Making your story a page turner – part 3

A post about omitting unnecessary words. And an announcement.

Hello! This post is about the thing I enjoy by FAR the most in life – omitting unnecessary words from stories. But before I go into that, there’s something I need to tell you.

I’m about to set off on a Psychopath Test anniversary tour of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It’s very exciting – there’ll be mystery guests – but it’s also long and grueling. My son told my wife he thinks at some point I’m going to hate it and go crazy, but she reassured him, “Don’t worry. If he does, he’ll be a long way away.”

I wish I could remember who it was, but some big theatre star like Maggie Smith once said something like, “When you’re going on stage every night, don’t do ANYTHING during the day. The whole day should all be about the two hours you’re on stage.”

Hence my announcement: I’ll be putting this newsletter on hiatus until early December. I’ll pause everyone’s payments in a few days. Which means that if you want to became a paid subscriber now you’ll get access to the whole archive and chat and you won’t be charged again for seven weeks. I MAY still post things, but I don’t want to feel I have to in case I’m too exhausted, hence the freezing of the payments. But I'll be back at the beginning of December!

So …omitting unnecessary words.

In 1996, I read George Saunders’ brilliant debut short story collection, ClvilWarLand In Bad Decline.

The whole thing knocked me over, but one paragraph in particular - from his story The Wavemaker Falters – ingrained itself in my brain and taught me more than almost anything about how to write.

Well, from Kurt Vonnegut I’d already learnt the power of abrupt tonal shifts. I mean: Slaughterhouse Five is a novel about the WW2 firebombing of Dresden in which the lead character is kidnapped by space aliens and displayed in a zoo with a porn star called Montana Wildhack. Reading Vonnegut taught me that if you have humor crash up against horror, it can make the comedy funnier and the horror more horrific. People shy away from these kinds of tonal shifts – they’re worried about getting it wrong and coming over as facetious or glib or offensive - but I say as long as you’re aware of the moment you need to STOP being funny, it can be very powerful.

But from George Saunders I learned about brevity - about how breathtaking it can be to omit unnecessary words.

In The Wavemaker Falters, a man who operates a wave machine at a waterpark loses concentration and a child accidentally dies in his machinery. Here’s the paragraph that had such an impact on me:

And then the story moves on. To my recollection, NOTHING in that paragraph is ever referred to again. We never again hear of him doing secret chores to mitigate his guilt. George Saunders could have written a WHOLE NOVEL about a man who does that, but instead he gave us that huge and complicated and funny and devastating idea in a tiny number of short and simple sentences. A novel in a paragraph. It just blew me away.

With superfluous words, your reader will feel like they’re in a car with a slightly faulty engine. It’ll judder and judder. Even one superfluous word can feel like an engine misfiring. Whereas how smooth was that George Saunders paragraph? It’s like ice skating.

Honestly, it’s happening to me with the book I’m currently writing. It’s like magic! You write a sentence. Then you go back to the same sentence the next day and with a fresh eye you realize you can express the same thought in fewer words. And if you go back to it the day after, with another fresh eye, maybe you’ll find even more unnecessary words to omit. Sometimes you’ll go too far and your sentence will feel too truncated. Then you put back a word or two.

I do that every day for months and months. I go over every paragraph, over and over, every day, maybe 100 times, tweaking this word, moving this comma, omitting every unnecessary word. I spend a LOT of time inside thesauruses. Does that word express exactly what I mean? Which synonym means EXACTLY what’s in my head? Is that word too big? Too small? Is it overstating my case? And if it is, could it be funny to overstate?

And on and on until one day I read it over and there’s nothing left I want to change. Every sentence reads just right.

What we’re trying to achieve, I think, is something that the supreme court judge Olive Wendell Holmes once said:

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

I think that should be written above every writing desk. We’re trying to take the most complicated ideas, and reduce them to their smallest and simplest number of words. When you distill and distill like that, a real power emerges.

Let me give you a stupid example from my own work. There’s a story in my collection Lost At Sea about me hanging around backstage at Deal or No Deal, watching the strange, almost cult-like dynamics between Noel Edmonds and the contestants:

Jim the contestant carer is forever giving motivational talks. We're getting about four every day.

"GROUP CHEER!" Jim constantly yells, his eyes aflame.

I wonder if this is in any way because of Noel Edmonds' famous antipathy towards negativity. Noel writes in his recently published self-help book, Positively Happy, that he can't abide negativity in the workplace. Noel hates negativity. He even advises readers, on page 88, to dump their sexual partners if they are too negative. I can't help thinking that, if I were Noel Edmonds' lover, he would dump me.

"But surely a bit of negativity makes you - you know - interestingly spiky and sassy," I suggested to Noel earlier, during a break from filming.

"I simply will not get involved with people who are negative," Noel replied. "I won't tolerate people in the workplace who are negative. I like realistic people, but negative people? No. Just get rid of them."

"I have a habit of being a bit negative sometimes," I said. "I'd hate my wife to read Positively Happy and dump me as a result."

"Then be careful," Noel said, looking me in the eye, "because she might."

I was and remain very proud of the sentence ‘Noel hates negativity.’ That’s a lot conveyed in three words.

By the way, my favorite Noel Edmonds quote from the story is this:

I visit Noel in his Winnebago. It is parked deep within the Endemol complex, near a dried-up river. Inside, it is very luxurious, all cream leather seats. Les Dennis's far smaller and less deluxe Winnebago is parked next to it. Les Dennis is filming a Channel 5 game show called Speculation in another studio.

"Les Dennis can have the big Winnebago when he gets the ratings we get," Noel says.

Every word matters. Every punctuation mark too. There’s a famous Isaac Babel quote about writing: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

It’s all about precision. I’ve always thought of writers as being like sculptors. You’ve amassed your big block of marble by convincing people to talk to you, meeting them, having adventures, transcribing the interviews, and now it’s time to start chipping away at it, turning it into the most perfect version of itself.

I’ll even think about syllables, about the rhythm. If two words work perfectly but one has fewer syllables, I’ll choose the shorter one. It’s like making a dollhouse. The same goes for podcasts, by the way. I make my BBC show Things Fell Apart and my Audible shows exactly the same way.

There’s another reason why it can be so powerful. I love the idea of writing as being like a partnership between the writer and the reader. If you omit all unnecessary words you get to a place where the reader is reading between the lines, figuring things out for themselves.

Around 2015, there was suddenly a big move against this style of writing - writers leaving things unsaid - in case they were misunderstood and got shamed for it. Remember that Justine Sacco tweet from my book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed:

She was trying a South Park / Randy Newman type joke mocking her own privilege - and mocking American ignorance in general - by doing a comically exaggerated version of it and leaving the true meaning unsaid. But while she was asleep on the plane the entire world misunderstood (some of them willfully if you ask me), her life exploded, and that kind of writing abruptly fell out of fashion.

But I’ve always loved that style. I thought Justine Sacco was just doing a pretty bad version of it, unlike the Randy Newman song My Life Is Good, which does it MUCH better.

If you’re forced to explain exactly what you mean, you lose that partnership with your reader, so I’m glad we aren’t quite as uptight about all that now.

Ok that’s possibly it until the beginning of December! It’s been really fun and I look forward to resuming.

Let me leave you with a recommendation: Bob Odenkirk playing Charles Manson as Lassie on the Ben Stiller sketch show. As with some of my other recommendations, I found this incredibly funny AFTER taking edibles, so if you don’t like it, it’s THC’s fault.

See you on the other side, in December!

Godspeed, Jon.

Jon