"Is This The Moving Picture Ship?"

The opening dialogue of King Kong (1933):

Charles Weston:  Say, is this the moving picture ship?

Watchman:  The Venture?  Yeah?  Are you going on this crazy voyage?

Charles Weston:  What’s crazy about it?

The story goes that originally there were 5 pages of exposition, but scriptwriter Ruth Rose boiled it down to these few lines.  What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in concision.  It gets the story moving fast.  Without wasting words, it tells you that there’s going to be a wild adventure involving a film crew, and everything progresses from there.

When I get bogged down in setting up a scene, I recall the opening of King Kong.  It reminds me to get down to business.  While it’s tempting to tantalize the reader with a sloooow unfolding of exposition, actually it’s a waste of time and doesn’t respect your audience.

My wife just finished copyediting Dead Hungry.  Following her recommendations, I cut another 1,300 words from the novel.  While some of those pieces were my “darlings,” I kept reminding myself to keep it simple.  The literary equivalent of Occam’s Razor.  Besides, the reader is not likely to miss them.

A constant challenge for me is that real life is made up of many fascinating details that influence and affect one another to create a rich experience.  In a story, however, the number of variables needs to be streamlined because you cannot possibly fit them all in.  While you may know your character won a third grade Spelling Bee, is it salient data?  Maybe winning allows her to go to the national competition in New York where she witnesses a mob hit; that would serve a purpose.  But if winning simply shows that she’s really good at spelling, does the reader need to know that?

Of course, the author may use this detail to help formulate her character, even if it never makes it to into print.

The question becomes what to keep and what to leave out.  In an old B.C. comic strip, Thor is sculpting a statue of Peter.  When B.C. asks him how he does it, Thor says he simply chips away the parts of the stone that don’t look like Peter.

So, when I write, I ask myself, “Is this the moving picture ship?”  The answer determines what comes next.