Writing is all about emotion, when you get right down to it. People read and writers write because we’re after something magical: excitement, happiness, power, peace, fear, sadness, anger. Even the humble Aesop’s fables arouse feelings, whether curiosity, surprise, or delight.
But writing about or with emotion is exceptionally difficult. This applies whether you are portraying a character’s emotions or trying to elicit emotion in your readers.
Detail selection affects not just the content of a piece of writing, but the style. Thus, when an editor flags or corrects detail selection, you may think your style is being tampered with. This can make you feel anxious or angry, which is understandable!
I’d like to explain some of the ways that detail selection affects writing style, meaning that errors in detail selection will cause style errors. While correcting these can be painful, it’s important to recognize that no amount of style will cover up bad detail selection—whereas good detail selection will automatically improve your style.
Writing is a complex discipline. Of the countless details available to communicate a thought, which should we choose to carry the weight of our meaning? We can’t write about every single thing related to the idea we want to convey. Instead, we have to choose our details. Not enough detail, and the reader gets confused. Too much, and the reader is bored. The wrong details distract and misdirect.
A big part of my job as an editor is dealing with detail problems. Writers get carried away in the grand sweep of their arguments and don’t notice that their supporting points are unconvincing. Novelists focus all their drafting efforts on climactic scenes that fall flat because the main characters are vaguely drawn. The nitty-gritty matters.
Think about writing as a matter of detail selection.
May I just offer a little advice? Avoid writing sentences like that one.
You probably spotted the problem a mile away: May I just offer a little advice is loaded with qualifiers.
Qualifiers aren’t inherently wrong. When chosen well, adjectives and adverbs make our writing more precise, powerful, and expressive. But qualifiers subtly enable bad writing in a way that nouns and verbs do not. This is especially true of words and phrases like often, a little, much, somewhat, totally, really, only, and completely (and on and on, really—oops!).
A couple weeks ago I pulled some Alice Munro collections from a library bookshelf. I’ve read Munro’s short stories in anthologies before but never connected to them. But there in the stacks I thought, Everybody makes a big deal about Alice Munro. I guess I should give her a try.
I began at the beginning of one of the volumes, and after “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid,” I was still unconvinced. Then I tried a new tack: I read aloud. Two paragraphs into “The Turkey Season” and I was hooked. To see why, do a little experiment.
How much should a writer think about writing style? All writers grapple with the concept every time we put pen to paper. Even the least self-conscious writer stares at the page or screen and wonders, How do I want to say this? We are always aware, on some level, that the choices we make in stringing words together reflect our identities.
I recently read a good short story, "Dry Whiskey" by David B. Silva (The Best American Mystery Stories 1999, ed. Ed McBain). The story builds unassumingly to a subtly powerful ending. However, the author struggles with the use of past perfect tense, enough so that it interferes with a smooth reading experience.
Past perfect tense is formed by combining the auxiliary verb had with a verb's past participle (had written, for example).
I blissfully enjoyed The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. However, one of the first style quirks that jumped out at me was Rothfuss’s reliance on the constructions it was and there was (and it is, there were, etc.), as in “It was night again.” Out of the prologue and first twenty-one chapters, seven begin with It was. Rothfuss is a talented writer; he’s capable of chapter beginnings like this: “Chronicler walked. Yesterday he had limped, but today there was no part of his feet that didn’t hurt, so limping did no good.” The It was beginnings stick out like seven sore thumbs.
