Since sitting the other side of the desk again, I’ve been struck by the common traps in which so many writers are caught. In the interest of keeping my promise to the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, I thought I’d list some of those traps here.

Active versus Passive Verbs
Passive voice slows action, sometimes arresting it altogether. Not good.

Take a look at this sentence in the passive voice:

In the interest of brevity, little say expedience, he began to pack the boxes.

Now look at this in the active voice:

In the interest of brevity, little say expedience, he packed the boxes.

Active voice sustains action and often heightens it.

Show don’t Tell
I’m going to quote from Paul Lima’s excellent book, (re)Discover the Joy of Creative Writing.

‘Telling is the reliance on simple exposition:

Mary was an old woman.

Showing, on the other hand, uses evocative description:

Mary moved slowly across the room, her hunched form supported by a polished wooden cane gripped in a gnarled, swollen hand that was covered by translucent, liver-spotted skin.

Showing and telling as used above conveys the same information—Mary is old. Telling states it flat-out. And showing? Read the example over and you will see it never states that Mary is old, yet leaves no doubt about it.’

Orphaned Environmental Description

Pretty boring description, like reading a menu. Instead, when writing environmental description it’s a good idea to tie that description to your main character’s POV, thereby heightening tension, character development and carrying the plot forward.

Here’s that same description as I wrote it for the opening scene in Shadow Song.

Sunlight gleamed on the white marble floor, like lace where it passed through the transom over the front door. There were lilies, white and frail, in a vase on the table against the paneling. The lilies’ fragrance was pungent, like a drug to calm the nerves.

Do you see how through imagery, word choice, and a tight point of view this passage improves? There is now a sense of tension which is carried in the images of fragile lace and lilies in contrast to the sturdiness of wood and stone, the perception there is a need for a drug to settle the pulse. Before we just had a room. Now we’ve set tone and pace, created foreshadowing.

Redundancies in Dialogue
As always you should be aware of your word and punctuation choices, particularly in dialogue, so that you keep your writing tight, razor-sharp, and thereby interesting. Dialogue is one area I often see writers fail, as in this example.

Do you see how clumsy is that bit of dialogue? There’s no need for the stage direction explanation of ‘he barked’ and ‘he ordered’. It’s implied in what the man says. Here it is made snappier.

If you need to insert some speaker identification, then a simple ‘he said’ will suffice. You want the reader to skim over that part, because it’s throw away information. The important stuff is what the man says. How he says it is conveyed through word choice and punctuation.

Rolling Eyes, Green Eyes and Eye, Aiy, Aiy!
One of my major pet peeves in writing is the stereotyped tall, blonde, green-eyed woman with legs from here to there, or the tall, dark man with chiseled face and grey eyes that stare though you.

Yawn.

Why do so many fictional characters have green, violet, hazel, or grey eyes? What happened to the ordinary blue or brown? And is it really necessary to describe the colour of a character’s eyes? Does it advance the plot, heighten the tension, assist in the revelation of this story? Likely not. The colour of my eyes have never affected my day to day life, even when in crisis. Why should my characters’ eyes be any different?

And then there’s the eyes scanning the room, rolling over faces, crossing the water. I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking at something my eyes stay firmly put in their sockets. It’s my gaze that does the wandering. Do you see what a ridiculous, even unwonted hilarious image this creates, these rolling, scanning, crossing eyes?

Too many times when I’m reading a manuscript I find myself scanning a paragraph or two describing the main character. The passage is written from the protagonist’s point of view. He or she is not looking at any sort of reflection. But there it is, a full description of those grey eyes I mentioned above, with that chiseled face and dark hair.

Doesn’t wash.

And what’s more, it doesn’t matter. Your character’s age, physical condition, charisma and more can be conveyed through interaction with other characters, how they react to him or her, his position in that society. What’s more, you do have to leave some room for your reader to interact, to put their own mark on this internal landscape you’re creating. Otherwise you might as well write a screenplay and have your reader watch a movie where nothing’s left to the imagination.

There was, for me, a fascinating revelation recently about the subtlety of this kind of interaction, having to do with my latest novel, From Mountains of Ice. I don’t describe Sylvio di Danuto, the protagonist, in great detail throughout the novel. It is given he’s middle-aged. Beyond that not much.