One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a writer had nothing to do with dialogue, plot, or worldbuilding. It was learning what not to write.
When we imagine a scene in our heads, we experience everything. We see the room, hear every conversation, watch every movement, and notice countless little details. The temptation is to put all of that onto the page.
The trouble is that readers don’t need all of it.
Take breathing, for example. Every character in every novel spends the entire story breathing. Unless something unusual is appening, however, the reader simply assumes it. We don’t need to be reminded that a character inhaled before speaking or exhaled after standing up.
That changes the moment breathing begins telling us something. A runner gasping for air after climbing a mountain tells us about exertion. A witness holding his breath while waiting for a verdict tells us about anxiety. A detective noticing that a suspect suddenly begins breathing faster may have just realized the questioning is getting uncomfortably close to the truth.
The breathing isn’t important.
What it reveals is.
The same principle applies to everyday bodily functions. Characters eat, sleep, bathe, brush their teeth, and use the bathroom because human beings do those things. Unless one of those activities contributes to the story, readers are perfectly happy to assume they happened somewhere between chapters.
On the other hand, a dirty diaper might tell us that a young father has absolutely no idea how to care for an infant. An unusual odor might become the clue that leads a detective toward a poisoning. A sleepless night may explain why a character makes poor decisions the next morning.
Once again, the activity itself is ordinary.
Its effect on the story is what matters.
The same idea extends to everyday interactions. Suppose two characters meet for lunch at a restaurant. Unless the waiter accidentally spills soup into someone’s lap or overhears an
important conversation, the ordering process is probably not the interesting part of the scene.
Most of us have experienced that exchange hundreds of times. We don’t need to hear every greeting, every question about the menu, every drink order, or every “I’ll be right back with that.”
We don’t need to count the steps from the front door to the table or watch the characters unfold their napkins.
A single sentence can accomplish all of that.
After they were seated and had ordered, John leaned across the table.
“So,” he asked, “how was your day?”
The reader has lost nothing important. They know where the characters are, they know food is on its way, and now the conversation that actually matters can begin.
Of course, there are exceptions, and they are often some of the most enjoyable scenes to write.
If your characters are eating in an ordinary restaurant in Chicago, your readers already know how that experience works. If, however, your story takes place in an alien civilization where meals are part religious ceremony, part legal negotiation, and part social ranking system, then suddenly every detail becomes interesting. The reader has never seen this kind of restaurant before. Watching a bewildered human guest struggle to understand unfamiliar customs tells us about the culture, the setting, and the people who live there. In that case, the ordering process has stopped being background and has become part of the story.
I think that is the real distinction.
Readers already know the ordinary parts of life. They know how to walk through a doorway, ride an elevator, order lunch, or drive across town. Unless something unusual happens, those
moments can usually be summarized in a sentence or two.
The writer’s job is to slow down when the reader encounters something new.
That might be an unfamiliar culture, an unusual magical ability, an alien courtroom, or a gryphon family gathered for dinner. Those are the moments that deserve careful description because the reader cannot fill in those details from personal experience.
One of the pleasures of reading is that readers naturally supply the ordinary parts of life themselves. That leaves the writer free to spend time on the extraordinary parts—the things that make this story different from every other story.
In the end, writing is not simply deciding what belongs on the page.
It is deciding what can be left off the page without the story losing anything important.
More often than not, those are the decisions that separate a good story from one that feels like a transcript of everyday life.
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