How I Write Window Pane Prose

It’s all in the editing.

I wrote earlier this week about George Orwell and his statement that good prose is like a window pane.

How to be a Window Pane Writer

This George Orwell quote is EVERYTHING if you want to write stories that your readers get lost in.

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Tina Lopez asked me to talk more about that in my own writing.

When I sat down to think about it, I realized that I don’t write window-pane prose right out of the gate. I have too much telling. My beats aren’t quite right. I have words I don’t need.

All of those things keep my prose from being like a window pane. That comes when I edit them away.

Let’s call that cleaning the window pane. And it’s hard work.

Some of it is grammatical.

Some of it is clarity.

Some of it is sensual.

Here are some questions I ask myself:

Are there any words that I could cut without consequence?
Am I overusing words or repeating them, so that it’s noticeable and pulls my reader from the story?
Does the dialogue read naturally enough?
Is who is speaking each line of dialogue clear?
Do I have any tags that I don’t need?
Are there any dialogue beats (the little bit of action in the same paragraph as dialogue) that could be made stronger?
Have I slipped point of view or tense?
Am I telling something I could show?
Are there enough sensory details to put the reader in the setting?
Is there anything that’s confusing, pretentious, or that would in some other way pull the reader out of the narrative dream?
The most important question of all: How does the character feel?
Is there enough white space?
Are the paragraphs formatted so that each one belongs to a specific character?

Here’s a passage from my current work-in-progress novel.

This is a random passage. I basically closed my eyes and pointed to a page. This is the start of the fourth chapter. I haven’t edited it yet — at all. Because I’m still working on the first draft and I don’t edit while I’m writing.

Mom’s in the kitchen with Q at her feet, just standing there staring at the stove like it might spontaneously start fixing dinner.

“Want me to make dinner tonight?” I ask.

She shakes herself a little, then turns to me. “How about we do it together?”

I put my backpack down and go to wash my hands in the sink. “Can we have ravioli?”

“Comfort food. Good choice.” Mom opens the freezer and pulls out the bag of pasta we bought the day we got to Convergence. “Get the pot out for me. And tell me how your day was.”

My first pass edits tighten it up some. I don’t add anything — this is all about taking away. Chipping at my prose to get rid of what doesn’t need to be there.

After I do that, this is what I’m left with.

Mom’s in the kitchen with Q at her feet, staring at the stove like it might spontaneously fix dinner.

“Want me to make dinner tonight?”

She shakes herself a little, then turns to me. “How about we do it together?”

I put my backpack down and wash my hands. “Can we have ravioli?”

“Comfort food. Good choice.” Mom opens the freezer and pulls out the bag of pasta we bought the day we got to Convergence. “Get the pot out. And tell me how your day was.”

Here’s what I did:

I took out ‘just’ and ‘started’ in the first paragraph. (Started is a ‘telling’ word and one I try to remove as often as possible. Just is a filler word that I don’t need.)
I also took out ‘standing there’ in the first paragraph. (We expect people to stand in the kitchen, in front of the stove. If she was sitting or doing anything other than standing, I’d need to say so. But standing is a given.)
I took out ‘I ask’ in the second paragraph. (I don’t need it — she’s clearly asked question, thanks to the question mark. And it’s clear who is speaking.)
I took out ‘go to’ and ‘in the sink’ in the fourth paragraph. (‘Go to’ is another telling phrase and it’s not necessary. Hands are generally washed in sinks, so no need to specify. Since she’s in the kitchen and still talking to her mom, it’s clear she didn’t go wash up in the bathroom.)
I took out ‘for me’ in the last paragraph. (To avoid having ‘me’ twice in that paragraph.)

That left me with a clean, solid draft. I’ve removed anything distancing (started, in the sink, go to) and anything extraneous (I ask, just, for me.) Most of that immediately removed telling.

Now, on my next pass, I can focus on replacing what I cut with more dynamic prose. I especially want sensory details and to make sure that how both characters feels is clear.

The daughter is traumatized. She’s had to leave everything she’s ever known to move from a California shelter to Pennsylvania after a wild fire burned her entire town.

The mother has been through that trauma and is suddenly in her childhood home, which she’s never even told her daughter about. That means the trauma of the fire is compounded by her childhood trauma. She is dissociating.

But I don’t want to just come out and name those emotions.

Mom’s in the kitchen with Q at her feet, staring at the stove like it might spontaneously fix dinner. The dog perks when he sees me and offers a single soft woof. It’s how he says hello.

I scratch his head when he comes to me, but keep my eyes on Mom. She doesn’t acknowledge me at all.

“Want me to make dinner tonight?”

She looks at me like she doesn’t know who I am. Like maybe I just wandered in off the street. My heart has time to thud to my throat. My nose fills with smoke.

No. I exhale hard to clear it. There is no fire here.

She pulls an apron I don’t recognize from a hook on the wall. The whole thing passes so fast, I’m not even sure it happened at all.

“How about we do it together?” she asks.

I put my backpack down and wash my hands. My sixth grade health teacher sings Happy Birthday in my brain, twice, while I rub liquid soap between my fingers.

When my heart is back where it belongs and the kitchen only smells like musty old house, I turn off the water. “Can we have ravioli?”

“Comfort food. Good choice.” She pulls out the bag of pasta we bought the day we got to Convergence. “Get the pot out. And tell me how your day was.”

Here’s what I did.

I added the dog into the scene. This slows things down and gives it a more real-time feeling.
I wanted to show that the mom has dissociated and the daughter notices, but isn’t sure what’s happening. I broke the beat from the third paragraph into a larger, stand alone paragraph to achieve that.
I removed ‘she shakes herself’ from the fourth paragraph, because I want this to read a little creepy and it’s creepier without it.
The main character has moved to this house after her entire town burned in a forest fire. I gave her a tiny PTSD moment. This adds sensory detail and shows how off balance she is.
I gave mom a beat before her first line of dialogue. I wanted something that signaled a return to normal.
To slow things down a little and show that the main character is confused and upset by her mother’s odd behavior, I added the hand washing scene. I think, thanks to Covid, most people know that you can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice to time how long you wash your hands. This gives her a moment to pull herself together, too.

Final thoughts.

The first pass editing shortened the scene a little. The second pass nearly tripled the length.

A lot of what I added was to adjust the balance of show vs tell in this scene. Showing lets the reader into the scene and invites their own experiences to color it. I also wanted to show both mother’s and daughter’s emotional state.

I want the reader to be in that kitchen, too.

Maybe what I’ve written here doesn’t read as a trauma response to you. Maybe your own personal set of experiences makes it read more like anger than fear. Or more confusion than anger or fear.

That’s okay. Once you read it, it’s not mine anymore. It’s yours.

And me? I want to disappear, as transparent as a window pane. So you’re not only not interrupted from the narrative dream, but you also have a clear path toward looking through that transparent window pane into yourself.

I don’t want the dominate thought while you’re reading my books to be — wow, Shaunta is a good writer.

I want you to feel something. And when you crawl back to reality when it’s done, to think — wow, that was a good story.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, Louie Baloo the dog, and Ollie Wilbur the cat. She’s on Instagram @ninjawritershop and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.

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