Smooth Reading

A book I'm reading now reminds me of how important it is to make novels read smoothly, without snags or points where the reader needs to slow down. Rough spots pull the reader out of the story, and they aren't able to live it with the characters the way any good writer wants. Let me give you some examples.

This writer uses way too many adjectives. She's doing a lot of things right, like limiting adverbs, but she's overdoing some other things. Almost every noun has one or more adjectives, and most of them have about three. Although I can tell she's spent time choosing the best ones, this is overkill, bogs the story down, makes the writing too wordy, and is unnecessary. Use a few clear descriptives and trust your readers to get the picture.

Then, she seems to work hard to pull in unusual verbs, which can be good, but they should fit. I find some of her choices laughable, if not irritating, since they raise too many questions. For example, how is a T-shirt etched? And a truck came slowly munching up the drive. This is just plain trying too hard and failing miserably. I'm not a fan of Stephen King, but he would agree that trim writing is much easier to digest.

__________________________________