Brevity is the soul of wit. Except when it isn’t.

I’ve thankfully been moving right along with my novel revision. (Last week falling down a flight of stairs and this week getting a kidney stone certainly didn’t help my cause, but I’m recovering well. And, as a result, I’ve been reading a lot more. I’m actually doing stuff with my Goodreads account!)

There’s been some tricky moments here in Revision Land where I had to find clever ways to camouflage infodumps with smoke-and-mirror techniques. I had this checklist for a scene I’ve been struggling with, where I knew the reader needed to know this, this, this, and maybe this. But the dialogue wasn’t working. It was coming off stilted, and explaining the information in the characters’ thoughts doesn’t always work. Planting an inquisitive noob in the scene doesn’t always work, either (A Watson character).

I’ve found having expositions come out through internal observations works very well to counter this problem, especially when I can find ways to tie the information directly to the situation at hand. Passing on the information to others through brief dialogue works wonders, too. And vaguely alluding to the information is a sound technique, while also giving a nod to the readers, saying that they’re intelligent enough to figure it out themselves. I like it when writers give readers the benefit of the doubt.

And then there’s sometimes no room left for information and it has to get dropped entirely.

The Bard wrote ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’. And I agree … when it comes to things like short stories, dialogue, action scenes, and poetry. But I’ve also found I likened that proverb to law during my first draft– A lot of the time, I ended up trimming away too much, leaving behind the bare bones.

All that leaves me with is a pile of bones– Solid, efficient, and quick, but it lacks personality and seems noticeably less creative. It doesn’t always give the story room to breathe or the characters enough time to grow, either. So brevity sometimes has the opposite effect.

I’m starting to believe that simply being aware of where the bare bones are in a scene is all that’s necessary. From there, I can let more information slip through the cracks, just not to the point where it sounds like exposition for exposition’s sake. I believe this goes a long way to help prevent brevity from sucking the soul out of wit.