What Not to Write

A couple months ago I stumbled across a draft of a novel manuscript I’d written many years ago. It was a story that had come to me all at once, and that (unlike all my other works in progress) had been a joy to write because it had flowed and it had taken my mind off some hard realities during a difficult time of life. I had finished the draft and then put it away.

In the spring of this year I was in another hard reality period of life and I don’t know if it was chance or fate that I came across that long-neglected draft but I sat down to read it. I still loved the story, and I could see clear as day how to refine it and make it stronger. I could also see how much of the first draft was just not needed. It was crowded with things I wrote while trying to get the draft down, but which didn’t contribute to the plot or which weren’t critical to the characters’ story arcs. They were all going to hit the cutting room floor.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could write a draft without all that dross and not spend all the extra time putting it in only to take it back out?  The years that had passed since writing it gave me a gift—enough distance from the original writing of the story to make evident some lazy writing habits of mine that had contributed to the unnecessary passages.

I imagine every writer has their own writerly tics–the things they write when they are really searching for the next salient plot point, trying to nail down a setting, or figure out the character.  Here’s my short list of my own top five lazy writing habits—the categories of things that didn’t need to get written and which certainly didn’t need to remain in the next draft. My hope is this list will give other readers a way to see their own literary surplusage.

Too much non-resonating detail.

That early draft had an incredible amount of detail that was just not needed and which actually distracted from the flow. When the characters went out for a meal, I described every dish in sequence. The waiter introduced himself and got a full description even though he was not relevant to the conversation or the plot. I devoted a full sentence to the boot tray that sat at the entrance to a house, described each individual piece of furniture within a room, and named every piece of equipment in a woodshop. In the best light, these details were setting a scene, but they were not part of the story.

Anyone who has eaten out understands that there are wait staff. Unless that person plays a role in the story they don’t need to be named or described. Anyone who has lived in sloppy climates knows what boot racks are for. Unless that boot rack was a murder weapon or would change a character’s life, it did not need a whole sentence.

Detail can be critical to a clearly told and understood story, but the details must matter, and they must create a story flow. Details that provide a relevant piece of information are essential to understanding a story. Irrelevant details detract from the story, cluttering it up with distractions. Trust the reader to know the basics, and give only the details that have significance to the story somewhere along the line

Overuse of the same telling detail.

Not only did I have too much detail in some passages, I repeated some story details a lot. In one story moment, one of the characters helps another out of her coat and then hangs it up for her. It was a good detail: it showed that the guy was old-fashioned and chivalrous. Unfortunately, for the rest of the story, any time the couple came in from the cold, I described the same action again and again. I didn’t actually count how many times one coat could get hung up in 80,000 words, because it would have been embarrassing.

Anyone who read that first description of hanging up the coat understood what it meant about the character. In later scenes, the reader could fill in that action, knowing that the character would help others off with their coat. Only if the action changed in a significant way (the character didn’t help someone off with their coat or dropped it on the floor) would it have story significance again and be worth including.

Having the Characters overexplain

Sometimes people do inexplicable things, but they have a reason for it. When my characters did things out of the usual, in my first draft they then soon explained their behavior to one of the other characters. These revelations were typically unrealistic dialogue, a conversation that no two people would ever have. When one character asked why the other hadn’t applied to college during their last year of high school, the answer was that her father had wanted her to but she was livid with him and so didn’t. Maybe it was the truth, but it didn’t ring true that such a deep conflict would be discussed in a casual conversation. It felt contrived, and it left the reader with nothing to figure out. That made reading it less engaging.

Backstory is pretty much always better when told in the present

My old draft had a lot of backstory, and I told it in two different ways. One was to have a short passage that told the backstory as if it were a flashback, or a separate story. A character would see something that sparked a memory, and then there would be a break in the flow, a separate flashback story of that memory, and then another break in the flow and the main story would resume.

The other strategy was to incorporate the backstory into the present moment as part of a conversation, or as something that directly influenced the current story action. The backstory that was incorporated into the scene was far more engaging than the separate scenes. It was incomplete, coming out in little bits, presenting pieces of a mystery that the reader had to put together.  I’m not saying don’t ever use flashbacks or alternate between past and present, but for me, backstory is better told in present actions that occur in the main story.

Don’t keep presenting the same character confronting the same problem

Tension is good in a story. It draws the reader forward. There’s a point, however, where the reader gets frustrated when a character encounters the same problem again and again but repeats the same response. One of my characters had social anxiety and didn’t like being alone in public. Throughout the story, she had more and more situations that forced her into public places. In that first draft, her strategy for dealing with being in a public place never changed, she kept to herself and felt awkward. By the third example of that situation in the story, I was out of patience with her for not learning, growing, or adapting. To have her keep making the same mistake was insulting not just to the character (who was smarter than that) but to the reader.

The takeaway

The bottom line about all that repetition and extra detail was that I had not been trusting the reader.

• I didn’t need to include every detail: the reader would be able to fill in the normal details as they read. I just needed to call out the critical details that would make the story clear.
• I didn’t need to make the same point with the same details more than once. I had to trust the reader to remember that detail, and fill in that action in later scenes. I only needed to repeat a detail when something story relevant was again revealed by it.
• I didn’t have to explain the conflict by making the character reveal their inner secrets. If I described the conflict, but didn’t present an immediate explanation for it, then the reader could wonder what was causing it and develop their own explanations.

The author’s job is to present details and events in a way that lets the reader follow the story. They want to do that. They don’t need a superhighway, or a bunch of flashing signs pointing them to the critical moment. They do need an interesting path along which to travel. Sometimes, when a reader doesn’t know exactly where a path is leading, but trusts the author that it is a good strong path and it is leading somewhere worthwhile, it is magic.

How about you? Are you aware of any lazy writer tics? Are there kinds of writing that you are always cutting out of drafts?