“What a great novel – I finished in a single sitting!” That’s the kind of comment you want.
Not (taken almost at random from the Amazon site): “I had to read the ending three times and I still cannot work out what actually happened. Parts of the rest of the story were almost as incomprehensible. Characters appeared and disappeared without any explanation and there’d be conversations you’d have to keep re-reading in order to work out who was saying what. A total disaster. Don’t waste your time like I did.” Ouch.
Aside from the obvious precaution of making sure that your plot is easy to follow, there are several ways to make reading your novel more of a pleasure. When naming characters, avoid two people having names that start with the same letter. Janet and Jemma, Pat and Pete, Eric and Ernst may be totally different in your mind, but to a reader they could easily be confused.
Write as if you were talking to a friend. Avoid long words and putting in two when one will do just as well. You might want to go easy on the adverbs too.
Cut out long descriptions that do nothing to advance the story. Do we need to know the kitchen is painted in three shades of green, “including the shade of lime you find in airport lounges”? It may add atmosphere but if there’s too much atmosphere, you’ll bore the reader.
Although it’s nice to know what kind of music the protagonist likes, we don’t need long lists of what he’s listening to. Aside from the fact that most people will not have heard of Jaco Pastorius, not everybody has the same musical taste and it will not advance the story one iota. The same goes for lists of cooking ingredients, the streets he travels down, and so on.
Don’t think you have to burden the reader with your characters on a 24 hour basis. Only tell us about the interesting things that happen. Let the reader fill in the blanks. We all eat breakfast, we all go to the toilet, and we don’t necessarily need to know about it when our hero does.
Elmore Leonard sums all this stuff up in a single line: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”.
There’s another expression much loved by authors: “Murder your darlings”. It was coined by British critic and writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who, in his ‘On The Art Of Writing’ (1916) said: “…if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’”
This simply means that if you look at your writing and a passage stands out as a piece of particularly fine literature, then it must go. Unless you are writing high literary fiction or poetry (and I take it you are not), then writing should not look like writing.
Elmore Leonard again: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”
One good tip to see if your writing flows and is easily understandable, is to read it out loud to yourself. You’ll soon spot any parts that grate or are unclear.
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