One of the hardest lessons of this existence is the simple fact that you’re not as interesting as you think you are. That goes for your writing, too. The impulse to spend page upon page, intricately carving a vision of epic proportion from the gleaming marble of imagination is powerful. However, it is an impulse that must be handled with care… much like radioactive waste.
Allowing your personal interests to dominate the page is a good way to make your innocent reader drift off to sleep, or worse yet, read something else. In film, every scene is supposed to advance the plot or story. Those that do not significantly enhance the over-all story end up on the cutting room floor. Normally that’s no good, except that the “Special Edition Director’s Cut” market would have nothing to re-sell if those useless scenes stayed cut.
If your movement has pages, paragraphs, even sentences that don’t advance the plot, then they are slowing it down.
Opposite of obsession, there’s another crucial issue with many writer’s scenes. Boredom. If you, as the writer are bored with it, chances are you audience isn’t even reading any more.
I won’t name names, but I was unexcitedly sifting through a new installation of a series some months ago and was slapped in the face by the authors obvious boredom with his task. The series was started by his father, and the son and his buddy (both published authors, though I’m suspect of their success) had taken it upon themselves to finish deceased Dad’s epic work.
The scene in question was a climactic confrontation between two characters of equal power, who’d been squaring off psychologically, playing a galactic cat and mouse game of strategy with the meaningless lives of their followers, splashing their strained resources like so much water upon the cliffs of destiny.
They look one another in the eyes and…
“…they collided like meteors…”
Meteors? Seriously? Do meteors even collide? Don’t asteroids become meteors when they hit the earth? If they have to collide, shouldn’t it be like…asteroids? Meteors? Not meteorites?
Couldn’t their wills have impacted with the force of a dying star, the voluminous burst of energy mocking its last gasp of life? Couldn’t their eyes have blazed with the fury of a newly born star, the hateful life-bringer, locked and ferocious, intent on mutual destruction? Couldn’t the meeting of their destinies weighed so heavily upon the universe that mere light was warped and bent, twisted like the smile of a perverse old man, perched upon the glowing accretion disk of a ravenous black hole?!?!?!?
Meteors? Really, dude?
Anyway, I think the author was bored out-his-mind and had turned on the Typo-matic some half dozen chapters back. Fellow writers, don’t be that guy. Why use a meteorite when nothing short of a super-nova will do? If you’re bored, if your pacing is suffering, hit enter six times and jump ahead in time six days. Write that. Jump ahead in time six years. Write that. Whether you use it in your final manuscript or not, it’ll help with your boredom (and ours). Trust me.