Stop Overexplaining: A Common Storytelling Mistake

So one of the main mistakes when it comes to storytelling is overexplaining.

I have a friend who always says, “I don’t need to explain myself to you.” And I realized, yeah, you don’t. Nobody needs to.

If I just want to tell you a story, I should make this story interesting enough so that your attention stays without me explaining it. Ideally, I want to put you into a situation where you are naturally curious to hear what’s going to happen next. And if I have to explain myself to you, it probably means that my storytelling isn’t good enough.

Also, very often, overexplaining stalls. First of all, you end up with a very long book. That’s what happened to me.

I’m the type of person who can just talk endlessly, and it translates into the books too. I don’t have the problem that I don’t know what to write. I have the problem that I have to shrink, shrink the amount of words.

With my first draft, I would write a paragraph, and within the paragraph, I would say the same thing three times in three different ways. Which is good—I come up with a lot of metaphors this way—but as a reader, you get bored with that. The pace of the story gets slower, and it takes away from the whole experience.

I’ll give you an example:

“She slammed the door. She was angry with him, which was why she slammed it.”

Like, why are you putting the second sentence there, Hana?

“She was angry with him, which was why she slammed it.”

Isn’t that kind of obvious from the context? You can just say:

“She slammed the door.”

That’s good enough, and people are going to know what you mean.

I think somebody told me, “Trust your reader.” Just trust your reader. People are smarter than you think. Often. Sometimes dumber, but that’s another—I’m kidding.

I used to have the tendency to think that I have to explain everything, because how else is the person going to know what I mean?

But they will get it.

Especially when it comes to vibe and emotions. Anger is very easy to show. You make the character punch somebody. You make the character slam the door. If you make them just frown—if you just say, “She frowned,” the reader already knows that she probably frowned for a reason.

Unless you make them frown randomly. Yeah, then maybe you’ll end up confusing them and they will not know what the fuck is happening.

But if you use these things deliberately, then it actually becomes extremely powerful.

And what I like to do—in the first novel, I was still learning a lot. In the second novel I’m writing, I’m using facial expressions and these actions very little.

Sometimes I just say, “She frowns.”

She’s mostly emotionless, my main character in my next novel. She has also the spirit, but the way she shows it is that she’s pretty much mostly calm, and then she frowns. Or she narrows her eyes. Or my favorite one: her nose twitches.

So she goes like—

That’s my favorite one.

And when you write it, the reader understands. So you don’t need to overexplain it. You can just show it, and most of the readers will get it.