Transcription
Instead of buying a red Corvette, I conceived a child at age 40.
[Music] Howdy, welcome back to How to Write Better. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn. I'm a writing instructor at howtoritebetter.org. I'm also a New York Times best-selling author, and this is another installment in our new series, which is called Ask a Best-Selling Writer. We're answering your questions, so drop your questions in the comments below. I'll get to them on a future video. Today's question comes from Wilson. Wilson says, "How could I improve the following sentence?"
"As I ponder this thought, it has occurred to me that becoming a parent late in life may have spared me from the trope of events known as midlife crisis."
Well, I understand what you're trying to communicate here, but it's a bit flowery. It's a bit try-hard. It's a great first draft sentence. You want to get it out of your head and onto the page, so bravo to that. But as we're refining it, what do we want to do? We want to subtract, subtract, subtract. That's often how we improve our writing through the editing process. It's not by adding more; it's by removing that which is superfluous.
And so, here's how I would reconstruct that sentence, and I'll give you a couple ways that I would do it, depending on whether or not I want to show or I want to tell. We could talk about both of those. If I'm just telling, I would say, "Becoming a parent late in life spared me from a midlife crisis." Or, if you want to make it even more pithy, you could say, "Parenthood spared me from a midlife crisis." Because that presupposes it gives all the information that people need. You don't need to say, "As I ponder this thought." Obviously, you're pondering the thought, right? "It has occurred to me." Well, of course, it has occurred to you; you're writing it. "That becoming a parent late in life." Okay, I don't have to say "becoming a parent late in life" if I just say "Parenthood spared me from a midlife crisis." Because the assumption there is I'm at midlife. It is a late time to become a parent. And so, your readers are smarter than you might think. And so, condensing the sentence down, you're making the reader do a little bit of work, which they actually appreciate. No one who is in their 40s is reading a book from kindergarten, why? Because it doesn't require any celebration. But as readers, we want to be challenged a bit, not challenged so much that it becomes a slog that we have to get through the writing, but you make the writing more beautiful by making it more concise.
Now, that was the telling example. Let me give you this showing example, which, by the way, good writing does both. It shows and tells. We'll talk about that in a moment. So, so here's how I would write the sentence if I wanted to show something: "Instead of buying a red Corvette, I conceived the child at age 40."
Now, there's a whole world in that sentence, right? You could use that sentence to start a novel because it tells me so much about the character. I was thinking about going this way, following the status quo, following the societal conditioning, buying the cliché, the red Corvette. But instead, I conceived a child at age 40. That presupposes that I was spared from my midlife crisis, but I didn't have to use the word "midlife crisis." That phrase never came into existence in here because you're showing what a midlife crisis looks like. And so, showing is really important when you want to immerse the reader into the story. You want to pull them into the world in an interesting way. You show.
Now, often it takes longer to show something. Now, you tell when you want to get through the narrative. You need to communicate some information to the reader. You don't want to spend seven pages trying to explain the camera that I'm speaking into right now. No, you can just quickly describe with one or two sentences the camera before you get to the showing parts of the story. You want to show because that's the expressive side of it. That brings the emotion into the story. You want to tell when you're being communicative, when you have information to communicate.
If you want some more writing tips, you can download my free ebook. It's called 15 Ways to Write Better. You can read it in less than an hour, and you'll walk away with 15 tips to help you improve your writing today.
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