Skipping the Story

Stories are an important part of writing. That's kind of a no-brainer for novelists, but it is a good lesson for all writers. If you are writing a poem, something should be happening. Even if you're describing a scene, there should be some kind of action or movement in the picture you paint. And if you are explaining principles or ideas, stories are of great help.

Stories are examples that help us understand things better. When I tell people to write short sentences, that isn't helpful until I show them a long sentence and compare it to a short sentence. If I was a philosopher and told people to feel the flow of the universe, that is gibberish until I tell them a story of what it feels like and how it's done.

My blog entries are stories in a sense. I have a setup that I progress through, which leads to my point, which I give examples of, and end with a conclusion. This is great for people who don't know what I'm talking about or don't understand exactly what I mean. But sometimes, people just want to skip the story.

The great thing about facts or principles is that they can easily be condensed and compiled. They become very manageable pieces of information that we can take with us. If I was writing a pocket book about writing, I would include all of the lessons I've put in all of my entries here, but I would reduce each post to a bulleted line.

When you skip the story, you can lose valuable information. But if all you need is the principle, then you save a lot of time and trouble by skipping the story.

As a reader, sometimes you need to skip passages of writing to get to the interesting parts. I find that when sentence structure is similar, the message is usually similar. When the first two or three sentences of a paragraph keep saying the same thing, it is usually a safe bet you can skip the whole paragraph and go to the next one.

As a writer, know that everything has a story, but not every story needs to be told. Sometimes, you need to skip the story and get to the point. The power of writing is in balancing the two of those in just the right way.