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Resist the Urge to Explain
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When I started writing, I explained the why and how for everything in my stories, repeated, and stated the obvious. Paying attention to well-written stories and feedback from qualified writers helped me understand and resist this urge to explain (RUE).
RUE consists of excessive details about the characters, background stories, actions, and settings. The medicine for RUE is editing drafts multiple times until only relevant information remains and every word counts. Below are some suggestions to fix RUE.
CHARACTERS
Resist the temptation to write a laundry list of details about a character in one paragraph. People won’t remember those details. Only keep relevant details and give them a context that makes them memorable. Embed the relevant information within action sentences.
Laundry List
a) My uncle had blue eyes and wrinkles on his face and was bold.
Instead, look for the right place in the story for these two sentences:
b) Tears rolled from my uncle’s blue eyes when he lost the hat his wife gave him the year he lost his hair.
Years of working under a scorching sun left deep lines on his face.
