flannery O'Connor maintained that even though details are essential to the writing of fiction, piling them up, one on top of another, is counterproductive to what you should be about: telling a story.

When writing your story or novel, always consider what the reader needs to know. What you'll almost always end up with, if you give them more than is needed to make the story work, is loose ends at the conclusion. Remember, when you describe something or someone, you are intentionally calling readers' attention to that thing or person. So they have the right to assume that the thing or person is of some importance and that they will reemerge in the story. We'll let the great dramatist Anton Chekhov have the last word on this subject of making sure that everything in your fiction is there for a purpose. He said that if there is a gun on the wall in act one, by act three it should fire.

WHEN THE BEST DESCRIPTION IS NO DESCRIPTION

Sometimes the best way to tell or show something is not to tell or show it at all. It's always a good idea to make the reader do some of the work in your fiction, and this is particularly true when it comes to description.

Here's one of the best examples I can think of. There is a fine short story by Saki, the pseudonym of H.H. Munro, titled “The Interlopers” in which two old enemies find themselves trapped under a fallen tree deep in the forest on a cold winter night. While waiting for one of their groups of men to show up to rescue them, they manage to resolve their differences and to bring a generations-old feud between their two families to an end. When they finally hear some commotion on the ridge above them, one of the men asks the other, who has a better view of the ridge, which group of men it is:

“Who are they?” asked Georg quickly, straining his eyes to see what the other would gladly not have seen.

“Wolves.”

Chilling, isn't it? And the main reason that it is so chilling is something that the author doesn't do. He doesn't describe the horrors that we know are coming. After all, the men are trapped and the wolves are wild and no doubt hungry; you get the idea. And it's that idea that he wants to emphasize, not the gnarling, bloody business that he could have described in great detail. He isolates that final, terrifying word with no instructions or suggestions about even how it is delivered by the speaker. It might be a shout, or a pleading. But I've always heard it as more of a whisper. I've always imagined a very soft, emotionless, statement of an unfortunate yet unalterable fact. And the impact of that last, single word has stayed with me for many a year since I first read it.

A Checklist for Clutter

If you have to put a checkmark beside any of these when reading through your manuscript, then you've got some clutter to either modify or dispose of.

Look for places where you can leave much, or all, of something to the reader's imagination. Obviously, when you're writing a mystery or suspense tale, there's plenty that you'll need to leave out, since much of that overall suspense will depend on how you write your descriptions. But carefully chosen omissions will serve you well in any genre.

This intentional lack of description can work for settings also, but to a lesser degree. My first two books had been particularly dependant on their settings — one was about the town I grew up in and the other was about an island that was hit by a horrendous storm — so I wanted my third offering, A Place Apart, to be a story that could take place practically anywhere. So I set it in Ohio, a place for which I didn't have a fixed idea. But I found early on that I still had to describe many things about that time and place in order for the novel to function at all.

Having your story play itself out in a time and place that is completely generic — with absolutely no description of interiors or landscapes or what the weather is doing and no clue regarding past, present, or future — will take away much of what makes good fiction work. But there will be places where it's just not important for the reader to know if the story is in Vermont or California or the Ukraine. Backstories often fall into this category. If a character's grandfather once taught her an essential life lesson, then it might not matter where he taught it. But be careful. Remember, readers like to know where and when things are taking place.

SUMMARY: KEEPING THE WHEAT, TOSSING THE CHAFF

Several times in this book I've referred to what I call the clutter rule, the principal that anything that you include that doesn't serve to move your story along has to go. It's exactly the same thing, of course, as when Stephen King's old boss told him to take out everything that was not the story. However you conceptualize it, this really should be one of the golden rules when it comes to the writing of your fiction. Nothing short of just plain bad writing will slow your reader down or stop him altogether faster than having to wade through an overabundance of clutter. That and not giving him enough information or detail to bring him on board in the first place.

I told you at the start of this chapter that it is sometimes difficult to stay between these two extremes. But you'd best do that reckoning constantly when writing. Drifting too far in one direction or the other will weaken, or destroy, what you want to be a fine bit of storytelling.

EXERCISE 1

Pull out one of your manuscripts and start looking for places where you have used description. Now, consider for each place how your story or novel might benefit by having less description there, or none at all. Let the impact on your reader be your guide. You might omit some fine writing, but your story will be the better for it.

EXERCISE 2

Relying on your writer's craft and your fine wordsmithing, write a short phrase that will work better than each of these that contain cliche´s. Remember, the object here is to remove the cliche´ and retain the image or description that it created.

EXERCISE 3

Open a novel or a story by a good writer — be forewarned: this exercise won't work if you choose a bad writer — and start looking in the text for places that he or she obviously chose another word to keep from repeating one that they had recently used. You'll be surprised at how lucrative your search will be, and seeing how they did it will influence how you will do it.