Stephen King and Unnecessary Words

Debra L Schubert's recently posted (here and here) about Stephen King's On Writing, an interesting book to struggle with, and one from which I have already posted a short excerpt over on White Flow
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Here's one of the key ideas she pulled out:

7) Eliminate ALL unnecessary words. Seriously, all of them. This is different than "Kill your darlings" (which SK did NOT pen, btw). This refers more to the excess words we writers place in sentences because we're so darn smart, lazy and enamored with description.

This idea is very dangerous if you misunderstand it. Sure, eliminate words that don't do anything. Pay close attention to intensifiers like "very" and "excessively", which often weaken the construction of the sentence they are in. Pay attention to meaningless verbal tics, to avoid... like... extra STUFF... that... like... slows down the STORY.

On the other hand, look at popular authors like George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling -- and, ahem, Stephen King -- and tell me, please tell me, that there are no words that an editor could cut if she wanted to...? Tell me that every single word and paragraph is there in service to the story...?

It just ain't so. Words do not merely impart meaning. They also add to cadence, to flow, to the sound of the sentence in our mental ears, to meter, to flavor. So-called extra words can be useful to calm the pacing during a reaction scene, or to give a sensation of floating to the reader.

WORDS DO THINGS!

Words are exceedingly delicious. Make your sentences tempting, not just "sufficient".

Hat tip Spy Scribbler.


Oh, King also made a dubious differentiation between plot and story. Which, I believe, is a factor in why his novels are so long.

White Flow from Rosina Lippi

Crackling hot off a sparkly email, I just put up a new post on the White Flow blog by Rosina Lippi, author of Tied to the Tracks and Homestead, among six other novels in print.

Here's a teaser -

...
And there’s a glimmer, very faint. It's appeared so gradually you’re not sure how long you’ve been seeing it. Now it's a faint line in the darkness, and then, more slowly, intersecting that line, another one. A corner. A window? A door?
...