It's my short stories. I don't know what genre to put them in other than commercial fiction, although some of them will feel like memoirs. The audience is African-American, mainly women, 30's - 60's, intelligent enough to like reading that isn't pulp.

The goal:to show that middle-class black people have some very painful problems, just like everyone else - life isn't rosy once you have money.

TirzahLaughs wrote:

Just don't preach or info dump.   Good detail is detail that you don't notice until after your done reading.

I got accused of preaching last year and dumped the story. So I know not to preach. But there's an art to detail and I have NOT mastered it yet. I think part of the problem is how I read. I tend to skip the detail and head straight for the action. So I'm not good at writing it. I get annoyed by strings of adjectives and details of, say, someone's fingers, things that don't help me to know a person on the inside, details that don't advance the plot.

Perhaps I need to make a list of every detail that NEEDS to be known in order to understand the character, and find a way to weave it into the story.

Thoughts?

I have about 9 different books of short stories. I have been reading them in an effort to understand "good writing". These stories are supposedly some of the best, or some that fit a genre. Unfortunately, the stories I've read so far are so complicated and esoteric that you'd have to be studying literature to be remotely interested in them.

But some of them HAVE to be akin to what I write. I'll go back and look again.

A good reminder to put more effort into this. Like so many things in my life, I want it to be easy. It's NOT easy.

Thanks for giving me things to think about.

QWLauren35 wrote:

There seems to be a happy medium between elaboration and brevity. More words would be needed to fully develop a character, but fewer words are "better" in general. Is all editing essentially "shortening"?

I also get the feeling that it is better to describe with verbs than adjectives.

Last, I read that the only "acceptable" way to add "filler" to a story is to add an active scene that keeps the plot moving. Extra description is a poor way to fill a story.

Thoughts?

For me, brevity is the rule. I don't understand elaboration - why do you need to do this once the message is communicated? OK, sometimes it makes it "richer" but often I think it's done when writers don't know where to go next...as you say...filler. If you're going to fill, as you say, create a new scene that informs.

Even if you read Proulx (Brokeback Mountain), who I consider to be an "elaborate" writer - each sentence communicates a message, so in the end she's brief.

IMO, elaboration is the quick route to boring.

I can't believe nobody told QW that: BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT! Then again, I applaud everybody for steering clear of that cliche.

I assume what you wanna do, QW, is be able to say everything you wanna say in the fewest words possible. Right?

But isn't that anathematic to a WRITER? When we edit, we don't wanna excise... We wanna expound on and on and into infinity!

What you gotta do (I think) is TRUST your audience. If you're a middle class black woman, and you're writing AS and FOR middle class black females, then TRUST that your audience will pick up on the nuances without further explanation.

Of course, I don't follow my own advice. Here I am --ostensibly writing for an audience of underpriveliged, disenfranchised, minorities-- and yet my prose ends up being geared towards upper class European intellectuals... Go figure?

Cheers

QWLauren35 wrote:

I think part of the problem is how I read. I tend to skip the detail and head straight for the action. So I'm not good at writing it. I get annoyed by strings of adjectives and details of, say, someone's fingers, things that don't help me to know a person on the inside, details that don't advance the plot.

I think this is a very important thing to keep in mind when searching for the balance that works for you.  It's generally a good rule of thumb to avoid writing the kinds of stories that annoy you as a reader.  So if extraneous detail is not your thing, don't try to force it into your writing. 

There are writers who do an amazing job painting a complete & vivid picture in the reader's mind with just one sentence, in a way that never distracts the reader and lets the story move forward at a fast pace.  Payge Turner, who was on this site for a while, was a great example of this.  Unfortunately, she's since moved on to other things and I haven't quite found her equivalent in commercial fiction, though c.e. jones comes to mind as another author who has demonstrated this skill.

Perhaps I need to make a list of every detail that NEEDS to be known in order to understand the character, and find a way to weave it into the story.

Thoughts?

That's a good place to start; or perhaps you can approach it from the character's point of view:  What is it that they see/hear/feel/smell/touch in the world around them?  The extent to which they connect to their surroundings -- and what aspects of their surroundings they connect to -- can be an excellent character reveal.