Itchy Bitesized 30: How To Perform An Explainectomy -

- bring life to your story, strengthen your prose, and all without messing with your plot

For the 30th post in the Itchy Bitesized Series, I’m looking at one of the line edits I most commonly suggest to writers (the others are here). I often suggest it to myself, too: something I’ve written is ‘over-explain-y.’

A story which is full of over-explaining will make perfectly good sense, but it will feel very ploddy, even lifeless - and it’ll almost certainly be longer than it needs to be. (For more on what to do when your story is too long, click here).

The great thing about performing an explainectomy is that it’s a remarkably straightforward way to tighten and strengthen your prose without messing with your plot. Quite different phrases and situations may be involved, but because they have the same effect, it’s helpful to consider them under the same heading - to put those spectacles on, as it were, and tackle them in one go.

Here’s a run-down of the things to look for.

• Speech tags:

  • More tags, more often, than you need to keep the reader straight on who says what.

  • Speech tags which double-up by explaining what the dialogue and action are already making clear. (My main dialogue post is here.)

• Filtering: explaining how these things come to be perceived by the viewpoint character. My main post about filtering is here, but for a quick check-in:

  • Gardner describes it as ‘the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: “Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.” Compare: “She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting ...”’

  • Filtering is much more likely to creep in when you’re very conscious of your viewpoint character, in first or third person.

  • Other ‘filtering’ words that often creep in as notice has here include: seem, look, see, watch, perceive. Then there’s the ‘thinking’ filters: remember, think, wonder, consider, observe, recall. Ask yourself: do I want to remind the reader, here, of the frame: of the viewpoint character’s act of observing? Or do I want to zoom through the window and show only what’s beyond it?

• Explaining everything:

  • Movement and action. You are not writing an industrial time-and-motion study or translating labanotation, so we don’t need every part of every pot-of-tea-making, or circumnavigating of the globe, laid out. Which parts are important to the story as a whole? Can you make your swift, ground-covering Telling Showy instead?

  • What’s about to happen: Your writing mind may kick off the scene by summarising where it will go, which is that the picnic turns out to be a disaster, and Telling us what happens before you Show us is something I see all the time. But that note-to-self can be cut and usually should be: narrative drive is usually weakened if you reveal us at the beginning of the voyage that the ship arrived safely. Unless, that is, you can trust yourself and your narrator to keep the tension up despite the plot-spoiler by making Why and how did it happen? as urgent and compelling a question in the reader’s head as What will happen next? It can be done!

  • What is happening: If your viewpoint character or narrator keeps analysing/worrying about/stating the significance of each stage of a scene the moment it happens, it can really slow things up. It also doesn’t leave any space for the reader’s intuition to engage and get to work. As Andrew Stanton says, the audience wants to work for their meal: if you give your reader a 2 and a 2, you can trust them to make the 4 you need.

  • What has happened: If when the scene concludes there’s lots of working-out and worrying over the implications, or worse still a comfortable resolution so everything’s fine again, the narrative tension of What will happen next? which (you hope) the scene has created will all be dissipated - unless, of course, the reader has good reason to know everything isn’t actually fine.

  • Why what has happened matters: Yes, thinking can be character-in-action too, but it needs to be thinking that leads to action, not mere rumination, worrying, analysing or explaining-to-self. Again, trust the reader to have got what matters from how your characters-in-action acted.

• But don’t scold yourself for finding so many of these explainy bits. Over-explaining is the very natural outcome of a first-draft process.

  • think of much of it as ‘notes to self’: they help you keep a grip on things, until in revision you know which words are essential, and which can go.

  • think of it as process-writing. You needed to write the full tea-making event, to find out that the bit that really matters is when the spout dribbles tea onto his new silk jacket and he explodes and asks for a divorce.

In sum, if your first editing question is always, ‘Does the story need this?’, your second question should be, ‘Does the reader need this?’ And don’t forget the third stage of the writing process: ‘Is this as persuasive as it could be?’.

If the best story of all is the one you induce the reader to write in their own head, then explaining more actually weakens their experience. In editing, you only want to give them what their imagination can’t do without, if it’s to recreate the story you’ve created.

Image credit: Steffen Wienberg on Unsplash