Don’t over-explain default objects and gestures

When novels are bloated with an excessive word count, the extra words are often where you’d least expect them.

In fact, when I’m editing, I often find that very long novels are among the most tightly plotted. The authors know the word count is a problem, so they trim all the extra scenes and streamline the storytelling.

So how do these novels still end up way too long?

It’s almost always at the sentence and the paragraph level. When nearly every sentence has a few unnecessary words and nearly every paragraph has a sentence or two that’s already apparent from context, it really, really adds up. Over the course of a novel these small, seemingly innocuous redundancies can mean tens of thousands of extra words.

I’ve talked about a few different ways of paring back your word count, but today I want to focus on one pratfall in particular: over-explaining default objects and gestures.

Let an ordinary hammer be a hammer

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we all have roughly standard ideas of everyday objects and gestures. If you read about a hammer in a novel that a character uses to hit a nail, you and I might have very slightly different mental images but they’re roughly going to conform to a “standard” hammer. Something like this.

It’s not necessary to spend a paragraph describing what this particular hammer looks like. It’s just a hammer. Unless there’s some reason this particular hammer departs from the norm or some characteristic will be important later on…just let it be a hammer.

So, for instance, when you’re describing a car, you don’t need to point out that the car has “round black rubber tires.” That’s the default. Unless you tell us otherwise, we’re just going to assume that a car has black tires.

We also don’t need unnecessary hyper-specific details. If you show a character showing up at someone’s house and they ring the doorbell, we don’t need to know that it’s on the right side, roughly three feet high, with a glowing button inside a brass plate, purchased at Home Depot five years ago on a sunny day, when none of that actually matters for the scene.

Unless the doorbell is actually a cat you poke and it meows or something otherwise unique, just let the character ring the doorbell.

A character pointing is just pointing

This extends to gestures as well. Sometimes I’ll see painstaking descriptions like:

Nathan stretched his right arm and extended an index finger toward the object that caught his interest.

So, uh… “Nathan pointed?” You can just say that! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with your physical description when there’s a clear, simple word just sitting there.

And look, I just saved 15 words. If you pare back just two excessive sentences on every page of a 500 page novel, that’s 15,000 words right there.

You usually don’t need to point out which hand is doing something

“Left” and “right” very rarely matter in a novel. So often I see descriptions like this:

Nathan picked up the pitcher in his left hand and with his right hand he picked up a pen.

Does it really matter which hand picked up which object? If you just say “Nathan picked up the pitcher and a pen” the reader will infer he’s using different hands and it probably doesn’t matter one whit whether the pitcher is in his left hand or his right hand. If anything, it forces the reader to do extra work to keep track of which object is in which hand.

Dispense with left and right unless it truly matters–and it almost never matters. The reader will just conjure their own mental image and that’s fine.

Dispense with pleasantries and chores

There are lots of things that we do when we encounter people we know when we’re out and about. We say “hello,” we hug or shake hands, we ask after people’s loved ones.

Unless these things actually matter to the scene at hand in a novel, the reader will infer that people were greeted satisfactorily and that pleasantries were exchanged. You don’t need them on a page. I’ve edited novels where pleasantries alone accounted for dozens of extra pages.

Readers will infer that characters are exchanging pleasantries and eating and drinking and using the restroom as needed throughout the narrative. We don’t need every single tiny action spelled out. When the mundane details of everyday life are depicted in painstaking detail, it can sometimes feel like we’re reading an endless series of chores.

Unless there’s something about these chores that are necessary to push the overall narrative forward, they don’t need to be on the page.

When to be more specific

So when should you be more specific?

When it’s important and additive that the object or gesture departs from the default.

If Nathan pointed with a wink or stood on his head and pointed with his big toe, then sure, describe that in more detail. If a car has neon pink square tires, describe that. If the fact that the hammer’s handle is rubber is a detail that matters to the story somehow, point it out. If it really, truly matters which hand a character is using to do something, fine.

But if it’s just your usual everyday point.. just let the character point. Doesn’t matter which hand.

If they’re round black tires, just call them tires or leave them out entirely and trust that the reader will just infer they’re there and won’t assume the car is levitating.

Even if you’re creating a novel that’s stylistically unique, I still think it pays to be cognizant of this principle. Avoid bogging down the reader in interminable descriptions of the everyday unless there’s some particular reason you want to point out a specific detail.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 2, 2021

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Art: Detail of Last minutes of False Dmitry I by Carl Gottlieb Wenig