In
today’s competitive book market, a writer can’t afford to spend time writing
long blocks of prose. With books competing with the fast pace of movies, television
and the internet, the more time a writer takes to paint little details in a picture with words is time that a customer
will be lost.
In
nineteenth and early twentieth century a writer could get away with long
paragraphs filled with blocks of colorful prose. A writer could spend entire
paragraphs describing furniture, the lushness of the green grass on the lawn or
the exquisite tailoring of the embroidery on a gentleman’s waistcoat and his
tailored English suit.
They
could take several chapters to introduce a series of ancillary characters
before getting to the main characters and their storylines. All people had been
books. There was no Television, no movies, no internet or cell phone games and
apps vying for the attention of the reader.
But
write like that today in the face of all that competition and the reader puts
down the book. No one wants to spend a hundred to two hundred pages waiting for
a writer to set up the story. There are just too many things to do.
Today,
a writer has fifteen pages to establish their story and all the characters.
Twenty at the most.
A
writer today has to understand that there isn’t much time for exposition. Every
second is precious and a few lost in a long rambling paragraph can mean the
difference between a sale of a book or a reader picking up another authors’
title.
I
know many writers want to tell a character’s backstory to get the reader
involved in the story. But there’s a time and a place for it. At the beginning
of a story a reader wants to have three questions answered:
Who
is the main character?
What
do they want?
Why
should we care?
Once
the writer answers those three questions, they’ll have established enough of a
plotline to get the readers’ interest and compel them to read more. Then the
writer can fill in the details as they move the story forward.
Too
much exposition keeps the reader from having an enjoyable experience with a
story. If a writer adds too many details, it prevents the reader from using
their imagination and making up pictures in their heads of what’s going on
between the lines of the pages.
It
also prevents the reader from making their own observations regarding the
actions of the characters. When a reader is immersed in a story they don’t want
everything explained to them down to the last letter. They want to come to
their own conclusions about characters and the action they see transpiring in
front of them. Leave something to their imaginations!
Part
of good storytelling is writing just enough. A writer has to have enough
confidence in their characters to let them move the story forward.
Always
remember less is more. Less details let a story have more of an impact on the
reader.
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