The TOO LONG and SHORT OF IT
In his now-famous Ten Rules of Writing, the inimitable Elmore Leonard listed as his final rule: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” As an adjunct to that, the wonderful memoirist and novelist Joshua Mohr once added: “Nobody skips dialogue.” To those two dictums, I humbly submit a third, noted by me in The Art of Character: “Less is more, unless it’s not enough.”
Readers do not read to learn about your experience or bathe in your insights. They don’t even read for your characters’ experiences and insights, at least not directly. Instead, they read to have their own experiences and insights.
Our job as writers is not to explain everything for the reader. It is to provide just enough information—in the form of dramatic scenes with crisp, evocative dialogue, as well as insightful self-reflection on the part of the characters—so the reader can imagine the rest for herself. Overburdening—worse, assaulting—the reader with inessential verbiage undermines her ability to engage the text with her own imagination.
Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut rule or bright shining line between just enough and too much. Every decision to cut or keep needs to be guided by the need to serve the story and
