Monday, July 20, 2020

Writing tip #2 Don't Bore Your Reader

There is a place in this world for all sizes of books. Don’t bore your reader with all kinds of filler pages to make your book appear to be larger than it is.

It is perfectly fine if your story is meant to be a short story. If your story has a lot of detail, action, suspense or drama it is fine for your book to be a larger novel. What is not fine is to fill your pages with nonsense to make it look like your short story is a novel.

Examples:
Your character wants a glass of iced tea.

Don’t do:
Mindy got out of bed and walked toward the kitchen. She stopped in the hallway after spotting a small piece of paper on the floor. She bent down to pick up this less than an inch piece of paper that she assumed had fallen from the notebook she was carrying the night before. She tossed in in the trash as she walked to the kitchen for a glass of iced tea.  Mindy got a glass from the cabinet and walked over to the refrigerator. She put four ice cubes in the glass and then closed the freezer door. Then she opened the refrigerator and got the tea container and filled her glass.

See what I mean? None of that is needed. The reader doesn’t care that she saw a tiny piece of paper on the floor and why it was there and that she picked it up and then she threw it away. The reader doesn’t need a step by step play by of all of that. None of it is even relevant to the story. She was going to the kitchen to get a glass of tea.
Next issue; The reader doesn’t need to know exactly how many ice cubes she put in the glass. All this stuff is filler nonsense to make the book and story look longer. The reader is going to skip over this stuff.

What you should do:
Mindy lay there on her bed with her mouth dry. She got up and walked to the kitchen for a glass of sweet ice tea. She knew that was exactly what she needed in the hot Summer night.

So instead of all these lines of filler stuff that has no relevance to the story at all. You said the same thing in just a lot less lines.  In these three lines you gave detail. You told what she wanted. You told how she felt and nowhere in the story did we need all these lines of filler stuff to make the book longer.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YWB6VV/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0

In this romantic comedy Jack and Jade, who have been best friends since childhood are both dating all the wrong people. After a date they meet up and discuss how horrible it was. Their dates generally go from bad to worse. Jack has been on dates where the girl is marrying them on the first date and Jade has been on dates where the guy asks her to help him rob a bank. They continue on down this long road to love leaning on each other through all the wrong turns.

FREE BOOKS! Tommy The Snowman Had A Bad Day & The Angry Snowman

 FREE MARCH 22ND - MARCH 26TH GET THESE EBOOKS FREE AND IF YOU LIKE THEM YOU CAN BUY THE PRINT BOOK THAT HAS BOTH INCLUDED FOR YOUR KIDS. To...