Invisible Creature started a series of posts on packaging design, then and now. Their first target is a box of Trix. It’s the case that packaging has gotten a lot more cluttered the past few decades. Empty space in design is seen as wasted real estate for marketing or information. Our eyes aren’t able to breathe as easily.
How does this relate to writing? Well, take your first novel – maybe you’re on your first draft it already or you’re just in the thinking stages. You’ve read tons of great books already, and the thought of escalating your own plot germ into 300 or so pages feels daunting. You’ll need to fill in that space with something, because your plot isn’t quite as expansive as you thought. What do you think you will do?
The amateur mistake is to write too much. Too much description, too much dialogue, too many needless scenes, or the worst offense: too much backstory. We marvel at our verbosity in transit but when we reread that page we though was so clever turned out to read like fifth grader with an overworked thesaurus fetish (no offense to talented fifth grade writers).
I fell into this trap on my first draft of Gods. I overexplained the environment or stretched my dialogue out instead of economizing my words to get the point across, and I substituted five words for one that would have worked just as effectively. There were unnecessary scenes I wrote out because I thought they were humorous or passionate. I even laid out the protagonist’s entire childhood (really), and I thought I was disguising bare exposition by having her speak her whole history to another character. Going back and reading that and other newbie blunders in overwriting resulted in many facepalms.
To remedy this, copy the masters. Take two of my favorites, Fahrenheit 451 and The Bell Jar – Bradbury and Plath both hold back when they could have unleashed the full power their literary fury. Their respective tomes are slim but classic. Certainly there are classics that are much lengthier, but the idea here is that the more is better so long as the better is consistent. More words by themselves are useless.
I know it’s hard to delete that one nice action scene or section of wry dialogue, but keep it mind the edited out parts can always be used for a different work. Some of you might fear that you’re “estupidizing” (my word) your writing by making it less effusive; I can certainly understand that sentiment as I personally hate reading things for myself that are too easily digested. It’s better to think of it more as respecting your readers’ time. They are putting their whole attention and a block of time into reading your story – why not make their effort “high quality” by not jerking them around with stacks of descriptive paragraphs of snowy mountaintops or the villain’s tentacle-like nosehairs? Your story is good enough without all the insane packaging. Step aside a little but, let the story tell itself, and allow your readers’ minds to breathe.