My number one weakness as a technical writer* is, and has long been, wordiness. I just take too blasted long to say what I'm saying. And reading my old (fiction) stuff now, it's crystal clear what the primary symptom is: I just would not stop holding the reader's hand.
* Writing skills, in my opinion, break down into two categories: technical skills (grammar, structure, clarity) and storytelling skills (characterization, pacing, dialogue). Conciseness is my technical weakness; pacing is my storytelling weakness. I'm working on it.
What I mean is... OK, here's a typical example:
"Omegas," said Alavom, sitting up straighter the way a boy will when excited.Reading that made me cringe. Reading that would make you, the reader, roll your eyes and find something else to read, because I'm wasting your time and insulting your intelligence. It should read:
"Omegas," said Alavom, sitting up straighter.The reader is not a moron. He is capable of inferring for himself what it means when a teenage boy suddenly perks up while listening to a conversation. If the reader was a moron, he would be reading something more appropriate for his level, like Twilight.
The one rule of writing I'm trying very hard to enforce upon myself is the first of the six rules George Orwell laid down in Politics and the English Language: "If you can cut a word out, always cut it out." I'm still not very good at that (as this very post evidences), but I'm working on it. Wasting seven words explaining to the reader something he already knows is a double whammy: It wastes space, and it interferes with the story's flow.
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