So very true. It is always easier to pick these kinds of issues out in other people’s work than our own. We have our writer-blinders on. That’s why we go through so many drafts when we edit. It takes looking at the same work ten times to catch things we missed throughout the other nine revisions!

* another writer’s work. Boy, do I make more typos when posting on writing blogs? Pretty sure I do. Sigh.

I only recently learned the term for this, the “As you know, Bob” problem. Now when I’m writing a critique, I mention that and hope the person searches for the term, since there’s a ton of good advice out there on how to recognize and avoid it.

Hi Diane! Thank you for the comment! Being a writer of fantasy myself, I know how difficult it is to get that description into our stories for the reader. One technique I’ve used, which I will be talking about in a future post, is going through the entire manuscript (during editing) and only read the dialogue. See if it makes sense, or if it’s bogged down by the details. Some details are okay, especially if neither person having the conversation know them already. Since you are writing in first person present tense, you can always use your character’s inner thoughts as well, to get some of those details in. Play around with it, and as you said, find that balance.

Thanks for the post!

I agree that a lot of the time where I’m noticing the over-description in dialogue, tends to be in YA books. Even in TV shows like Shadowhunters (based off of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series), they are writing the dialogue to have way too much description. It makes the characters sound “cheesy” and not true to life. I loved those books and I will continue to watch the show, but somehow they need to find a better way of getting some of the backstory into the dialogue without sounding like the characters are reading a dictionary definition. An excellent example of quick, true to life dialogue, can be found in Rainbow Rowell’s books. Her book FANGIRL is a great example of this. Highly recommended if you haven’t read it already!

Writers just need to spend a little bit more time in their character’s heads to figure out what needs to be said vs what is already shared knowledge among those talking. We need to read and write dialogue with the hope that it will push the story forward, not be bogged down by the details. Thank you again for the great comment!