Writing is a form of communication between one human being and another.
This should be obvious to anyone and it usually is when we are talking about non-fiction.
I have a point I want to communicate to my reader.
I make my point through my writing.
You read my opinion. My opinion has been transferred from my brain into yours through the medium of writing.
It isn’t so obvious when we talk about fiction, but it’s equally true. Fiction is a form of communication between the author and the reader.
Anything that interferes with this is subverting the purpose of writing.
The medium of fiction is story. The medium of fiction isn’t how wonderfully elaborate a writer came make their descriptions. The medium of fiction isn’t how big the writer’s vocabular is.
The medium of fiction isn’t even whether you get all the grammar and punctuation right.
The whole point of writing fiction is to immerse your reader in the story.
Readers read fiction to get immersed in the story. Anything that interferes with that is counter to the whole purpose of writing fiction.
If your goal in writing a piece of fiction is to influence the reader with your philosophical or political message, then this message needs to be embedded in the story in such a way that the reader doesn’t even see it.
Take Charles Dickens, for example. He told intense, engaging, often funny, heart-wrenching, poignant stories with a powerful political message.
Charles Dickens’ work was instrumental in getting the child labor laws of England changed. He brought public awareness to the problem, but he never clubbed his reader over the head with the need to change anything.
He simply portrayed what was already happening in the country. Everyone in England at the time already knew the situation. Everyone knew children were working in factories, in street jobs, as chimney sweeps, and in practically every other walk of life.
His stories didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know. His work showed the human side of the situation and made people realize just how awful these children’s lives were.
If the author wants to convey a message and make the reader think, the message has to be woven into the story itself.
If the writer comes right out and tells the reader what to think, the writer has failed.
Bad art asks no questions.
Mediocre art asks the questions and tells the audience the answers.
Great art asks the questions and leaves them unanswered.
All great art does this. It makes the audience think without ever blatantly giving us the answer the author thinks we should come up with. The author lets us come to that conclusion on our own.
This is also hands down the most effective way to get people to change their opinion on something.
Most people already have an opinion on everything. Telling them or demanding them to change it will only make them hostile.
Showing them a different side of the same argument—the human side of the argument—is the best way to make them see the same problem from a different perspective.
We’re all human. Certain truths apply to all of us. Leveraging these truths is the best way to get inside someone’s head and leave your message there for them to think about it in their own way.
Anything that interferes with this communication process is the enemy of the fiction writer.
Our job as writers is to eliminate everything that doesn’t directly relate to our story.
This includes all our carefully constructed descriptions. Descriptions should be short, simple, and only convey the information the reader absolutely needs so they can understand the unfolding plot.
We can look at this process from the macro level, the micro level, and the mid level.
The micro level is the sentence and individual word level. A word, phase, or sentence that isn’t necessary to the plot has no place in any work of writing.
Here’s an example from my latest book. This is the original sentence.
It was the same sequence that always played out at the end of every bout.
In the edited version, I changed it to:
The same sequence always played out at the end of every bout.
I removed the words, It was, and that. The second sentence communicates exactly the same information with fewer words, so these words aren’t necessary.
Removing one, two, or three words isn’t a pedantic or inconsequential detail that is beneath our notice as writers.
These words are actually throwing roadblocks in front of us and our readers.
The unnecessary words create barriers between the writer and the reader that stops the reader from receiving the writer’s message.
The reader doesn’t care about anything except receiving the information as quickly, as simply, and as effortlessly as possible.
They might not register consciously that the author is using unnecessary words, but the reader will pick it up subconsciously.
The reader will intuitively understand that the author is wasting the reader’s time.
The writer is belaboring the point instead of just getting it out there as efficiently as possible.
This can be as simple as changing, was working, to just worked.
I have gone through this process dozens of times even just in the few minutes I spent writing this blog post. This a crucial and indispensable part of the writing process.
I also take the flow, rhythm, and readability of the text into account when I make the decision to remove a word or multiple words.
The mid level covers paragraphs, descriptions, and sections of chapters that don’t relate to the story or are just extra filler with no connection to the plot.
Here’s an example. See if you can tell which book the following description came from:
A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thick-set with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen. On both sides of the house was a big orchard, one of apple-trees and one of cherry-trees, also showered over with blossoms; and their grass was all sprinkled with dandelions. In the garden below were lilac-trees purple with flowers, and their dizzily sweet fragrance drifted up to the window on the morning wind.
Below the garden a green field lush with clover sloped down to the hollow where the brook ran and where scores of white birches grew, upspringing airily out of an undergrowth suggestive of delightful possibilities in ferns and mosses and woodsy things generally. Beyond it was a hill, green and feathery with spruce and fir; there was a gap in it where the gray gable end of the little house she had seen from the other side of the lake was visible.
Off to the left were the big barns and beyond them, away down over green, low-sloping fields, was a sparkling blue glimpse of sea.
This description is totally irrelevant to the plot.
The reader would never know from this excerpt which book the description came from because this excerpt contains zero plot information.
This is three whole paragraphs—long paragraphs—that don’t belong in the book at all.
They could have been cut entirely. The rest of the book—the essential part of the story—would have been exactly the same.
Now let’s look at the macro level which is the most important level because it relates to elements of the story itself.
Think of the macro level as the outline level where we hammer out the skeleton bones that are going to hold up our story and carry our reader to a satisfying conclusion.
Unnecessary parts of the story at the macro level could include entire chapters.
The most glaring example of this is the Harry Potter books. The author included unnecessary and irrelevant chapters at the beginning of almost every single book. These chapters could easily have been cut without changing the story.
Take a look at the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
All of the information we received in this chapter could easily have been included in Hagrid’s conversation with Harry on the storm-tossed island when they first met.
The book should have started on the morning of Dudley’s birthday. The hair-cutting incident where Harry’s hair magically grew back after a disastrous haircut could have happened that same morning.
If I had written this book, I would have made this whole birthday scene, along with the trip to the zoo, happen the same day that Harry received his first Hogwarts letter.
The author made the same mistake in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, only this time, she included two chapters that didn’t belong in the book.
The first chapter is a long, unnecessary scene of Cornelius Fudge’s meeting with the muggle Prime Minister.
The second chapter details Severus Snape’s meeting with Bellatrix LeStrange and Narcissa Malfoy.
All of the information we need from the first chapter about what’s going on in the magical world and the war against the Deatheaters could have been included in the third chapter when Dumbledore takes Harry from the Dursley’s.
Dumbledore could have told Harry all of this information in a few sentences. We didn’t need an entire chapter with two completely unknown characters to tell us this information.
The second chapter shouldn’t have been included at all.
It completely spoils the book that we find out ahead of time that Draco Malfoy joined the Deatheaters and that he was on a mission for them to infiltrate Hogwarts and carry out their agenda there.
All the other information from the second chapter should have been revealed over the course of the whole book.
That’s the mystery—putting these puzzle pieces together. It ruins the story to dump them on the reader at the beginning.
These are plot points that should have been corrected in the outline phase. Other high-level details related to the story structure happen here. These are what makes the story successful or unsuccessful.
This is one of the biggest problems we see in the fiction world.
Writers are so full of themselves that they add any extra nonsense they feel like without regard to whether it relates to the story or not. Don’t be that person. Give the readers what they want—which is a good story and nothing else.
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