I recently attended a Writing Workshop presented by a well-known literary agent and she was focusing on how to uncover and focus on the essentials of your story.
She talked about how, during the lockdowns of Covid, as a country, we were forced to focus on just the essentials. Essential workers, essential jobs, essential travel. Everything that was not deemed essential, was halted, eliminated, or at the very least, postponed.
She stressed that as writers, that was how we should approach our work. That when revising and reworking our stories, we needed to make sure we stripped out every thing that was not essential.
That is harder than it sounds.
As a writing teacher, I find myself often encouraging my students to add more detail, be more specific, or include a vivid description.
However, as I pondered the word essential, I realized that in my mind I was connecting it to short or brief. But essential is defined as “absolutely necessary”. It has nothing to do with how short or lengthy something is.
Maybe that three paragraph description is absolutely necessary. But maybe it isn’t. Perhaps that section of dialogue is essential. But maybe it isn’t.
Deciding what is essential is clearly harder than it seems. Mainly because in order to determine what is absolutely essential to our story, we must have a very clear and concise vision of our story. Our theme. Our purpose. Our message. We must know and be able to articulate what we trying to say through our story or essay or article.
I put this new realization to work with my Student Writing Club this week. A student was working on a narrative story that seemed to be rambling a bit, so we just chatted. I asked her what her theme was, what message did she want readers to go away with, and what points did she want the story to make. As we chatted, I could see that as she worked to answer my questions about her story, she was thinking of her story in ways she had not before. As she articulated her vision, she was uncovering the essential parts of her story. She was then ready to make decisions regarding her work.
I am currently getting ready to start another round of revisions for one of my work-in-progress chapter books. I plan to do just what my student did and spend some time first thinking about what is essential to the point of my story. Through that prism, I can then look at each character, scene, event and detail and determine if it is absolutely necessary. If not, it will have to go.
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