Not an Editing “Tip.”

(Just a tool that might help clean up your writing and create a faster paced reading experience.)

Removing excess words. If you don’t need particular words, why keep them?

• Another crashing wave sends me into a sprawl, and I’m forced to use my tides a few more times to distance myself from the rocks.
• I should drop down as deep[er] as I can manage [and] use the reef for cover.
  
• I can’t tear my eyes away until he disappears fully from view.
  
• A burst of lightning shows the outline[s] of the cliff side.
• A loud thud from the port window makes me jump, drawing my full attention. -> I jump at a loud thud from the port window.

Showing instead of telling. Making the reader feel what the protagonist feels is almost always better than telling them the protagonist is undergoing something.

• I can’t believe the sight I see. ->  My lungs catch painfully, a shocked squeak rising out.
  
• Everything is slick and wet. -> The slick metal offers no hold for my wet hands. I clench my fingers until the ridges bite into my scales, shark teeth holding me in place. Agonizing.
  

Removing passive voice. Active voice is more engaging and should be always be used unless you have a specific reason not to use it for that sentence.

• The rock is a muddled, dark brown, and I almost miss him amid the lofty coastline. -> I almost miss him against the muddled, dark brown rock, his body tiny amid the lofty coastline.
  
• Her voice is strained and furious. -> Fury strains her voice.
  
• The wound is closed again, but before it closed, enough blood seeped out that I now feel woozy and off kilter. -> The wound closed while I slept, but enough blood seeped out that my head still spin, my limbs heavy.

Always remember though: you have to do what works best for that particular moment. Some scenes require different strokes than others. Use your best judgement, and take pride in your personal writing style.

I would love to see a fantasy novel where the lore that the reader / protagonist learns at first is not true

e.g. they're told that this kind of creature has some kind of psychic or pheromone-based "mate bond" that cannot be broken; but it turns out that's a popular myth that has never been scientifically substantiated, and is basically used to keep people in bad relationships (basically the equivalent of "human women are biologically submissive")

"lore" is imo too often treated like information that the author is giving the reader, and it just happens to be using the medium of diagetic (that is, 'in-story') exposition.

it's so much more interesting and dynamic to treat "lore" as information that is generated and disseminated in-story. who is telling the protagonist this information? under what historical and social circumstances was this idea formed? what political motives are there for trying to get people to believe this information? which characters would disagree with it? would the protagonist believe it, or be sceptical? does the plot bear it out, or cast doubt on it?

Basically, my stance is that it's rarely a coherent criticism to describe a big, elaborate cinematic set-piece as gratuitous or unnecessary. The fact alone that the film's makers put so much time and effort into the stupid thing tells us that this was the whole point of the exercise, so if the fault lies anywhere, it lies in the whole rest of the movie for neglecting to contextualise and justify the set-piece. This doesn't mean that the set-piece can't be criticised on other grounds, of course, but necessity isn't one of them.

All of which is to say that if an elaborately staged sex scene seems gratuitous, the real problem isn't the presence of the scene, but that the film up to that point has failed to adequately impress upon its audience why it's critically necessary that these two characters fuck.

There was a Neanderthal in the kitchen.

His name was — inexplicably — Abba.

“That sounds so fake,” Brittney said.

The two of them watched Abba try to work his way around the concept of a box of Lucky Charms. He had managed the trick of the cardboard flaps, and was struggling manfully with the plastic bag.

“I like it,” said Charlie.

“Yeah, but Abba? We have the most scientifically significant discovery in human history in our kitchen, and his name is Abba.”

Abba flipped over the bag to see if the other side would open any easier.

“I can’t hear that name without thinking Waterloo,” Brittney said.

“Actually, that’s really interesting,” said Charlie. “We know he’s a father, and a lot of languages have a word for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ that are made from an open vowel sound and a bilabial consonant. Mama and papa. Ama and aba. Linguists say we borrowed these words from baby babble and used them to describe ourselves.”

Abba was trying to open the bag with his teeth.

“So?”

“So, if the same is true for Neanderthals, then for hundreds of thousands of years, for as long as we have known ourselves, we have held our children in our arms and loved them, and when they babbled at us we found words and named ourselves with them,” Charlie said. “We’ve done it since prehistory, and we’ve done it over and over again in a thousand languages until—”

There was a popping sound, followed by a little rattling hail of oats.

Abba stood at the epicentre of an explosion of cereal, blinking. Pastel-coloured marshmallows clung to his face and beard.

Brittney and Charlie stared to see if there would be a reaction of some kind. Then: “You good, Abba?”

Abba plucked a blue moon from his cheek and popped it into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully and gave a thumbs up.

“Also weird that Neanderthals had the thumbs up thing, apparently,” Brittney muttered.

“Well, it’s like what I was saying. He’s proof that we’ve been repeating the same behaviours over and over again through history.”

There was a thoughtful silence. Abba chewed noisily and with sticky delight.

Then Brittney said, in a slightly far away voice: “So the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.”

“Fuck off.”

side note more people should make characters schizospec. just for shits and also because everybody loves us forever

your favorite character is schizophrenic and fucks hard. you agree

schizophrenic superhero who gets set on a quest by an ancient prophet and they take an extra week to start it because they just assumed they missed their meds dose and had a delusion. schizophreniform character who has extra noises and brighter colors whenever the camera is showing their pov. schizotypal superhero only keeps an anonymous identity because they don't like people knowing who they are from their condition-specific social fears. schizophrenic superheros who practices 1 liners by talking to themselves in public. regular old character who goes on a massive adventure and their schizospectrum disorder doesn't affect them because they're on the right meds and it's not a major part of their character. You see my visions. And all of them fuck hard

Fellas, it IS gay to be straight XD

Every time I hear a showrunner say some shit about how the reason he doesn't want to write his male slashbait duo into a romantic relationship is because "their bond is so powerful and profound that it transcends sex or romance" I want to ask him, "Does your wife know your bond with her is too weak and shallow to transcend sex and romance? Or do you not fuck her either, because you love her too much?"

You cannot talk about homophobia without also talking about misogyny. It is baked in.

A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.

okay i did not expect this untagged post to get any traction behind it, and it's been interesting reading some of the notes, but OH MAN it is driving me nuts to see how many people are adding 'well, it's because we're taught to show not tell! interiority is telling!'

my dude. 'she looked at the sunset and felt sad.' is interiority that's telling. 'she looked at the sunset and remembered the days of walking home from school with her father, hand in hand. in those days, the colours always seemed more vibrant. today, as the sun dropped behind her childhood home, the shadow seemed to creep upwards, muting the sky as well as the earth. she took a deep breath, refusing to let yet more tears fall.'

that's a thirty-second quick hypothetical, but that is also interiority, and that is showing.

this continues to putter along and i am certainly not reading all the reblogs and tags, but someone somewhere shared a link to against casting-tape fiction: first person narrative and interiority, which also has some interesting bits. it talks specifically about first-person, bit i think much of it is more broadly applicable:

I believe that writers have internalized a similar set of ideas and conventions [as to when viewers watch reality television]. Their characters do not act or are not seen to be acting. We open in media res without context as to who these people are or what they care about or what they need, and we just watch them walk down streets and bump into people and sometimes, sometimes, there’s a little thought about what’s going on in their lives, maybe, if you’re lucky. The deracinated I in contemporary first-person fiction is like a reality tv show played without the volume. It’s a string of arbitrary actions.

[...] there is a tendency toward oppressive passiveness. It seems to me that many writers, particularly beginning writers, are after the sense they get when they watch a close-up of Isabelle Huppert’s face in furious silence in The Piano Teacher. Or the sense of implication they get from watching Viola Davis’s quivering lips, wordless, but moved by great emotion. They want that. They write their first-person narrators with mute interiority because they are mimicking what they have seen without the skills or the understanding or acute sensitivity to understand what is going on inside of those women. They are after the silence of the blasted female consciousness, so denuded and effaced by suffering and trauma that their faces project a gorgeous, raging silence.

i think passiveness/arbitrariness is a big reason why i nope out of so many stories in the first few paragraphs. i have really noticed lately that there is a lot of writing out there that just feels like a list of what a character is doing, without any thought to the why or to how the character's actions affect or are affected by their emotions. again, the article captures how this feels:

It’s like the reader is expected to just open the book and follow along watching a string of events with no shape and no meaning, and no sense of why the narrator is presenting them to us.

of a good example of interiority, the article author says (emphasis mine):

Even in their passive moments, when they are holding back or not acting for fear of reprisal, the narrative itself never feels passive because the characters are thinking through their motivations, their fears, their anxieties, their favorite singer, their favorite movie, what their mother made for dinner, what they’re going to do when they got home. The narratives operate via thought. People thinking as they move through life. Even when the intense or dangerous situation arises, the characters process it, think through it, react, respond. We do not linger on their face as is the case in some first-person narratives. Instead, we unfurl the network of responses and relations to the event so that the character emerges brighter and more vivid in our minds rather than murky.

also quite liked this bit about characters who are not forthcoming or honest about their intentions/past/whatever (emphasis again mine):

Even when we do not want to think about something, we think about something else, no? Even when we try very hard not to look at the grossest parts of ourselves, we look somewhere else, no? A character who cannot speak on a subject is only interesting dramatically if they speak on something else so that what they do say and do express bears the imprint of what is unsaid. And indeed, that is only interesting if the reader has some sense of what is unsaid or that there is something unsaid. Otherwise, we’re just watching a person be boring and incommunicative. And what is the point of that?

interesting to see a couple of different people discussing the same topic and tying it to a similar underlying cause, anyway.

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.

I have been looking for this post for years after I came across it and it’s finally here and I need to reblog this because it is absolutely and entirely accurate.