Bare Bones

If you’ve ever read any of my stories, I hope that they aren’t the worst you’ve ever seen.    I know individual tastes vary, but those of fiction editors vary maybe a little too much.  Stories written specifically for certain magazines rejected.  The word “subjective” always  slathered on like burn ointment.

Sometimes I wonder about the essence of storytelling.  It has changed over time as I found out when my friend Fantasia had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school.  She complained about the overly descriptive narrative that made the plot sometimes hard to follow.  I explained how gothic it was.  Even that didn’t help.

No doubt, over time, writing preferences change.  Or should I say reading preferences?  Many of us had to write descriptively in school.  When we carry it over into our fiction we find editors who don’t like our verbosity.  Flash fiction is all the rage in this internet culture of constant click-throughs.  Who has time to read a descriptive story?

For me, it is often the attempt to set the mood.  Feelings that define me are hard to put into words, and so I carefully engineer a metaphorical world that expresses those emotions.  I try to write scary and end up funny.  That’s okay, at least it’s descriptive.

Since I’m a self-taught writer (i.e., a reader), I wonder what the proper amount of description is.  Does a recipe or formula exist that I’ve somehow managed to overlook all these years?  Sometimes I read an entire novel without finding out what color the character’s hair was.  Or what she wore.

Bare bones writing—just the story, ma’am, just the facts—may make for gritty police drama, but one of the true joys of writing is the effort to put the ineffable into words.  Writing is the chance to show oneself for who one truly is.  That’s why I use a pseudonym.  Long live descriptive writing!

If there is a magic number, I wish I knew what it was.  How many adjectives per square inch?  How many laughs, tears, or frights should I put on the page?  Have I even reached you?  Hard to say.  Since most of my writing ends up in the slush pile hell of some editor’s inbox, I can at least express myself here.  And if you’re reading it, I won’t even know.  It’s a hard feeling to describe.