Tips For Tightening Up Your Writing

Writers more than almost anyone else are prone to go mad around the new year. We promise to write this, edit that, finish this project, and finally get around to publishing that one secret story we've never put to paper before. By and large the madness passes by the time Valentine's Day rolls around, and we get back to business.

Some resolutions are well-meaning though. A few of them are even necessary. If you made a resolution to sharpen your stories by tightening up your prose, let me hand you a whetstone.

The metaphors are mixed, but you get the thrust of it I'm sure.

Tip #1: Take Out Unnecessary Words

The kingdom of the novel is full of swooping paths that lead through mountains and caves, round huge lakes and across the seas. You can write however much you want, but many writers use this freedom as an excuse to create loose prose hung with extraneous words like a gypsy fortune-teller's baubles. While the loose, flowy prose is interesting, even engaging, it's all too easy to trip on the excess.

One of the best ways to eliminate roundabout writing full of phrases like I reached out my hand to take it is to write short fiction. I highly recommend everyone write at least some short fiction before taking on a novel because it teaches you to trim the fat and get to the point. If you only have 3k or 5k words to tell your story in you learn really damn quickly to cut out adverbs you don't need, and to remove instances of words like that, just, up, down, and others.

Words. Do. Not. Bleed.

Every writer has words that keep showing up in text which could easily be removed. For instance say you wrote, Terese sat down on the chair, sighed quietly to herself, and put down her book on the side table. A tighter, smoother sentence would read, Terese sat, sighed, and laid her book on the side table.

One sentence doesn't make a lot of difference to your overall word count, but if you go through your entire manuscript and trim the fat you'll see thousands of words vanish. You'll also notice your writing style is punchier, and easier to read.

Tip #2: Ask What This Scene Is Showing Us

Imagine for a moment that you were making a movie. You need to ask what every camera angle, every action scene, and every word of dialogue is telling your audience. For instance if there was a 5-minute scene in the middle of Casablanca where Rick played solitaire after he got drunk in the bar what would we get out of that? Does it act as a setting for a monologue? It is a statement on how he's desperate to do absolutely anything but face his lover's return? Or is it a waste of 5 minutes that would be better spent focusing on an actual aspect of the drama that's going on in the story?

This is why we scrapped the scenes with Legolas's kid sister.

This is one thing that books and movies share; if a scene has no purpose you need to cut it.

It can be hard sometimes to figure out if a scene has purpose, or if you're faffing about. For instance, does that scene with your lead catching coffee with her mom show us important things about how she was raised and the sort of relationship she has with a female role model, or was it just stuffed in there as a way to eat up word count? Is the action scene where your detective takes down a team of three bank robbers a gratuitous shootout, or does it illustrate the sort of man he is when lives are on the line and he has to do his job?

These aren't always easy calls to make, but your job is to tell the story. Does the story benefit from following your teenage monster hunter through every high school class every day of the week, or should we just skip to the part where she's tracking a werewolf on Wednesday afternoon while ditching Spanish III?

Tip #3: Listen To Your Beta Readers, and Kill Your Darlings

They'll never feel a thing.

Every author has beta readers (here are the 5 types every author should have). These are the men and women you trust to tell you if you got your facts right, if your characters are going off the rails, and if you've got holes in your plot. For some reason though when beta readers tell authors they should really get rid of a certain scene they flip their collective shit. They couldn't possibly get rid of the spunky kid sister, or cut out the long reminiscence about the lead's first ever sexual encounter. It's special... and important... and...

And I've got news for you; your word babies are no exception to the rules of good writing. Stories are stories, and if you put in a scene, plot twist, character, etc. that isn't passing muster it's your job to drum it out.

That doesn't mean you should immediately cut out a scene that you feel strongly about. You need to talk with your betas (or editors, or both) about why they feel this thing should be removed. Does the scene repeat an important point that's already been mentioned and thus comes across as unnecessary repetition? Is it just fan service in the event it's a pointless shoot out, sex scene, etc.? Is it offensive, a common complaint with profanity, violence, rape scenes, and other elements? You might decide to keep a scene even if it's been suggested you should delete it, but make sure you're doing it to remain true to the story and not because you have an attachment to that particular piece of prose.

Tip #4: Avoid Metaphor Vomit

This one is a warning based on my personal experience. Writing a great metaphor is a satisfying experience, but metaphors are the spice of your prose. If you use them too much then pretty soon you have one big symbolic mess that is difficult to make any sense out of.

A few solid metaphors are good. Make sure they're spread out so you have plenty of normal, easy-to-read text between them.

Hopefully you found this week's Literary Mercenary helpful. Good hunting to my fellow authors in 2015, and if you'd like to help support me drop by my Patreon page and become a patron today! If you want to make sure you catch all of my updates then follow me on Facebook and Tumblr as well!

The Golden Rule of Good Writing: Don't Be Boring

As an author you can do anything you want. If you want to write a horror story, write a horror story. You want to write a rape scene, go right ahead (I already covered this here). You want your characters to say fuck all the time, feel free (I covered that here too)! You can be profane or prudish, disgusting or droll, biting or brazen... what you cannot be is boring. Nothing, and I do mean nothing is worse than a boring book. That's why this week The Literary Mercenary is here to help you pick up your prose's pace with a few, simple rules.

Rule Number One: Open With The Monster

No one cares about the building of the mead hall; we care about Grendel.

There's a phrase every writer should be familiar with; in medias res. It's Latin for "into the middle of things," and it was first coined by the poet Horace. The phrase refers to stories that start the reader out in the meat of the action instead of at the "beginning" of the story. Whether the hero is in the middle of a shootout, the heroine is chasing bad guys down a dark alley, or someone who might be our lead is sitting in a classroom and taking a stressful exam, the point is that we come in while someone is doing something. Details of the world and context for what we see are filled in afterward.

As always, examples work best. Some time ago I was chatting with a writer who was having trouble with her plot. I asked her to give me her elevator pitch. Her book was about a girl who was a high school freshmen, getting used to her surroundings, new classes, adjusting to new friends, etc. After about twenty minutes of telling me about her perfectly normal trials and tribulations she drops the bombshell that the girl is being stalked by a nightmare creature from the ether, and that in chapter five it slinks out of her closet and tries to kill her.

My advice to her and to you dear reader is this; open with the monster.

Rule Number Two: Short and Sharp

Say hello to my little friend!

You know that one family member who drones on and on at events, insisting on telling you every story in the most languid, roundabout way? The sort of person who could be regaling you with a story of a behind-enemy-lines covert kill mission in Afghanistan and make it sound as exciting as getting a root canal? That's the sort of prose you want to avoid.

Let's take another hypothetical example here. Say you're writing a hard-boiled detective story, and your hero went home and crashed after a long night on a big bust. You could eat up page after page of him preparing breakfast, showering, going through his closet, washing his dishes, and shaving. Or you could slam all of it together into a single paragraph of short, hard-hitting sentences. "I woke up with the afternoon bells, and stumbled into the shower. Once I was clean and shaved, with a few eggs in my guts and clean clothes on my back, I was ready to hit the streets."

That's an entire early afternoon in less than 50 words. What's more the reader internalizes it more easily because it's in handy, bite-size pieces. Your novel shouldn't be a meat loaf that someone has to slog through; rather it should be a bowl of M&Ms that when someone has eaten the whole thing they wonder how the hell that happened.

Rule Number Three: When in Doubt, Cut it Out

Editing, in its natural form.

What do Kathy Reichs, Michael Crichton, and Tom Clancy all have in common? Well aside from being bestsellers, all three of these authors have habits of including reams of information in their books that read like technical manuals which are not necessary for readers to understand the story. Reichs presents jargon-filled run downs of murder wounds rather than just telling us the victim took an ax to the head, Crichton provides abstracts of scientific theory on everything from gene-splicing to time travel that have no impact on being chased by a T-Rex or life-or-death sword fights in medieval France, and Clancy often waxes on for pages about naval culture which seems completely unconnected to the book you're reading. This information may be fascinating to some readers and tedious to others, but the point is that if you don't need it to clarify the story you should cut it out.

Put another way, we're all very impressed that you're an aficionado of 15th century Renaissance artwork. If we don't need to know the name of a particular artist, an official term for a certain brush stroke, or the value of a given painting then don't waste page space on it. Don't break stride while we're running pell-mell after terrorists to remark on the architecture; focus instead on where characters are going and what they're doing.

Rule Number Four: Don't Waste Our Time

You have precisely 20 seconds before your reader self-destructs.

Most people have fairly scheduled lives. Students go to class, then come home. People with 9-5 jobs go to work, then come home. Maybe they take in an occasional concert or go see a movie, but their lives are routine. Characters are people, and many of them have equally boring, scheduled lives. That said, a novel is a series of points of interest strung together on a chain like a pearl necklace. We're interested in the pearls, so don't waste time telling us about the chain holding it all together.

Look at Harry Potter. The bulk of the story takes place during sessions at what amounts to a wizarding boarding school, but we don't slavishly start every day with Harry getting out of bed and end every day with him going to sleep. We don't mention anything he does or learns in class unless those incidents build the story. You cannot tell the reader every action a character takes, so focus only on the important parts. If readers can't tell the difference between a plot-relevant scene and non-plot relevant scenes then they're more likely to shut your book and move on than read every scene for fear of missing something crucial.

As always, thanks for dropping in on The Literary Mercenary. If you'd like to make a donation to keep me going feel free to visit my Patreon page or click the "Shakespeare Gotta Get Paid, Son" button on the right hand side. If you'd like to get my updates then either give me your email, also on your top right, and just to be safe follow me on Facebook and Tumblr.