When I first complained about being unable to write long, I was asked: “Were you a tech writer or a journalist?”

Well, yes, I have written checklists and manuals before. How did you know? Oh, because I distill everything down to the bare minimum words for maximum information transfer. Thus, my initial stories were trying to fit a novel into 12K words, and I hated infodumps.

The more I’ve written, in general the longer the stories have gotten. Not always, as Between Two Graves was fairly short… but Dust of the Ocean clocked in at slightly over 98K words.

So, when a former journalist who’s used to fitting everything into a hard word count of column inches noted he wrote way too short… it was comfortable, familiar, and old home week. However, my reply I started to type was going to be a giant wall of text, so I’m putting it here instead.

First, let’s talk about what NOT to do.

A longer story is NOT about wordcount padding, tedious scene description, infodumps, or any of that terrible stuff that bores readers and writers alike. It’s about pulling more of the story out of your head and onto the page, and making it richer and deeper.

So what to do?

1. Fleshing out the main characters.
2. Fleshing out the side characters.
3. Fleshing out the world.
4. Adding the visual effects, emotional beats, and description that reinforces the plot and the character arcs.
5. Complex reaction scenes – unpacking motivations and adding foreshadowing.

Fleshing out the main characters

Okay, first off, realize that I once wrote a tactically-correct romance and never, in the course of the entire story, wrote what colour the heroine’s eyes were. I only realized this when writing the sequel, and I went back to double-check…. only to find after reading through twice, carefully, that I just never bothered to mention one of the things most romance writers will dwell upon ad nauseum.

Mind you, the geology got described in loving detail, as did the firefights and explosions…

So, I’m not exactly the best at this. I did, however, learn from this mistake.

But it’s not just about the eye and hair colour. What catches their eye? Do they notice the surfboards outside the fire station and think “Oh, yeah, there’s someone here I’m going to fit in with?” Do they notice the way someone laces down their boots?

When you’re writing their actions, it’s not just what they say and do, it’s about why they make that decision.  It’s about the things they choose to do on their downtime, what they find funny, what annoys them, what they’re willing to go out of their way to do, and what they find hard and painful and do anyway.

You can flesh that out with interior monologue, or you can flesh it out with little side conversations, and the souvenir he picks up at a stall just before meeting the target at the souk. Pick what fits your style.

Fleshing out the side characters.

This one is a  little trickier, because the more authorial attention you pay to a character, the more important the readers expect them to be. So if you have a universe populated by henchmen, faceless mooks, and barely-there cardboard cutouts, anybody who’s brought to a little more life is expected to be important. But if you raise the background level of detail, then you can have a rich world full of the impression of detail (that actually isn’t there) and lots going on behind the page (whether or not it really is… and sometimes this will come back later in the story when you weren’t expecting it.)

On the one end of this, you have a thriller trick of giving a minor character’s life story (which actually is a bunch of worldbuilding an infodump in disguise)… only for the heroes to shoot him in the head as they’re entering and clearing the hideout, or the villains to kill him ruthlessly as their introduction to the story.

On the other, you have the other vendors at the Famer’s Market who have a running byplay, and the regular customers at the shop, and the farmer who’s infamous for trying to keep equipment running long past its useful life, who all have extremely minor running parts to play in the background of an Alma Boykin story, fleshing out the world.

Note that this is also where sequels can come from, and minor characters get promoted to major characters later.

One of my side characters, Crane, is first introduced as Random Intelligence Guy, the one who gives the briefing and disappears. But he had a very dry and sneaky sense of humour, that made him more than Background Character #3… He then showed up several times when I needed escalation, and was eventually revealed to be the Spooky Intelligence Mastermind in the background, playing out his long-term game full of realpolitik.

This was excellent, as he is very useful at sending characters on missions, or taking people who were the exact right person at the wrong place and wrong time, and drafting them into the mission whether they wanted to be or not.

…But he accidentally got promoted from minor character to major character due to his willingness to take a break from high-level meetings to brush out a wounded girl’s badly tangled hair. It was a scene that made sense from a pacing perspective, from a “I can’t just drop her for the next three chapters and pick her back up when she has something to do” perspective, and from a character arc, from the running theme of the human cost of all the exciting parts. That it revealed the human cost of being who he was, as well…

Means that I now have readers who are politely pointing out that they want his book, next, please, because he’s become far more real and interesting and they want to not only know more, but to give him the happily ever after they know he’s lost.

Fleshing out the World

Worlds can be characters, too. From the tombs to the riverboat to the space station… A ship can be a character in her own right, (and often is referred to as one, especially when she throws a fit, sheds parts, breaks down, and holds together despite everything to make it through…) A world can be a character… to pilots, and wildland firefighters, the weather is a fickle friend one day, an enemy the next, but always to be respected and never ignored. Even in quiet pieces, the garden can be choked full of weeds when things seem overwhelming, burst into bloom when hope returns, and after all the crisis is over, produce an overlooked and sweet bit of fruit in the resolution.

The more you describe it, the more it comes alive to the reader. “They put him in a bare room to wait. He did not sit in the chairs, but paced.” vs. “They tossed him in an interrogation cell to wait. There was nothing in it but the table with two chairs: one was a cheap office model, battered and worn, and the other was a heavy steel frame bolted to the floor. He avoided sitting in either, and paced, deliberately not looking at the one-way mirror as he marked time by the sound of his feet echoing off the stained concrete walls.”

Take a moment to look around, and let the description speak in its own way to the character’s mental state. Whether you’re describing the hopeful energy of the streets as they fill with clubbers so blissfully ignorant of the alleyways and the rain-blurred chalk lines as they drunkenly stumble up the street in search of the good time they won’t remember, to the diner’s dingy walls from decades of greasy smoke, the worn furnishings under the pitiless light, and exhaustion in the waitress’s body language even as she summons up a smile for the private eye and his order on the third hopeless night of chasing down dead end leads…

You don’t have to say “He was tired and cynical”, when you describe the world in such a way.

Also, when you throw in extra detail on the world… sometimes, later, it becomes relevant. That island chain you mentioned just as a “Back when we were doing (this exercise) out of (there)” sheerly as a way to establish that these two have known each other a long time? Might become the setting of a sequel. Sometimes it doesn’t, but it does make the world feel bigger than the page either way.

Fleshing out the Action Scene

Take what I’ve said above, and apply it to the action scenes. It doesn’t have to be long… in fact, a good amount of this can just replace “Said.” Action beats are a great way to convey scene, character, emotion, tone, and keep track of equipment, information,  people, or the macguffin.

“See anything yet?” He asked the guard.
vs.
NameHere stepped out of the sterile air conditioning, and looked around. The jungle’s air was heavy as a wet blanket, the air full of screeching birds and howling monkeys, all out of sight as he scanned the perimeter they’d blasted in the thick green canopy. He turned to the guard, who was focused down so hard on his scanner he hadn’t acknowledged NameHere’s presence. “See anything yet?”

“Standby to be boarded.” The speaker said. BigDamnHero signaled to the others as the lights flickered, and then went out.
vs.
“Standby to be boarded.” The speaker crackled. The whole crew could hear the ship groan in protest as the pirate’s shuttle failed to evenly match vectors. In the nearest Airlock 15, BigDamnHero started battle breathing, forcing his system to stay calm despite the adrenaline surge as Shipname wailed in bending metal and escaping air. He signaled his team to bunch up in the stack as the lights flickered, and darkness descended.

“We need another plan.” She said.
vs.
“We need another plan.” Her fingers tapped the empty holster at her waist.

Fleshing out the Reaction Scene.

After every action scene, there should be a reaction scene. Why? Pacing. It gives your reader a chance to mentally breathe, and reader and characters both to process what just happened, what they learned, how things got better… or got worse.

This is what Big CGI Action Movie often gets wrong – the movie doesn’t always need *another, bigger* fight scene; it needs a space for the characters to mourn, celebrate, be exhausted, react, reflect, and plan what they’ll do next, then set it into action.

Unless you’re writing literary, this isn’t supposed to be a lot of maundering navel-gazing; it’s there to move the character arc and the plot along. In a short story, this may be cut down to a paragraph, or even a few lines, but in a novel, this is your chance to make the characters really connect with each other… or completely antagonize each other. This is where the clowning around goes on in a buddy comedy, cementing the friendship. This is where the couple falls in love, or falls apart. This is where they put the clues together in a mystery, and where they figure out how the stakes have changed and what the new information means in a thriller. This is where people react to the choices made, and that reaction sets up the next action scene.

This is where you unpack motivation. In the action scene, you can see the hero turn off the radio. In the reaction, his sidekick can roll his eyes, tell him what calls he missed, and remind him to turn it back on again… while the narrator tells the audience, or the sidekick tells the new guy, that hero’s never going to miss That Clue again, or never going to alert the bad guy to his presence again while clearing a house, by an ill-timed radio call.

Yes, this is usually where those of us who write short get annoyed at the 4-page infodump on the history of the kingdom or how everybody is related. Don’t worry; if you naturally write short, your “terrible infodump” is probably going to consist of one paragraph. It’s okay. Write it out, and note that when you came back after finishing, you can see if it interrupts the novel’s flow.

This is also where foreshadowing usually happens. Your characters are  thinking about outcomes, and naturally, the pieces start falling into place. You need to show this, and show the information getting kicked around on what may or may not come about. Some will happen, some won’t, and the reader enjoys the guessing game. If your beta readers were completely lost and felt something happened out of nowhere, go back and stick in three prior references across three different, non-consecutive reaction scenes.

Summary

Yes, I realize the irony of writing a very long post about fixing writing too short, thank you.

Any questions or tricks I missed?