In this post that is sure to enlighten fans of the craft of storytelling, Richard Z. Santos extolls the virtues of brevity while outlining his evolution as a writer who came to learn that less is often more

For writers, sometimes the things we’re best at can become a little too easy to fall back on. There’s a fine line between showing off your skills and indulging yourself. For example, if you’re good at dialogue, then maybe your fiction has long stretches of characters exchanging witty, natural dialogue that doesn’t actually move the story forward very much. Who knows, maybe you’re so good at describing faces that your readers will know exactly what everyone’s eyes look like but not what they actually think.

Leaning into what we’re good at is natural and it’s not a bad thing. But more and more I’ve been trying to put constraints around my writing in order to force myself out of my comfort zone.

I tend to over-complicate things. Maybe this is also true with personal interactions and relationships, but I’m speaking of my writing here.

My stories and novels tend to become labyrinthine, knotted, multi-vocal. My debut novel, Trust Me, took me seven or so years to write because I kept adding new POV characters. Each new character required me (so I assumed) to deepen the mystery of what was happening in order to accommodate them and their choices.

While I think the published product is balanced, early drafts were overstuffed and it made the writing process more difficult than it needed to be. I added historical asides that dived into the history of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The ghost of Billy the Kid popped up. I worked so hard to make my novel everything, that it kept getting away from me. Only when I cut most of the nonsense out and focused on the story, did the novel actually come together.

In addition, my work tends to swirl around conspiracies, the machinations of the powerful, secret cabals, hidden power brokers and their impact on everyday people. I’ve probably watched too many paranoid moves from the 1970s; although my time working in Washington, DC myself also plays a role here.

Of course, as a result of these complicated plans and deceptions, my word count can skyrocket. Recently, I set out to write a quick ghost story for an anthology. By the end, I had written about World War I, the use of exploited Latino and Native American laborers to build ski runs and roads in the Rockies, characters with secrets I didn’t know they had, a love story, mining towns, and more. Hungry ghosts, also. The story was supposed to be under 5,000 words, but my first draft was just over 11,000. Oops.

So, because I know my tendency to paint myself into corners and laboriously write my way out of them, I’ve been trying to simplify.

With my third novel, Graft versus Host, I limited myself to a single POV character. It is possible! The novel still includes a vast conspiracy, shady real estate developers, corrupt cops, a dead white supremacist, and a protagonist who might be losing his mind, but it’s a tidy 70,000 words. What to some might seem like too slight of a book, feels like admirable restraint to me.

With “A Trail Job” I wanted to write a quick story (under 2,000 words) in the PI genre that didn’t turn into Chinatown or a Chandler novel where no one (not even the author) really understands the plot. No red herrings that lead our hero off the track and into a deeper, parallel mystery. No switching POV to a different character whose suffering aligns with our protagonist’s. No smoke-filled rooms, no faces only glimpsed in shadows (well maybe one), only a small story with small people.

Don’t get me wrong, the real world is complex. Forces outside our control are dictating how we live our lives, and sometimes those systems become so manifest, and violent, that we’re all forced to confront our role in society. But also, for most people most of the time, our daily lives are kind of boring.

So, could I write a PI story that is true to the boring, or at the very least familiar, parts of life? Would it be under a million words long? Would it be interesting?

That was my goal. I leave it up to y’all to decide.