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Trimming the Fat (aka Expendable Scenes) in Your Novel

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by Lorena Hughes

frustrated-writer3I don’t blame you if you don’t want to read this post. Revisions can be dreadful, overwhelming, confusing and frustrating for many writers, and the idea of doing them (or reading about them) may sound as fun and exciting as standing in line at an airport security check point. But revisions have a strange quality, they can also be infinitely satisfying once you figure out what needs to be done, and the end result is a stronger manuscript.

One of the reasons why revisions are so difficult is because you must tackle several elements at once: character development, plot progression, pace, prose (to include style, grammar and dialogue), among other monsters. Today, I’m going to focus on what constitutes the structure of your novel: scenes.

Since your novel is basically a sequence of scenes with transitional sentences/paragraphs/thoughts, it’s essential to evaluate each and every one of them as both a unit and a part of a whole. My writer friends tease me because I’m ruthless with them (“If I were you, I would delete this scene” is my motto!). But there is a good reason for my callousness. More often than not, a pacing issue is the result of a scene—or several—that aren’t serving an important purpose in your novel. These “problem scenes” are difficult to spot because we often grow so attached to them. (Very often we need someone else to point them out.) So how do we determine if a scene is important enough to keep or if it’s more problematic than useful?

Here are the five questions I ask myself when evaluating a scene.

1. Is the scene active or reflective?

Ideally, you should have a good balance between active and reflective scenes. Active scenes being the ones where something important happens (an action that moves the story forward), and reflective scenes are those where the character ponders on his situation, informs other characters of his problem or fills the reader with backstory and/or information dumps. In my experience, agents and editors often complain that novels are “too slow.” This problem may be the result of too many introspective scenes or instances where characters engage in ordinary activities.

Arguably, you will need more active than reflective scenes to create a good progression, but the balance of active vs. reflective heavily depends on the genre you’re writing (though the consensus seems to be that even in literary fiction there must be enough action to keep the reader’s interest). In genres such as adventure and thrillers, most of your scenes should be active, but in Women’s Fiction, for example, it’s tolerated and even expected to have many introspective scenes to reflect the author’s voice and the character’s personality.

Once you figure out if your scene is active or reflective, determine whether or not you have too many of one or the other. Perhaps you have too many reflective scenes in a row and the pace would benefit from moving them around (if it doesn’t affect your sequence of events, of course). The same goes for active scenes. Perhaps it’s time to give your character a coffee break from all the chaos surrounding him!

2. Is the scene repetitive?

Do you have similar scenes throughout your book? In other words, have you used the same setting many times before, have you had similar conversations or too many scenes between the same characters? Perhaps it’s just a matter of condensing two scenes together.

3. Is an entire scene necessary to convey this information?

Sometimes we hold on to a scene because we think that the information shared on a particular line of dialogue is vital but we don’t realize that an entire scene may not be necessary in order to divulge this one, tiny, bit of information. When I’ve recommended to my friends to cut scenes that are dragging forever, I try to spot what is important about them and suggest they move this information elsewhere. But what about “show, don’t tell,” you may ask? As you know, “showing” (in this case, enacting a scene) is fundamental for a reader to identify with a character or situation, but not all events are equally interesting or deserve this much attention. It’s your job to determine which events are relevant enough to turn into a scene.

4. What purpose is this scene serving?

It’s important for a writer to understand why a scene deserves to take room in his or her novel. Is the scene in question advancing the story? Enlightening the reader about the character’s past or his quirky personality? Developing a bond or conflict between characters? If you don’t understand the purpose of a scene you’re holding on to for dear life, you may have a problem.

5. If I remove this scene, will it affect the flow of my novel?

My first novel started as a telenovela for the Latin American market. As you know, soap operas have tons of characters and last A VERY LONG TIME. Therefore, writers have the luxury of penning what I call “peripheral scenes.” These are scenes where secondary characters catch up with the main action, or where the heroine ponders her decision with friends, or where a subplot between secondary characters develops (but does nothing for the main plot). When I translated my soap opera to English and formatted it as a novel, I had tons of scenes like these (no wonder my novel was over 143,000 words!). In novels, these scenes are sometimes hard to spot because they can be considered “bonding scenes” between characters. A good test is to evaluate if your novel will suffer if you remove a particular scene. From my experience, it probably won’t. Readers are smart and will catch up with the action without you having to overexplain how things came to be. If you’re doubting the validity of a scene, you’re probably on to something.

In conclusion, the trick to revisions (especially if you’re going to do them on your own) is to be honest with yourself—which can be difficult considering your emotional attachment to your work. As a critique partner, I have noticed that many writers are very resistant to deleting superfluous scenes. (Sometimes they’re more willing to kill a character than a beloved scene!) I think it has to do with the fact that these scenes become familiar to us and it becomes harder to envision our novels without them. However, many times after the deed is done, writers realize how much better their novel flows, and they don’t look back (it’s happened to me several times). It’s rare that after deleting a scene, a writer will bring it back (at least not in its entirety).

What do you think? Do you have an emotional attachment to your scenes or are you ruthless when it comes to evaluating (and getting rid of) them?

LorenaHughes2Lorena Hughes was born and raised in Ecuador. At age eighteen, she moved to the US to go to college and got a degree in Fine Arts and Mass Communication & Journalism. She has worked in advertising, graphic design and illustration, but her biggest passion is storytelling. Her historical novel set in South America, The Black Letter, took first place in the 2011 Southwest Writers International Writing Contest (Historical Fiction category), an Honorable Mention at the 2012 Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and was a quarter-finalist at the 2014 Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA). She is represented by Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency and is a freelance writer for What’s Up Weekly. You can find her on Twitter at twitter.com/SisterLorena.

This article was originally published on The Writing Sisterhood blog, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: 13 Ways to Show Character Emotions, Part 1

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

In some ways, the telling of emotions is easier to identify than other forms of tell. Simply look for the name of any emotion:

He felt defensive.
Chase was relieved.
It concerned him.

Consider the following passage from an early draft of my own science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder:

Dana spent most of the day after Bill’s surgery sitting at his bedside, battling a tumult of unfamiliar emotions. Frustration at her helplessness, fear that she’d lose her best friend, anger at those who had done this to him, regret for never having expressed her feelings in any meaningful way, and sadness for the loss of her fallen companions.

This tells what Dana is feeling. The revised passage below shows the same emotions.

Dana spent most of the day after Bill’s surgery sitting at his bedside. The doctors and nurses came and went, but she didn’t talk to them, afraid her voice would fail her if she did. Instead, she watched their faces and tried to read Bill’s progress in their expressions [ fear of losing her best friend].

She’d lost her friends and her innocence, taken by an enemy upon whom she’d fired the first shot [sadness and regret]. So she buried her head in her hands to block out everything from her sight but the man she was helpless to aid [helplessness].

Anger and frustration are missing from the second passage. I decided they would have faded to the background, supplanted by deeper, more profound feelings. Besides, the original passage contained too many emotions to begin with.

If you’re having difficulty determining whether you’ve told or shown an emotion, find a way to render it without using the name of the emotion or a synonym. You can’t tell an emotion without using its name or a synonym. Though the telling of emotions may be easy to spot, for many writers it’s one of the most difficult problems to correct. Here are some techniques that will help you show your characters’ emotions effectively:1

1. Use emotional honesty

Emotions are complex, and each is part of an emotional spectrum. The passage above that shows Dana sitting at Bill’s bedside, is a good example of the complexity of human emotions. Don’t restrict your characters to one emotion at a time or to emotional extremes.

2. Convey the source of the emotion

Consider the following passage:

Several minutes went by. Dana’s chest tightened with each passing second. It was nothing, she told herself. She should have expected it. But she was sweating in her pressure suit.

Clearly, Dana is worried about something, or something bad and unexpected has happened; the reader can’t be sure which. Though I’ve shown Dana’s physical response to her emotion, the emotion itself is lost. Now read the unabridged passage:

Several minutes went by. Still no word came. Dana’s chest tightened with each passing second. It was nothing, she told herself. Bill was always late. She should have expected it. But she was sweating in her pressure suit.

More minutes passed. Come on, Bill. The mission was timed to bring down the first four targets in the first two minutes of the attack. Yet no report came from the Puma.

The reader now knows what Dana is worried about and why. Show the cause, and the emotion becomes real.

3. Avoid clichés

Mad as hell
Green with envy
Love so much it hurts
Hate with a passion

Overused phrases like these may tell the reader what your character feels, but they don’t allow him to experience what your character is going through. Simply put, they don’t show. Find more original ways to express your characters’ emotions.

4. Use metaphor

In the following passage, Dana has spent the past several hours in the trauma center waiting for news on Bill’s condition.

Finally, Bill’s doctor emerged from the surgical wing wearing a white smock that looked like it had never been worn before. He was an angel or an apparition, his face devoid of any emotion that might reveal the state of his patient. Dana might have imagined him. Nonetheless, she rushed forward.

Comparing the doctor to an angel or an apparition, two disparate beings, shows the complexity of Dana’s emotions. Her action in the final sentence shows that her hope is stronger than her fear.

Read the rest of Kirt Hickman’s series:
“13 Ways to Show Character Emotions,” Part 2
“13 Ways to Show Character Emotions,” Part 3

1Ann Hood, Creating Character Emotions, Story Press Books, 1998.

WorldsAsunderKirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the September 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Joint Authorship: Professional Marriages Made in Heaven or Hell

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by Sherri Burr

SherriBurrJoint author collaborations can be as complicated as marriages, and last as long or as briefly. Jimmy and Rosalind Carter survived a multi-decade marriage before deciding to co-author a book. They raised several children, ran a peanut farm, governed the state of Georgia, and lived in the fish tank known as the White House. Yet when the two decided to write a memoir together, their marriage almost collapsed. What they found is that they didn’t remember the same events and dialogue, or reflect in the same way on the significance or meaning of events. In the end, they published a memoir with separate his and her parts, with different typesets so that you knew when one was speaking.

If Jimmy and Rosalind had problems co-authoring together, what does it say for the rest of us? Many collaborations are entered into with haste and the parties often repent in leisure. Unfortunately, some joint authors have headed to court to resolve their differences.

The copyright statute defines a joint work as one prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.

Courts have considered whether the researcher of a play or the contributor of two scenes and new characters to a movie can be considered joint authors. The answer was “No,” in Childress v. Taylor. Someone who supplied underlying research material, which the playwright turned into a play, does not become a co-author. Similarly, in Aalmuhammed v. Lee when a film consultant contributed two scenes with new characters, Arabic translation into English subtitles, and selected prayers for the film Malcolm X, that person did not become a joint author, but rather the appropriate designation was religious consultant.

By contrast, a court said that the author of an outline and two chapters could potentially be considered a joint author of a novel. In the case of Maurizio v. Goldsmith, Goldsmith asked Maurizio to help write a book about first wives, and proclaimed that they “would make a lot of money off the book and get rich.” Goldsmith and Maurizio worked together on the outline. It wasn’t until Maurizio attempted to formalize their agreement by asking for co-authorship credit and 25 percent of the profits from the book that Goldsmith reacted badly. After Maurizio sued, the court ruled there were serious joint authorship issues that could be tried by a jury.

A recent joint authorship case involved two law professors. The parties, Kate Bloch and Kevin McMunigal, agreed to write a casebook together in 1999. In 2000, they entered into an agreement with Aspen Publishers to produce Criminal Law: A Contemporary Approach in April 2003. Their book published in April 2005. Afterwards, the professors agreed to separate and reached a separation agreement in November 2007. Aspen said it would give them individual contracts if they could separate in writing. McMunigal submitted a new casebook proposal, which Aspen accepted. Bloch did not submit a new proposal and repudiated the separation agreement. McMunigal sued, claiming the casebook is a collective work and not a joint work.

Unlike a joint work, a collective work is defined as one in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. Prominent examples are periodicals, anthologies, and encyclopedias and the SouthWest Sage newsletter. The contributors to the Sage retain their copyright in their individual work.

In McMunigal v. Bloch, the court found that the casebook was a joint work and not a collective one. The professors intended to become co-authors when they entered into a publishing contract that described them as co-authors and specified joint obligations, including requiring they submit a single manuscript. Further, they both supervised the casebook and it did not list who authored which chapters. Thus, the casebook could not be partitioned like a collective work.

To avoid ending up in a court, here are some suggestions that hopefully will make your joint author collaborations flow smoothly:

1. Pick someone to work with whose work you have examined and admired.

2. Memorialize the contribution in writing, even if it’s on a napkin to indicate who is responsible for what parts of the work.

3. Draft a schedule and stick to it. Pick one person to ride herd on the other author(s).

4. Decide at the beginning, when you like each other, how you might someday end the collaboration if necessary. Prepare the equivalent of an authorship prenuptial agreement.

A Short and Happy GuideSherri Burr is the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law where she teaches Entertainment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Art Law. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and the Yale Law School, Burr has authored or co-authored twenty books, including A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well Being (West Academic, 2014).

This article was originally published in the September 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: 5 Goals of an Opening Scene

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

Your opening scene must accomplish several things:

Make it clear from the outset who your hero is

Write the first scene of Chapter 1 from your hero’s point of view. I go a step further and make my hero the first named character in the book. Your reader will pick up on these cues. If you start Chapter 1 from the viewpoint of some other character, your reader will incorrectly assume that this character is the hero, which might cause confusion later on.

Show your hero’s ordinary life

Your story should pull the hero away from his ordinary life. Before it does, however, you must show the reader what that life is like. This will help the reader understand the impact the crisis will have on that life and on the hero. Show the reader what kind of person your hero is. Give her a moment to connect with him in a setting she can understand and relate to.

Hook your reader

Many people will read the first page of a book while they’re standing in the bookstore deciding which book to buy. If your story doesn’t rev up by the bottom of the first page, you’ll probably lose these readers. Therefore, give your hero an immediate desire, even if it’s just a cup of coffee, and place an obstacle between him and the thing he wants. Otherwise your opening will lack tension.

My first novel, Worlds Asunder, begins:

“It was really embarrassing.” Edward “Chase” Morgan drew the top card from the deck: the queen of diamonds. “We’d just returned from hitting a crack factory and warehouse in Cuba. This was back when President Montros thought he could stop the drug trade with air strikes.”

He tapped his cards on the table. Michelle Fairchild, his materials engineering intern from Mars Tech, had won every game that evening. Not this one, though, if he could help it. Chase needed just two cards to win and Michelle hadn’t laid down any of hers. Unfortunately, the queen wasn’t one of the two. He tossed it onto the discard pile.

Smiling, Michelle picked it up, then placed it and two others on the table. Chase groaned. That group put her in the lead and, at double or nothing, the credits were starting to add up.

The opening dialogue promises an embarrassing story about my hero, Chase Morgan. It hooks the reader in just four words. The rest of the paragraph reveals Chase as an adventurous character, the card game gives him an immediate want, Michelle presents an obstacle to victory, and the credits provide the stakes of the game.

Make your hero likable

As the scene progresses, I show Chase caring (in a paternal manner) for both his intern and his dog, poking fun at himself, and losing the game graciously. The scene gives the reader several reasons to like him.

Define your hero’s goal

Because you need to show a snippet of your hero’s normal life before crisis disrupts it, you might not introduce the external conflict (your hero’s goal in the story) until some time later. Nevertheless, reveal his goal before the end of the first chapter. In Worlds Asunder, I do this about two pages later:

The comm panel buzzed. Chase stretched his lanky frame and got to his feet, then leapt to the terminal against the slight lunar g.

“We’ve got a ship in trouble,” Security Chief Stan Brower said. “The Phoenix. Snider needs you to assemble a team…”

[Chase] logged into NASA’s data net and scanned the Phoenix file. He scrolled past the physical statistics— size, class, thrust-to-mass ratio—and came to the corporate data.
OWNER: Stellarfare
CREW: Randy Lauback, Phyllis Conway
He read the last line again. His investigations career had come full circle, it seemed. It would end where it had begun. With Randy Lauback.

Chase knew then that he had to take the case, however long it might last, and follow it through to completion. He owed Randy that much.

This not only defines his goal, solving the Phoenix case, but also gives him a personal stake (some unspecified, yet important, history involving the ship’s pilot).

If you haven’t accomplished all these things by the end of Chapter 1, find ways to do so. This may mean deleting scenes from the beginning of your book and starting the story when the crisis occurs; it may mean changing the viewpoint character of the opening scene or moving a different scene—one written from the hero’s viewpoint—to the front of the book; or it may mean accelerating the pace by moving background information to later pages.

WorldsAsunderKirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the March 2010 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission.



5 Steps to Master the Art of Interviewing

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by Sherri Burr

SherriBurrWriters interview. It is one of our most important research techniques. We interview for background information about characters or settings, to obtain quotes to enhance our stories, and for profiles. Use the following five steps to make your interviews successful.

Set up Interviews

How do you contact the person? One option is to write a personalized letter or email. Mention what you admire about his or her work, and why he or she will benefit from talking to you. Although busy, people will take time if presented an opportunity to offer wisdom to benefit others. Mention your credentials, including people you have interviewed before, to give the impression that you are a professional.

If you’re lucky, you’ll run into the person on the street or at a conference. This happens a lot at big events. At the 2008 Book Expo America, I happened upon a room with Magic Johnson and Alec Baldwin. At Taos Talking Pictures, I was interviewing a young actress and noticed that Julia Roberts was standing to my side, and behind the young actress was Susan Sarandon.

With these chance encounters, you have to immediately ask for interviews. This can be intimidating when the person is famous. While I did ask Johnson to speak at a University of New Mexico event and Baldwin for an interview, I was rendered speechless by Roberts and Sarandon. So I wrote a column about standing in the presence of greatness and only knowing their mystery.

If the person says yes, you must follow up immediately. Set a specific time and place. Do not let months go by, as I did, contemplating that Alec Baldwin gave me his cell phone number. If you wait, you’ll find, as I did, that he does not return your messages.

Prepare for Interviews

Obtain background information by Google-ing the person. Print and highlight the most relevant points. Write sample questions, but do not stick to a script. Have a sense of what you most want from the interview. If interviewing writers, ask about their favorite authors and what they learned from their craft. Ask how they deal with rejection. Do they have mentors?

If just venturing into interviews, watch a pro like Oprah. She handled with aplomb, Rielle Hunter, the lover of former presidential candidate John Edwards, and Sarah Duchess of York after she was caught on tape trying to sell access to her ex-spouse, Prince Andrew.

Conduct Interviews

Interviews can take place in person, on the telephone or by email or text. The face-to-face encounter is the best because you can observe body language. With the telephone, you will at least have the tone of voice. With email or text, you just have words. Barbara Walters asked Shirley MacLaine if she liked her brother Warren Beatty. MacLaine answered “yes” while shaking her head “no.” If there is incongruence between body language and the words, the former is the most accurate. With an email interview, that difference would have been missed.

That said, sometimes you take what you can get. I secured only a telephone interview with MacLaine. It lasted seven minutes and I printed every word in my Entertainment Law book.

For face-to-face interviews, arrive early to set up. Bring your writer’s notepad, a pen, and a tape recorder if you desire. Do not rely on the tape recorder as your only recording device. Technology can fail. For a television interview with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a student intern forgot to turn on the audio, resulting in a useless product with no opportunity for a second chance.

For a print interview, the best recording device is pen and paper. It gives the interviewee some comfort watching you write down her words. But even that can be intimidating. While interviewing The Bachelor’s Bob Guiney (the third bachelor), he clammed up, so I tucked away my writer’s pad. Then he spilled his guts about how ABC was mistreating him. Afterwards, I rushed to my car and wrote it down. I went to bed thinking I had mush but woke up with a complete profile article in my head. If you do employ a recording device, keep it going even after the interview is finished as you sometimes get gems at the end.

Write the Results Immediately

Sometimes dreams resolve problems. When this happens, immediately write the results in your journal or type them on your computer. It’s tempting to think the article will remain in your head for hours or days. Not so. A fully realized piece can just vanish. Thus, don’t wait.

Share the Results with the Subject

Email the results with a deadline that tells the person that this is what you plan to print and they have days (or a week) to make changes. If you do not hear back within the deadline, assume the story is okay to run. Sometimes a subject will want to remove a line or change things. I usually oblige them unless it’s something I want to keep. Character actor Morgan Woodward described the prison guard he played in Cool Hand Luke as “a walking Mephistopheles.” I loved the line and asked to keep it. He relented.

A Short and Happy GuideSherri Burr is the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law where she teaches Entertainment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Art Law. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and the Yale Law School, Burr has authored or co-authored twenty books, including A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well Being (West Academic, 2014).

This article was originally published as “Mastering the Art of Interviewing” in the September 2010 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: Ten Tips To Tighten Your Narrative Style

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising FictionNo matter what kind of writing you do, your narrative style must be taut, clear, and engaging. If you write fiction, it must also contain tension and emotion. Unnecessary words and phrases will clutter your narrative. They will sap the strength, even the very life, out of your writing. The following tips will help you eliminate the unnecessary clutter.

1. Eliminate Filter Words

Filter words, also called viewpoint intruders, are words like saw, felt, heard, watched, etc., that take the reader out of the character’s point of view. Consider this example from a critique submission. “I” refers to a woman named Clara.

I looked around at my fellow passengers. I overheard snatches of conversation in Italian. I saw parents feeding snacks to children, even a breastfeeding mother.Here, the reader isn’t looking at passengers, overhearing conversations, or seeing parents feed children. The reader watches Clara as Clara looks at, overhears, and sees the action of the scene. These words have become a filter between Clara and the reader.

The author can eliminate the first sentence because Clara doesn’t see herself looking around. The rest of the passage can be written without filter words:

All around me, people spoke in Italian. Parents fed snacks to their children. One woman nursed her infant.2. Eliminate Thinker Attributives

A thinker attributive uses phrases like he thought, or knew, or remembered to show what your character is thinking. Don’t rely on these devices. You’re writing from the character’s point of view; therefore, any thoughts you express are assumed to be the thoughts of the character. This makes thinker attributives unnecessary. Look at the following example from a critique submission:

Luke believed that his dad knew most everything that went on in Willacy County but he wasn’t sure he knew about the sugarcane fields.Now, without the thinker attributives:

Luke’s dad knew most everything that went on in Willacy County, except maybe about the sugarcane fields.Because the passage is written from Luke’s viewpoint, these are clearly Luke’s thoughts, though he might be wrong about what his father knows or doesn’t know.

3. Minimize Use of “Not” and “n’t”

Readers want to know what something is. They’ll be dissatisfied if you tell them only what things are not. Therefore, not interesting, becomes uninteresting, boring, dull, or plain; perhaps even uninspired, bland, or tedious, depending on the context. Generally speaking, eliminating not results in tighter, more precise wording.

4. Eliminate Unnecessary Use of “That”

The word that is often used unnecessarily. Consider the following example, excerpted from a letter my hero wrote in my own science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder:

I’m writing to let you know that my homecoming will be delayed. I know that you and the girls were looking forward to seeing me, but a case has come up that will delay my departure.Wherever you see the word that, delete it and read the sentence without it. If the sentence makes sense, omit the word that. In this example, only the third occurrence of that is necessary.

5. Eliminate Repeated Elements

Repeated elements are aspects of your story, particularly an emotion or bit of characterization, that you’ve shown in more than one way. Repeated elements weaken your writing. This example from a fight scene in Worlds Asunder contains two repeated elements:

The whole apartment seemed to be swirling. Nothing was clear and everything was moving. Where is he? Chase heard a sound to his left and spun his head. For a moment, his vision went black, the swift movement nearly causing him to lose consciousness.This revision eliminates the repeats:

The whole apartment seemed to be swirling. Chase heard a sound to the left and spun his head. For a moment, his vision went black and the pain in his skull soared.At best, repeated elements give a feel of wordiness to your narrative. At worst, they condescend to the reader. Have confidence in your ability to show. Show things once and show them well. Your reader will get the point.

6. Eliminate Adverbs

In general, delete your adverbs. Adverbs tend to signify lazy writing. The author uses a descriptor to avoid finding the right verb. I once heard a writer recommend deleting all adverbs from a manuscript and reading it without them, then putting back only those that are absolutely necessary. I would add: For those that remain, strengthen the verb rather than reinsert the adverb. For example, stared grumpily might become glared, glowered, scowled, or frowned.

7. Eliminate Repeated Words

The following passage from an early draft of Worlds Asunder takes place immediately after a lunar building explodes. A construction worker drives his oversized bulldozer up a damaged truck ramp and spots two wounded survivors trapped on a damaged framework of trusses above him:

He depressurized his compartment and climbed out. He found the distance that he had to jump to be greater than he’d expected. He heard the men above him now, coming in loud and clear on his comm system, urging him to hurry. He looked up and saw their catwalk swaying and beginning to sag under their weight.

Every sentence in this passage starts with he. This draws the reader’s attention away from the story and onto the text. Restructure your sentences to avoid repeated beginnings. Include more sensory details. Show your viewpoint character’s emotions. The following revision doesn’t have a single sentence that begins with he:

Once in place, he depressurized the compartment and climbed out. His heart sank when he saw the distance he’d have to jump.

The men called to him through the comm, urging him to hurry. Suddenly, a support buckled and the whole catwalk began to give under their weight.

Similarly, don’t repeat the same uncommon word, or forms of the same word, within a short span of text. Consider the following example excerpted from a critique submission:

Jamie, Leah, Camille, and Lawrence passed the platter around, fast and deliberate, like a quarterback passing off a football.

Substitute synonyms to avoid repeating words.

Jamie, Leah, Camille, and Lawrence passed the platter around, fast and deliberate, like a quarterback handing off a football.

8. Eliminate Excess Adjectives

Don’t string a bunch of adjectives together to describe a single noun:

. . . a hot, dry, sunny, summer day.

The use of multiple adjectives gives the reader too much information to catalogue, especially if you do it often. If you must use an adjective, limit yourself to one per noun. Pick the one that describes the characteristic most important to the viewpoint character. For example, a construction worker laboring outside would probably describe the day as hot. A farmer, concerned about another year of drought, would characterize the day as dry.

9. Eliminate Unnecessary Prepositional Phrases

Chase stood among the clues in the cockpit and let them tell their story.

If the reader already knows Chase is in the cockpit, write this as:

Chase stood among the clues and let them tell their story.

Challenge each prepositional phrase in your manuscript. If it doesn’t say something that’s both new and necessary, delete it.

10. Don’t Put Questions in Your Character’s Thoughts

Minimize the number of questions that appear in your character’s thoughts. Similar to telling, questions in a character’s thoughts do your reader’s work for her. They tell her what to wonder. Let the reader come up with her own questions.

Consider the following passage from a critique submission, in which Luke has ventured into a sugarcane field that has always frightened him. There, he meets a boy named Antonio.

The dark-haired Mexican kid was standing with a finger over his lips. Luke frowned and opened his mouth. The boy shook his head and made a waving motion.

He wants me to go away? That’s what I’m trying to do. Why did he stop me? Luke studied Antonio. He’s trying to hide something. But what? Himself? This kid is confused, Luke thought. Antonio must be an illegal. What else could he be hiding?

The last paragraph puts direct questions into Luke’s thoughts. There’s almost always a more effective way to show what questions your character faces than to pose them so blatantly:

The dark-haired Mexican kid stood with a finger over his lips. Luke frowned and opened his mouth. The boy shook his head and made a waving motion to shoo Luke away.

All Luke wanted to do was run, to get as far from this creepy cane field as possible by the time the dying sun faded from the horizon. Yet he studied Antonio. Nobody would enter the sugarcane, especially at night, unless he was hiding something. He must be an illegal.

The reader still knows what questions Luke has. Now, however, the reasons for them are clear as well.

In summary, minimize your use of these ten grammatical devices. Doing so will increase the pace of your narrative and the tension in your story.

WorldsAsunderKirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009). This post combines the first two articles in his two-year column, “Revising Fiction,” originally published in SouthWest Sage, and reprinted here by permission.



Adversarial Adjectives — An article by Andy Mayo

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One of the things that strikes me when I read Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories is her use of what I’ll call adversarial adjectives — adjectives that put a completely different spin on the noun they are modifying.  For example, notorious virginity.

Notorious means having a bad reputation. Virginity isn’t usually thought of as being the source of a bad reputation.

Yoking these two words together isn’t mindlessly clever. The description fits the character, Laura in the story “Flowering Judas.” She is a physically attractive woman who refuses to become romantically involved with anyone, especially the revolutionaries she is helping. So she is notorious for her virginal stance. Her virginity is a denial that tarnishes her reputation in the macho world she inhabits. “Notorious virginity” fits the story perfectly.

My favorite adversarial modifier is in this construction: pitiless courtesy.

A writer could substitute cold, callous or even cruel, but the meaning would not quite be the same. Pity-less is about power. To be pitied is to be looked down upon, to be patronized. Only a person in a superior position can pity another.

So here too, the description perfectly fits the character being described: an overweight “revolutionist” who ‘has the malice, the cleverness, the wickedness, the sharpness of wit, the hardness of heart, stipulated for loving the world profitably.”

Writing instructors today caution against using adjectives (and even more so, adverbs).  The mantra is, show us, don’t tell us.

But Porter’s adjectives — “notorious virginity,” “pitiless courtesy” — are so striking that it is hard to imagine how more “showing” could be as effective.

Other great adjectives in the same story include:  “specialized insolence,” “expedient logic,” and “puzzled eyebrows.”

And then there is “the vast cureless wound of his self-esteem.” You can almost see the wound bleeding with self-pity. His ego-problem cannot be cured.



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