If, like me, you’re the sort of person who spends a lot of time online reading other people’s thoughts about writing craft, a) I’m sorry, and b) you’ve probably noticed how much writing advice is focused on streamlining. Cutting word counts, killing your darlings, combining scenes in the name of efficiency. Removing anything extraneous – anything that doesn’t serve the plot. If you’re not that sort of person, a) congratulations and b) you’re just going to have to take my word for it.

For beginning writers, at least in the genres I write, this is usually sound advice. My earliest drafts went nowhere because they had pages and pages of characters sitting around in pubs talking, and very little that actually happened. They were dull, and all the pretty sentences in the world couldn’t fix that. 

But is the cutting mindset still useful once you’ve mastered the basics of writing something propulsive and coming up with a plot that moves? I’m not so sure.

The reason this is on my mind is that I’ve noticed a number of the recent, big SFF books I’ve read have a kind of… thinness to them. I don’t mean in terms of page count. Most of them are around a respectable 400 pages. But they’re so slick and sleek I feel like I’m watching a stylish action movie, not reading a book. Plot events zip along, everything is wrapped up neatly at the end, and nothing remains unexplained or floating, to niggle at the back of my mind. Anything that initially looks like friction, an interruption in the smooth story-fabric, turns out to be a plot-relevant design feature. 

There are no knobbly bits. It’s all a little too clean and tidy, and as a reader, there’s not much to hold onto, to let me immerse myself in the world and characters a little longer. The books end up feeling oddly slight.

The flipside of these neat and overly-engineered fictions is the endless filling-in of gaps. Smoothing the surface with filler instead of filing down the knobbly bits, so to speak. 

Think of the very first Star Wars movie. All those little asides and visual details that hinted at a bigger universe without having any impact on the plot. Watching it, did you need a map of Mos Eisley or a taxonomy of every species hanging out in the cantina? Did you have a burning desire to know what the Kessel Run was? Probably not. But now there are endless spin-off shows and movies explaining every little plot lacuna, expounding on the backstories of minor villains and making sure we know what our old favourites got up to next. And this ends up having the same flattening impact as too little detail. Everything still feels engineered – in this case, to head off the overinvested Xitter fan triumphantly yelling “Plot hole!” The goal seems to be the same: seamless, frictionless story product.

Of course, I’m being a touch hyperbolic here. These tendencies crop up, to some extent, in otherwise good work. But once I’d noticed them, it was impossible to un-notice.

So, how am I trying to combat this in my own work? I try to bear in mind the stories I love which feel richly textured – as though there are lives and histories going on beyond the edges of the main plot, which matter just as much as those of our heroes. Those where layers of material culture are hinted at, impacting the feel of everyday life even where they’re not the stuff of plot. 

I’m thinking of the Ribs – remains of a giant long-dead creature – which stand in Miéville’s New Crobuzon, emanating low-level doom and hinting at layers of deep time stretching back far before anything that happens in the Bas-Lag novels. It’s a detail that lingers in my mind nearly twenty years after reading Perdido Street Station, though it contributes little to the plot.

Or, for a real world-set example, take one of my favourite books, Mary-Ann Constantine’s Star-Shot. Set in a lightly alternate version of Cardiff, the book’s main conceit is the appearance of mysterious – and deadly – pockets of unexplained silence around the city, and the disparate group of characters who come together to fix it. 

But they spend almost as much time wandering around looking at exhibits in the National Museum as solving weird phenomena. The scene that I return to most often in the novel is one where Lena, a former microbiologist from Syria who now works as a cleaner, visits the museum. Quickly getting bored with the art collections, she gazes instead at glass sculptures of the zooplankton she studied in her former career, contemplating her old life and her late husband. It’s an essential moment of the book, despite moving the plot forward not one iota. The role the museum plays in these people’s lives makes the city feel realer, more like the one I live in. Their different experiences with it create a palimpsest of meaning. Texture.

These gestures beyond the ‘frame’ of plot make their worlds feel more alive and the characters that people them more complete.  As I work on my next manuscript, and make plans for the one after that, I try to keep these things in mind. 

Both are set in fictional small towns (though one is in 1990s Cornwall and the other on a distant planet in the far future). So, what are the things that make up the texture of life there? Climate and landscape, sure. The way the main characters spend their days and make their living, absolutely. But also the gossip. The claustrophobia of everyone knowing everyone else’s business. The contrast between small-town politeness (social, full of chit-chat) and city politeness (minding your own damn business), which might affect how you structure your day – going to the shops is a whole different endeavour if there’s going to be a ten-minute conversation with everyone you see there, instead of going in, paying for your shit, and getting out. And there are the layers of personal history in a place you’ve lived your whole life, sitting atop its landmarks like a chorus of ghosts.

Not all of this will serve the plot. Mentioning some of it might feel like a speedbump in an otherwise smooth ride. But I don’t plan on filing down the knobbly bits.

Writing News

Not much to report this month. Continuing to plug away at 90's Witch Book, as well as a few shorts. There are a couple of short publications in the works, which I'll hopefully be able to tell you about next time.

What I've been reading

I recently finished Michelle Paver's latest novel, 

Rainforest

. While she certainly has a formula, when it comes to books about horrible Englishmen grossly overestimating their ability to deal with inhospitable environments, she is the master. These Englishmen might be her most horrible yet.

What I've been watching

My last trip to the cinema was for 

Obsession

, which is a pretty straightforward 'be careful what you wish for' horror, but great fun. I hadn't seen Inde Navarette in anything before, but her unhinged performance really makes the film.

What I've been listening to

Last Friday I caught ALT BLK ERA live in Bristol. I'd seen an acoustic set by them before, but the full-band experience was full of energy, and one of the loudest gigs I've attended in recent years. Support band Shelf Lives were good fun, too.

That's all from me for this month. 'Til next time.

JL