With few exceptions, all stories have boring stuff in them. Even the best selling pros tend to have at least a little bit of the boring in their otherwise perfect novels. If you are a reader or a writer, you know exactly what I mean by the boring stuff – it’s all the stuff we skim or skip over entirely when reading a story.

Why? Because we want to get to the good stuff. Because the color of the night sky and the crystalline sound of the mockingbird’s song, while lovely, still stops the action. Forget that stuff – we want to know when the villain will pounce. Or whether our heroine will marry the bad guy or the good guy. Or how on earth our heroine will get her petticoats untangled from the gears of the giant clock before she is chewed up by its mechanisms.

Setting is nice but not if it gets in the way of the action. And many well known authors concur:  

Elmore Leonard: “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.”

Alfred Hitchcock: “Drama is life with the dull parts left out.”

Truman Capote: “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”

Is that narrative necessary or is it in the way?

As much as we admire and perhaps even envy an author’s skill with words and can positively swoon from a beautiful turn of phrase, does the reader need to know:

The origin of the story.

Our heroine’s first kiss.

Every step taken by the hero to make his sandwich.

You may be shaking your head about now and thinking, we need narrative, we need a sense of space, we need to know what the characters look like, we must be sure the reader understands the back story so he/she can understand the motivation... Right?”

And I agree, those things are important - otherwise our characters are floating free style in an invisible matrix without anchors. Although, maybe less is more?

Inference or full on assault?

In writing your narrative, perhaps it’s the devil in those details we need to examine. For example, finding one definitive aspect of a room that the reader’s imagination can use to fill in the blanks (“It was the kind of place where manners and civility went to die.”) Can you convey that your hero is a curvy, energetic brunette without the reader having to know her exact height, weight, dress size, dietary habits, and the hair-pulling contest she had with her little sister when she was five, at the outset?

Step back and think about the details that will show what you’re trying to convey without having to note every single detail possible. I understand you’ve probably done a lot of research and, after that kind of investment, maybe you want to use more than a sentence or two. But one of the real tricks of good writing is finding those one or two sentences that speak volumes to your reader and fill their imagination with the special world of your story.

Cheat sheet

Just to help keep yourself in check, following are a list of questions you can ask yourself to make sure you aren’t leaving in unnecessary narrative:

Does it stop the action?

Does it keep the story moving forward rather than drag, or veering off in a different direction?

Will my reader care about this?

If you removed the section, would your reader miss it?

Is this detail necessary so your reader can follow the story?

Will your reader stay up past midnight and slog through the 8 paragraphs to find out what happens next or close the book and go to sleep?

There are other questions you can ask yourself and they’ll be easy to come up with if you simply put yourself in the shoes of your reader while going over your story.

While it’s absolutely true that it is your story, and you and you alone know what you want to communicate, know what’s important to your characters and the message you want to deliver. It’s your readers who will decide if they care. If you give them what they want and leave out the boring stuff, they will love you and your story.