When we write, we hope that somewhere, in some way, somebody will read it and embrace the message we are sending. When we receive an email from a reader saying they ‘get’ our concept and book world, or when a reader comes up to us at a book event and says it to our face, we experience a flow of delight and satisfaction.
Not only have we delivered and met those readers’ expectations, but we also feel we’ve formed a connection with them. They trusted us to produce a book in which they were prepared to invest precious reading hours (and taxed money!)
But how did we induce that reader to trust us?
The key is how we visualise potential readers as we’re writing. For me, anybody who picks up a book and reads it is already a smart person. But do we see a potential reader as bright and fully capable of intuition, discernment, and depth of feeling? Or do we think of her as a bit slower and less sensitive than us? Do we trust him enough to resist over-explaining everything we want her to feel?
Yet there’s a tendency, common to new writers but also affecting multiple-book authors, to punctuate every action with an interior reflection about what an action or decision means, evokes, or portends. It slows the pace and risks annoying the reader. (Confession: I often do it on my rubbishy first draft.)
Experiencing is much more powerful when one hasn’t been told a moment before what one is going to feel or is supposed to feel. This extra telling diminishes the power of what preceded it. If the writer has dragged me to the spot and insisted, repeatedly, that I look where she’s pointing, I feel as if I’m being lectured. Much better if I’m so engrossed in the story-world she’s created that I can’t not feel it.
So as I write, I keep saying to myself: ‘No, the reader smarter than that. Don’t patronise them with lazy prose or an easy notion.’
How to avoid (or remedy) overwriting
When writing and even more when editing…
• Take a red pen to your words and mercilessly circling or crossing out every place where you’ve conveyed a point more than once.
• Stop and imagine a smart, sensitive reader. Would they understand my meaning if I offered it simply and directly, in fewer words?
• How could I make those fewer words more powerful rather than adding more words?
• If you need to add a back-up sentence to explain a word in the previous sentence, then use a different word in that previous sentence, then you can cut the back-up.
• Use dialogue – a tried and trusted technique which will feel more immediate to the reader.
The opposite danger is under-writing
While I’m a huge fan of the Hemingway school of pared-down style, there’s a balance to be struck between being so succinct that nobody has the foggiest idea what your work is about and wandering, overdone prose. Underwriting assumes that we’ll automatically feel everything that happens to the protagonist exactly the way they would. But if we fail to give context that points the reader towards the character’s desires or woes, the reader will feel disconnected from the character. We’ll have to explain it later, or the reader may misperceive the entire story and throw the book at the wall in frustration.
Trust your reader!
Exposition works only when it challenges, surprises or in some way takes us, emotionally and mentally, somewhere new. Respect the reader enough to participate in your story and its world by giving them something additional to process.
It’s winter and it’s snowing. For some reason, your protagonist isn’t wearing a coat. He’s soaked. He trudging through slush. Then you write that he’s feeling miserable. There’s no need. Trust me, readers will work it out.
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.
Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
Overwriting at first draft is probably essential. Then that red pen (or the keyboard equivalent) comes next. My problem once, though, I realised I’d overwritten a certain ‘point’, went through, crossed out, and later discovered I’d taken them ALL out which left my editor (and therefore a reader) very puzzled. I put two back.
Moral:don’t over – or under – egg the pudding!
I tend to think of these as the same as red herrings in an Agatha Christie mystery. You need the clues, but very subtle, almost hidden ones that make sense once the ‘whodunit’ is finally revealed.
Love your books Alison!
Thanks for commenting, Helen. Writing is as much craft as a creative process and we need to be our own best/worst critic. 😉
Delighted you enjoy my books – thank you!