Standard Advice Offered by Many Editors

“Move the story along,” they say. Is that advice valid? John Bowers offers his opinion.

Do you agree with him?

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Writing Advice These Days Is as Thick as Pine-Tree Pollen in Spring

You can find thousands of books, blogs, and articles on the subject, and Facebook writing groups abound that offer suggestions (some of them quite forcefully) on how you should write your novel. One of the more common suggestions I’ve come across is the following:

“If it doesn’t move your story forward … cut it!”

Sounds like pretty good advice, doesn’t it? I don’t disagree.

And yet … maybe there is more to this story than meets the eye (or as my five-year-old son once told me back in 1983 about a Transformers commercial he had seen, “Mordemencyeye”).

Stick to the Topic

Many writers, yours truly included, have a tendency toward verbosity. One of the hardest things I have had to learn is to cut back a little on the prose, especially when it becomes repetitive. Or, as a bookstore owner told me just last month, don’t “vomit” thousands of useless words. When a reader becomes involved in a story, he or she likely doesn’t expect the author to take off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the tale being told. For example, if you are writing a murder mystery, you probably shouldn’t have your characters engage in a five-page conversation about football. (If you’re writing a novel about football players, they probably shouldn’t go on ad nauseum about murder mysteries.)

Different genres have different expectations, of course; romances often wander all over the world because romance can happen anywhere, under any circumstance, whether it be on a sunny tropical isle or in a dank wartime basement during a bombing. Likewise, comedy has few limits because humor can be found everywhere, and science fiction has even fewer limits because the genre (and its sub-genres) are truly limitless. Genres vary.

But no matter the genre, it is essential to keep the story moving forward. Every scene should contribute to the overall tale. If you bore the reader, that reader may not finish your book, and is unlikely to purchase your next one. Keep that story moving forward!

However …

But what about this? What about that?

Okay, let’s talk about that. By “moving the story forward,” do you mean that every single word has to be about the plot? Does the character have no life of her own? Is the protagonist a robot who never sleeps, who never stops for an oil change?

The only reason I bring this up is that, while the concept of moving the story forward is sound, I fear that many newbie writers who are still groping in the dark may take the advice too literally. When you’re first starting out, listening with adoring ears to the advice of the “experts,” you tend to hang on every word. You are likely to grasp the first advice you hear and internalize it, never realizing there may be more to it, and perhaps you won’t accept advice from someone else who may be just as knowledgeable as that first sage you encountered. (After all, if it works for Stephen King, who am I to argue? If I just do everything he says, the way he says to do it, then I’ll make millions!)

Right?

Well … maybe.

Maybe not.

What works for one writer, no matter how successful, may not work for you or me. Each of us has to find our own voice. And while moving the story forward is critical, that doesn’t mean you can’t stop for breath once in a while, or a drink of water.

What Am I Talking About?

Life doesn’t always move in a straight line. When you work at a job, you are going to take an occasional break. Go to lunch, use the restroom, or (in the old days) step outside for a smoke. Life is full of diversions, most of them minor, that break up your day … but you still get the job done.

Your novel can have diversions, too.

For example — you might be in the middle of a very dramatic narrative. Tension can be building, the situation might be life and death, but you can insert a little humor. In fact, a little humor might be welcome at that particular moment. Like this scene from my novel Revolt on Alpha 2:

It’s only a brief moment in the narrative, and does nothing to move the story forward, but it accomplishes two things — it offers just a flicker of humor (because Walker is already wounded), and also tells you something about Kopshevar, who is a secondary character. Even under the direst of circumstances, he is a bit of a joker. (But in this particular scene, the humor ends there — Nick Walker takes that rifle into the bell tower, and the next thirty hours are not funny at all.)

There Are Other Reasons to Interrupt Your Story

Description is one.

I’ve been criticized for spending too much time on describing things, but other reviewers have said they can “see” my story unfold as if it were a movie. For that reason, I will not change my style. I love (most of) Robert Heinlein’s novels, grew up on them, but in my estimation he was weak on description. His tales were wondrous, but I always had a hard time visualizing his settings. Western author Zane Grey was just the opposite; you could read one of his novels and, even if you had never visited the Great American West, you knew exactly what it looked like. Grey may have spent too much time on description, but he was masterful at it.

Describing the scene might be interpreted as breaking up the story, of not moving the story forward, but I do it anyway because I love doing it, and I believe the reader benefits from seeing the setting in his mind. However, you don’t have to describe everything in sight. If you say “pine forest,” that’s probably enough, because everyone knows what a pine forest looks like. The same is true of a prisoner-of-war camp — anyone who has watched war movies already has a mental image of barbed wire and gun towers. In my novel Return to Sirius, I used this description:

This does nothing to move the story forward. What happens next will happen with or without the description, but I think it adds flavor to the scene and enriches the novel.

And Finally …

In the space available here, I can’t possibly enumerate all the valid reasons one might interrupt the story, but I will offer one more — character development.

Wooden characters (except for Pinocchio) are boring as hell. When you watch a movie, you aren’t impressed by someone who just stiffly repeats his lines. You want to see personality! The same is true in your novel.

Sometimes, in the middle of a hard-driving plot, you can’t always spotlight your character’s, er, character. You can do it with dialog to some extent; perhaps they use colorful language, or have an appealing accent (which can be difficult to write without pissing off the reader), but there is more to a character than that. Sometimes you have to take a break, put them in conversation with someone about something inconsequential, to give the reader a deeper understanding of what makes them tick. You might only need two or three paragraphs, something that does not move the story forward, to accomplish this goal, but I think it can be justified if done correctly.

In Victoria Cross: United Federation Attorney, Nick Walker’s girlfriend chats with a colleague on the elevator as they leave the courtroom. What she says has zero to do with the storyline, but gives us a deeper perspective of her dedication to her profession. In this snippet, she has just declared that prosecutors (including herself) have too much power:

She goes on to elaborate, but the point here is that interrupting the forward narrative is sometimes justified by helping us know the character better.

The Bottom Line?

A story is more than just a linear series of events. A story needs depth, which requires not only action, but well-developed characters and vivid descriptions. Taking a moment here and there to polish these elements is essential, and when you do that, your story is moving in the right direction.

Now stop listening to me and get back to that keyboard! Your audience is waiting.

© John Bowers

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John Bowers began writing at age 12 and was considered a prodigy by his English teachers. He wrote prolifically until his thirties, but life got busy and he took a decade off, returning to the keyboard in 1993. He is the author of the Nick Walker, United Federation Marshal series and the Starport series, all available on Amazon.

Now semi-retired, Bowers still works part-time as a computer programming consultant and spends his free time writing novels. He lives in Central California.

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