Keep This On A Need To Know Basis, Please

Today's forecast in the morning newspaper read:  "Snow.  Several inches by Tuesday."  That was it.  That made me smile and I thought well, how much more information do I need, really?  That about covers it.  Did I need to know if that meant 3 or 6 inches?  If the temperature was going to be 22 or 28?  If the wind was going to be from the South/Southwest or the North/Northeast at 10-20 mph or 20-30 mph?  If there was going to be some emergency situation due to weather, I was trusting the paper would have devoted more than five words to the daily weather report.

After dropping my daughter off at school and continuing on to my favorite coffeehouse to write, I sat looking out the large plate glass window at the snow swirling outside and started wondering about how much information one needed when they were reading a novel.  A lot of the rewriting I do of my first drafts includes cutting out details that I realize aren't relevant to the story.  Things like "Max swung his feet to the floor and shivered as he covered the short distance to the bathroom.  After brushing his teeth he went to the front door and stepped outside to pick up the morning paper, and found out what cold actually was."

Okay – Max woke up, brushed his teeth, hated how cold it was in the house, then got his newspaper in weather that was 60 degrees colder than his bedroom.  Who cares?

The answer is no one unless you're me, or unless that sequence of events is so critical to the story that the plot won't make any sense without it.  Maybe Max sees a dead body outside his door when he gets the paper.  Maybe someone takes a shot at him as a car screeches past while he gets the paper.  If those things don't happen, or something similarly dramatic, that sequence has to go.

I've come to recognize that the reason those things get put into the first draft (I'm oversimplifying a bit – things as obvious as the example above never make it to the page, but when I reread my first drafts, I'm constantly surprised at the mundane unnecessary details that do) is because of my writing process.  When I sit down to write a chapter, I know what action has to happen by the end of it to move the plot forward.  How the chapter unfolds is something I see in my mind as a movie, dialogue and action together as though I were watching something unfold that was already a finished scene.  I just write it down as I see it.

That process, inevitably, leads me to write down more than I need to.  If Max gets out of bed, shivers, brushes his teeth, then gets a blast of icy wind in his face when he goes outside to get his paper, those are all things I see that help set the atmosphere and his mood for what is going to happen next.  And while I am not quite as pessimistic as Ernest Hemingway, I recognize that maybe those details are things that only I need to know, not the reader.

As I get to be a better writer, I'll be able to differentiate the relevant from the irrelevant before writing it down.  Practice, practice, practice.  Until then, I'll have to keep that red editing pencil handy when I read my first drafts.

I finished Chapter 11 today, and now Max is in Los Angeles looking for Ae-Cha.  It feels good to be back there, even if only in my mind's eye.  Word count is up to 14,850.

I hope your Monday was as good as mine!  The newspaper was right, if conservative; it's not even Tuesday yet, and we have several inches of snow.  Read something today that tells you exactly what you need to know, and nothing that you don't!  Thanks for reading.  -Jon