They
are among the most frequent observations
heard at the class for
"Writers/Improvers" that I
attend each week.
The first one is about avoiding
clichés. A typical comment would
be this: "Watch out for phrases in
your writing that you've seen
elsewhere." That's a good
working definition of phrases that are
no longer fresh, that fail to convey the
intended picture to the
reader.
Almost as common is an entreaty to cut
out all unnecessary adjectives and
adverbs. That might come as a
shock to some people who were taught in
school, perhaps many years ago, that it
was good to embellish their prose with
lots of these "modifying"
words. By contrast, the good advice now
is that "less is more" and
that you must make sure that any
adjectives or adverbs "pay
their way".
"Nothing should be
wasted."
That's another favourite. It means
that in a crime novel, for example,
everything should be there for a
purpose. It should help the plot
or sub-plot along, or it should set up
something that's coming later, or else
it should illuminate a character.
Otherwise, what's it doing there?
Lastly
(for this selection anyway), I can pass
on the oft-heard advice to show
your readers what is happening rather
than simply telling them.
One way of doing that is to reveal the
story through dialogue between the
characters, rather than through simple
narration by the author. An
additional advantage of using dialogue
is that the pace of the story usually
picks up when dialogue begins.
The advice is all good.
The hard bit, of course, is following
it!
©
David Gray
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