Less is More

There’s a certain joy that comes from being in total agreement with someone, and we recently got to experience it a whole lot. During last week’s lengthy power outage, we whiled away hours and hours listening to an audio book, and holy shit you guys, it was terrible. It was way too long, and the focus was on all the wrong parts of the story. We had to stop the book numerous times to voice our many objections.

This book was painful for us, but it did spark some fun discussions. They weren’t arguments because we were in fierce, burning agreement. But we were both quite passionate, and voices were raised. It was cathartic.

Also educational.

As we mentioned recently, we struggled a little bit with just how much spectacle we wanted in the finale we were editing. The dust had settled, the darlings were buried, the ego-bruises were being iced, and then we listened to this load of hooey and suddenly felt much more confident about the amount we cut.

The protagonist in this audio book finds himself alone in an allegedly spooky setting, and proceeds to run around for what felt like hours and hours of listening time, not interacting with anyone else. It’s just this seemingly endless string of “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” and it carried all the excitement you would expect from a stranger on the bus telling you about the dream they had last night.

It taught us to use care when sending a protagonist off on a solo mission. Most compelling conflicts arise between characters, so with only one character on the page you’re setting yourself a challenge to hold reader interest. They say getting there is half the fun, but we needed to make sure that the journey didn’t overshadow the destination and what happened there. And now we’re in fierce agreement that we’ve got the right balance.