Bite-Sized Line Editing: Tiny Actions
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Scenes keep getting longer but the story isn’t moving forward? If your word count is getting the better of you, line editing can help.
Today, we’re going to talk about how tiny actions might be responsible for scenes that feel slow, stuffy, bogged down, or downright tedious.
Welcome back to our bite-sized line editing series, where we talk about small writing craft elements you can look for in your own writing when you’re tackling line-level edits.
Today’s topic? Tiny actions.
What are tiny actions?
In prose, narrative that describes movement or action is often called blocking(this is a fancy theater term that writers liked so much we ran off with it). It’s useful for talking about who is doing what and where they’re doing it. For our purposes here, we’re going to look at a subsection of blocking that we’ll call tiny actions, which are small movements performed by characters. These movements can be anything from gestures to opening a complicated lock, from getting dressed to eating.
Tiny actions are distinct from big actions because they are components of larger movement. You can think of this as the difference between “watching TV” and “sitting down on the couch and pulling up your knees, picking up the remote, fluffing the pillow, flicking through shows, stretching, grabbing a handful of chips,” and so on. These small details can provide interest, depth to a scene, and even character insights, but they can also simply take up space if not used strategically. To avoid tiny action filler, here are three main points to keep in mind.
Don’t direct the obvious
For the most part, small actions that we do every day often don’t need to be explained in close detail. Readers are familiar with common actions, and so, as the director of the scene, you can allow them to take some artistic license rather than controlling every detail. Describing each movement—especially things we do every day–can bog down a scene in no time. If you’re a highly visual writer, it can be overwhelmingly tempting to include a bunch of tiny actions in order to convert the scene you see in your head onto the page.
Here’s an example. Let’s consider all the movements involved in eating a waffle. Readers generally know what goes into this: People use a knife and a fork to cut the waffle into bite-size pieces, spear the piece of waffle with the fork, bring it to their mouth, open, bite it, and begin to chew. It’s generally not necessary to write out all the steps in this process because they’re something the reader is already aware of (even if they haven’t had waffles, they’ve eaten food before). Occasionally, you might want to slow down a scene or amp up tension by including such minute details, but most of the time, these tiny actions don’t add anything to the scene other than word count. At best, you provide a highly detailed description of how this particular character eats a waffle; at worst, you’ve lost your reader in action that isn’t really action.
Don’t make it weird
Tiny actions can extend a moment, or they can make a moment awkward. Lingering too much on small movements can have the effect of drawing so much attention that the bigger action is lost. Some actions that normally would be fluid or graceful can come off as clunky or stilted because the narrative insists on describing each step. Generally, the more body parts that are mentioned in the sentence, the clunkier it becomes.
Personal and intimate moments with characters often fall into this trap. Too much close-up attention to what characters’ hands, fingers, hair, eyes, breath, hips, biceps, that muscle in the jaw that always jumps, and mouths are doing can get your reader focused on details so much that they lose sight of what’s supposed to be happening in the scene. Like words you’ve stared at too long, these character attributes can begin to look weird and almost take on a life of their own (eyebrows are the first to gain sentience, waggling, jumping, crashing into each other) Certain genres thrive on close-up details, but it’s always important to step back and consider if the story is still moving forward or if it’s getting lost in someone’s eyes (and not in a good way).
Don’t make us do it again
If an action is complicated and warrants a detailed description of how a character is doing it, your reader will thank you if you simplify the process if your character has to do that complicated action again. Small, complex movements, like using a lockpick, climbing a rock wall, or opening a bank vault often only need to be described once for a reader to understand the difficulty or skill required. After that, feel free to summarize if the character does it again.
As an example, I was recently reading a story where a character trained in stealth was taking advantage of a rather large air vent to sneak around a building and get access to locked rooms. To gain entrance, he painstakingly chipped away part of a decorative grate covering the vent, which he then painstakingly put back once he was inside the vent. He used this vent a few times to get around, and each time, the narration shared the process of removing and replacing the piece of the grate. The reader was well aware of his skill at this point, so there was no need to remind them of his process of getting around each time. We can trust that he knows how to do his job even if we’re not always told every step!
Tiny actions are just one element to keep an eye out for while line editing. Stay tuned for our next installment on bite-sized line editing!
Missed our previous posts? Check out our mini crash course on participial phrases and word choice and world building.
You can also read more about line editing on our blog.
Thanks to Thomas Wolter on Unsplash for the photo!
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