Machete
The Right Tool for the Right Job
Welcome back to Shelf Life where no one knows how to dress. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that we’re not fashionable. We definitely are fashionable. Rather, it’s that time of year when no one can properly dress for the weather. Autumn is when it’s deepest winter in the morning and high summer in the afternoon. I don’t know who made up these weather rules but they’re terrible. I’m thankful for layers.
On Tuesday I talked about how to get at your text with a scalpel when you need to reduce word count by a little bit. The scalpel method is great for making sure you’ve been as concise as possible when you need to keep your word count down. I don’t believe that concise writing is the be-all, end-all best type of writing but when you’re trying to come in under a limit, it pays to be concise. Sometimes literally.
That said, sometimes the scalpel is not going to do it and you need to get a different tool: The machete. A machete is a long blade that is often used to clear out brush or cut down crops like sugar cane. One does not use a machete with careful precision. This is the ultimate hack-slash tool. You swing it in broad strokes in front of you and Lorde help whatever was in front of you. That’s the machete in a nutshell. Some folks call it a swing blade.
When your text is well over the target length, substituting one word where you originally used two is not going to get the job done. When you’re at 6,000 words and you want to submit to a mag with a limit of 5,000 words, or when you’ve written a doorstopper of a novel that’s well outside the generally accepted range for your genre—the scalpel is not going to get it done. You could carve away at that text for years and never get where you need to be. It’s time to cut some serious text.
But when we write, we don’t write text for the cutting room floor. If we didn’t think every sentence, every word, told part of our story, we wouldn’t have written it in the first place. It’s hard to know whether we can cut our text and preserve the authorial meaning and intent or whether the text really needs to be that long.
I rewatched Amadeus (1984) recently and, in it, the Mozart character is told that his music contains too many notes and he replies:
I don't understand. There are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required. Neither more nor less.
I think that’s how many of us feel about our writing: I didn’t use too many words. I used exactly the number of words I needed to tell the story; no more and no fewer.
As an editor, I know this is rarely true. Many manuscripts contain things they don’t need and, often, could benefit from omitting. The trick as a writer is to figure out what can be omitted while leaving the story, meaning, theme, intent, and so on, in tact.
As writers we may feel we’ve not included anything extraneous. Every detail matters. Every word is important. Simultaneously, as the writer, we have the entire wealth of backstory and background knowledge in our head when we are writing (or reading what we have written) so, conversely, we may believe something can be omitted when it really can’t. Something that goes without saying to us may really need to be said for the reader.
How, then, do you figure out what’s omittable? How can you identify what is oh-so-skippable?
There’s only one rule: Don’t tell the reader things they don’t need or want to know. That’s it. Here are the things readers do not need or want to be told in the text:
Information they already know.
Information that is not important to the story.
Information they can reasonable figure out for themself.
Note when I say “information that is not important to the story” I did not say “to the plot.” The story is more than its plot. The story includes characterization, worldbuilding, theme, motif, and more. It’s okay to include information that doesn’t directly support the plot as long as it is still important to the story you are telling.
Before I get into the weeds, I want to add that this advice applies to other types of writing than fiction. Nonfiction, research writing, email writing, technical writing, et cetera. I talked about this in Write an Email People Will Actually Read. If you put in too much information, you might end up imparting not enough information when readers peel off before absorbing your message.
Information They Already Know
Telling people things they already know wastes words. This doesn’t mean you never want to give background information. It’s important to supply information that some readers may not know so they can understand your text. However, if reasonably every reader in your audience already knows something, there is no need to write it.
Ever seen—or perhaps written—this agent query?
Dear Agent,
I am writing to you today
They are reading your letter. They know you are writing to them.
To learn whether you may be interested in representing
That’s what 100 percent of query letters are for. They know you’re seeking their representation.
My fiction novel
All novels are fiction.
One Hundred Years With the Madding Crowd, complete at 80,000 words.
This is the first bit of useful information in the letter.
Another example: Consider the back cover of a paperback. There is—or at least there used to always be—a paragraph or two pitching the novel to readers. This is the same descriptive marketing copy you find on Amazon. An example of this text for Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen might say:
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind.
Here’s what you will never see:
This book is about Elizabeth Bennet and how she first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy.
We know it’s a book. Back cover copy for P&P might say something like “in this enduring classic,” because some readers might possibly not know it’s an enduring classic. However: Anyone holding the book in their hand to read the back cover copy knows they are holding a book.
Information That Is Not Important
As I wrote a long time ago in First Law of Worldbuilding, the author of a story needs to know a vastly greater amount of information about their world, characters, and story to write their book than the reader needs to know to read and understand the same book. Readers do not need all the information the writer has. It’s usually a mistake to try to include every detail you think of, every single thing you—as the author—know about the story. If you do so, you’re definitely sharing information that is not important to the reader. I said usually because Tolkien can get away with this and people will read that Legendarium and probably do dissertations about it. Most of us are not Tolkien. This is for the best.
Something I have found useful—sometimes painful, but useful—is to read through large blocks of exposition in my text and make a bullet list on a piece of scrap paper of the information within the exposition that is actually necessary for the story. Once I’ve jotted down all the critical info that must be kept, I delete the whole block of expository text. (Note that I’m doing this in a revision version, so the deleted text still exists in previous drafts.)
I go through my text looking for blocks of exposition like that—long passages with backstory, history, worldbuilding, ancillary information, or anything like that—and add the critical details to my bullet list before deleting the passage.
Finally, after removing all the sloggy exposition, I go back through my text with the bullet list I created and look for ways to work the critical information into the text naturally. Can I add it to existing dialogue? A character’s stray thought? For instance, I might write a character’s thoughts and memories of growing up on the family farm to let the reader know she has six brothers. I might not need that whole reminiscence. Perhaps she can just mention, later on, that her impressive wrestling skill comes from growing up with six brothers. I don’t need to give the reader the entire life story if the material aspect of it that they need is “six brothers.”
Information the Reader Can Figure Out
Readers love figuring things out. This is why the mystery genre exists and is always popular. There is no need to tell a reader outright what they can figure out from context.
This goes hand in hand somewhat with the “show don’t tell” adage. Instead, I’ll put it like this: Show or tell, but one is enough. You don’t need to show the reader something and then also tell them to make sure they got it. Readers are very intelligent. Likewise, you don’t need to tell the reader something and then also show it. Showing is often better than telling, but sometimes telling is fine. Not everything needs to be shown. A mix of storytelling techniques is ideal in most situations. Show something, tell something; use some dialogue, use some exposition. Write an action scene, write a quiet scene.
Most adult readers, I think, don’t want to feel like they’re being hit over the head with the information they need to understand the story. The author’s challenge is to deliver critical information in such a way that most readers will get it, without belaboring the delivery such that it feels ham-fisted or obvious.
Again, as the writer, it’s challenging to self-assess when you’ve struck this ideal balance. It’s just tough to read the text from an outsider perspective and judge whether you’ve given enough information for the reader without giving too much.
For my own part, I like to cut back as far as I feel I can during revision before releasing text to beta readers. I give beta readers a few targeted questions to answer after their initial read, and those questions usually are designed to gauge whether the reader picked up all the information I was hoping they would and made the assumptions or inferences I tried to direct them toward. Rather than asking questions that give away the answer (eg, “Did you understand that the brunette was his sister?”) I try to word the questions in an open-ended way (eg, “How would you characterize the relationship between the brunette and the main character?”). Sometimes I get really interesting answers that tell me I really missed the mark (eg, “The brunette was the ghost of his landlady, right?”).
If most of my beta readers get make the right inferences, that tells me I’m right on the money. If most of my beta readers do not pick up on the right information or make the right inferences, I know I need to add more detail back in to the text. If all of my beta readers make the right logical association, then I can ask myself whether I could dial back the handholding and be a little more close-lipped.
But on the other hand my readers are very intelligent and insightful as a rule, so it’s no surprise when they get it in spite of my own shortcomings as a writer.
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