An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Fourteen -- He walked and breathed his stage directions

This is it, we're on the downward slope to the end. It's mostly just little things now, so stick your legs out and freewheel, ringing your bell gleefully! But avoid the crocodile pit.

This one's about what's known in the trade as 'stage directions'. These are actions that you describe your characters (and, I guess, props) making. They don't tend to be terribly interesting, and so when you're editing you need to decide how much they're propelling the story forwards. However, if you have too few, your reader doesn't know where your characters or what they're doing. So, the magic here is deciding what to cut and what to keep.

Here's an example of some dialogue mixed in with stage directions. Look at all the movement.

Ariane stepped towards the portal, drawn by her curiosity and its strange gravity. She lifted her hand up and had to fight hard to stop it from being sucked in.

'That's weird,' she said. She turned to Gregor. 'So if I go through there I'll end up in a magical land full of fauns and elves and stuff?'

Gregor put his hand on her shoulder. 'This one's out of warranty and sends you to a world where you star in cookery shows, so I'd stay away.'

They're called 'stage directions' because they might appear in a script. They tend to be very tied to dialogue. Here's my manuscript continued as an incredibly badly formatted script, to show you what I mean:

Ariane steps back.

ARIANE

Yeah, I've no desire to be on Iron Chef for eternity. What else have you got?

GREGOR

(pointing to a different part of the shop)

Now, over there we have what I call 'The Lion, the Ring, and the Wizarding' section. If you'll follow me...

The two actual stage directions here, where Ariane steps back and Gregor points, are the kind of thing we're most interested in. Although they might be necessary in scripts so you can block out character movement (maybe? I know exactly nothing about screen writing) they tend to bog down fiction and so we have to treat them with caution. But they are also vital for some kinds of thing: after all, action scenes are mostly stage directions, and if you don't have enough you can't figure out what's going.

As a result, unlike, say, hedging, it's one of those things where there's no right answer. It's a stylistic choice, and feeds into the pace of your writing style. There's always going to be someone who doesn't like your pacing, and that's fine. It's why there's room for all of us in this game. But, like all things, understanding what levers we can pull is useful.

Let's do this one like the dialogue tags one; I'll rattle through some guidelines, and then we can take stock at the end.

First: the best stage directions move the story on in important ways, and those ones tend to stay. These are particularly the case in action.

Ariane scooped up her sword, and thrust it into the demon's chest. It quacked like an angry duck, and then, with a hiss, collapsed into sand, the grains tumbling around her blade onto the sun-bleached earth. She stepped back, and smirked.

'Yeah, death's a beach, isn't it?' she said.

By my count there are six actions here, plus a dialogue tag. Of them the first four are, I think, essential. She needs to kill the sand demon, and you need to see it dying, otherwise you won't know what happened, so they absolutely stay. The next two, stepping back and smirking, isn't needed. Should I keep them?