Are Your Words Working Hard Enough?
By Kelsey Allagood | May 25, 2022 |
Over the last few years, I’ve come to seriously admire authors who write well-crafted, efficient sentences. I’m thinking of sentences that aren’t necessarily simple or grammatically perfect, but rather ones in which each word seems carefully chosen to pack the biggest punch. Take, for example, the first line from Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing:
The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh’s moist breath hung the oaks and pines with fog.
Look at that sentence! Not a single word is wasted. Each one carries weight, fully embodying its own essence, coming together to form a backdrop you can feel on your skin in just sixteen words.
I think of sentences like these as IKEA storage units. Not a very romantic descriptor, I know, but bear with me: these sentences are make efficient, attractive use of limited space for maximum impact.
This type of writing is a matter of personal taste, not correctness. But if you, like me, tend to veer toward the verbose rather than the succinct, toward the Faulknerian rather than the Hemingwayan—and, most critically, you want to tone it down a notch or two—it’s surprisingly easy to build a self-editing habit into your writing practice.
Writing as Interior Design: Endless Metaphors Ahoy
If I were to describe my natural writing style in terms of interior décor, the words “eclectic” and “maximalism” come to mind. A less polite but more accurate phrase would be “a hot mess.”
I could spend hours wandering around an IKEA display floor. Unfortunately for me, translating my admiration of smart storage to my own home is more difficult. I’ve always wished that I could be one of those people to whom interior decorating and organization comes naturally. But as I am not, I recognize that that decorating my own home is going to take a lot more planning and forethought than for someone with a knack for design. As much as I may want to, I can’t just wander into a flea market and wander out with an armful of knickknacks that will look effortlessly put-together.
This, of course, assumes that I want my space to look effortlessly put-together. There are plenty of people who couldn’t care one way or the other what their “aesthetic” is, which is completely valid, and others for whom a mismatched eclectic is their aesthetic, which is also completely valid. Unfortunately, I like the IKEA aesthetic, yet have none of the inherent talent to replicate it.
[Extremely Barack Obama voice:] Now, let me be clear.
You know by now that I’m comparing interior décor styles to writing. But I am emphatically not suggesting that everyone should write like Hemingway, nor that simple sentences are inherently good writing. I am an absolute sucker for some lyrical prose, some wandering sentences, some poetic repetition and other literary devices. Just as the world would be boring if every house was Scandinavian minimalist, the world would also be boring if every sentence is always perfectly efficient.
That said, being prudent with words can be a useful skill to have in one’s back pocket, whether for professional purposes, to draw attention to a particularly intense scene, or just because you want to spice up your writing style a little. And despite being a chronic over-writer by nature, I’ve managed to turn concision into a sort of habit in my writing, almost by accident.
I used to work in a job (oh my God, Kelsey, another metaphor? Yes. I’m not sorry), where I had to write highly complex technical documents with very strict page limits. My company’s funding depended on those documents, so it was important that they not only be within the required page limit, but also clear, compelling, and understandable. As frustrating as it could sometimes be, those page limits forced me to learn how to prioritize ideas, boil them down to their essence, and trim fat from my writing while still remaining clear.
If you’ve stuck with me through these meandering metaphors: hi, mom.
For any writers who have skipped down to this section, here are a few self-editing tricks I picked up that have bled into my fiction writing.
- Search for phrases that can be shortened, especially those that use “of.” See if “a few feet of snow” can become “hip-deep snow.” “The parking lot of the Chili’s” might be “the Chili’s parking lot.” Even something as simple as changing “a forest of pines” to “a pine forest” can change a sentence’s momentum. Not every “of” phrase needs to be reordered, especially if it goes against the flow your sentence (like the “of” in this sentence). But you can use this strategy to speed up or slow down the reader’s momentum depending on the tone you want to convey.
- Find nouns you can turn into verbs. “The sky was covered in a blanket of clouds” might become “Clouds blanketed the sky.” (The same principle applies to changing passive voice to active, but it’s easier for me to pick out nouns that I might turn into verbs, rather than thinking about whether a sentence is passive). “Piles of laundry sat on the every surface” could instead be “Laundry piled upon every available surface.” Using more active, evocative verbs can make your writing stand out.
- Set yourself an arbitrary page limit that seems impossible to meet, and then edit your work down to meet it. This is probably not something you want to do with an entire novel, but try it with a chapter or scene. I say “page limit” rather than “word count” because I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to be brutal in my cutting in a way that forces concision, rather than simply rewording sentences with fewer words. There is a difference between “saying the same thing in fewer words” and “choosing to only say what is necessary to understand the point.”
To illustrate this point, I’ve taken a few sentences from one of my own works in progress and edited them for once word count, and again for the arbitrary limit of two lines. Is there one you think is stronger?
Original sentence: Jane is lost. The basement beneath the bioethics building is labyrinthine, with rows of identical doors lining tiled hallways that smell of chemicals and lemons. She’s stumbled into a classroom. It’s dark except for a single point of blue light winking upon the projector. (44 words)
Reduced word count: Jane is lost. This basement is labyrinthine, rows of identical doors lining tiled chemical- and lemon-scented hallways. She’s stumbled into a dark classroom, the only light a single point of blue upon the projector. (34 words)
Space limitation: Jane is lost. Stumbling over cracked, wet tile, she passes endless winding corridors lined with reinforced steel doors, and finally dashes into a pitch dark classroom.
- Write some microfiction. I’ve written before about the benefits of writing microfiction for those of us who have trouble narrowing our focus, but I’m going to harp on it again. Try to write 100 words that tell a complete story, where a character changes between the first and hundredth word. This is more of an exercise than a piece of self-editing advice, but sometimes even the act of sitting down and trying to write a 100-word story seems to help my brain make the neural pathways I’m needing in my longer work.
Have you ever been accused of being a little verbose? If so, did you embrace your verbosity, or try to make some changes? What other tips might you have for a writer trying to write more concisely?
Kelsey Allagood (she/her) is a writer, occasional photographer, and trained political analyst specializing in the causes of war and systemic oppression. This background led her to begin writing fantasy fiction steeped in the anthropology of conflict.
Her writing can be found in literary magazines such as Barrelhouse, GRIFFEL, Menacing Hedge, and Wanderlust. Her photography has been featured in RESURRECTION mag. She has also written on peaceful resistance movements, art as a form of political resistance, and countering violent extremist ideology.
Kelsey has a Bachelor’s Degree in international and cultural studies from the University of Tampa and a Master’s Degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University.
She lives in Maryland with her husband, mother, and a rescue dog named Henry.
Terrific post, Kelsey—and not an once of fat in it, so you’re walking the walk for us!
I appreciate that you’ve proposed that concision can be a tool “in one’s back pocket” because, of course, we need hammers and wrenches and staple removers and all sorts of tools, since different sentences serve different purposes. I LOVE your second exercise, especially—though I recently put down a novel that I tried hard to read (three times) because every single sentence seemed to begin with a formulation like “Clouds blanketed the sky” = inanimate objects, rather than characters, doing and being everything, and it grew incredibly irritating and intrusive (for me, anyway). When the writing draws attention to itself, it gets in the way of the story, as we know.
Anyway, strategies and examples to show how we need to challenge every bit of language to justify its place in our work. Sometimes lyricism or flow is the justification—but less often, I suspect, than I like to tell myself :-)
Thank you so much, Barbara! Varied sentence structure is so important in creating a natural flow, as you know, so I can totally see why the repetition of object-as-actor would get grating after a while. Same with lyrical writing; I’m a huge fan of pretty prose, but sometimes you just gotta write “subject-verb-object” and move on :)
Hello Kelsey. Your suggestions for making things better ring true for this former English classroom taskmaster. I would add to your list sentences that begin with “there is” or “there are.” I also think it’s a good idea to put all intensifiers under the microscope, every use of “very,” “extremely,” etc. That goes as well for my own bad habit of putting something I consider dubious in quote marks, so readers will know I’m being ironic/sarcastic. No, Barry, quote marks usually serve as a crutch for lazy writing, not as an intensifier or clarifier of anything.
Thanks for a post that writers should highlight and stick on the wall in front of their laptops. And then, if they haven’t already, they should buy William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Dave King and Renni Browne’s Self-editing for Fiction Writers, and read both books over and over.
Barry, you reminded me of Twain’s quote on intensifiers: “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Hah! Mike, if I reminded you of Twain about anything, I thank you.
I feel like the stamp of approval from a former English taskmaster is the highest praise I could get! Love your additions, both the “there is/there are” and those sneaky intensifiers in all their forms. Thank you, Barry!
Excellent, Kelsey! Succinct and informative, as it should be. Thanks.
(Now, normally I would write another hundred words of fluff, but that misses the point of this article, doesn’t it?)
Thanks so much, Mike!
(And I also feel the need to fill this post with fluff, as though saying “thank you” isn’t enough–When did we as a society decide that “thanks” needed to be bolstered with even more words??)
Love this post! It’s all about perfecting your craft. I’m all for trimming the fat. But I’m also a proponent of NOT “killing all your babies.” You can put them away for future use. Those “babies” are poetic prose that may fit better in a future work. I’ve been told you shouldn’t “show off” your lyrical side. I say, BS. If you can write a sentence like Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing) then by all means, show it off!
That is *exactly* why I always have a separate document called “text graveyard” for everything I write! I think it both helps me be bolder in choosing what to cut, since it isn’t going away forever, but I’ve also definitely reused language in other projects. And I love the attitude that we should show off our skills. Writers work hard on their craft and should get to show off, too! Thanks for reading, Pam.
Kelsey, I was at Second Story warehouse in MD over the weekend with my son and we both noticed how books are becoming gargantuan nowadays (400-500 pages) compared to the tightly written novels of yesteryear (200-300 pages, some even less than 200 pgs) and the bigger books aren’t necessarily better. And yes, just like scenes ought to do double and triple duty, words should too. I love all your exercises, esp. microfiction. It can really pack a punch. Perhaps because I cut my writing teeth on children’s magazines with strict word/page counts I tend towards brevity.
I’m so happy that you enjoy the exercises! At times I feel like a broken record, but as someone who always overcomplicates stories and “couldn’t” write short fiction, forcing myself to write microfiction has been a revelation. Glad I’m not the only one who finds it such an enjoyable medium for reading as well as writing. :)
Editing this week, Kelsey. Your ideas and tips are great. Thanks.
Best of luck on the editing, Elizabeth! Thank you so much for reading.
Exactly what I need as I watch myself describe landscape when my character just needs to get to the danged bus station. The way I’m writing the scene she’s going to miss her bus.
Thanks for this, Kelsey. Those tips you’ve provided are what I tell my students, while in my head I hear my mother’s voice: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Listen, I love a good landscape description. I love them so much, in fact, that I’ll often get so distracted writing them that I convince myself it is *essential* to the plot that I know the exact layout of the entire town. And, while I’m at it, the county, and—
Anyway, much like in meditation, sometimes you just need to gently guide yourself back on track when you notice you’ve strayed. Good luck getting your character to the bus stop!
Thanks, Kelsey! My own writing leans towards concise and tight, so I can appreciate your article even more. There are days I struggle to find another way to say is/was. For the last two years I have been writing short fiction, posting to my blog weekly. A challenge trying to illustrate change in a short venue, but so worth the effort. Thanks again.
Two years of weekly short fiction!! I’m impressed and a little frightened by your power, Bob. It must be so cool to be able to go back and see how you’ve evolved as a writer over time. Thank you for reading!
Hi daughter 😁
HI MOM <3
HAHAHAHAHA!! This comment exchange has made my day. :)
Kelsey, I always love your posts! This one delights my editor’s soul right in the sweet spot. Plus it’s funny, which is my other favorite thing. Plus it’s full of metaphor and analogy and highly personal voice, which is much of the territory I haunt in my own writing as well. And it’s damned solid advice. Thanks for sharing, and for the smile!