SMFS Member Guest Post: Three Simple Tips For Tightening Your Prose by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Please welcome back Andrew Welsh-Huggins back to the blog today….

 

Three Simple Tips For Tightening Your Prose 

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

 

Tackling a piece of mystery fiction, from short story to novel, can be a daunting task, for novice and veteran writers alike. The good news is there’s never been more help available for the process, whether it’s tips on craft, advice on editing,  suggestions for getting published, the inside scoop on marketing, and more.

 

But this embarrassment of writing riches also comes with a downside: how to keep track of it all. It’s a problem I encountered even while writing my eleventh book, a crime novel titled The End of the Road. Pantsing vs. plotting. Third-person limited vs. third-person omniscient. Show, don’t tell. Some days, trying to juggle all these writing recommendations, you end up feeling like Prince Humperdinck in the film Princess Bride: “I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan. My wedding to arrange. My wife to murder. And Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped.”

 

With that kind of pressure, it pays to keep it simple. In that spirit, I offer three easy things you can do beginning today to streamline your prose—and lower your wordcount, at least a bit—with hardly any heavy lifting:

 

_ Reduce attribution. After years of waging this battle with my own writing, I will hazard that at a minimum, half of every use of “he said” or “she said” can be eliminated. Not only are their appearances unneeded, they often bog down dialogue, which should pull a reader forward, not push her back. If the individual tics and tones of speakers are well-established, readers can follow along just fine. Still, if a scene goes on for a while, it’s all right to occasionally provide a reminder of who’s talking and while you’re at it, flavor the text with a description of some sort, a la: “… she said, remembering how long ago breakfast was and wondering when this conversation would end.” But those interjections can usually be the exception, not the rule.

 

_ Stop starting. So many times, we read that a character “…. started walking across the room.” Or “… started to interrupt.” Or “ … started to open the door.” Really? What about just: “John walked across the room.” “Polly interrupted.” “Corrine opened the door.” I’m guilty a hundred times over of this foible, but I’m not alone. It pervades fiction, including that of some of our finest writers. It’s starting to drive me batty.

 

_ Have it with “had.” Tenses can be confusing and make you tense as well. But without question, an easy way to simplify your writing is to stop casting every action in the pluperfect. Take this made-up example: “I remember the first time I’d met Jack. I’d seen him at Donovan’s one Saturday night. He’d walked the length of the bar to offer a woman a fresh martini olive to replace the one she’d just eaten.”

 

Let’s try again.

 

 “I remember the first time I met Jack. I saw him at Donovan’s one Saturday night. He walked the length of the bar to offer a woman a fresh martini olive to replace the one she just ate.”

 

I’m not sure what’s driving the overuse of the pluperfect but I know I’m not alone in wanting—for the most part—to show it the door. Marvin Kaye, the late fiction editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, went so far as to remove unnecessary “had’s” in stories, as he explained on his submission page. “Boiled down, here is what’s wrong with some (not all) compound past tenses—except for fiction written in present tense, our convention is to put things in the simple past.”

 

So there you have it. Deep six “said.” Skip “started.” Halve your “had’s.” You’re already ahead of the game, and have nothing else to worry about other than story arcs, back stories, loglines, synopses, and whether to prologue. Happy writing!

  

Andrew Welsh-Huggins ©2023 

Writer, reader, veteran pet feeder. Shamus, Derringer and International Thriller Writers award-nominated. Find my work and sign up for my newsletter at https://www.andrewwelshhuggins.com/.