How do I make my writing less wordy?

Then practice.

 

I think the OP is going to need something a wee bit more substantial so they know what it is they need to practice. But there have already been some good suggestions upthread.

 

I have the same tendency to overwrite. I got this advice from someone else:

 

My problem was - and still is when it comes to fiction - under-writing rather than over-writing. The above advice is sound enough, but if I was to use this method, my meagre 500-word chapters would become even more meagre 250-word chapters.

 

Yeah, true enough, but my under-writing stems from a lack of content rather than an economical writing style. That’s always been my problem and pretty much why I gave up. Telling a story in 90,000 words when I could tell the same in 20,000 has always been the reason for my failure.

 

I think there's a happy medium between over-writing and over-paring. As Phillip Pullman said, not that long ago, when asked about writing a 500-word synopsis, "If I could have told my story in 500 words, I wouldn't have bothered writing a novel."

I'm of that mind myself. Writers such as Elmore Leonard are not my favourite to read. What is missing for me is the pace and emotional content that gets me immersed in the story. I'm no more immersed in Elmore Leonard's short novels (and I've just been reading a collection of his) than I am in a newspaper story. The stories are being competently told, but I'm left unmoved and I won't remember them.

Short novels, such as The Great Gatsby and Breakfast At Tiffany's (written by a man who usually wrote short stories to a high standard) are immersive enough to keep my interest because the scope of the story is not all that broad. The style itself isn't truncated—in fact, in the case of Gatsby, the details are lush. I reckon these aren't so much short novels as long short stories, and for me they work.

I don't think you could crush Lord of the Rings into a volume the size of The Great Gatsby, and have it make the same impact on the readers who love it. The lure of The Lord of The Rings was the slow, immersive pace of the thing and the richly imagined world where it took place. It was a complicated story, and took place over quite a lengthy period of time. We happy readers went on a long, anxious journey with those characters ...shared their worries, their successes, their grief, their peril, their near-failure and ultimate victory. There is nothing wrong with that kind of writing. (There were some scenes and some elements that could have been cut ...Tom Bombadil, the long ballads, etc. Those weren't examples of rambling word choices or overly detailed sentences and paragraphs, but a tangential plot issues which could have been removed without hurting the story at all.)

However, I have just finished reading Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope. My god, THAT is over-writing! The kind of over-writing that made me grit my teeth in order to carry on. Trollope was writing for a different time and a different audience, of course, and that sort of self-aware meandering was the fashion. The story itself was interesting enough and quite amusing overall, but I would not recommend imitating his style. It really is dated and overly coy.

 

The default response when I try to explain my under-writing is to say I’m probably trying to stretch a short story to novel length, and while I dare say that may have been true with some of my ideas, I’ve had others with good scope that a good writer could have stretched to doorstopper proportions. Over-writing is easy to fix, it’s nothing to worry about. Under-writing, however, is a real problem.

 

How are your stories conceived? Do you 'think them up' in terms of constructing a plot and characters? Or do you daydream them? Sit and imagine the scenes they're in, etc? Imagine conversations, and their reaction to events, etc?

 

Usually from a single, ‘what if/imagine if’ idea. Often from a desire to create a type of novel that doesn’t seem to exist (maybe for good reason) such as a plotless, road trip adventure.

 

You might want (if you don't already) to take time before you write (but after you have thought about the story idea for a while), to sit and imagine your story. Pretend you are watching a movie (where you are a participant. You are IN that movie.) Try to take it out of the intellectual realm (thinking of a good plot, thinking up what characters will fulfill that plot, etc) and start to 'experience' the story. Then write what you have experienced, including the sights, sounds, smells, emotional highs and lows, likes, dislikes, fears, anticipations and satisfactions that you experienced when living within your story world—inside a character's head—for a while.

I think the ability to experience what you are writing is the key to producing richer stories. Expanding the emotional experience of the reader is a good way to get and keep their attention—but it's difficult to do that if you don't emotionally experience the story yourself. If it just boils down to telling the story in a straighforward, efficient manner—this happened, that happened, the end—you get the facts of the story out there, but the reader won't find it easy to share the experience. It might be a great story idea, but it can leave the reader unmoved.

Not to mention, daydreaming is fun! And if you're a writer, that's a good excuse to be doing it a lot.

 

That all sounds like a very good approach, @jannert, but I’m resisting the urge because it can only end in frustration and I’ll end up hating the story and it’s characters, as I have with every attempt I’ve had at writing a novel.

 

Maybe you're just trying too hard to get something workable. It's annoying that ...the more you work on something the more it seems to slip away. I know the feeling, to some extent.

I think sometimes it can take ages between wanting to write a story—even a particular story—and getting to the point where you actually write it. As long as you're not being driven by assignment, maybe just ease off the pressure and enjoy just making up stories?

Here's a trick that helped me. Pretend to be telling the story to a person you know—somebody who will like what you write—and start 'telling' it to them in your head. How would they take it? Make them your spellbound (not critical) audience. What would you say or do to get them on the edge of their seat? I broke through my 'can't really write a story' barrier by pretending I was telling the story to my younger sister. It was amazing how easy it was to make the words come out in story form.

There was one pitfall I discovered with this method though. Age. I pretended to be telling the story to my sister when she was young, back at the age when I DID tell her stories. Consequently my first draft came out with a more naieve YA tone than I wanted. So I had to adultify the tone during the edits. That was bizarre. I'll need to tell her the next one as an adult!

 

@jannert - You know that sounds like it would work for me. Such a simple approach but one I’ve never considered.

 

@OurJud, keep writing poetry at least--I want to read more things like your blossom and sea poems.

 

Thanks, @Friedrich Kugelschreiber, I shall certainly try if ever inspiration strikes. I’ll say the same back, too, as I’ve not noticed any entries from yourself of late.

 

We both seem to be in the same boat.

 

I'd start with reading Ernest Hemmingway. Fact is that what you read will influence how you write, so reading "hard-boiled prose" will likely help you with getting rid of excess wordiness in your own prose.

You can also read Tolkien. He is lot word-ier than Hemmingway, but he generally does not have useless stuff.

And if you are a gardener as opposed to architect, you can even use your own writing for inspiration: look at that utterly unnecessary detail you included and imagine how you can make it necessary. Though you should probably be careful with that, so as not to end up with an unholy mess of a plot.

EDIT:

I do not think ballads could have been removed without hurting the novels. Major draw of Tolkien's work in general (not just Lord of the Rings) is that the world itself feels alive. As I have mentioned on another forum, world itself is a character. It is living, breathing... and all that "plot-unnecessary" stuff? It is crucial for making the world feel so alive. Ballads do not help plot progression, but they sure help reader gain sense of history in the world.

You may want to read this to better understand the issue:
https://www.academia.edu/11244346/Archaeology_and_the_Sense_of_History_in_J_R_R_Tolkiens_Middle_earth

 

This is something I also struggle with in my writing. I tend to craft sentences which are far more complex than they need to be. My solution has been to re-read my writing and eliminate any spots which are unnecessarily wordy without changing the meaning.

"He had been trading with the Arkirians up the river, not that they had many goods to sell, but the new merchants from Daelia proved to be a much more lucrative market."
OR
"The Arkirians up the river had little to sell him, but the new merchants from Daeilia were a more lucrative market."

The meaning of the sentence doesn't change. In both cases we know a man traded with Arkirians up a river, then Daeilian merchants arrived and had more to sell. The only difference between the two is that the second sentence implies trade with the Daeilians while the first makes it explicit.

 

I've been thinking about this a lot.

In some ways, the first actually reads less wordy to me.

In the second, we get exposition about one group living up the river, and another group being new (just traveled here I guess) and having an abstract yet undervalued commodity. All of that is just exposition about the world and accomplishes only one thing--it tells me why the Daeilians are worth noticing. The fact that their arrival is saving the MC from a bad trade deal could be understated, and bringing that fact out might be worth doing.

The Arkirians, the fact they live up river, and even the fact that the Daeilians are "new" is all information that I'm going to forget almost immediately because it doesn't seem anchored in anything that matters (minus context earlier in the story). So, the second version of what you wrote only accomplishes a single thing: telling me why I care about the Daeilians.

In the first, you have this bit of, "not that they had many good to sell," which sure, could be shortened to something like, "not that they had shit," or whatever, but what it does do it provide some character voice. We get a little of the main character's dismissive attitude, which is lost in the second version. So, this first version of what you wrote accomplishes two things: characterization and context for why Daeilians matter. Depending on what led up to it, you could even work it to provide some amount of sympathy or regret for the Arkirians, or disgust from the reader that the MC is dismissing them.

Getting more than one of character, plot, description, and action out of every sentence might not be possible, but you did get a minimum of 2 from the first version, and I think that is the quality that makes something seem like a faster read.

In this above version, I get across description (a stinking river that is associated with the Arkirians), I am specific, rather than abstract, about trade goods, I am dismissive of the Arkirians (preserving character voice), I provide context for why the Daeilians matter (using the word stuck to characterize how they are saving him from a bad trade deal, and showing his motivation). The combination of all those characteristics is going to make it feel denser, and therefor read faster, than the simple statement of truths--even if the simple statement uses fewer words.

tl:dr I think your first version is about twice as good and fine to read. If all you managed to do was get a little character voice in every line of description or exposition, you'd be onto something good.

 

It might help is you post a paragraph (or two) that you think is too wordy. Then you can see how others might pare it down.

 

I don’t tackle the overuse and redundancies until I’ve been through a couple of beta readers.
When I go after the errant verbiage, I challenge the individual word. For instance, I pulled out over nine hundred of the menacing word ‘that.’ And when I went after the overused word of ‘was’ I often found it tied to a passive phrase. When I see the word ‘it,’ I ask myself, what is ‘it’ supposed to be?

 

That's a lot.