I am not, sadly, an amazing baker. If I were to appear on The Great British Bake-off: An Extra Slice, it would not be to showcase my beautiful, Paul-Hollywood-handshake-worthy cake. I would be displaying my misshapen catastrophe for the amusement of Tom Allen and the audience. It may well taste quite good, but the presentation – good grief.
I did, when my son turned one, manage to bake this cake…
… with a lot of support from my friend Angela, who is a fantastic baker. Left to my own devices, I’ve relied heavily on creativity to disguise the wonky and often somewhat sunken appearance of my bakes. For creativity, read: icing, Smarties, more icing, Lego, Playmobil, more icing, plastic animals…
But the absolute pièce de résistance of my baking portfolio, a creation that is something of a legend among my family and friends, is my son’s second birthday cake. At least, some of it was cake.
The body, a fairly decent chocolate sponge. The head… well, that particular sponge cake was so disastrous I binned it. And then, knowing that I couldn’t very well present a decapitated Igglepiggle to my son, and the guests due soon for his party, I looked for something, anything, I could ice to stand in as the head.
Hence the bath sponge. Easy to shape, and it seemed apt, if not remotely edible.*
CHEEKY LITTLE HACK?
By this point, you may well be thinking, Iffy baking, Charlie, thanks for sharing. But what does this have to do with novel-writing?
Well, here’s the thing. You can totally pad your cake with a bath sponge. So long as you don’t attempt to serve that part of the cake, no one need ever know! You can pad away to your heart’s content, layering on the icing, gleefully enjoying your cheeky little hack.
But if you pad your novel, that’s less cheeky hack and more risky shortcut. Pad, and you may well lose your reader’s interest.
The A to D of Padding
Here’s how padding can happen:
- Step 1: You write the opening chapters of the novel. You’re fired up! You can picture the story ahead of you, many of the key scenes.
- Step 2: You get past the opening of the story and you want to get to that first really key scene. You’re excited to write it. But it’s not quite a case of getting from A to B; it’s more A to D, because you can’t jump from the opening to that scene. You’ve got to go through B and C to get to D, and truthfully, you’re not feeling it so much as you write.
- Step 3: This keeps happening: annoying bits between the parts you really want to write. You can’t just skip them – the story won’t make sense, and you want to hit 70k, 80k, 90k words – but you’re a bit bored as you write these parts.
- Step 4: You reach the closing chapters of the book, and these are full of Big Moments, and now you’re energised and every word matters.
Now what? You’ve written a novel – congratulations! But as you go back and edit the manuscript, you encounter those parts where you weren’t entirely engaged as you wrote, where you were just putting words on paper in order to get from A to D.
Those parts are padding. They’re bath sponges you’re hoping to conceal with icing.
And if you weren’t fired up when you wrote these words, if you were disengaged, then can you really expect your reader to be engaged here?
Tiny sponges too
Those B and C scenes that get you from A to D are pretty big sponges. But you may sprinkle your book with mini sponges as well. For example, you write four paragraphs describing what a room looks like because you feel the chapter is too short.
I’m not suggesting that every single word you write in a novel needs to be attention-grabbing and the product of much agonising and labour. That’s the kind of thinking that leads to overcomplication like:
‘I am not in agreement!’ declared the portly and curmudgeonly gentleman with aplomb.**
Versus:
‘No,’ said the man.
But sentences/paragraphs that are just fluff and filler… yawn. You probably felt bored writing them, and the reader is probably going to feel bored reading them. In fact, they may well skip them. And as Elmore Leonard famously advised writers:
Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
Sounds obvious, but how many books have you read where you’ve found yourself skipping? Or, worse, giving up because after a strong-enough start to hook your interest, the book fizzled out?
Tips to avoid padding
If you find yourself reaching for the bath sponge, here are some things you can try:
- Don’t be a slave to a target word count, especially in your first draft. Let go, and let your story form on the paper.
- Write the stuff you’re burning to write first, the scenes that are vivid in your mind. An example: Stephenie Meyer wrote the pivotal meadow scene in Twilight (Chapter 13) first, and then continued writing to the end of the book, and then went back and wrote the beginning.
- Give yourself permission to skip bits as you write. Devise a marker you insert in the text, e.g. [ADD HERE]. Later, you can come back and fill these gaps – but not with fluffy padding! With writing that you love. I did this with my second novel, and when I look at that novel now, I know which parts I wove in later, and actually, those are some of my favourite bits.
- Do a ‘big picture’ review of your structure and plot. Do these need rejigging or further development? Is a subplot going nowhere? Is there enough story overall? Could Chapter 6 be cut? Would the action in Chapter 9 work better in Chapter 5?
- Beware a) lengthy descriptions and b) dialogue that doesn’t advance the characterisation/plot. Be honest with yourself: are you just filling the white space with words?
- If you’re bored as you write, take that as a clanging alarm bell. Something has gone awry. Stop, take a break, reflect on why you’re not engaged. Either rewrite in a way that does light you up, or ditch that particular scene.
And if all else fails, remember why you’re writing in the first place. Because you want to love having written – which means loving what you’ve written.***
With my best wishes,
* I feel I should point out that Igglepiggle’s head was a brand-new, unused sponge. Sure, no one was going to eat it, but still, a hint of Matey bubble bath seemed unappetising.
** This, Elmore Leonard wrote, is ‘perpetrating hooptedoodle’. A wonderful word, don’t you think? It was coined by John Steinbeck in his novel Sweet Thursday to describe ‘pretty words’ that distract from a story.
*** ‘I hate writing, but I love having written’ is a sentiment commonly expressed by writers, a notable one being George R. R. Martin. The original quote is often attributed to Dorothy Parker.
