No More "Thought Verbs."

From the article:

"For this month’s homework, pick through your writing and circle every “thought” verb. Then, find some way to eliminate it. Kill it by Un-packing it.
Then, pick through some published fiction and do the same thing."

There you go.

Ray Bradbury is good at "unpacking", and with simple words, like he's painting with his words.

By the way, if anyone is interested, his 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales is currently on Kindle special. $1.99. It's an amazing collection.

Heh, a Joke I often make to friends that (try to) read my 'in work' chapters is: 'Suggestions welcome -- but not always used as might have been intended!'

In this case, and with my tall tale already well past 250k, perhaps I need to look it over and see if I'm guilty of doing too much 'show' where 'tell' would play better ...

The article is food for thought - but not tasty for all. Writing palates vary. I don't think it's intended as, "YOU MUST DO THIS OR ELSE."

phantasy said:

I love getting rid of the word 'thought', but I think the best way to show what they thought is with the actual 'thought' put into the prose.

Like,
'He thought she was annoying.'

Putting instead,
'And here came Sheryl. Stupid, pimply Sheryl. With her cigarette-tarred voice.'

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Could add "Crap, it was annoying the way she ..." Keeping the voice but adding the actual emotion to it, to clarify.

BethS said:

Some of the examples he gave were instructive and quite good. I'm particularly thinking of this one:

Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”

Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like:
“The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”

That's good characterization (though lousy punctuation) and brings the relationship into sharp focus. That's the sort of thing we should be striving for, to make our writing and storytelling fresher and deeper.

That said, "thought" has its place. Sometimes a shortcut really is called for.

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rwm4768 said:

I agree with this. A very important question to consider:

Is it interesting?

If so, unpack it. If not, quickly tell it and move on to the interesting stuff. Too many writers end up with bloated word counts because they treat every detail like it's interesting, and that's just not the case.

Some things aren't very interesting but are necessary. That's when telling does work well.

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Yeah, what Ryan said. If it's interesting, show more. If not, tell it quickly and move on.

I guess the trick is what one person finds interesting, another will not. But that's true in every book. Does anyone actually read every single word of a book? Doesn't everyone skim over some parts - parts that another person might find fascinating?

I like geography and include too much landscape details in my writing. It's helpful when others point that out to me, so I can reconsider the passages.

guttersquid said:

From the article:

"For this month’s homework, pick through your writing and circle every “thought” verb. Then, find some way to eliminate it. Kill it by Un-packing it.
Then, pick through some published fiction and do the same thing."

There you go.

Click to expand...

Are you saying every bit of published fiction is good and should be held up as "do it like this" ? Or something else?

juniper said:

Are you saying every bit of published fiction is good and should be held up as "do it like this" ? Or something else?

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I think Palahniuk's point was that you'll find plenty in published fiction that could be similarly 'unpacked'.

I don't know if someone else has posted it, but there's a good little craft book called The 10% Solution, which focuses on weeding out weak and unnecessary words from your prose. Things like filters and so on. Self Editing for Fiction Writers is also good.

I wouldn't tell most writers to worry too much about getting the wording right on the first draft, though, unless you're one of those writers who excels at revising as you go. A lot of people can bog themselves down and kill their inner muse if they worry too much about things like filters and so on while they're still delineating their plot and character arc.

I think what Palahniuk is possibly getting at is that many authors do well by "overwriting" their first drafts, then cutting the fat from subsequent iterations (because yes, some things are better "told," rather than shown). It can be harder to flesh something out when it's sparse or limp than it is to rein in something that's too bloated.

But every writer is different, so like all advice given on the web about writing, even by famous authors, be willing to try it if it sounds like something that could help with a problem you have, but YMMV. There is no writing process that works for all, or even most, writers.

Chuck Palahniuk's post in the OP isn't a rule of writing. It's a suggested writing exercise. At least, that's how I read it.

For six months, think of internalized actions by their external symptoms (so to speak) and give only that.

Is that a way to write forevermore? Hell no. But this exercise alters your perspective as a writer, and it allows to see a whole other way to present a moment or a scene. In fact, I'll go one step further and say this presents instead of stating a scene.

I'm bad at certain forms of writing. OK, I flat out SUCK at them. There are others that I simply don't like. That does not mean, however, that I don't or shouldn't make the attempt. I think I'm better for trying, even in failure.

Brevity is not the source of wit. Clarity is. Brevity is too often the source of weak, vague, and weasily prose. The object of writing anything is to write what you mean, and write exactly what you mean.

If you need a hundred or five hundred words to do that, then you should use that. If there is a choice between a short but vague sentence and a long but clear sentence one should always choose the long and clear sentence.

What Pahlaniuk is NOT saying is… you must write like this forever and ever and damn you if you write any other way. He says, this is a useful exercise for new writers because it will make you a better writer. And I fully agree with him.

The purpose of writing novels is to tell a story. I can’t imagine that an agent would nix a beautifully clear and well written story with excellent language if it goes ten thousand words or even twenty thousand words over the limit.

The key to being able to discern whether the overshoot of the word count is experience and knowledge; when you can definitely say ‘I can not cut a single word more without sacrificing clarity and meaning’. Unless you can do that, Pahlaniuk’s suggested excercise is indeed well worth considering.

Because that’s all it is, an exercise. An exercise that will make you a better writer.