Critiquing is Hardest by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Writing is hard. Editing is harder. Critiquing is hardest.

I once told a guy who asked me to critique his “chapter” that it read more like a synopsis of a novel then a chapter of book. He refused to talk to me again. And I thought I was being gentle. I did tell him he had a good concept, but that he needed more practice with showing the story.

Now I’m faced with the dilemma of an excellent novel with too much detail in the fight scenes. I’m talking literal blow by blows, but I have very few fight scenes in my stories, and certainly no battle scenes, I’m not exactly sure I’m the right person to tell this author to pare it down a little. There were spots so detailed it’s boring.

Yeah, I’ve done that (not in a fight scene), back before I learned better. I just never realized until reading this unpublished novel what all my friends, and Konnie, had been talking about. I’d never had to read someone else’s far too detailed scene, and there is an enormous difference between writing such a scene and reading it.

Back when I made this mistake, I thought the more detailed it was, the easier it would be for the reader to “see” the scene. I couldn’t be more wrong! The more a story is bogged down in details the harder it is for the reader to “see” the scene in their head. I found myself skimming over such sections in the novel I'm critiquing, I just couldn’t handle it, which also meant I wasn’t helping the author fix the issue.

It also made me eternally grateful to a friend who once helped me edit two pages of description down two paragraphs. Konnie knows the scene. I was trying to show the reader one hideous room, in detail. Konnie even said it was boring and that it took too long. In writing, general descriptions go a long way, but you also must have descriptions.

Anton Chekov has a famous quote about not telling the reader the moon was shining but rather show the glint of moonlight on broken glass. Or something like that. Description does take more words than simply telling, but it doesn’t have to take up a whole page or more. Limit it!

The trick is give the reader enough detail that they can fill in the rest on their own. The reader doesn’t need minute descriptions of a scene or the actions of the characters, just general descriptions. And the reader certainly doesn’t need a blow by blow of a fight scene.

I have one where the hero’s dogs come to the rescue of the heroine, and about all I have is them jumping on the bad guy and clamping their teeth into him, then the hero comes running and the bad guy gets slammed into the wall and the hero gets in his face and tells him he’s fired and to get out.

And I think that’s the longest fight scene I have in any of my stories. Earlier in that same story the hero was in altercation with his brother, and all the hero did was slug the idiot and walk away.

I do have a couple altercations in the novel I’ve been editing the last few months, but while in one I mention one of the secondary characters “throwing punches” I do not mention in detail every punch, and the only mention I have of who he is fighting is calling them “the miscreants.” We’re talking about one paragraph in a scene that starts with the victim screaming in terror and the good guys running into the fray and ends with the miscreants being carted off by the police.

I could have gotten a lot more detailed, but what more was needed? The heroine’s cousin was fighting hard and connecting only with the miscreants and not with the hero or his family, who also entered the fray. Enough said, beyond later mentioning the black eyes a few of the miscreants ended up with.

In the other fight scene, the fight itself is a couple small paragraphs, leading into it, and the aftermath takes longer. Its not that I don’t have details in the fight scenes, I just don’t have minute detail.

I didn’t need to give a blow by blow, because a blow by blow would have been too tedious to read. And tedious detracts from the story. None of us want that, especially the readers.

The problem is how do you tell a talented aspiring author they need to cut the detail without discouraging them from writing? Anyone?

Happy Writing everyone. 😊