Readers don’t want filler.
“Vigorous writing is concise,” says William Strunk Jr. in his classic book The Elements of Style. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that … Continue reading
Don’t clog your lines with double attribution.
The author didn’t realize she was wasting words whenever her characters spoke.
In nearly every instance, she provided not only a dialogue tag, “Christina said,” but also a “beat” or “action tag,” a phrase describing what the character did as she spoke.
Consider this double attribution line:
“I’m so sorry,” Christina said, … Continue reading
Don’t try this in your initial draft.
Forget tight writing and let your book’s first draft flow. Then practice tight editing. As Strunk & White advise in The Elements of Style, retain only those words that earn their keep. No freeloaders.
In the process you’ll find many candidates for deletion.