Why sensory tags and stage directions are ruining your writing (and costing you readers)
Pitting Colleen Hoover against Raymond Chandler and Justin Torres against Dan Brown to see who writes action best.
Hello writer friends.
I’d originally planned this post for yesterday, but then there was a dumpster fire raging online that I had strong thoughts about. I shared my thoughts about the Cait Corrain sitch here if you’d like to stick some s’mores into that particular fire.
But now back to our regular programming!
I have a confession. When I’m writing commercial fiction (by which I mean fiction that I hope a lot of people will read), I get bogged down in what I call “stage direction” prose. In my dialog tags, especially, people are doing too much while they take in information.1 It’s only in revision that I’m able to whittle down sensory details to what’s essential.
Case in point, to get to a sentence like:
“We’ll live to see another day,” he said, while tugging closed the curtain.
I probably started out with a clunker like:
“We’ll live to see another day,” he said, while tugging closed the curtain and using his free hand to reach for his cocktail.
The first example, to my mind, is interesting and visual. The second is bulky and stage-direction heavy. In today’s post, we’re going to see how to avoid stage-direction writing in which the prose prioritizes what a character is doing physically over the emotion of the scene.
This feels like a timely post because—for whatever reason—I’ve recently been reading manuscripts that are overly physical to the detriment of story. If you’ve ever taken a class with me, you’ll know I’m big on visceral writing and describing the way that things smell, taste, feel, et cetera. But sometimes, we can get so caught up in insisting how a character is physically experiencing something that we force the reader right out of the piece.
It’s hard to explain this craft pitfall without using real examples, so buckle up for those examples. I’ll first share words by the novelist Michelle Hoover who has experienced this same problem in her students’ writing, then we’ll pit famous writers against each other to see who writes action best.
I’m hoping that this article will show you:
How to edit your writing for flow and emotional impact.
How to make your readers feel like they are a part of the action instead of a passive observer.
How to make your writing feel more polished and assured.
How to write action sequences that feel vivid and stressful (in a good way).
To do this, we’ll be pitting Colleen Hoover against Raymond Chandler and Dan Brown against Justin Torres.
Ready? (She asked, while typing on her keyboard and staring at the snow falling outside her office window.)
Let’s go ;)
Why people write stage-directiony prose without understanding how it feels to read this kind of writing:
A few weeks ago,
published the following as a note: