The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [8]
Therefore, whenever you try to inflict on your readers a detailed description, your story stops. And readers are interested in the story—the movement—not your fine prose.
Does this mean you should have no description in your story? Of course not. Description must be worked in carefully, in bits and pieces, to keep your reader seeing, hearing, and feeling your story world. But please note the language here: it must be worked in, a bit at a time, not shoveled in by the page.
I am certainly not the first person to warn about "poetic" descriptions and how they stop a story. And yet they continue to appear again and again in amateur copy. Such segments prove one of two things: either the writer has no understanding of the basic nature of fiction, or the writer is so in love with her own words that she allows arrogance to overcome wisdom. "Fine writing" almost always slows the story's pace and distracts readers from the story line itself.
And note, please, that description can be something other than writing about a tree or a sunset. Beginning writers sometimes make the mistake of stopping everything while they describe a character's thoughts or feelings. This often is every bit as bad as the rosy fingers of dawn.
Of course you should and must look into your character's head and heart. And some of your insight must be given the reader, so she can know about the character, sympathize with the character, identify with the action. But in good fiction—even at novel length—such descriptions of the character's state of mind and emotion are usually relatively brief. The accomplished writer will tell (describe) a little, and demonstrate (show in action) a lot. Modern readers want you to move the story, not stand around discussing things.
In this regard, you may want to think about your fiction delivery systems. There are different ways to deliver your information to your reader. They have characteristic speeds:
• Exposition. This is the slowest of all. It's the straight giving of factual information. Nothing whatsoever is happening. You're giving the reader data—biographical data, forensic data, sociological data, whatever. Some of this has to go in your story, but there's no story movement while you're putting in your encyclopedia info.
• Description. Almost as slow. Again, some is necessary. But watch it.
• Narrative. Here we have characters onstage in the story "now," and their actions, give-and-take, are presented moment by moment, with no summary and nothing left out. This is like a stage play, and much of your story will be in this form, as we'll discuss in a later section. This kind of storytelling goes very swiftly and provides continuous movement.
• Dialogue. Story people talking. Very little action or interior thought. Like a fast-moving tennis match, back and forth, point and counterpoint. When the story people are under stress and talk in short bursts, this is tremendously fast and forward-moving.
• Dramatic Summary. The fastest form of all. Here you have dramatic stuff happening, but instead of playing it out moment by moment, as in narrative, you choose to add even more speed by summarizing it. In this mode, a car chase or argument that might require six pages of narrative might be condensed into a single light-speed paragraph.
If your stories seem to be moving too slowly, you might analyze some of your copy, looking at what form of writing you tend to use. It could be that you are describing too many sunsets (in one form or another) and never using any dialogue or dramatic summary. On the other hand, if you sense that your stories whiz along at too breakneck a speed, perhaps you need to change some of that dramatic summary into narrative, or even pause (briefly!) now and then to describe what the setting looks like, or what the character is thinking or feeling.
In this way, you can become more conscious of your tendencies as a fiction writer, and begin to see which tendencies help