Just Because It Happened, Doesn't Mean You Have to Tell Us

This week, we’re looking at common mistakes or habits surrounding the portrayal of events in a story.

Whether a manuscript has multiple actions smushed into one sentence or entire scenes worth of unnecessary set up and transition, we’ve got some solutions. 

P.S. Just because it happened, doesn’t mean you have to tell readers about it.  

For all the lessons + tips from this episode in one spot, check out and download this PDF  (https://drive.google.com/file/d/13duj5elX1l5IjxHpfk5jLgCEhFzpHsAN/view?usp=drive_link). No subscription or signup is necessary. 

Do you need support with your writing? Check out our coaching and editing services at https://veronicajorden.com/ and https://annaschechter.org/. 

Do you want to know what Anna's reading? Check out her instagram @annaotations (https://www.instagram.com/annaotations/).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Veronica, a Gen Xer. And I'm Anna, a Gen Zer. And this is X Wright Z, a podcast fueled by our love of books and the craft of writing.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

We're writers and editors who read across the genre spectrum. And you know how in Sci-Fi characters are on an intergalactic mission to do whatever they need to do? Well, we're on an intergenerational mission to help writers write better stories.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

And as part of our mission, every episode comes with a handout chock full of key takeaways and tips that you can use for your own writing. A simple Google Doc with no signups or subscriptions necessary. If we can spark your creativity and help support your writing habit, we'll consider this a job well done. Now let's dig into this week's discussion. Okay, so today we're talking about another grouping of really common mistakes that we see um writers make, especially in early drafts. And these ones can tend to weaken a scene.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

We've really been enjoying this sort of series on common mistakes that we see. And we hope that you've been finding them fun too. And not like a lecture, like, oh, you have these mistakes in your writing, but more like what a cool craft writing really is to have all of these technicalities, all these little things that add up and really make a difference. And today we're going to be looking a little bit more at a scene level, but we're going to look at sentences too. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah, good. Yeah. I mean, and I and again, we're going to caveat all of this with like, you know, mistakes is in quotes here, because these are things that most of the time, if you correct them, it's actually going to make your writing better and stronger, and it's going to create a better reading experience for the reader. But there's always going to be exceptions. So take this as kind of a generality that if you implement some of these changes, that your writing will improve, but it doesn't mean that you have to take them all as like gospel and this must happen. We will never say that. So today, what we're going to talk about, we've kind of grouped together like some what we're calling mistakes, things that we see often in writing that individually aren't necessarily a problem. If they only happen once or twice, it's it's not such a big deal. But I think, and I think Anna will probably agree with me, a lot of these mistakes, when a writer does it, they tend to do it throughout the draft, not just one time. We've grouped them together very specifically because I think they have, they, they have an impact on pacing and immersion. And kind of we've talked about in the past this collaborative space that we create with the reader where they feel like they are a part of the story. And if you do these things, it can often impact that. So the reader's experience. So either we're pulling the reader out of the moment by stepping out of a character's point of view, or like I mentioned, we're kind of breaking into that collaborative space and not trusting that the reader is gonna understand what it is we're creating on the page. I think this really goes back to the trust piece, where sometimes we spend too much time writing around a scene or setting up a scene instead of actually just letting the action happen. So we're gonna break down each of these, look at some examples, talk about how they kind of weaken the scene, and then and then give you like what can you do instead? How do you fix this problem?

SPEAKER_01 3:51

The first one is something that we see all the time, and I've certainly been tempted to do it myself. When you're a writer, you know more than your characters do, and you certainly know more than your readers do about where the story is headed, what fate awaits your characters, and so forth. When the author tells us something that we we can't know, that's the first mistake we want to highlight.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

So this one we're calling it POV breaks and overexplaining what a character can't know. Another name for this might be don't notice, don't know. Yeah. If if a character does not or cannot notice something, they can't know it in order to report it to a reader. Veronica, do you want to define this a little more concretely?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this has a lot to do with POV, right? So if you are, and I would say the vast majority, we've talked about this in in previous episodes as well. I think the vast majority of folks who are writing fiction right now are writing either first person or third person close or third per third person deep, right? So it's if we are inside a character's perspective, experiencing a story, if they can't hear it or know it, then neither can the reader. So this will happen things like a character will you'll have imagine you have a scene and um we're in, you know, character A's point of view, and then character B will walk away, and then there'll be a line like, you know, Charles walked away and he said to himself, and then you have this line. But the problem is if we're in character A's point of view, if Charles has walked away and that character can't hear it, in this scene, neither can we. We've broken POV there, right? An example of this is when we break the fourth wall. Do you have an example of that, Anna? Like where we would see that sometimes?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Well, yes, and first of all, breaking the fourth wall can be so fun and so rewarding. Yeah. But it has to be done intentionally. These are the the fourth wall breaking that we're talking about here is the kind that happens unintentionally. So, and it comes back to the camera focus. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Should we define what breaking the fourth wall is for people who don't know, maybe?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yes. Oh, good, good point. Okay, so it's a term that comes from theater, as far as I am aware. Yep. The a stage has three walls, and we or the audience is looking in through a non-existent fourth wall. That's how we're able to look into the play that's happening on stage. Right. Breaking the fourth wall is when a character from the play, or in this case in a novel, turns to the audience in some capacity and addresses them. Maybe it's an aside, maybe it's um a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's it's also the moments in the office when Jim turns to look at the camera directly. That's a great example. That is fourth wall breaking that works really well because we all know that the office premise is that a documentary is being filmed in a normal American office. So when Jim looks, he's looking at the camera crew who's filming the documentary, and he's thinking, why am I here? Right.

unknown 7:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

So we see this happen, and you'll see it. It it is a mechanism that writers can use, right? Um, it's usually, I always tend to think of it as being kind of funny, but it can also kind of be it's a ex it's an external narrator commenting on what's happening in the story. And so we see this often in fiction when a writer writes a line, something like, she smiled at him, confident he would say yes. What she didn't realize was that he had already decided to leave her, right? So it's that what she didn't realize. She can't know that. If we're deeply immersed in her POV, she she can't realize what she doesn't realize, right? That's an external voice narrating on what's happening in the scene.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

It's a it's a little pop-out moment. Like the narrator just like hopped downstage and said, Hey audience, she doesn't know. And so we we popped out of her head. And there's a little certain kind of verb in that sentence when she didn't realize.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Our last episode's topic was filter words. Realize is one of those filter words. And so as we were kind of prepping for this episode, we realized there's a nice little overlap between filter word use and moments where the fourth wall is broken, or we pop out of a scene for a narrator to tell us something that we don't know, see, or hear, or some other filter word otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

But when you check for filter words, you're also doing a check for this and vice versa, which is nice.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Yeah, good. You know, and and the thing is, like you can use this technique, right? There are some books, we see it a lot in movies and TV shows, like Anna gave the example of The Office. There's nothing wrong if you decide to use this technique in your writing. Where it becomes a problem is like I would expect if that is the technique that you're using as a writer, I would expect to see it early in the book, like almost immediately, so that you establish that as kind of the baseline. So if you haven't done that, and then like a third of the way through the book, now we have this break in the fourth wall that pulls me out of POV and it feels strange. It's also very telling, like it's setting the, it's not even foreshadowing. I mean, it is, but it's a telling foreshadowing that kind of removes some of the fun for the reader because now we've just told them something is wrong instead of just letting them experience it in real time with the character.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Okay. To come back very briefly to your example with the woman smiling at him because she believes he'll say yes. A writer can show that he is about to say no without declaring what she did not realize was he would say no. Yeah. If his body language, if he stiffens up, if he pulls away a little bit, that's more effective foreshadowing.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Right. Yeah, I agree. And it again, it goes back to that collaborative space as a reader. And it's it's you trusting that you've done enough to show how he is responding in that moment that you don't have to tell us, that we'll understand as a reader, we'll pick up on it. And that again is the that's what makes it feel juicy and immersive because now as a reader, you didn't tell me, but I understand, like I understand the subtext there. Cool. Okay. All right, so that's one mistake that we see kind of in this area. The second one, and this one can often be funny. And Anna and I have talked about this many times, but it's it's concurrent action that doesn't make sense. So when you have a character doing two actions at the same time, that if you slow down and actually read it, it it doesn't make any sense. And oftentimes it's kind of funny.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

You know, we we talk so much about pace. So writers naturally they want to cram things in together to get them done with and keep moving forward. But then we end up with sentences that are really funny sometimes, physically impossible or questionable other times. Let's just get into a couple of examples. One of them is as he reloaded the gun, he fired at the target. Huh. Another might be pulling on his coat, he tied his shoes. So what's wrong with those, Veronica? Because we've read sentences like those before.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

So what's the problem? There's actually another one I think we've talked about before. She giggled as she sipped her wine, right? So what's happening there? These actions are kind of, I mean, they are related, and we understand what the reader or what the writer is trying to convey. But like, let's look at that first one. As he reloaded the gun, he fired at the target. Well, you can't technically fire a gun if you're reloading it. You can't fire while you're reloading, right? So in that instance, that should actually be two separate sentences and not concurrent. He reloaded the gun, period, or he reloaded the gun, comma, and then fired at the target. So it's um one has to be completed before you can do the next one. Pulling on his coat, he tied his shoes. Well, that's I wish I could figure out how to do that because like when my kids were younger, that would have made that would have saved me so much time. But like if you think about the physicality of that, you can't physically be putting your arms through the sleeves of your coat while you're tying your shoes. I mean, could I think up a situation where that might I like? I can't even physically think about how you could even if you even if you had like super magical powers, I mean, maybe if you could tie them with your mind while you're putting your arms through a coat, maybe. But if you're just relying on hands, how do you do that, right? So how do you how do you fix this problem? Again, it's about separating these two actions. They can't be done at the same time. He pulled on his coat, comma, and then he tied his shoes, right? Or yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And if if I could see a writer trying to convey a sense of a character who's frantic, running late, trying to escape. Right. And they're throwing everything on at once and trying to get out the door. Even so, even in the midst of the chaos, a character, a person would have to stop putting on the coat or finish putting on the coat in order to tie shoes. Exactly. Um it's also the possi, it's it's also very possible that to show that frantic action, you don't need to smush the actions into one another. You need stronger verbs, which that's a thing that we are always coming back to here, isn't it? Yeah. If the sentence or sentences were he threw on his coat instead of pull, and then shoved his feet into his shoes. We've got throw and shove, which are stronger and more evocative action words that allow us to feel like, oh my gosh, he's trying to get out the door without us throwing, without us having to pause and ask, how many hands does he have? Right. Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Right. And then like the other example I gave too, like she giggled as she sipped her wine. Technically, I think you could do those things, but then you might end up with wine coming out your nose, right? So again, it's anytime you see this construction, we've seen it also like he, as he hailed a cab, he jumped into the backseat. Well, you can't, again, it's this idea that one of those actions has to finish before you can do the next one. So this sentence construction, even though it feels like rhythm-wise, it feels right. Um, you have to really pay attention anytime you use this construction, can they actually be happening concurrently? So, like you can, for example, John was sitting on the bench waiting for a phone call. You can both be sitting and waiting, though that makes sense. One does not have to be completed before the other can happen. But if you have actions, I mean, what's interesting too in that if you it's looking at simple past versus like um a participle where something is ongoing. But then we're getting into the grammar of it. So, like, really, anytime you're looking at this construction as he or as something happened, something else is supposed to be happening concurrently, because that's what that sentence construction does. Just make sure that those two actions actually can be done concurrently. And if they can't, then then simplify either simplify, you know, as I mentioned, into two sentences, um, or use a comma and then, or like Anna said, consider if it's a section where you could use a stronger verb to convey that instead of smushing the sentence to convey um quickness. See if there's there's other ways that you can show the emotion in that scene instead.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, with the phone ringing, um, the one thing I'll sort of highlight about that is that in the sentence Veronica read, the character is doing two actions, sitting and waiting. Those are both possible at once. We also come across sentences sometimes that read like this waiting for the phone to ring, it rang. Which it sounds okay. The phone only rings. It doesn't wait. So that waiting for the phone to ring, I bet there's I bet it's like a there's some there's a subject mismatch there. I think there's a subject mismatch possibly because it's character waiting for the phone, then it rang.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Even in that sentence, waiting for the phone to ring, it rang. Well, it it's one of those things like, do we really need to know that they're waiting? If immediately then it's going to ring. Maybe it's just the phone rang. Like it so consider whether you even need that construction at all, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:14

It's about clarity.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Same with hailing the cab. Do we need to know that you hailed the cab in order to jump into it? If you're jumping into it, I'm guessing you hailed it.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

True. Yeah. And that's about like precision and it's about not overriding, which is kind of what we're gonna uh talk about next.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Yes. So our next sort of habit that we come across is a form of pre-narration and unnecessary setup that occurs. This is when we get the before, before the action, before the main event, before the conversation, before the conflict in a story or in a chapter. And how this feels for a reader is like we're being told all about what's about to happen instead of just getting to get into it and experience it. So it is a tell versus show situation and very much one where you need to have some faith in your reader to understand kind of like character mindset, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:28

I think you when we were talking about this episode, like um you called it the just do it moment. And I think that's true. Like, don't tell us what you're about to do, just do it. Like, that's that's how you because pacing can get really slowed down. And let's look at an example because I think this one really, really clearly demonstrates. So imagine you're reading and you come to this, she was going to tell him exactly what she thought. How dare you, she said. Well, okay, but you've told us she's about to do something instead of just showing us that line of dialogue absolutely conveys this idea that she is telling him exactly what she thinks, right? So we don't need the setup because, like Anna said, like, one, it's telling us what's about to happen. So basically, like, we're not leaning in anymore. We know they're about to have some kind of conflict, which isn't as impactful if she were just to bust out with this. How dare you! That feels much more intense and it's much more fun as a reader. Um, and it's also like the author is kind of hedging a little bit. They want to make sure that the reader understands that this is about to happen instead of just trusting that they've written something that clearly demonstrates that, which that line of dialogue absolutely does.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

To bring it back to like a stage production or film or TV, we don't, unless it's a stylistic choice, we don't get told when a character is about to burst into an impassioned monologue or spilling their guts. They just do it, you know, to come back to that phrase. Um if there is, you know, if you've got a very shy character who's never been able to speak their mind, and there's an external narrator who maybe has been helping us along to understand what this character is unable to say, I could see a really cool moment where the external narrator says some something that's like, and now she can take it from here. And then it goes, but there would be that would be such a highly specific instance to use that.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Yeah, I agree. And kind of hand in hand with this, and I see sometimes a lot of pre-narration where there's setup, right? Where because the the the writer wants to make sure that the reader understands what's about to happen. But sometimes we see a post-dialogue too, where or where we'll see something happen and then the author will almost like summarize just to make sure that the reader understood. And again, that's entering into that. Trust the reader. If you've done a good enough job to show the emotion and show the impact of what's just happened, be it a dialogue or action of some kind on the characters in that scene, then you have to trust that the reader has picked up on that. Because if you have to do a summary to make sure that I'm always going to tell you to go back and look at how you can actually show it to make sure that's conveyed, so that you don't need this line of summary.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Yeah. That's like doing a post-mortem on a scene that just happened. Yeah. Unless there is truly something that's that was missed, like detectives going back over information, right? Don't need a post-mortem.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Anything that's going to tell the reader something they already know, unless it's been a like unless you have a very specific setup, like you said, like it's a detective story where they're actually processing and analyzing that information. Or if it's been a really long time in the book since you've mentioned something, that's a case where I'm okay with some a little bit of kind of summary retelling. But if we've just read the scene, again, trust that the reader understood what you created there and don't take up extra like um page real estate to retell us something we already know. So then there's one, one last section. And this is probably my one like I don't know, it's my pet rock. When I see this in books, I see it often with writers, and it is what I call play by play, and this happens often in transitions. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

So this is somewhat connected to the previous one, but it tends to take up even more real estate on the page. These tend to be longer chunks of writing that move us from A to B and give us, as Veronica said, a play-by-play of everything that a character does. Um we see this when a character is moving through a space. So for example, he walked over to the door, reached for the handle, grabbed it, and opened the door. Yeah. We don't need all of that set up. We could we can simply have a character open a door. And then another one, which Veronica, I know you love to talk about, are daily routines. You want to take that one away?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Yeah. I mean, so, and I get it. This is like a lot of times when when writers, especially in an early draft, when they're they're with a character, this happens a lot when you have a singular POV, is we tend to be with that character from the moment they wake up in the morning until they go to bed at night. That feels like a natural transition, right? Because it's a whole day that feels like, oh, we've started the chapter at the beginning when they woke up and we followed them all day long until they got to that point where they're ready to go to bed. And that that feels like a natural transition. Why? Because that's how we tend to frame our own lives. The problem is in a book, we don't, we don't need all of that extraneous stuff. It doesn't matter that they got up and and I'm gonna say this again, there's always caveats, and we can talk about or exceptions, we can talk about that here in a second. But for the most part, most people wake up in the morning, they use the bathroom, they brush their teeth, they have some kind of breakfast or coffee, right? And then they start their day. Well, who cares? Like, unless something significant is happening in that time period between the moment they open their eyes and they like left the house to go do whatever the action is. We don't need that. Like that time can be used sometimes for processing. And I would say the exception to that is if you have a character who part of their characterization is sticking to their daily routine, then I could see that potentially being used. But then I would still want to see, I wouldn't want to see the exact same thing every single time. And I think this also lends into there's this, if you've been around riding circles long enough, there's this adage, you want to join a scene as late as possible and leave as soon as possible. And so if you use that, if you think about that, think about in a scene where the action actually starts, where the reader is actually going to be interested. So if I have this day, like if I'm getting married, right? Um, and it's my wedding day, it you it doesn't really matter that I got up and like went to the church. The action starts when I get to the church.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

I'll caveat, I want to caveat that actually.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

I know it could be that it could be. But so maybe wedding's not a good one. I'm just gonna go to work and at some point at work today, I'm gonna get this like mysterious phone call. That's what's like the exciting thing about this scene. It doesn't really matter how long it took me to get to work. You can use some of that to create characterization to like if you want to make me this character put them in a really ugly mood because they sat in traffic for, you know, two times what it would normally take them to get to work. That's fine. But I don't need, I don't need 20 minutes of explanation from the time they opened their eyes to the moment they walked in the office, right? That's what I'm getting at. The same thing at the end of the day. I don't need to know that they like at the end of the day, they like processed everything. They put their pajamas on, they brushed their teeth, they climbed into bed. I don't need to know that. Just skip to the next chapter and get to the juicy parts, the action that's actually happening. Can you tell this is my Tet Rock?

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Yes. So my caveat with the wedding day is that that is one morning where your routine is different in a meaningful way. A graduation day may be the same. Um first day of work, but I any of those days where you wake up and the day is not going to be normal and you know it, so you're planning for it, you're taking extra time in your routine, you know, things are different, that might be a time to show your routine.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Yeah, you're right. Um and it's one of those things too. Like if you're if it is one of those days, see, I gave a terrible example, the wedding day, but like if let's let's look at a wedding day, that is gonna be different. And probably what's happening is in between the the getting up and having coffee and brushing teeth and all of that, there's some processing going on. There's some characterization building. This character is probably thinking about all the different things. Am I sure I want to do this? Do I have all the things I need to go? When is my mom getting here? So that time is actually being used to process things. Um, so that is different. So, yes, you're right in those instances. Um, we also see a lot of play-by-play, like I think you mentioned, like when we're moving from one place to another. So if I need to get from like hesitant to use the wedding example, we're gonna, if I need to get from my home to my office and I drive the same way every day, and nothing changes unless I am thinking about, or I'm saying I, the character is processing something or having a conversation that needs to get into um the story. That's how you can use those that transition time that normally I would say cut is if you're gonna use it to characterize or process something else that's happening in the story.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah. You know what? That actually brings to mind something that I read online recently. And I wish I could remember who wrote it, who wrote this post because it was it was really good. Um something that they're an editor and something that they have picked up on is sometimes a character will go to visit Mike at house number one, and then go visit Sue at house number two, and then see his favorite cashier at the grocery store, and then go and bump into Aunt Whoever on the way home. And that can work. Isn't it kind of interesting if we were to smush any of those people together? What if Mike and Sue are also both shopping at the grocery store? And so we get to bump into characters in one location rather than go from A to B, kind of traveling along the yellow brick road the whole way through. Or if these characters would never be at the same place at the same time, maybe you can skip over the walk from one house to the next and then to the store. Can you just bring us to the destinations?

SPEAKER_00 29:50

When we were planning this, I think, Yana, I think it was you that kind of wrote down whatever it is you're writing, if it's not a scene that is actually moving your platform, if its only purpose is to account for time or movement between places, then you can probably cut it. Just jump us ahead in time, find a different mechanism, even if it's like 15 minutes later, she blah, blah, blah. Or use cues in your setting to talk about like you can have a character look at a clock, you can talk about sun positioning. If the if the scene starts in the morning and then we need to jump to that evening, like that's a really easy transition that we're gonna recognize as a reader, if it's early morning sun and now the stars are out, we know that time has trained that we've got a big jump in time here, and you don't have to account for that time. Um, the reader will just make the leap and understand whatever happened in between doesn't matter. We want to get to the juicy parts, right? Movement between places, same thing. It's like my commute to work. If nothing happens on that commute to work, then just start the day with or just start the scene with me already at the office where the juicy action is about to take place. Don't waste the page space telling me about the commute to work that is uneventful. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

And if you just need to get a little bit of that into your writing, again, start us late and have your character think back to, oh, my coffee was burned this morning, the cat threw up on the rug, and the traffic was bad. You know, again, that that's doing characterization. The character's coming across a little pessimistic. Probably what my mindset would look like too if that was my morning. But, you know, you can always get your character to the scene and have them reflect back on the day that has what has already transpired that day. Right. Especially if it tells us more about the character, where they're coming from, what they're going through.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Right. I think the the the whole point of this is if you, if you, if it's not really necessary, you do not have to account for every single moment of every single hour of a character's day or a character's movement between places. It only needs to be in there if that scene does something else. It's processing, it's a it could be a reaction scene, like if you've just had something really highly impactful. Again, it's that character processing, they're reacting to something, or a place for a conversation. So if you feel like that you do want to spend some time in those transition places between for time or movement, then figure out how you can add a another purpose to it. Can they have a conversation? Can they process something? Can you do some deep characterization with that time as well?

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yeah. At some point during planning this episode, we said to each other, just because it happened doesn't mean you have to tell us.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

That's right. Yeah, I don't need to know that you brushed your teeth and like I don't care. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad you brushed your teeth. Yeah. But I don't I don't in the context of if if you are on an adventure story and you are a super secret spy agent and you're about to like take this compound, I don't really care that you brushed your teeth that morning. I just want you to take the compound. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Right, right. That's a good point. There's a time and a place. Yeah. Um and certain things, certain actions and events of the day-to-day existence of being a person are assumed.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

But, you know, and again, it's like, and I gave another example of this. It's like if you're gonna make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, just make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Don't tell me that you took out two slices of bread and then opened the peanut butter and then got a knife and then spread the peanut butter and then got the jelly and then spread the jelly and then put the two bread, like yeah, like if it's common tasks, just make a peanut butter, just say you made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the reader will understand. Trust that they will know what that means. I mean, obviously you have to consider audience again. See, like my brain is like, but there's always an exception. Of course there is. But if if you're not in one of those exceptions, then then just simplify. Don't take up half a page to tell us something that we already know or that's not important to the story.

unknown 34:06

All right.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Yeah, stepping off my symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

All of these things that we've covered today are going to allow you to reclaim space in your story. So if you've got if you've got a word count that's ticking up and up and you're looking at it like, uh-oh, this isn't gonna work, you could have hundreds of words to cut just because they're precursors or play-by-plays to leading up to a main event.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

These are what we would call kind of common mistakes that if it if it came to us from an editor's perspective and we were helping someone actually, you know, edit their manuscript, these are common things that that pop up that immediately are gonna make me as an editor and probably edit two. I'm I'm guessing like they're gonna make me stop and think, do we actually really need this? And if we don't, it's gonna get the red line, right? The goal here is to write as clearly, as succinctly. We want to make sure our pacing is good. Um, and use that real estate for other things. Often I I think when people do this, it's because they feel like they have to, they have to have more on the page. Like, and again, it comes back to does the reader understand what it is I'm trying to convey? And if that's where you find yourself adding all these additional things because you're not sure you've done enough or you're not confident that the reader will understand what it is that you're trying to create in that scene, then I would say it's time to go back and look at that scene a little bit more. How can you use stronger verbs? Are you using filter words? And is there something else? Like if you feel like your chapter is too long because you've got all these things, and so you're like, well, I'll just end it here. If we can give you back a page or two, what else could you do with that space? Could you dive deeper into dialogue? Could you use um some internality to really? I mean, internality is gonna be a much better place to make sure that the reader understands where your character's mindset is than through summary or play by play, right?

SPEAKER_01 36:03

So absolutely. All right, that's really all we have for today. So thank you for listening. If you're enjoying this series on mistakes and habits and the craft of writing, let us know because we we we c we find it kind of fun and we hope you do too. Obviously, we've got other types of episodes that we want to come back to. If you have ideas, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

I mean, we we can geek out about this. That I mean, you've got two editors talking about these are things I see all the time that you know we could do this all day. Don't forget that we also have a handout that goes uh along with every episode. So this episode, like some of the other kind of common mistakes that we've we've talked about, all come with a handout so that you have something that you can keep um to use as you're going and doing remissions on your own work.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Yeah. And also just as a reminder, we see these things all the time. And so if you're listening and thinking, oh God, my manuscript is garbage because it has all of these things, so does everybody else's first draft.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

So these are common, these are normal and natural. I agree with you 100%. I, you know, these are common things, but as your voice evolves, as you write more and you start to recognize these patterns, they're very easy to fix. Um so yeah, just know we've all done it. I've done it, Anna's done it. We all do it. A lot of these things are because they're how we we tell stories when we're just talking to people and how we think about our day. Like, you know, it's back to that whole, I know I keep I'm coming back. I'm like that, like that Midwestern goodbye where we're at the door and I'm like, but one more thing, tell it. You know, it's it's this idea that we oftentimes, especially if we're beginner writers, we are we are telling stories the way that it makes sense, the way that we would tell a neighbor about what our day was like. Or if a spouse said, How was your day? You know, we we tend to think about it like that, but fiction requires a little bit more nuance. Nothing else to say other than happy writing, y'all.