DON'T SHOW OFF

As you write, it is tempting to demonstrate your mastery of prose, hoping your reader will marvel at your skills.

Don’t. It’s all about story. Nothing else matters.

Take this example.

Imagine you are on a train in England, heading north. It is raining. The skies are dreary. The rain is smacking the window, and you are staring out, feeling down as the day gets drearier, the skies darker, the views outside slipping into the dark stone and industrial scars of northern England.

Which of the following explains it best:

The icy grey sky restlessly grumbled. The thick blackened clouds were dragged down by the heavy rain which they held in their delicate frames. The clouds struggled to withstand the burden of the weight until, with a gush, they gave in, soaking the ground in its tumult.

Or

The rain rained.

I hope you say the second. The first is some nonsense I dreamed up for the sake of this exercise. The second is the first sentence of Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, which is now known by its new title because of the success of the film version of the book, Get Carter, a Michael Caine film. It sums up perfectly that dead feeling of one of those dreary days, where the rain feels set in for the day.

A few years ago, I was asked to judge a short story competition, and I remember reading one of the stories where half a page was used up by talking about the rain on the window. To be fair to the writer, he wrote poetry normally, and it was sort of poetic, but he was trying to tell me a story, and all I got for half a page was raindrops travelling down the glass. I felt like shouting at the page, “yeah, it’s raining, I get it. Just tell me a story!”

The winner, in contrast, just got on with the story, and it was better for it.

I can guarantee that if you try to smash the reader with the charm of your poetry, when you are six books in, they’ll be the parts you’ll wish you could go back and take out.

There are other things to avoid too. Time for the next page.