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/.
