Writing advice and commentary from the editors at Essential Edits / SFeditor.ca
Linguistic recommendation: gender-inclusive writing in correspondence
http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/wrtps/index-eng.html?lang=eng&lettr=indx_catlog_g&page=9tZXuAe4oZYs.html
Making letters and emails gender-inclusive
https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/en/blogue-blog/inclusifs-gender-inclusive-eng
Gender and sexual diversity glossary
http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/publications/diversite-diversity-eng.html
Thanks to Gael Spivak for pointing these out.
Writing Drabbles and other types of flash and micro fiction is a good way to 'tighten' one's writing. Editors and agents often say things like, "this is good, it just needs to be tightened up a bit" but it's not always obvious to the author what that means exactly. As I try to edit down my novel by 25% without actually cutting any scenes, paring down my verbose style to something a little 'tighter' is what's required. The discipline of writing a story in a hundred words, or even 1000 words for flash, helps develop the skills necessary to be more concise...
Try it! Harder than it looks!
If you don't have time to watch, do what I did and listen to the audio podcast at the link included. It has the advantage that you can listen on your headphones as you do the dishes or vacuum or walk the dog, so you get two things accomplished in the time for one. Also, the audio version includes 15 extra minutes of Mark's commentary on HIS writing life, in this case, excellent advice on how to keep from being overwhelmed by too many writing projects or being discouraged when you (inevitably, in my view) fall behind self-imposed deadlines.
My favourite Fallis advice to writers from the interview—something I've also been telling students and clients for years—is not to chase trends:
For crying out loud, write something that you care about. If vampires are all the rage right now, don't write a vampire novel because of that. If you love vampires, by all means. But I remember meeting a writer, an aspiring writer, and she said, "Yes, I'm writing a novel about vampires because they're so hot now". (In the rise of Twilight.) And I said, "Oh, do you, are you interested in vampires?"
"No, not really."
"Do you know much about them?"
"No, not yet. But I'm just researching them now."
"Do you know any vampires?"
"No."
"Are you a vampire?"
"No."
"Are you touched in any way by vampires?"
"No."
So I could only imagine the challenge it would be to write a book that feels real, and powerful, compelling, authentic, when there is no connection at all between the subject matter and the writer, beyond the marketing imperative of the high profile of vampires at that moment in time.
So when people would say,"Why would you write a politcal satire of Canadian politics, that sounds like a terrible idea," and maybe it was, but at least it was something I cared about, and knew about, I'd lived in that world, I had some views on it and I had a story I wanted to tell to illuminate a different path we might take in how we practice politics in this country. And I think it's hard to write your best work when you're not writing about something that you care about.
I've seen this again and again: writers chasing a trend. Even those talented enough to write something half-way decent are wasting their time because by the time their book is ready, the market has been flooded by copycats, and the trend is over. Any book you can write fast enough to cash in won't be good enough, and any book that's good enough will take too long to write, have edited, go through the submission/or self-published process to appear while the trend is still there. The only authors who were able to cash in on Twilight's success, were those who already had a really fine vampire book in their bottom drawer before vampires were hot.
Similarly, there is no hope of predicting what the next big thing will be to get ahead of the curve—would you have expected Canadian political satire, for example? And even if you could predict, it still has to be something to which you actually have a connection. Certainly, every genre editor can spot when a mainstream writer has decided to "knock out a genre novel" on the grounds of "how hard can it be" and reinvents every cliché that died out 50 years ago—or worse, believes an SF or Romance novel has lower standards. No thanks!
The whole interview is awesome because Mark is a great interviewer and has known Fallis forever, certainly before Fallis was known outside of Hamilton, and because Fallis is a fascinating guy with an unusual career path. (And for older writers like myself, it's encouraging to know you can still make it as a writer after age 35.)
I'd also recommend Mark Leslie Lefebvre's Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing for not just this episode, but as an ongoing series. Mark was the founder and former director of Kobo's Writing Life program for independent authors, was a long-time bookseller and one of the first to install an Expresso Book Machine in Canada (i.e., print-on-demand before anyone else had heard of POD), and is an established author himself. He has an insider's knowledge of both traditional and self-publishing, and extensive experience as a bookstore manager. So...yeah, you need to be listening to this if you want to understand what's happening in the industry.
Highly recommended.
High achievers are susceptible to Impostor Syndrome, says psychotherapist and author Dr. Aaron Balick, because they push the bounds of their professional areas, often working at the edge of their area of expertise. "It can be said that the more successful you are, the more likely you are to experience this, since your experience at the top of your field is, by its very nature, unusual."—from an article by Bonnie Burton.
Grad students writing a thesis or dissertation are by definition out at the edges of their disciplines, creating new knowledge. A thesis or dissertation is usually the largest, highest-stakes project they've undertaken yet, so struggle and angst are pretty much inevitable. That one bumps up against staring at the blank page or having to rethink one's approach multiple times or not having the pieces all fall into place instantly is all perfectly normal because the processes of creation and writing are both complex and difficult—for everyone.
Which is where, of course, writing coaches come in. A little moral support can go a long way, starting by reassuring the writer that the angst they are feeling is normal and healthy. If writing were easy, everyone would do it. To do it well, is to put in effort, and effort requires struggle.
To help grad students with their struggles, Essential Edits has commissioned a 32 page guide by Dr. Runté on Thesis Writing Strategies which addresses the issues of dealing with the angst of writing (and more specifically, of rewriting) a thesis or dissertation, available FREE from the EssentialEdits.ca website.
https://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/self-publishers.html
on topics such as How to Master Point of View, self-editing, children's books, indexing, and so on. Worth a look!
Essential Edits will be engaged at Word on the Street Lethbridge in three ways:
I have certainly seen authors get so caught up in the myth that one has to promote oneself on Twitter and other social media to succeed, that they end up having no time to write. (Or, more prosaically, just end up procrastinating on social media because getting likes is more fun than working on one's book.) And I'll concede that for some, telling their online audience the events that might have otherwise found their way into the novel could be depleting. But on the other hand...I have not infrequently had to edit out long passages from a novel that don't belong there and told the author, "stop venting! If you need to vent, go on Facebook. Rant all you want on social media, but keep this off-message rubbish out of your novel." When the space-suited hero puts down his blaster mid-battle with the alien hoards to complain about how the grade 3 teacher is assigning too much homework to his kid, I feel we may have allowed the intrusion of extraneous material...
Though, that's probably not the novel O'Hagen was referring to... :-)
Edward Willett is the award-winning author of more than 50 books of science fiction, fantasy and nonfiction for readers of all ages.
However, different writers take different approaches to the use of magic in stories. In older books of the fantastic (think The Lord of the Rings), magic is (in the words of Brian Niemeier, winner of the inaugural Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel in 2016 for Souldancer) “mysterious, ineffable, and unpredictable,” whereas in most modern fantasy, magic is more likely to work “like a technology that we can systematize.” It’s the latter form of magic that has given rise to the term “magic system”: the rules established by a writer of fantasy to which the magic in his books adhere.
The designing of such systems seem to be a topic of endless fascination for those interested in writing fantasy, which is presumably why Niemeier wrote his essay, “How to Design Magic Systems," from which I just quoted. It’s also why I was on a panel entitled “How to Build a Consistent and Original Magic System” at the 2014 edition of the annual—and highly recommended—Calgary writing conference When Words Collide.
The star attraction of that panel was not, alas, me, but rather Guest of Honour Brandon Sanderson, widely acknowledged as among the best at crafting interesting magic systems for his bestselling novels.
Over the years, Sanderson has formulated his approach into laws, three of which (so far) he has explicated on his website, starting with his First Law: “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.”
Sanderson recounts how, while on a convention panel on magic early in his career, he stated as a given that, “Obviously, magic has to have rules,” and was shocked to be challenged by the other writers. They claimed systematizing magic robbed fantasy of its sense of wonder: that sense of the “mysterious, ineffable, and unpredictable.”
Sanderson calls that kind of magic “soft magic,” and he and Niemeier point out the problem it sets for writers: because it has no rules, it cannot be used to regularly solve story problems without becoming a deus ex machina. Since we don’t know what magic can and can’t do, every time magic is used to solve a problem faced by the characters the reader is left wondering why magic doesn’t solve all the characters’ problems—which of course would destroy the narrative.
Systematized magic, on the other hand, which Sanderson terms “hard magic,” operates in accordance with strict rules. Looking at my own books, in Magebane, magic requires energy in the form of heat, so the palace has giant coal furnaces; in my Masks of Aygrima series, magic is literally mined, and most magic-users must have a store of it handy in order to perform magic; and in my Shards of Excalibur series, my young protagonist can dissolve into water and travel anywhere it goes—but only fresh water, and she can only reappear in water deep enough to submerge her (giving swimming pools and ponds an unusually prominent role in the narrative).
These limitations heighten narrative tension, because magic is not always available to solve problems, and shape the plot, as the characters struggle to find ways to use their magic.
Or, as Sanderson puts it in his Second Law: “Limitations > Powers”; it’s by putting limits on magic that you make it interesting. Superpowers are a form of magic, and as Sanderson points out, how dull a character would Superman be if not for his Achilles’ Heel, Kryptonite? (For that matter, how dull a character would Achilles himself have been if not for his famous heel?)
Sanderson’s Third Law is, “Expand what you have before you add something new.” Or, as he sums it up, “A brilliant magic system for a book is less often one with a thousand different powers and abilities—and is more often a magic system with relatively few powers that the author has considered in depth.” This ties in with the previous laws quite nicely. The more magical powers that are available, the easier it is for someone to solve their problems with magic, which may result in a flabby narrative.
Note, despite Sanderson calling them “laws,” they are of course nothing of the sort—more “suggestions from experience.” After all, wizards in the Harry Potter books certainly have “a thousand different powers and abilities,” and limitations seem few, but the J.K. Rowling did all right.
In truth, there is only one absolute law of creating magic systems: it has to result in a better story.
Or, as Niemeier sums it up: “In magic as in everything else, make it fun for the reader.”
My favorite Willett novel is his space opera, "Lost in Translation": a great fun read, and its anti-racist, anti-war message has never been more timely.
Stumbled across an NPR broadcast today that made the same point, part of the now defunct How To Do Everything podcast. The Nov 4, 2016 episode "StoryCorn" starts (approximately 1 minute in) with an interview with writer Eric Larson who makes the same point, if somewhat more eloquently. Larson also tempts himself to his writer's desk with permission to eat a double-stuffed Oreo cookie with his coffee when he first sits down to write. Worth a listen!
Do you have characters — or stickfigures
Years ago I attended a presentation by Emmy-winning author, Sean Stewart, in which he explained why there were no children in SF. It is, he said, extremely tricky to keep the action going and the tension up if the heroine running down the corridor is trailed by a toddler saying "Are we there yet, Mommy?" or "I don't like the Death Star, Mommy! I want to go home!" every ten feet. (I thought this terribly funny at the time, but found it less so when I subsequently had children of my own, and recalled Sean's description as my five-year-old kept punching me every 30 seconds because we were stuck in an hour-long line up at customs one 3AM flight, and she couldn't understand why I wouldn't let her leave.) Kids and action adventure stories do not make an easy mix.
Challenged by Sean's talk, I chose to include a 9 year-old in my own first novel—which may partly explain why my first novel took so long to finish. Although a key factor in a couple of scenes, figuring out what to do with the kid for the rest of the book was ridiculously difficult. Arranging for various babysitters to show up so my hero(s) could go adventuring without him wore thin pretty fast, and the biggest flaw my editor identified in my preliminary draft was that I had simply forgotten about the kid for five chapters while the main characters dealt with their current crisis. "And where is her son when all this is happening?" came to be the one editorial comment I dreaded most during revisions. So yeah, I don't recommend including child characters in an action novel unless one is a glutton for punishment.
The biggest problem I see with child characters coming across my desk as an editor, is authors getting the ages wrong. As any parent knows, there are huge gaps in sophistication between an infant, a toddler, a grade 1, a grade 4, and a grade 7. When one has an infant of one's own, one can accurately peg the age of other infants to within a few weeks. By the time our child is in grade school, our accuracy is down to being able to say if a newly encountered child is the grade above or below our own: a mere six weeks makes no difference developmentally, but a year's difference is still sufficiently significant to be obvious. As kids grow up, age becomes increasingly unimportant, with some teenagers, for example, presenting with greater maturity than many of the adults one encounters. As our own children age, our ability to remember what characteristics go with which age becomes less precise, because that knowledge is no longer relevant to our daily lives—at least not until our children start delivering grandchildren.
Writers, however, need to get this right. If one gives a nine year-old character the dialog of a five-year-old, one's adult readers might not notice—it's just a kid talking—but a nine-year-old reader will find it infuriating. It is not just not credible to that young reader; it is highly insulting to discover the author has so little regard for nine year-olds—whose self-image is that of a grown up / sophisticated almost-adult, definitely not to be confused with a five year-old child. That the writer could make such a fundamental mistake is to them an insurmountable barrier to finishing the book, no matter how good otherwise. Could you finish a book that gave the character of a Sudanese immigrant an Irish brogue? If the author can't get the dialect right, how is the reader to take anything in the novel as credible?
Most authors know better than to attempt depicting an accent they are not themselves intimately familiar with, but I am astonished at how frequently they will assign dialog or actions inconsistent with a character's age when depicting children. If one is writing a YA novel, for example, the younger siblings in the novel had better behave in a credible way, or the YA readers will throw the book across the room in disgust. YA readers have a much more accurate estimation of maturation levels than most adults because they either have actual siblings that age, or have best friends with siblings that age; and if they cannot picture their little brother or sister saying or doing that, the story loses all credibility. I don't understand authors who spend months researching police procedure or forensic evidence or the astronomical details of their SF setting, but are three years off the mark in depicting the reactions of a ten year-old. If one doesn't currently have a ten year-old in one's household, or a convenient nice or nephew, then why even have that character in the novel? If there is some compelling reason to add a child, do your research: go find some kids that age to talk to. One needs to put at least as much research into that character as one would any other element of the novel.
I started with a seven year-old in my novel...but have revised the age upward with each subsequent draft as my own youngest matured, because the only sure test I have ever had for the credibility of that character was to ask, "Is this something my kid might actually say/do in these circumstances?" Of course, not living on a starship, I have to do a certain amount of extrapolation, but at least I'm determined to be in the right ballpark in terms of maturation. Am shocked and appalled how often this is not the case with many of the manuscripts that cross my desk.
Which means not only do you have to catch the attention of the pre-reader with the kind of character, problem and world that from page one is going to make the exhausted, underpaid and over-worked intern think that she wants her boss to come back from lunch so she could share this amazing ______, which doesn't have to be the best _______ out there, it has to just tell from the very beginning why it's going to be different from every other _____ out there. But then, after the amazing beginning, you need to leave a trail of bread crumbs, from about every 1000-1500 words that you can point out to your ideal reader and say *this. This part is going to tickle you*.
And then follow the formula where every single time you don't know what to do, or you find your main characters just leaning around and talking, you throw the worst possible thing at them. You need to have all the parts line up and it needs to say something about the world that when someone asks you what's it about, you can say "it's about overcoming your fate and crushing all those who oppose you" rather than "it's a girl who does stuff." And when all of *that* comes together (you know, just pluck the ace of spades out of a card deck eleven times in a row) you've got a great story.
Which is like saying...lose weight by diet and moving more. We all know *what* we have to do, but I've found ways of figuring out *how* to make sure all of those are done in a way that other people think I've accomplished the same goal. Which is the 90% of the problem I was talking about. I'd thought I knew all the cheats around so I didn't have to eat less and exercise more, but then I figured out for *me* at least, the best way to lose weight is to do the obvious things. Some people plunge into an ice pool and use SCUBA gear to breathe because being cold burns more energy. I don't know if that works just as well, but yeah. I figured out that the things people have been telling me since the beginning were, no fooling, the only way I figured out how to write after fifteen years. I'm not saying I'm the brightest person out there, but learning to know that you need to learn how to know to write is again, 90% of the battle.
And the how is...you just do it. We talk about writing as though the answers are multiple choice and we just need to recognize the work when we see it. That's the lowest level of "knowing" how to do something. There are five or six, but it ends with synthesizing new things from what we know about two different things. So the "how" is to show your work that you know the rules of writing. Life is long answer format.
Start with a main character who has a problem. You don't need to know the iceberg level of the problem, you need to see what the tip the MC says. Characters who see the whole issue are like the AI characters in the Two Towers who were smart enough to look at the problem and run in the opposite direction. Big problems need big pay grades. Small problems need characters who just need to step out of their life momentarily.
Then as they figure out what the problem is, so do you. You're learning what they're learning, then as soon as you know what the iceberg problem is, in your rewrite you rewrite it like you knew what the whole problem was from the very beginning and as soon as you know what your character doesn't, it's really easy to provide the clues in the rewrite to the audience.
I remember how absolutely sure I felt in my 20's that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong and that the last thing I needed to do was learn how to write. I thought I just needed to be discovered. Coming to the realization that what I was writing wasn't very good and that I had to learn how to write in my thirties was a major shock to the system. So many writers, like me, had started life just a little bit wiser than most--which makes you brilliant at 17 and so stupid at 27--if you've never had to learn that that little bit of extra you started with is just a drop in the pan to what's possible when you put your mind to it.
I can relate to that, only just add a few decades to the ages given. Just now starting to get a glimmer of maybe how to start writing stories that work--most of which I learnt by editing other people and then turning around and saying, "Oh wait, I screwed that up in exactly the same way!"
As Barbara would say, if you're not selling, learn to write better.
Saturday, I received an Aurora Award (see previous post). Here's what I (re)-tweeted at the time about getting an Aurora Award:
@Runte scores an Aurora Award at #vcon
I retweeted someone else's live tweet partly because I was in a hurry (I was on a panel right after the awards ceremony) and but mostly because retweeting someone else's tweet felt somehow (i.e., irrationally) less braggy.
There was not a lot of response to this tweet, but tweeting about the award again seemed, you know, worse than braggy. I don't like Twitter streams where people keep repeating announcements about their upcoming books or whatever, so didn't want to be that guy. But on the other hand, really DID want to adveritze that I had received the award, and no one seemed to have noticed my first (re)tweet.
When I got to work Monday, I thought I should mention to the Faculty's communications officer that I had received an award on the weekend, because we're supposed to, and because I thought there was a chance she would put that in the Faculty Twitter feed. And she did, but here's how she tweeted about it:
ULethbridgeEducation @ULethbridgeEdu · Congrats Dr Robert Runté! Recipient @PrixAuroraAward for work on speculative fiction http://bit.ly/1vJnXcO #uleth
Thinking her version might be slightly more effective.....
So, deconstructing here, she grabbed a picture of me from her files, slapped that onto a powerpoint slide; looked up the paper to grab a suitable quote for the target audience (i.e., Faculty of Ed students and faculty), used a couple of different typefaces, and ta-da! Since she had this out within an hour of my telling her, that's that max time she could have spent on it, but I'm guessing she had other more important stuff to do at the same time, so probably a lot less.
I've tweeted text I have thought worth quoting, and announcements, and I've tweeted photos, but um...feeling bit stupid that it never before occurred to me to make a custom slide to combine the interesting quote with the announcement on a strong visual.
Well, duh! This is freaking awesome!
And the result of her tweeting this on Faculty stream was a wave of new twitter followers on my twitter feed....
So from now on, any time I send out an announcement, I'm figuring out some kind of interesting tag line, and putting it out as a visual.
My apologies if this is obvious to everyone else, but thought I would share a lesson learned.
P.S.: My faculty's communication expert is Darcy Tamayose who is herself a published author
The other 26 chapters in the collection are filled with tips on how to write by successful authors from across a variety of genres and communities. Together, they provide a pretty realistic portrayal of the challenges / obstacles aspiring writers face. This collection is aimed at writers starting after retirement, but most of the advice would be applicable to everyone.
It's not that I have anything against literature, even though I do sometimes mock CanLit for its depressive tendencies and for its literary pretensions. When I was a judge for a major literary award a couple of years ago, I was shocked how all 33 nominees seemed to be the exact same story. The story I thought should win was brilliant-- moving but with an undercurrent of self-deprecating humour, and it used (what I now think of as) the CanLit story structure perfectly. It wove flashbacks seamlessly into the ongoing narrative so that the reader finally put all the pieces together for an actually meaningful insight right at the climax. But the problem with the rest of the entries was that, reading all 33 stories in a week, I realized they were all using the exact same formula, the exact same structure. The other authors were all trying to write that one story, but for the most part, failing miserably. It was as if they had all completed the same classroom exercise, but only one of them actually 'got' the assignment.
Which is, I believe, almost what happened. I bet each of those small lit mag authors had attended the same university courses--I don't mean the same campus or at the same time, just that they all, as English majors, probably read the same general cannon. The implicit theme of every English course is, "This — this set of stories right here in this syllabus — is literature!". Maybe "Literature" with a capital "L". The problem is, if you tell a bunch of aspiring young writers that this is literature, than that's what they are going to try to write. Which is fine for the one out of a hundred for whom that particular structure/ content/ approach is appropriate, the one percent for whom it comes naturally, for whom it reflects their vision and voice. But for everybody else, it is a distraction, a mistake.
For a decade I worked for the Student Evaluation Branch of Alberta Education; that is, the people who designed, wrote, and supervised the marking of the provincial exams. One of my jobs was on the team researching why some students scored better than others. One of the research findings was that students who scored 5 out of 5 on the English essays had a strong voice, that they said what they actually thought; whereas those who did badly tended to write what they believed their markers wanted to hear. These students never did better than 3/5, but when faced with the need to improve, doubled down on sucking up to the markers, rather than taking the risks they needed to actually succeed. Similarly, the weaker papers often went for convoluted sentence structures and a horribly inflated diction in the hopes of impressing the markers, though these characteristics were the very things undermining their score. The bottom line is that, in attempting imitate the style of the writers and critics they were reading, they gave up whatever voice they might have had, whatever command of language, style and content that might otherwise have been at their disposal.*
I frequently see the same thing with manuscripts from adult clients: English majors who have a fixed idea of what 'literature' ought to be like, even when writing genre fiction; who try to be Margaret Atwood rather than who they are. The thing they don't seem to get is that we already have Margaret Atwood and have little need for another. Trying to be Atwood, they will never be anything other than a pale imitation; better they be a first class, original them. What this country — what this world needs — is more original voices: more original literature, more breakthrough books — not more imitations of existing tropes and authors. By all means read all the literature there is, but never ever try to write like that; or like anything. Just write. What one reads undoubtedly influences one's own style and ideas. That's fine. Read widely and let it all settle into your subconscious. But do not consciously imitate someone else, whether someone identified as a 'literary giant' or someone 'commercially successful'. Never listen to anyone tell you what or how you should write, whether it is to be literary or to get rich. That way lies mediocrity, frustration, and failure.
(*See, for example, Runté, Robert, Barry Jonas and Tom Dunn. "Falling Through the Hoops: Student Construction of the Demands of Academic Writing," in Andrew Stubbs and Judy Chapman, eds., Rhetoric, Uncertainty, and the Unversity as Text: How Students Construct the Academic Experience. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 2007.)
There are three problems with providing too much physical description of characters (and to some extent, of settings).
First, timing. Beginning authors often feel they have to provide the character's appearance immediately upon that character's initial entrance. There is certainly a logic to that, but then what one often gets is expository lump right in the middle of what is supposed to be an action scene. Say an assassin jumps out at our hero: if the author feels compelled to provide a detailed description of what the killer looks like, then instead of the rapid pace of swordplay, gun fire or fisticuffs, the story comes to a complete standstill while we are briefed on disheveled hair, wild eyes, rumpled suit, and so on down to the shoelaces. Interesting as all of this might be, it is less relevant and compelling then the fact the individual in question is trying to kill the viewpoint character.
When police try to debrief an incident, for example, the witnesses are often hard pressed to identify their assailant's hair and eye color and height and so on because their attention was pretty much focused on the fact that they were being assaulted. In the heat of the moment, eye color is pretty far down the list of what people notice; so the reader won't really notice its absence either, if the writer provides sufficient action. What the reader will notice is that description replaced action; that the action ground to an unexpected halt at the precise moment the author should have been building tension.
Second, although the author may have cast the character in a particular way, imposing that one specific actor/description on the reader is unnecessarily restrictive. Yes, the author may have worked hard to picture the scene s/he is trying to depict down to the specifics of hair and eye color, but contrary to the beginner's understanding of the process, the writer's job is not to reproduce that scene in the reader's brain exactly as the author originally pictured it. On the contrary, one wants a certain level of vagueness, of blank canvas, onto which the reader may project their own experiences and preferences. Just as a playwright has to allow for a certain amount of interpretation of the script by the director and actors, the writer has to leave room for the reader to bring something to the project.
For example, if the story features a bully, then it is far better if in the reader's mind that bully merges with that bastard down in accounting who is currently making their life miserable. Of course their conscious mind is not about to suffer any such confusion, since pretty sure guy in accounting is not in fact king of the space vampires, or whatever; but great fiction, like great opera, often bypasses the intellect and goes directly to the viscera, with people's emotions. The resonance between the writing and the reader's own experience may be disrupted, however, if one insists on establishing definitively that the guy in accounting is not the bully under discussion because the one in the book has red hair and blue eyes.
Or, to take an example from the other end of the emotional scale, if one is too precise in describing the love interest, one runs the risk of including a detail that is, for the reader, a deal breaker. "Electric blue eyes" are as likely to remind them of their ex as of their current lover. (It is the same reason why it seldom pays to be too explicit in sex scenes: if it doesn't happen to be the reader's kink, one is more likely to get an "eewww!" than a sale.)
So why go there? If the writer insists on determining every microscopic detail of the experience for the reader because that happened to be how the writer pictured the scene, then it's not about trying to be precise, it's about being a control freak. If one wants to build readership, one has to give up some control so the reader can take some ownership of the reading experience. If one wants readers to recommend the book to their friends, then the reader has to come to think of it as one of their books.
Third, the author of course believes one breathes life into a character by providing all this detail; but in fact it often has the opposite effect: by lavishing attention on the physical description, the author is to that same degree likely to skimp on actual characterization. Eye color does not a character make, because one can randomly (re)assign hair and eye color and not change the character in any fundamental way. (Well, unless these things have special significance in this particular SF&F world, that grey eyes indicates elvish ancestry or some such...). Characters are generally memorable because of their actions, motivations, attitudes, strengths, flaws—in short their personalities— rather than eye or hair color. If one's character notes are all about physical appearance, then you're doing it wrong.
As we frequently reassure each other, it's not appearance that counts, but what's inside.
Which is not to suggest that one should never provide any detail of appearance or setting; only that one needs to ensure these details are inserted when timely and relevant; that they don't occur as a disruption of the narrative, or in overwhelming quantity (see previous column, "Common Mistakes #2: Less is More).
[Cartoon stolen from Bliss by Harry Bliss Sept 22, 2015)
Or, to put it another way, while it might have taken the writer three days to shape that description of the forest, and so had time to savor each carefully crafted image, the reader is going past at a 1,000 words a minute. Okay, maybe if you're Proust or James Joyce, readers will slow down for you, but, um, you're not. Not yet, anyway. So less is more. Out of the ten images you've come up with, pick the best one; prune the rest. This will usually make the scene—and your writing—leaner, tighter and so much better.
Same with metaphors, jokes, and even surplus characters. Had a manuscript across my desk yesterday where a writer used essentially the same line twice within three pages. It was funny and it built up the speaker's character, but you can't get a laugh out of the same punchline twice in three pages; one of them has to go. Later that same day, I was reading a another manuscript where the author introduced several characters, spent time describing them, building up their personalities, but then didn't actually have them do anything in the story. They were just sort of there...except for one character who sat out the entire story in the barn, and so wasn't even there. Maybe save the barn character for another story.... Just because you thought of an image, or a metaphor or a character, or a funny line doesn't mean you have to use it. Keep to the point, keep things moving forward, and restrict yourself to your very best material.
