As I write this, I just finished writing the 10th Wildebyte book, and we’re getting close to 40 short stories in the Saga of Life. You’d think I would have learned from all my mistakes by now, but you’d be wrong. I keep finding new ways to improve and bad habits I missed before.
This article is about a major realization that I’m sure will improve all my stories from now on. Hopefully it can help you too!
Here’s the situation. I’m an improviser, which means I don’t have a strict planning for how a story will go while I’m writing. Like most, however, I’m not 100% improvising. I’m somewhere in-between, balancing “having a plan” with “let’s see where this scene leads us”.
This is partially due to experience. My earliest stories were completely improvised, and it won’t come as a surprise that they were bad and never finished. Nowadays, while writing, my brain already thinks ahead and starts connecting future dots. While writing chapter 5, I suddenly know what chapter 15 should do. While halfway a book, I have a general idea about the ending.
And so, as I work, I keep a bullet-point list of “highlights” in my notes. A list of the most creative, fun, or important scenes that should come at some point. Maybe it’s a really cool plot twist. Maybe it’s just a great character moment, with good conflict and dialogue. My experience simply tells me: this is a highlight of the story. (I’m usually right, though that’s certainly no guarantee.)
So, what’s the problem? Well, we need to get there. Perhaps I’m currently somewhere in a jungle and my main character hasn’t even unlocked their magic ability yet. That “highlight” scene requires them to be somewhere else and with a vague sense of how that magic works. We need to “bridge the gap”. I need to write a handful of scenes to move there.
And I always take too long. I write too many scenes or entire chapters to go from my current position to a highlight. Which means I have too few words left for the actual highlight! Which means I lack the energy/motivation to really grow that part into the best sequence of chapters you’ve ever seen. What should’ve been a big moment becomes … just another chapter, which might even feel rushed.
Now, why does this happen? I’ve discovered two reasons.
Partially, I’m afraid of making leaps that are too large. This is a bad thing in general—you want your readers to understand your story—but especially dangerous because I’m hyperactive. My brain already moves in huge leaps that others often struggle to follow. If I don’t tone it down, or so I’ve learned the hard way, any story I write just becomes incomprehensible to many. As such, I’ve learned to really take my time and move between story waypoints step by step.
On the other hand, this is a consequence of an interesting fact about “motivation”. Many people think motivation is something you just have. And when you have it, great! Start writing! But it’s the other way around. Motivation arrives when you start doing the work. Many people experience this daily. If you can get over that first hurdle, if you can just tell yourself to work for a few minutes, suddenly you are motivated and you actually work for an hour.
As such, once I’ve decided to write a scene connecting A and B in my story, that scene usually grows in size. While in the flow of writing, I invent all sorts of details, I describe a new place in my world, I suddenly find myself in an interesting argument between friends. The paragraphs that we merely supposed to “connect” A and B, suddenly become a scene, become an entire chapter, become an entire subplot!
This isn’t inherently bad, of course. It’s nice that my brain automatically adds detail, texture and realism to anything I try. It turns scenes that some writers describe as “boring, but necessary glue” into ones that are always moving forward and saying something interesting. (Boring for the writer to write; not for the reader to read.) This property allows me to write fast and draw from an endless well of creativity.
But it becomes an issue if these “glue scenes” start to take away from the “main events”. It’s an issue when I spend more time and words on characters just traveling from A to B, while I know the event that will happen at B is far more interesting and enticing.
And so we come to the writing tip: Grow the good parts; shrink the other parts.
If you’ve been reading and writing for a while, I’m sure you can feel the strongest moments or ideas in your story. You know that scene you planned near the middle of the book will be an amazing highlight, where stuff comes together, new conflict starts, mysteries progress, and all of that during a magical battle or whatever.
So, simply put, get there a bit faster and then take a bit more time to flesh out that scene. If needed, find a way to lump the “glue scenes” into the main event. For example, you can keep your characters “traveling” to a new place (as a nice, calm breather between action scenes), but just have one character already be there to create anticipation for this big event coming up.
This necessitates summarizing or shortening the weaker parts that glue the story together. For the longest time, the idea of just “doing a time skip, summarizing what happened” was completely foreign to me. As if it was cheating. As if readers would roll their eyes at it and put down my book.
But it’s not. It’s absolutely fine, and it prevents this issue. Instead of writing an entire chapter just to have people travel and talk, you can write: “They traveled for ten more days without anything remarkable happening.”
That’s fine! Now I saved myself 2,000 words and energy, so I can jump into the more spicy scene I had planned immediately.
And during revisions, when you know the entire story, it becomes even easier to do this. It’s fine to write a bit too much initially, because it’s easy to summarize and shorten later. (Easier than the other way around: coming back to a story and finding you need to write new material to fill a huge gap.) Since I learned this lesson, my latest revision rounds became more fulfilling. Because I was able to look at a scene and say “Really the only important thing here is this line and that information, so let’s turn the entire scene into a summary paragraph instead.”
Grow what you feel are the best parts of your story—shrink the other parts. Which is easiest during revisions, but it can save a lot of energy (and gain productivity) if you do it already on the first draft.
In the end, the more I write, the more I come back to one main “skill” you should develop. One that I am clearly still developing, and I believe I will never be done.
What skill is this? Well, the skill of knowing how much time to give to every bit of the story. How much do we zoom in on this important conversation? How many paragraphs must I use to describe this important object? Do we summarize what happened the past week, or actually show it in more detail?
I find myself constantly asking questions like “but how important exactly is this object?” and trying to turn that into a number for how often to mention it or how many words to dedicate to it. Or questions like “is this fight itself more important, or the aftermath?”
Time is endless. You can take any moment and stretch it into hundreds of pages—or you can fly past it with a single sentence. The skill of storytelling, I feel, is to figure out exactly how long every moment in your story should take. To realize how “good” or “satisfying” a scene is, and turn that into some measure of how much effort and chapters to devote to it.
Hopefully, you can see this lesson in all my stories from now on. More time standing still at “good moments”, fewer chapters filled with details and subplots that move step by step.
Those were my thoughts for today,
Tiamo