Who is my audience? What am I trying to say? How much do I need to say?
It was easy when I was telling stories to my kids and their classrooms on Friday Reading Day. Lots. Period. The more the merrier. You don't say, "The ogre jumped from behind the tree." You say, "Barely able to hide behind the tree, the huge ogre watched the unsuspecting hiker... waiting.... for the perfect... moment.... to JUMP!!"
Yet when writing a technical manual, in the sentence starting the paragraph, the instruction is concise. "Left click on the frambusher to open it." The rest of the paragraph is an explanation of where to find the icon, why you need to open it, how long it takes to open and do its 'frambushing'.
Easy to make decisions in those instances. Or perhaps I just should have said, "Easy!"
The boggle comes when I sit down to write a story. How much information is too much? How much is not enough? (Of course, there are many other questions, but this is about brevity and verbosity.)
My solution is always to write more. Tell as much as I can.
Pump as much information into it as I can stand. Tell the story... make it flow... scene settings, background, character building, all of it. I want the reader to be able to visualize the story. I want the reader to be able to slip into the valence of the characters
Then, from a reader's point of view, I read... reread... and reread.
As I reread, I think about the person that might be reading the story. If the person is not a techy, should I use less tech information? If they are a techy, am I putting enough in there they can understand and not flame me for some inaccuracy? Am I 'teaching' a little new tech to someone?
Do I want to tell how the ogre was hiding? How he waited, smelling the air, dreaming of how the hiker would taste turning slowly over a barbeque spit? Or should I bypass all of that and simply say, "Crunching down on that last bit of well-seasoned leg bone, the ogre smiled to himself at how easy it was to hide behind the tree and catch the hiker."
I am a storyteller. I seem to have always been such.
If I'm writing about an Artificial Intelligence, do I need to explain what that is? In today's society, probably not. But wait, is it a part of the story to explain HOW the AI came to be?
How old are my readers? How educated are they? How much 'story' can I feed them and how much can be fantasy and how much can be fact? How much history and how much historical fiction?
I want to entertain, not write a tech manual. I've written enough of those through the years. Now it's time to have fun.
But, what does an editor want? And worse, what if the story never gets to an editor, which seems to be the case more and more for all authors. Professional Readers have a set list of things they have been told to look for. Even when an agent or editor reads the stories themselves, how many of them are getting used to just nixing the story when they hit the first grammatical error? I am beginning to think the list includes more negative things than positive things. So they reject the story three sentences in and never really see what kind of story they just rejected.
Agatha Christie, five years of continual rejections, more than $2 Billion in sales.
It took the insistence of an eight year old editor's daughter that she wanted to finish reading the book before J. K. Rowling was accepted after being told she needed to get a day job. +450 million sales.
Louis L'Amour, 200 rejections, +330 million sales.
Dr. Seuss, “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.” +300 million sales.
Zane Grey, “You have no business being a writer and should give up.” +250 million sales.
I'm not saying I'm in the league of these folks. Far from it, I'm quite certain. But, a couple things I do know for certain... I love to write, I love to tell stories, and editors seldom know what they are missing until it's too late.
To get back to the main topic, my solution to the question? Both. It's a story. Sometimes brevity works best and sometimes it's verbosity. Therefore, I shall continue to make some things longer and more detailed, just as I will continue to find a few things here and there that really do need to be shortened. I'll leave it up to the editor that selects my story(s) to do the final editing. Isn't that what they are really there for, after all?
At sixty-some rejections for three different manuscripts, I think I have a long ways to go before I give up. I've gotten some very nice comments and compliments from my readers.
I'll keep writing. Besides... the forth manuscript is almost done.
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