Another amateurish trait is that of not trusting the reader. We get many clients who write something rather like the following:

He rolled in agony. Fire shot through every limb. He felt like screaming out in pain. His entire face was distorted with the grotesque effort of not shouting out.

That uses many very forceful words (agony, fire, screaming, distorted, grotesque). You don’t need that many words to do the job. It’s as though the writer of this snippet doesn’t trust the reader to get the point, so he/she keeps making the same point again and again like some classic pub bore. Readers will ‘get it’, as long as you write in clear, forceful, non-repetitive language.

Here’s another example.

What do you think of the following little dialogue / micro-scene?

“Yes?” I nudged. “Yes, only . . .” she hesitated, then stopped completely. Waved her hands at me to signal she was done, or that I should look away. Some gesture like that. “So, yes, we should invite him?” “Of course. Fine. Whatever you want. It’s not like I care.”

We don’t know what’s going on here of course – presumably, if we read this in a book, we’d have more background to make sense of it all. But it’s pretty clear, isn’t it, that the woman here has some set of quite strong, deep emotions about the guy they might or might not invite to something – and she’s not that keen to talk about what she feels.#

And you got all that, without the writer having to spell anything out at all. The writer just dropped stuff on the page and let you figure it out.

So now take a look at this way of doing things:

“Yes?” I nudged her, anxious to know what she would think. “Yes, only . . .” she hesitated, then stopped completely. She waved her hands at me to signal something. I guess she was quite conflicted about me inviting him. Maybe she was a little bit angry, plus a little embarrassed. Her body language was more than consistent with these two emotions, so I decided that I should try to clarify the situation in order to identify her opinions more precisely. “So, yes, we should invite him?” I said, hoping that this time I would get a more detailed answer. “Of course. Fine. Whatever you want. It’s not like I care.” But although she said she didn’t care, it was evident to me that she did. As a matter of fact, when she spoke the words “whatever you want”, it struck me that maybe she was being passive-aggressive, that although she said “whatever you want”, maybe what she actually means was, “No, I’d prefer not to see him.”

That’s terrible, right?

And it’s terrible, partly, because this version of the dialogue massively breaks the “keep it tight” rule. But it’s also terrible because it just lectures the reader in this horrible heavy-handed way on stuff that the reader can perfectly well figure out for themselves.

It’s even worse than that, actually, because in the first example, all the nuances of the situation were left open to the reader to figure out. In the second example, all that clunky explanation just crushes the nuances underfoot.

The moral of this story?

Trust your reader. They’re smart like that.

(And get more dialogue help, if you want it.)