Free This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley

because they are speaking a foreign language? (Maybe you don’t hear as well as you once did.) What kind of clothes are they wearing?
    These are more or less objective observations of the place one might be in. But now that person takes an action. Let’s say that he picks up a cup of coffee (by the handle or the body?) and drinks from it. Is the coffee hot? Tepid? Cold?
    The character is sitting across from someone, a woman he’s interested in. What is she wearing? How old is she? What is her expression? What irregularities are there in her skin?
    You could go on forever. Details are endless, and they will overwhelm your story unless you master them. Even the most interesting acts cannot bear the weight of too much detail.
    Let’s say that the man and the woman leave the public hall and go upstairs to the bedroom. They begin to make love. Their progress in this will seem endless if you record every action taken. He puts a hand on her shoulder. She looks away. He touches her forearm and notices a dark cloud out the north-facing window. She caresses his right cheek with the palm of her left hand. They stare into each other’s eyes.. . . Sixteen pages later, they’re getting ready for their second kiss.
    Details will devour your story unless you find the words that want saying.
    The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. The only details that should be put in any description are those that advance the story or our understanding of the character. (You see—repetition works.) So when the main character, Van, walks into the room, he’s nervous about talking to Rena, the woman he’s interested in. Maybe the fly manifests Van’s anxiety. He notices its lonely buzzing in the big empty space of the ceiling, by the pastoral scenes of the paintings on the wall, and onto the wedding ring, which glints like an amber fog light from his finger.
    You might use other details, but here again they should be used only to further story or plot, character development, or the mood of the scene.
    The room is warm. Van knows this even though he’s feeling chilled. He knows because of the three beads of sweat on Rena’s forehead. The murmuring of the men sitting two tables away makes Van nervous. He wonders what they’re saying. He tries so hard to make out their words that he misses what Rena has just said.
    The awareness of details comes into the novel via the experiences and emotional responses of your characters. Using this as your rule of thumb, you can cut out most extraneous facets in any scene.
    But there’s another level of description and condensation that you must be aware of—you should not confuse the reader’s understanding of character responses with overly ornate and ambivalent detail.
    Van was irate, angry, furious, out of his mind with rage.
    Here the fledgling writer is trying to build a mood by using three different words and one phrase that convey similar meanings. Each word is more powerful than its predecessor until we come upon a six-word saying to cap off the sentence.
    The problems with using this kind of language and structure to explain Van’s feeling are threefold. First, the words are at odds with one another. Is Van angry or out of his mind with rage? Is he furious or irate? Second, even if we accept all the words as a buildup to a kind of personified explosion, we still have to wonder at those aspects of the definition of each word that make what is being said a kind of repetition. It’s always best to give the reader one emotional state at a time to deal with. * The third problem with this description of Van’s fury is the question of who it is that’s giving us the information—even an omniscient narrator wouldn’t be so removed from the character’s heart as to use this objective, albeit strong, language. The description of Van’s anger feels like an out-of-kilter definition rather than a closely felt