by C. S. Lakin
How to Best Benefit from This Book
As you read each entry, try to identify what’s wrong in the Before passage. Consider jotting down your observations in a notebook, paying special attention to the sections that apply most to your own writing issues. If you have a print copy, you may want to mark up these sections.
Pay attention to how the fatal flaw is presented and what solutions are offered to fix it. At the end of each chapter you’ll find a checklist of the points covered—what you need to search for in your scenes or stories to ferret out the fatal flaw. You’ll also get a bonus passage to work on, to help you test what you’ve learned (with a sample “correct” passage provided on the next page). We suggest you copy and print out these passages and work on them before peeking at the sample solution on the following page.
Every writer has a unique style and approach to fiction writing, so we hope that by reviewing a wide spectrum of examples, you will be able to spot potential weaknesses in your writing and fix them.
So as we tackle the twelve fatal flaws of fiction writing, jump in and take them on with us. If you’re still having problems with specific flaws, consider hiring an editor with fiction-writing experience to help you home in on your weak areas and give you the skills to self-edit your work effectively. There’s no reason any writer should have to experience novel failure.
So let’s start tackling.
Fatal Flaw #1: Overwriting
Repetition. Redundancy. Useless words.
All fiction writers fall into the trap of overwriting. We’re lured by the desire to be clear and thorough in our descriptions. To make sure the reader gets what we’re trying to say. We think if we pack our sentences full of words, we’ll get the point across. We’ll convey the right emotion and, in turn, evoke the emotional response we long for in our readers.
But however logical that seems, the odd truth is that, more often than not, less is more. Plot and character motivation can come across more strongly and effectively with fewer words. Carefully chosen words. Just the right words put down just the right way.
We tend to underestimate our readers’ ability to fill in blanks. We tend to get too close to what we are writing to see it clearly. We tend to doubt our own writing ability—and so we overwrite.
Gushing Is Fine . . . in a First Draft
Some writers find it helpful to gush onto the page in a first draft and worry about the cleanup later. Go ahead and do that. It’s a good way to keep the creative juices flowing and get the story out in some form. But too often writers get attached to what they’ve written. The sentences harden into concrete seconds after they appear on the page or computer screen. It takes courage and stalwart determination to be a brutal self-editor and hack away at those sentences.
While some writers “underwrite” (a flaw we’ll cover later in this book), most writers fall victim to overwriting. Overwriting is probably the most common flaw of fiction writing, and its tentacles reach into every aspect of a writer’s story: narrative, dialogue, action, and internalizing. Like a contagion, it infects our scenes so they die a slow (or quick) death.
But good news! There is an antidote. The formula is one part determination, two parts knowledge, three parts diligence, and four parts mercilessness. Once you learn to detach emotionally from the words you write, the battle is half won.
Every word counts in your story. Every word has weight. It’s heartbreaking to launch your story into a sea of readers and watching it sink before it clears the harbor. So before you break that bottle of champagne over the bow, learn to identify the symptoms of overwriting. Then, with cutlass in hand, hack away. The examples in this chapter will show you how.
The Forest for the Trees
When you put pen to paper, it’s fully possible to underwrite. To fail to say what you meant to say. But just as possible, and more common, is overwriting—the tendency to say too much, in too many words, and crowd out the forest for the trees.
Overwriting takes many forms. Wordiness. Vagueness. Redundancy. Convolution. Pushing metaphors so far beyond the breaking point that they cease to be enlightening and become ridiculous instead.
In all forms, overwriting loses the forest for the trees. Readers get so snarled up in excessive words, tangled sentences, and overdone diction that the big picture is lost.
It’s not fun to read. And often, it’s not fun to write.
If your words feel forced or unnatural while you’re writing them, you might be falling into this trap. It often happens when we try to “sound like real writers,” or want to come across as particularly smart or poetic. In those cases we lose our own voices for something artificial.
Finding the Forest
You correct overwriting by letting go of your commitment to every individual tree, leaf, and branch and rediscovering the forest instead. Where’s the heart of the scene? The point of the dialogue? The voice of the character?
Some say Michelangelo carved his famous David sculpture by chipping away everything that didn’t look like David. That’s how you cure overwriting.
See if you can catch the overwriting in this passage. What would you chip away?
Before:
As the sun was sinking down far below the edge of the purple, colorful horizon at the edge of the world, Jenny raised her wineglass to her ruby red lips and sighed sadly at seeing the day end. “It’s over,” she breathed.
Behind her, her impossibly handsome Italian boyfriend, Calvino, pushed his chair away from the table where they had been eating dinner like a panther slinking through the shadows of a dark night in Africa. She was just thinking he had been sitting there too long and wondered when he would come to join her by the edge of the expansive gold-rimmed balcony with its fluted decorations patterned after a famous architect from 1743.
He started to come toward her, and she waited for a long, interminable minute, staring at the purple sunset clouds, until he walked across the balcony, approached her shoulder, and bent down slightly so he could whisper in her ear. “It’s never really over,” he murmured.
Did this passage make you gag? It should have. Let’s take a look at the revision.
After:
As the sun sank below the purple horizon, Jenny raised her wineglass to her lips and sighed at seeing the day end. “It’s over.”
Behind her, Calvino pushed his chair away from the dinner table. It’s about time, she thought. She glimpsed his dark Italian features from the corner of her eye as he approached her on the gold-rimmed balcony.
“It’s never really over,” he whispered in her ear.
In this example, the edited version is far shorter—and more focused.
It cuts redundant language, so “As the sun was sinking down far below the edge of the purple, colorful horizon at the edge of the world” becomes “As the sun sank below the purple horizon.”
It cuts a lot of the small in-between actions that can clutter prose: “She was thinking and wondering”; “he started to come toward her”; “he walked, approached, and bent down.”
The rewritten version also implies the relationship between the two characters through their actions and words rather than explaining it outright. It cuts details that are irrelevant to the scene (the eighteenth-century architect) and a simile that, in the end, added nothing to the character or the moment.
By cutting all these examples of wordiness, we end up with a sharper scene—one that is focused on the forest. On the tension between the characters. On the lament over the end of the day and the promise of something more to come. Many a tree is gone, but the view is clearer.
Extrapolate that first example over the course of an entire scene, or an entire chapter, and you can see why overwriting can be such a problem—and why learning to cut back, to focus on the scene you actually want your readers to see, can go a long way toward creating a sharper, more vivid, and memorable story.
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C. S. Lakin, Layer Your Novel: The Innovative Method for Plotting Your Scenes (The Writer's Toolbox Series)