26. Less is More: how to keep your writing clear and simple

In a guest post on The Writing Well, on May 14, I discussed showing (dramatizing) vs. telling (summarizing) in fiction writing. In order to dramatize without over-dramatizing, it helps to make your language as simple as possible. LESS wordiness almost always means MORE impact.

Be stingy with adjectives and adverbs. The fewer you use, the more powerful your writing. The trick is in choosing the one or two best modifiers.

He angrily slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!" he snarled rabidly, his face contorted in rage.

                                      

See how much simpler—and more effective—this passage is if you get rid of some of the indicators of anger:

He slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!"

Trust your readers... and trust yourself. Sometimes, as writers, we are unsure of our ability to convey strong emotions, so we tend to overdo it. With simple, clear writing, you only need to make your point once--you needn't beat your reader over the head with it. Compare these passages with their simplified revisions:

Her eyes filled with tears of joy. "Oh, Michael," she breathed softly, her face full of love. "It's... it's beautiful," she added, her voice trembling with emotion. Never had she felt such love.

Her eyes filled. "Oh, Michael," she breathed. "It's beautiful."

A sense of power surged strongly through him and he raised his fist in the air, pumping it three times. "Yes!" he cried triumphantly. He would make all the small, petty little people cringe and pay for what they had done to him.

A sense of power surged through him and he raised his fist. "Yes!" he cried. He would make them all pay.

Bear in mind that the context usually gives plenty of hints about what is going on. For example, in the first example above, we would know it is a love scene. In the second, we probably already know how he feels about the people he will "make pay"--and what he feels they have done to him.

Finally, a personal bugaboo, don’t EVER use the word “hysterically” in describing how someone weeps.

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, sobbing hysterically.

All you really need here is:

“Leave me alone!” she sobbed.

Tomorrow: Give yourself credit as a writer.

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23. How to insert background information in dialogue

As a group, writers tend to be very generous with their colleagues. Nobody exemplifies that spirit better than my mentor, the late Robert Cenedella. Bob taught me the most important things I know about writing in the early 1970’s, when I worked for him first as a secretary and then as a script writer. Bob was a writer who had done it all: articles; short stories; an acclaimed novel (A Little to the East—well worth searching out); live and taped television dramas, including soap operas. At the time I met him, Bob was Head Writer for Another World, and just starting a spinoff, called Somerset.

                                                                          Bob Cenedella

Lessons from my Mentor, Part I

Among the many things Bob taught me, one of the first and most important was what I call The Soap Opera Rule. The rule is simple: Never have one character tell another something they both already know.

I call it The Soap Opera Rule because it's often broken on soap operas, but you see flagrant violations of this rule all the time, in novels, stories, movies and nighttime TV shows. When The Soap Opera Rule is broken, it looks something like this:

Chet shook his head. "I feel so bad for you, Roger," he said. "First you spent all those years studying to be a PhD in astrophysics. Then you married Camille. The two of you were chosen to be the first couple on the moon. But then she got leprosy and died hideously. They kicked you off the project. And you haven't been the same since."

Roger choked back a sob. "I didn't know it showed!"

 Well, okay, they aren't usually this bad. But some come close.

The problem here is that the writer needs to insert a lot of background information into the script (or novel, or whatever). So he just throws it all in. (Whew! That’s over!) But there are many better, more natural ways to get that information across. One way would be for Chet to think about some of the facts during his conversation with Roger:

Looking at his friend's gaunt face, Chet couldn't help feeling sorry for Roger. All that work getting the PhD in astrophysics, all the training he and Camille had gone through, and then she had the bad luck to get leprosy.

"We're all sorry you won't be going on the mission, Roger," he said.

"Yeah, sure," Roger said. "If you're all so sorry, then why was I kicked off the project?"

Chet didn't answer for a moment. Roger had been so touchy since Camille had died. "I don't know," he said finally. "Rotten luck all the way around."

Alternatively, you could have Chet discuss the situation with someone who doesn't know about Roger's situation (during a scene that is about something else—or it will appear gratuitous); or put it in a flashback; or drop the pieces of information bit by bit in other scenes.

Whichever way you decide to impart the information, always remind yourself that you are informing the audience or reader, not one of the characters who already knows or should know.

Tomorrow: how to get from point A to point B.

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