For the last stream’s exercise, we tried something new for the exercise section: writing a story with way too much description.
Balancing description is hard. It’s easy to slip into describing too much or too little. Walking the delicate line between the two is hard.
So for the stream, we purposefully wrote a story with too much description, then went back and edited it so that it was more concise.
Chat voted for a topic, the first sentence, and then it was off to the races to make it is overly/unnecessarily detailed as possible.
Here’s the original and the rewrite that we came up with:
Boring and Overly-Descriptive Original
I may have flunked out of the secret agent academy, but that wasn’t going to stop me from getting Brad Bronson’s beetle. I’d enrolled in the academy a year ago, expecting to finally achieve my dream of becoming a super secret spy and going on exciting missions. Instead, I was given lots of homework and tests and boring books to read. One night I had to read forty pages in a textbook on sound muffling and then write a ten page essay on the topic. And my teacher Mr. Thompson had the nerve to give me a D even though I only turned it in three days late.
But that didn’t matter anymore. Now I was free from the school’s clutches to do whatever I wanted. Best of all, since I was no longer an official student there, I wasn’t held to their rules and laws. I could do whatever I wanted, and as long as the police didn’t catch me, then I’d be fine. And the police were nothing compared to our teachers. The teachers were constantly on patrol at the school, and we had near-daily interrogation sessions designed to break down even the most stone-faced students. If you ever used the knowledge that we learned in the classroom for your own gain, then you could be sure that the teacher would weasel it out of you.
One time, my friend Tyler had used a laser cutter from the secret supply cabinet to sneak into his girlfriend’s bedroom at night. When the teacher interrogated him the next day and found out what he’d done, they strapped him to a steel table and aimed a laser cutter at him, in total cliché villain style, slow-moving laser and everything. Of course they stopped the laser right before it hit him in the groin, but he learned his lesson for sure.
Thankfully, I wasn’t held to those rules anymore. I’d managed to pilfer a few security cameras from the supply closet before I’d been expelled, and I’d put them to good use: filming Brad Bronson when he thought he wasn’t being watched. I’d lived next to Brad since we were kids, and when I went off to Secret Agent High after middle school, he just followed the normal track to Birmingham Brown. He was the star athlete, after all, so he had no reason to want to leave like I did. Everyone in town loved him.
That wouldn’t be the case once I was through with him.
Better Rewrite
I may have flunked out of Secret Agent High, but that wasn’t going to stop me from getting Brad Bronson’s beetle. The jerk had been the talk of the town ever since he’d gotten his rare, five-inch-long, South American Hercules beetle. I was of course extremely jealous. I sat in my dark room kept at exactly seventy degrees, stewing to myself, glaring at my wall of specimens. Glass aquariums were stacked up on each other, each with an ecosystem and beetle of its own, but none as rare as Brad’s stupid Hercules.
Thankfully it wouldn’t be that way for long. Before I was expelled from Secret Agent High, I managed to liberate some micro security cameras from the supply closet. Today’s mission: install them on Brad’s favorite Red Sox hat that he wore everywhere. I was going to get video proof that he wasn’t the goody-two-shoes all-star athlete that everyone thought he was. And then, when his parents punished him by making him get rid of his beetle, I’d pilfer his prized possession.
I may have never passed a test at Secret Agent High, but it wasn’t for lack of skill. It was because I wanted to keep my true prowess a secret. Just like a real secret agent should.
The rewrite is interesting because it’s simultaneously more and less descriptive than the original. It’s less descriptive quantity-wise, but more descriptive quality-wise. Rather than giving us details upon details that we don’t care about, the descriptions in the rewrite are relevant to the character, plot, and setting.
Those are good metrics to go by in choosing descriptions for your own writing. If something doesn’t contribute to one of those three, then chances are, it should probably be cut.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by AndrewJVarela: You have been dating long-distance with a woman for many years. Finally the two of you agree to meet. Moments later a large, disk-shaped spaceship comes flying down and lands in your backyard. You blankly stare at it as your girlfriend walks out of it and gives you a wave.
We had an embarrassment of ideas for this one. In fact, we probably spent way longer just picking one idea and planning it than we did even writing the story.
But, I really like what we came up with. And even though it starts out fairly as expected, it has a few twists in store.
Or you can watch us write/read the story here.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming November 2018.
Featured image: Pakutaso