Necroben's StoryBlog

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On Multiple Journeys:

One great writing tip that I first saw voiced came from Robert McKee, whose book Story I often recommend. He points out that in most successful tales, the hero doesn’t just take an outer journey, he also takes an inner journey—one that is of equal import to the outer journey.

Very often, new writers will belabor a point—particularly unimportant points.

Much of this, I feel certain, has to do with tedious exercises that we learn in school. For example, I recall hearing of one college writing instructor who once told his class, “You’re not a real writer until you can use your words to construct a brick wall, one brick at a time.” He then instructed his students to describe a brick wall so perfectly that he could see it.

Now, I understand what the instructor was getting at. He wanted his writers to use all of the senses to “create” a brick wall. He hoped that they’d figure out how to entertain an audience through clever use of assonance and dissonance, surprise words choices, and perhaps he hoped that they’d figure out how to imbue the wall with life by using strong metaphors and similes, and so on.

But his instructions were rather vague, and most of his students failed rather miserably. Rather than being concise, original, or profound, they simply threw more and more words into the description, hoping that somehow they’d do something brilliant.

That’s something that we do when we’re new writers.

As a result, nearly all writers are familiar with the expression “Less is more.” In short, often by paring back some verbose baggage, we accomplish more.

By choosing just the right nouns and verbs, we can often get rid of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Often if we cut a sentence of dialog down to a single word or two, we get to the meat of the sentence instantly.

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