I’ll start with my usual caveat that there are no strict rules to the creation of art (and again, yes, fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories and novels are a form of art) so nothing below should be automated or strictly, universally applied. But that said…
I’ve done this. We’ve all done this. We all eventually do this:
With his left foot, Galen kicked the guard.
And we all need to stop… mostly.
This is putting a detail—his foot, and which one—ahead of what the subject of the sentence (Galen) was actually doing (verb: kicked), and as a result the sentence comes off as “passive.” Especially in terms of action, like this, we’re basically always better off just saying what happened, then, if necessary—and it isn’t always necessary—adding a bit more about how that happened. I’d start with:
Galen kicked the guard with his left foot.
Okay, but does it matter which foot Galen kicks him with? Most likely not. So then how about:
Galen kicked the guard with his left foot and stomped on the sewer rat with his right.
That Galen is an agile cuss! Now, which foot is which matters to what’s happening in the scene. Also keep in mind that subject and verb are right next to each other, right up front: Galen kicked…
And then, of course, context is king. This one sentence isn’t the whole story, and maybe we’ve established earlier that Galen has lost his right boot and doesn’t want to kick the armored guard with his bare foot. Or we know that Galen has a hidden blade in his left boot. But in any case, the detail is only there if it matters—if it adds to the story in some way. Otherwise, just let Galen do his thing…
Galen kicked the guard.
…and move on.
And lest you think this is a problem I just made up, using an invented example…
And out of those clouds there now dropped, like an avenging bullet, the other bomber that had been concealed.
This is from Doc Savage #25: The Devil’s Playground. In this sentence we get the verb dropped at the end of the first part of the sentence, then a weird simile, then the subject (the bomber). To me, anyway, this sentence (like lots of sentences by the various Kenneth Robesons) is just all over the place. Why not just…?
The concealed bomber dropped out of the clouds like an avenging bullet.
I’m not sure an “avenging bullet” is really a thing, but in any case here we see Kenneth (in this case, Alan Hathaway) Robeson using nineteen words where twelve will suffice—eleven if we delete the word “avenging.” This 42,000-word novel (the SFWA defines a novel as 40,000 or more words), originally published in the January 1941 issue of Doc Savage Magazine was written fast, edited fast (in this case by John Nanovic), published immediately, and as with all the other Doc Savage tales, shows the clear signs of an author unashamedly padding the crap out of his writing, and an editor happily letting him do it. I love these goofball stories not because of but in spite of the voluminous wordage.
Oh, and, why can’t I find an example of this sort of thing out in print more recently than 82 years ago? Because editors like me know this when we see it and encourage our authors to, y’know, just not.
Doc Savage Magazine was published monthly from March of 1933 through February of 1947 before it went bi-monthly for a while and eventually petered out in 1949. That meant “Kenneth Robeson” (mostly Lester Dent) had to hit monthly goals of 50-60,000 words at first, then finally only 40-45,000 words by the late 30s, in order to get a new Doc Savage novel out on time, and get paid. Think about trying to complete NaNoWriMo, plus or minus 10,000 words, not just in the month of November, but every month. It’s no wonder Dent eventually started hiring ghostwriters.
I don’t think anyone in 2023 is under anything like this sort of production pressure. If you are out there publishing monthly novels—or even novellas—well, I did suggest we be more prolific, so more power to you! But for what I feel safe in saying is everyone else, we have time to take it easy, and the luxury of not actually suffering over the final word count in any case.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you get to the “the end” and you like what you have but it’s 20,000 words, well… congratulations on your novella! There is a market for novellas, too, by the way. If it went to 100,000 words, congratulations on your novel. But if you’re tempted to add a quick 20-80,000 words to that novella to get it to novel length, please know that no work of fiction, including The Devil’s Playground, was made better by padding.
Think in terms of action first, then attack sentence structure and unnecessary detail like an avenging bullet.
—Philip Athans
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Great advice as always, Phil!
Great point and hilarious example from Doc Savage! I think a lot of writers do this today because they’ve been told to vary the beginnings of their sentences. Usually this happens because most of their sentences start with a pronoun, like I, or the character’s name, like Phil. So to avoid it, sometimes they write crazy convolutions of useless text.
That sounds like a logical explanation to me. And again, don’t NEVER do that, but, y’know… almost never!