Lucid Writing Advice III

If the scene is the vein, then the narrative is the blood of the manuscript. The creation of good narrative will make any story a good read. Fantasy writers fall into a common trap by given pages upon pages of inactive narrative as the opener of their manuscript, especially in novels. To the writer, this may seem a show of artistic ability, to the reader it loses his or her interest, and more than likely they will search desperately for another book.

There’s only one sure way to avoid this: don’t do it! And there are red flags that should alert you that your creating slow paced narrative. Here are the most prominent of those red flags below:

• When you read inactive narrative, and finally get back to active narrative, you have the sense that all those words really did nothing.
• Your talking about a character, then suddenly diverge to talk about a war that made him who he was today, and then diverge again to name the start of that war, and yet again to talk about the people who fought in that war.
• You describe everything at once, then the narrative becomes confusing as you describe them again as you enter a scene of dialogue.

The above are just examples, there are countless more. Examine the opening of your manuscript. If you see that you have placed hundreds of words of description in the readers lap-delete it- and start where the action is. There a common maxim in writing of any sort: Show don’t tell.

But this doesn’t mean that you have to destroy every piece of inactive narrative in our manuscript. If you find that such narrative is vital and essential then you should keep it. But otherwise, it’s a red flag to be burned.

I once wrote a story with an cast of characters that was fit for Hollywood, and more than six of them were important. With more than one main character you have an abundance of scenes of each character to balance. To many scenes, which diverges attention away from your main character too long will turn the story into a biography of whoever is in the story. To remedy this problem, you’ll have to become a friend of the delete key. Don’t be afraid to use it, and delete all those unnecessary scenes, and if you have to, delete some of those characters. Sliming your cast down will prevent you from having to remember what happened in the previous scene at one character. The worse thing you could do is forget a scene. The reader could read it, like it, and find to their disappointment that the character was locked in jail, but nothing described that he go out. The sorceress and the mage reached the castle, but we are ignorant if they even made it inside.

You don’t want to forget anything. If you find yourself saying " Oh no, I forgot about that," and brainstorming a way to write the scene and make it relevant to future scenes-you have too large a cast.