STFU! But nice...

Learn about the value of sometimes using fewer words!

“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brigitte+devin+davis&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

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The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.

[00:00:00]

Last week we asked the question, did Delphine save the cat in the short story, Brigitte which was Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor that I released back in October, but today we are going to move in a slightly different direction as we talk about trusting your audience by limiting the amount of words that you use today on writing in the tiny house.

 Hello, hello, hello. I am [00:01:00] Devin Davis. Welcome to this show. I am the guy who lives in a tiny house who writes stuff and talks about it on a podcast. And the reason behind this podcast is for us to improve our creative writing, to learn the parts of creative writing, to learn how it all works together to develop a practice.

And then to complete a manuscript that is ready to publish in a short amount of time. It is possible to write a short story in three months, and it is possible to write a novel in 18 months. Hopefully through this podcast, you will also have the knowledge and the wherewithal to adjust that timeline if you need to. Many of us hesitate to even get started on a project because we don't know how long it will take. But if we are prepared with the right tools and if we know how everything works, and if we approach it with better understanding of how it all [00:02:00] happens, we can get things done with really good quality and on a better timeline.

So this week we are going to discuss something that is a touchy subject. A lot of people say things like show don't tell. Or whatever other cliche words, cliche phrases that we hear in the writing community. And oftentimes we are led to believe that if we describe, describe, describe, we are helping our readers fully understand what is going on in the story and what is going on in the scene and what is happening with everything. There is a problem with describing stuff like that, with using a lot of words. And that is what we are hoping to tackle today. I have been reading the book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by george [00:03:00] Saunders,

and one of the things that hit home so much was the authority that the story itself plays in the story telling. And what that means is the story itself gets to dictate what is important and what is not important. And that's okay. Just to quickly demonstrate. So this is going to be a pretty short episode and that is just fine, but to quickly demonstrate there was a trick that I described in a previous episode where you describe the cat in the house, and in describing the cat, you also describe the house. That way you don't have to describe the house.

You don't need to take up the pages and the paragraphs to describe the house if we already understand the cat that lives there. It's this this fancy shortcut to making things precise [00:04:00] and still conveying something without using 5 million words to do so. And with something like a short story specifically, there is no room for fluff.

There is no room to simply, uh, blow smoke in our pros. And so one of those tricks is to describe the cat in order to describe the house. This one is kind of the opposite, but a similar thing. So if I were to tell you that our main character, Brian has a family photo that he keeps on his desk, what do we already understand or can safely assume about that photo?

If it is a photo that he keeps on his desk, odds are, it is framed. Odds are it sits on his desk in a frame and it sits in a way for him to see it all the time. Unless I take time to describe that differently, because that [00:05:00] is a normal thing that people do, we can let the reader assume that it's going to be a normal thing that our main character does too.

When we mentioned the picture on the desk, we don't need to say that it's in a frame unless the frame is important. We don't need to describe the frame because the frame is not important, but we kind of get that the frame is there. Why is the frame important or why is the frame not important? This is what we like to touch on when we say that the story itself has authority on what's important and what's not. It's not important because the story doesn't mention it. The story does not bring attention to the frame because it doesn't need to. And, allowing the reader to just assume a couple things to assume normal behavior and to figure some stuff out [00:06:00] on their own.

It allows the reader to imagine for themselves kind of a little bit what is going on here, especially if it's in a typical setting. I read a book recently that was laden with so much description that it slowed down the pacing of the story, and it made the story hard to pay attention to, and really challenging to read.

And sometimes you get to let the story dictate what is important by leaving things out. In the book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, there is a short story in that book called Darling that George Saunders analyzes for you. And, in that short story, it is a pattern short story.

And George Saunders goes crazy with what we can do with a pattern story. So it's one of those things where we just see the pattern of behavior. A woman meets a man and falls in love, and then the [00:07:00] man dies. And then she meets a man and falls in love. And then the man dies. It's more than that. But you understand what I'm trying to say. And some of the things that the story purposefully leaves out, George Saunders brings attention to as a way to highlight what negative space can do to improve storytelling. So after this woman's husband died, six months go by and she meets who will become the next love of her life.

But the story doesn't say the grieving process of those six months, the story leaves all of that out and just simply says, six months later. Because the story doesn't say those things, the pacing of the story is better. And focusing on the manner that this woman is grieving, isn't the point of the story.

And so we don't focus on it. The story says that that is not important. And so it's left [00:08:00] out and we are left to assume. And so that is something that we can do with our own work. Sometimes when we sit back and we go to revise our stuff and we go to revise our works in progress or whatever, sometimes there is too much. Sometimes more is not better. With things like prose especially in prose sometimes in dialogue, more isn't better.

We get to trust that our reader is intelligent and we get to trust that sometimes the negative space or the ability to fill in the blanks is actually a very good gift for the reader. And it improves the pacing and the flow of the way the story is going. And so with your work in progress, I challenge you to comb through and see if there are parts that you can clip or tighten up.

I have been listening to another book. It's [00:09:00] another fantasy book. Sometimes you just get to read a fun, YA fantasy book. I started paying attention to this more closely after I read this analysis by George Saunders. And so I was like, I wonder how often that happens because I was under the impression that in fantasy specifically, it happens a lot.

And so I have been listening more closely to exposition based dialogue. And I think to myself, how much of this was actually necessary to the story. And did it have to come out this way? Would it have been okay to simply remove this little bit of dialogue altogether so that this response could have been shorter? So a lot of the exposition that we get, especially exposition based dialogue is largely for world building. A lot of people understand that info dump in their prose isn't a good [00:10:00] thing. And so they info dump in their dialogue instead. And oftentimes it is to world build. It is to help the reader understand how the world works.

And if it's a fantasy novel, oftentimes it's to help understand that the magic system that the author is trying to establish. And so with that, with the book that I have been listening to recently that I finished just the other day, the magic system is a pretty hard magic system. It's largely not very mysterious.

It has a lot of rules. I mean, the author could have written a text book explaining the magic system that he created in this world. And the thing is, as the reader, I don't care. I don't care about the magic system as much as I care about the story. And so the story gets to hold the authority on what is important.

The story itself would have been much easier [00:11:00] and natural had the author chosen to simplify the magic system or chosen to let some of the things that happened with his magic remain mysterious instead of explaining away every little detail, because he wanted so badly for whatever reason to have this be a hard magic system, which is a magic system that is very well-defined instead of a soft magic system, which is one that is more mysterious and not as well understood.

I'm sure that there are good reasons for all of the rules and all of the ways that the magic works and governs itself in this world, in this book. At the same time, I know that a lot of it did not specifically apply to this story. And instead it was hard to read and it was kind of hard to slug through.

So again, Go through your work in progress [00:12:00] and see what you can remove and give your reader the gift of negative space so that sometimes they can use their own imagination to fill in the blanks. It's a fun thing to do. It requires an amount of trust, but you would be surprised or not.

By how much better? A couple perfect words are compared to several paragraphs of a lot of description.

Devin Davis:

And that is it for today. Just a reminder that "Brigitte,"Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible and Apple Books as an audio book. And I provide advanced reader copies of these short stories as I release them to my patrons. So become a patron today by visiting patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse [00:13:00] to support both my writing and this podcast. And lastly, be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is@authordevind. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.