Moving Your Characters Around in Your Story: Cut the Small Stuff

Get your characters across a room or into a car faster and you can focus on what really counts

It’s great to visualize what your characters are doing — it’s kind of like seeing them in a movie in your head. But the thing I see my editing clients and students doing is this: describing every single movement. It creates a sense of tedium in the reading that is hard to shake, because it’s happening all through the novel.

Writers often can’t see it. Or if they do, they can’t figure out how to cut it out. They figure if the reader isn’t told George is moving to the garage and getting into his car and starting the engine and backing out onto the street … well, how will the reader know what he’s doing?

And Mary is pacing, through the dining room where she straightens a vase, to the window, back to the kitchen, onto the porch to stare into the woods … yes, we get that she’s worried. Zzzz.

Part of it is a point of view problem. If you as the writer aren’t deeply enough into POV with your character, it creates a feeling of being on the outside of the story, like a camera, recording every little thing. The trouble is, it makes your reader feel like that, too. Held at a slight distance, never quite close enough. The world of the story suffers as well, because the character is never completely immersed in it, so neither is the reader.

Thus although it shows up on the page as extra verbiage that is only there to get your characters from A to B, that verbiage is a symptom of something deeper — you’re not immersed enough into your story world or the people in it.

Here’s how it plays out on the page.

Marty came into the room in a rush, closed the door behind him and went over to the couch. He slumped down onto it, lifted his feet and rested them on the coffee table. He sighed and checked his phone, scrolled through his contacts and found Lily, tapping on her number and listening to the ringing. He waited for many long seconds but it went to voicemail again.

And if you focus on Marty and his voice, his reactions and emotions instead?

Lily had been ignoring him all day, Marty was sure of it. He raced home, slumped on his couch and tried her again. No reply. He couldn’t possibly have upset her with that crack about her shoes. Could he?

It’s even more noticeable in first person.

I woke late, cursing at the failure of the alarm to wake me, and raced into the shower. There was no time to shampoo my hair or condition it. I scrubbed quickly and got out, toweling myself briskly and pulling on my usual work uniform, thick socks and sensible black shoes. I grabbed a piece of bread and slathered it with peanut butter, then left for work, making sure I double-locked the door as usual.

Instead — Late again. I needed an alarm connected to a foghorn. Barely time to shower, drag on my horrible work uniform and I was out the door. Not so fast I didn’t double-lock it though. No, I couldn’t take that risk.

In this example, do we really need to know a lot of these small details? The bread and peanut butter? What the work uniform is? Unless they are vital to the plot, all they do here is hold back story movement.

Neither of these examples of how to fix it are intended to be great literary efforts. But what I am trying to convey is firstly voice, and secondly to get inside the viewpoint character more. How do they see the world? For most characters, their world is about them. Them first, and then maybe someone else. How you show that on the page goes a long way to showing your reader who this person really is.

We all have masks we wear at different times for different people. Your job is to show your characters to the reader without their masks. Focus on what they’re thinking and feeling, not so much on what they are doing. The more you trim back the little physical movements around your setting, the more room you will have to make your characters real and immediate.