Leaving stuff out
The other day, I was looking over two different multi-book series, each of which is easily pushing a million words. Both are quite popular in their respective genres, but they are very different in their approach. Yet it could be argued that both writers make similar mistakes.
In the first series, the author (for my money) got a bit carried away by having all that space to play in, and so the reader gets to watch nearly everything the hero and heroine do, from the hero’s detailed morning routine (turn off alarm, shower, shave, brush teeth, make coffee) to the heroine endlessly revisiting her difficult relationship with her sister. The scenes involving action and mystery don’t totally take a back seat, but the pacing is leisurely. The author doesn’t just drop hints about various characters’ personalities or opinions; he/she provides five or six different scenes that beat the reader over the head with the fact that this character has a mysterious past that makes him untrusting and brooding, that character is all sunshiny optimism, and this other character is a wimp and a bit of a coward.
All of those bits of characterization are important to the story, mind. But by the time I’d watched Character C agree to three different bad ideas in three different scenes because he was too scared to speak up, I’d more than gotten the message. And I wasn’t really interested in the hero’s musing about the advantages of using a safety razor versus an electric one, even if they did provide some insight into his tendency to over-analyze and over-organize absolutely everything. I’d already figured that out from the super-tidy pencil drawer in his desk.
In the second series, the writer also got a bit carried away be having all that space, but used it somewhat differently. Instead of limiting his/her viewpoints to the two main characters and using the extra space to show the minutia of their daily lives, the author started handing out viewpoint scenes to pretty much every character he/she happened to get interested in, as well as to every minor character who happened to be present at an important event. Unsurprisingly, at least three-quarters of the characters developed their own storylines and/or subplots as soon as they became viewpoints, which made it harder and harder for me to keep track of what was going on, as well as slowing the pace to a crawl, simply because every “main plotline” scene was followed by at least a chapter’s worth of subplot scenes (sometimes more) before the next “main plotline” scene could happen and allow things to make progress.
Last week, I also picked up one of my old SF paperbacks from the 1960s, when 60,000 words was long for a science fiction book. I hadn’t read it in years, and while certain aspects of it were clearly dated (engineers in the twenty-second century still using slide rules?), I was pleasantly surprised to realize just how much characterization and how many subplots were crammed into that short wordcount.
It made me think of those Japanese ink drawings, the kind that make a picture of a cat or a horse out of two or three curved lines drawn in exactly the right places to enclose empty white space in the essence of cat or horse. The author made every word count, frequently several times for several different purposes at once. There is no wasted space…but there are also no extra words. Most of the subplots and most of the characterization takes place in the things that are not said in words on the page. They’re in the things that are suggested, implied, and left to the reader’s imagination.
In our media-saturated world, we’re used to getting more information than we need – often a lot more than we’re actually interested in. It becomes a habit, and then we start thinking that all that information has to be there, or the reader won’t understand. Because TV and movies show exactly what every character looks like, exactly how they dress, and every detail of the character’s home décor, writers get caught up in trying to paint the same kind of picture in words. In other cases, the writer has such a clear mental image of what is going on, and that image is so important to them, that they get caught up in trying to force the reader to recreate that exact same image in their own minds. This will never work (the written word is a spectacularly inaccurate form of telepathy) but that never stops people from trying.
The most effective writing is often counter-intuitive. In this case, it is nearly always more effective to coopt the reader’s imagination – poke it a few times, give it a couple of essential details and a lot of empty space, and let it fill in the mental image that has meaning and emotional impact for that particular reader.
It takes a lot of practice and work and concentration to come up with the fewest possible lines with which to enclose empty white space with essence of story, but it is so very worthwhile.
