Hello, writers. Because of a thing I got involved in, I recently lately found myself reading a number of people’s opening manuscript pages.
Some of them were very, very well-written. And they contained beautiful character development, beautiful setting, beautiful details. Nearly all of them had too many beautiful details, though.
The reason this is a problem is that it causes readers not to notice the details we really want them to notice. Everything on the page is printed in the same size font. There’s no way to draw attention to an important detail among a whole muck of unimportant ones.
Seven years (minus 2 days) ago I wrote a diary about the Japanese concept of ma and its place in writing, as explained by E.L. Konigsburg. The idea, as applied to writing, is that the less detail you provide, and the more you frame it with unoccupied space to draw the reader’s attention to it, the more likely it is the reader will remember the detail later.
Consider the following:
The night was dark, cold, and rainy; a storm had blown in from the coast and was tossing newspapers and trash and stuff down the street, along with some important papers that had been lost by a sailor off a German ship that was just one of the dozens of ships in port that week, some of them avoiding the storm and others docking until further news of the international situation could be obtained. A cat howled, and a dog whined, and a shot rang out, and the storm blew harder, to the point where you had to wonder if maybe it was no ordinary storm blowing in but a hurricane.
(Did you skim that? It’s okay if you did.)
The trouble with the above is that there’s so much stuff in it— sounds, interesting facts, weather, domestic animals— that the reader’s not sure what’s important. Is it important that there might be a war? That there might be a hurricane? That important papers have been lost? That a dog has been lost? Who knows?
So here’s tonight’s challenge.
Choose just two details from the paragraph above. Any two. One of them is very important to your story. The other is less important. Rewrite the paragraph so that the reader’s attention is drawn to the most important detail. Leave out everything else if you have to. Limit yourself to 100 words.
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