When enough is enough

[John Dean]

I return to a familiar theme for this blog, prompted by a couple of reviews of my DCI John Blizzard books on Amazon, which tapped into one of the hotly-debated issues as ‘modern’ readers undergo changes in the kind of writing that they appreciate.

Both reviews related to the question ‘how much is enough?’  One review did not like the amount of description of characters that I use and the other suggested that I use too much back story.

Go back a few decades and this was not really an issue for publishers or readers. Readers in those days expected novels to contain plenty of description but, over the years, that has changed, driven in part by the advent of the Twitter (now x) age where stories are communicated in just a few words. 

Also changing readers’ preferences has been the arrival of the world of Kindle, in which so many more books are available than ever before that the market place has become highly competitive. With many books only costing 99p (not to mention anthologies at the same price) readers are much more likely to ditch a book if they do not like what they see in the first couple of pages, because the book did not cost them much.

As a result, authors have found that the amount of description and back story they use have become issues which are increasingly occupying the thoughts of publishers and their editors, who know that a significant proportion of the new generation of readers are keen for the authors to ‘get on with it’ and not write anything which slows down the narrative, or else they’ll go elsewhere.

All of which brings us back to the question ‘how much is enough?’ When it comes to description, I agree that the reader does not need half a page describing a character and that most of their characteristics will emerge from what they say and do as the story unfolds but I do think that there should be some clues for the reader right at the outset.

As an author, I tend to limit the physical description of significant characters when they make their first appearance. I will summarise a small number of characteristics in a line or two, which tends to include hair colour, body shape (are they tall or short, lean or paunchy?) clothing and demeanour, adding up to a snapshot of what they are like. I feel that gives the reader something with which to build an initial picture of the character. I think the reader benefits from that as long as it is not overdone.

And so to back story. As authors, we need to be careful with not overdoing back story but some of it is needed because a character’s history is an important part of who they are.

However, the author has to be aware that every instance of us delving into their past can have the effect of slowing the novel’s forward momentum. One of the most common mistakes I note when I’m called upon to offer comments on inexperienced writers’ manuscripts is that they have spent too much time establishing the background to the story early on in the book, which slows the pace. Lose pace and you lose your reader because often they will not wait for the story to get into gear. Besides, there’s actually very little that readers need to know about our characters’ history from the outset that they won’t learn as the story unfolds. An author can, by all means, refer to the past and slot in short passages of flashback if they think it will help the reader build a better picture of the character but, again, it’s a case of not overdoing it.