“It’s not what you said, it was the way you said it.”
Every ex-girlfriend ever.
How you describe a room or a character is vital. This isn’t the same as voice, that’ll come later, I’m talking about moment to moment descriptions of objects, surroundings, sounds, smells. These are the brush by which you paint your world.
Here’s an example.
He closed the door quite quickly.
Or
He slammed it.
Which is more immediate, more impactful?
Which gave you a strong image, and which did you have to unpack?
80% of improving prose is one simple action.
Cutting unnecessary words.*
Until you’ve been writing long enough that you’ve got a grasp of your voice, this rule will be a guiding star towards simplicity, and efficiency on the page.
And headed towards writing lines like:
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
Faulkner
But lets step down from literary loftiness towards our lowly level. Here we can see how this works practically.
“She was quite tall and blonde and lovely, really just a strange out-of-time amazon drifted in from some far away shore.
Can work even better as:
“She was an amazon, drifted in from some far-away time.”
We’ve cut 10 words, and yet doesn’t that sound more poignant, more poetic?
This is part of why you’ve probably heard the advice to cut adverbs and replace them with stronger verbs: less words with more meaning is as close to objectively better as prose gets.
I heard stories of a comedian who’d sit at the back of a show, counting the syllables in jokes, cause if he knew he could get the same joke across in just one less syllable, it’d be funnier.
Case in point
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Pretty funny image, from the masterful, late, beyond-great Mr Terry Pratchett, but if we compare it to the example below:
“In the beginning there was absolutely, positively nothing at all. Then, all of a sudden, it exploded.
Isn’t that shite?
I cheated here a little, I admit, a lot of the joke comes from it’s brevity, but isn’t that the point?
All that being said, some writers who know their voice well will be quite eloquent with many uneccessary words, here’s a piece that’s meant to meander from Falkner’s As I lay dying:
“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.”
There’s a lot of words he could’ve cut here, a lot. But the passage is deliberately obtuse and convoluted to reflect the character’s mind.
You aren’t Faulkner… yet.
*Don’t shy aware from spending your word budget to establish tone or go to town on a piece of description though, if a metaphor works better than a strong verb, go for it. This is a sentence by sentence rule, I’m not saying that a 300k book is worse than a 30k one.
Even in dialogue, as you’ll see in the next tier, this same rule is key.
The Fellowship Of Ink 