 Stop using more words to tell a story than is necessary. And by the way, this won't just be advice for new writers, because it's a bad habit that I see in established SCP writers as well. I mean, heck, I do it myself more often than I'd like. Also, rather than let this introduction become incredibly ironic, let's stop here and talk about how you can be a better writer by writing less. Part 1. Show. Don't tell. The first thing we need to talk about is literally using more words than is necessary in a single sentence or paragraph. This is related to the incredibly common and also very good advice, show. Don't tell. Oftentimes experienced writers will say this to new writers as though it's somehow entirely self-evident what it means. And there is something appropriate to that attitude when you're dealing with a piece of advice such as that. But let's be real here. Plenty of people need more details to understand what it means, so let's start with an example sentence. Joanna was scared. So scared, in fact, that her hands shook and her knees began to buckle as the beast approached. So first of all, you can probably immediately detect a problem with that sentence. Technically, it does both show and tell what's happening, but you don't need to tell us what's happening if you've already showed us. The first sentence, Joanna was scared, is completely unnecessary. You can eliminate it, modify the second sentence, and get the exact same amount of information across the audience. Like this. Joanna was so scared that her hands shook and her knees began to buckle as the beast approached. Now this is better, but it's actually still pretty bad. The sentence, in and of itself, is pretty unwieldy, and it tells the audience that Joanna is scared. A better revision might be, Joanna's hands shook and her knees began to buckle as the beast approached. With that version, we've, without having dimension fear at all, put the idea of fear into the reader's head anyway. Some people get into writing and may even be successful at it with the thought that their ideas tell the audience exactly what people are feeling or what events are occurring, but the mark of a good writer is in what's left unsaid. You want the reader to know your protagonist is scared, of course, but you don't want to accomplish that by saying she was scared. That's just bad writing. And a lot of this can be avoided by just not saying things that are blaringly obvious. Now think about how often you read about an SCP object that is quote-unquote otherwise non-anomalous. That's an incredibly good example of this particular mistake, and almost invariably acts as a little more than filler. It's like saying the book had pages made of paper. We all already know what books look like and what they're made of. And you might even be thinking things like, well, if the book has three plastic pages, then I have to mention the rest of the book is normal, right? But no, not really. You could say the book has 246 pages, and that three of them are composed of plastic. Give your audience some credit and assume they understand how the world works. In fact, most of these problems in fiction writing come from not being able to trust that the audience understands what you've written down. But if you do have to say something like, Joanna is scared, then you've probably just failed to write a good sentence in the first place, and you need to work on that. Always look for ways to cut down your word count in individual sentences and paragraphs. You'll find your story is significantly more exciting to the reader if you do. And remember, your job is to create something for them to discover in their minds, not to demand that they see exactly what you're seeing. Part two, use less adverbs. So this is another piece of basic writing advice, but it still comes up quite often with experienced writers. You want to try to reduce the usage of adverbs in your writing. And if you don't know what adverbs are, they're things that modify verbs and verbs are things like talk and walk and eat their actions. And an adverb to modify those would be something like quietly talked or walked slowly or ate quickly. But the problem with using adverbs is that there's almost invariably a single word that covers what you want to say and does it better than a verb adverb combination. You don't quietly talk, you whisper. Walked slowly allows you to characterize the person doing the walking depending on the word you actually use. So if you say he creeped as an alternative, that means something completely different than meander. But they both can be characterized as walking slowly. Obviously, one makes your character seem weird and the other one just makes your character seem lazy. Again, this is always about communicating things to the audience without having to come out and say them. And finally, the word you choose in place of a verb and adverb can speak to the context and circumstances of your story. And it can be far stronger than the verb adverb combination. Ate his food quickly doesn't say very much, but devoured his food means something substantial for your character and the events surrounding the incident being described. Now adverbs do have their place and they can never be eliminated completely, especially when it comes to dialogue. But ultimately, don't use a verb adverb combination as an excuse not to use a much better word that fleshes out your character, the context of the scene, or the story itself. And in some cases, that you don't even need the adverb in the first place and can just use the verb. Part three, kill your darlings. No matter how anxious you get about your writing, there will come a time when something you wrote will make you very, very happy. And it might even be a single sentence or a paragraph or a whole work, but it will be something and no one else will care about it. Or worse, everyone else who reads that part of the story will hate it. There's a ton of different ways to speak to this advice because writers have been doing it for literally thousands of years, but kill your darlings is a fairly common way to put it. That is to say, learn to recognize when getting rid of that part you're so satisfied with will actually improve your work. But often it's about more than just that. Sometimes you have a brilliant ending, but you start to think it's not good enough so you just keep going. And then the finished work stops being great somewhere along the line and slides down into just good enough. When it comes to writing, it's always better to end early than it is to end late. But despite this, one of the most common pieces of critique I see bandied about by bad writers is, this needs to be longer. Which, alright so sometimes that is good advice, it's rare but it does happen. The vast majority of the time it's not just bad advice, it's actively harmful advice. Let me explain why. Imagine you have an SCP with three different story threads going. Maybe there's a couple of characters and then a primary plot. By the ending of the work, you've got a resolution for one of the characters and you've got a resolution for the plot, but say a secondary character is sort of left hanging. Now a lot of people will see this and they will tell you to keep going and finish that character's arc. It's a natural urge and instinct to suggest that, but that would weaken the story else wise because you've already got what is essentially a finished product. But how do you solve that problem if you've got a character's story that is left unresolved? The best solution is actually to remove the unresolved element from the story completely. You'll shorten it up a bit, but useless words are always useless. Don't add an unnecessary epilogue when you could shore up the pacing of the work by trimming it down instead. That's ultimately the goal of this, improve your pacing, because words aren't inherently entertaining. You have to work to keep it that way and part of that work is going to be cutting out unnecessary bits that drag your story down. So let's do a quick review. First, show don't tell. Don't spend time telling me your character is scared or that the room is hazy when you can describe a character is shaking or that the room is filled with steam. Two, limit your usage of adverbs in non-dialogue text. Use verbs with heft and meaning to characterize both situations and people in your stories. And three, fixing a problem in a finished work is often a matter of deleting things rather than adding more. Get comfortable condensing the work down when you spot an issue. And that's it really. A lot of writers will find they can take a work that's 20 pages long and end up with just one brilliant page by taking out all the extraneous bits. And others might struggle just to get one page done, but regardless, everything you write is not going to be good. Let your first instinct be to eliminate excess words, characters, or even entire plot points, not to add more. Anyway, if you liked the video, be sure to hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're alerted when I upload new content. And if you really want to help make sure this content keeps getting made, head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarion and pledge like Jason Graham just did. He pledged 20 bucks and joined the patrons you see on the screen right now as supporters of the channel. These patrons help me to make sure I can keep making this content for you. And let me know that I'm not alone out here. Anyway, that's it. I'll see you on Thursday.