Novelists could learn a lot from children's literature

As I work on revising my next book now that the editor has returned it with her corrections, changes, and suggested improvements, I find myself adding content; my manuscripts often lengthen during the editing and revision phase. They don't lengthen by much, normally not more than a few hundred words. However, I've noticed that the clients' manuscripts I edit tend to be shortened, sometimes substantially so.

I attribute that to storytelling style and experience.

Some writers adhere to the idea that everything must be spelled out and thoroughly explained. Every nuance, advance in the story, thought, emotion, and action must be explained in detail to ensure the reader doesn't miss anything. These writers spoonfeed the reader every detail and leave nothing to chance.

The tendency to do that results from the writer trying to impose the images in his or her head onto the reader's mind. Unfortunately, storytelling doesn't work that way. Perhaps the closest one can come to that is to use similes and analogies and comparisons to commonly known people, places, and things, like the color of coffee, the smell of diesel exhaust, the taste of Coca-Cola, the feel of sand. Your character may resemble a young Sophia Loren or an aged Morgan Freeman.

I believe too much detailed explanation not only leads to boring writing with description that drones and halts the story in its tracks, but that it also leads to lazy readers.

Other writers make leaps in judgment, jump to conclusions, and otherwise skip over important aspects of the story that could use explanation, because those leaps, jumps, and skips leave readers wondering just what happened. What did they miss? This usually happens when the writer gets caught up in his or her own story and forgets that the reader doesn't have that inside knowledge of the plot or the characters. I've been guilty of that. (Luckily, I've got an editor who points out my lapses.)

Then there's a happy medium toward which we writers strive: that place where the reader has to exercise his or her mind while reading without losing interest or becoming confused. Sometimes a storyteller reaches that happy medium through omission or by inserting small clues to alert the reader as to what is or has happened in the story. These small clues allow the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks and makes the reader a participant in the story, rather than merely a bystander.

The best examples of this type of storytelling come from children's literature. An author must use simple words written sparely to convey a lot of meaning. Most novelists could learn a lot from an author of good children's literature, not the least of which is how to make every word justify its presence in the manuscript.

Good storytellers learn when to add detail and when to leave it out. Good storytelling often relies much upon what is not written. What's important to realize is that there are no hard boundaries between either extreme or the happy medium. They exist on a continuum as a matter of degree rather than distinct and separate categories.