We all reach that moment in our writing when we seem to be
blurting words into a void, with no idea of whether they are working or not. We
peck and nibble away at our prose, wondering if it’s really getting any better.
I had reached that point in revising my novel when a writing
mentor saved my life. She has identified with surgical precision what’s working
and what isn’t, and what I need to do about it. Here are the top 3 tips that
have worked for me:
1) Keep your villain’s villainy subtle and
convincing.
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I had worked hard to make my
villain creepy, so that the thriller would be chilling from the start. Worried
that he wouldn’t be scary enough, I must have laboured the point, as though trying
to whip up a chorus of booing for pantomime villain instead of creating a
nuanced, believable character. ‘You’re insistent on telling us what a horrible
piece of work he is,’ my mentor wrote. ‘Let the reader sense that, not be
hammered over the head with it.’ She liked the scenes in which I showed him as
vulnerable. ‘If you write like this, the reader will get that he is damaged and
obsessed,’ I learned, ‘without you needing to spell it out as much as you do.’
This tip is working as I rewrite
this character, and creating him is a grim joy – after all, we are all
fascinated by the evil things people do and what drives them to do it, and a
three-dimensional character is always more interesting to write.
2) Keep the focus on what characters do and
say, without always spelling out how they feel.
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It was a new idea to me that I could trust
the reader to understand emotions without being spoon-fed them in signposts weighing
down the text: ‘her heart sank,’ fear rose in a wave,’ ‘anxiety jangled her
frazzled nerves...’ It seemed risky to remove these emotional pointers – what if
it made the text bland and hard to interpret? I needn’t have worried – it the
clues are there in the context and in the characters’ words and actions, the
signposts are not needed – and the writing flows so much better without them.
3) Don't describe every raised eyebrow, sip
of coffee or heavy sigh.
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‘Ease
up on spelling out too much,’ my mentor wrote. ‘It leads you to be repetitive
and slows the pace.’ She added, ‘If you’re writing a powerful scene, readers
bring something to the party themselves – their imagination. They can picture
the lifted eyebrow, the fixed gaze.’
Looking back over my writing after
receiving these comments, I laughed out loud. It was full of raised eyebrows,
humphs of annoyance, frowns and above all, fulsome indications of where
everyone’s eyes were focused at all times, ‘He looked down. He glanced up. He
held her gaze.’ Trimming away most of these details made the prose pacier, and
gave power and resonance to the ones left in. If a character holds someone’s
gaze now, you had better believe it’s significant!
A single fact I didn’t know before underlies all the top
tips noted above – that I can trust the reader. ‘They will get it,’ my mentor
assures me patiently, ‘they really will.’ Readers bring their imagination to
the party. Who knew that?
