First Sunday Q&A: Is Your Writing Expansive or Contracted?

Do you know your natural tendency as a writer? Its benefits and handicaps? How to realize and discover what you do without knowing, then balance the tendency

What’s new in my writing room: I’m still celebrating the big news that my latest novel, Last Bets, was selected in December for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year! Kirkus reviews thousands of indie books, and less than 1% receive a coveted starred review (which mine did). Of those, only 100 are selected across all genres for the “Best of” list. Stunned and delighted, here.

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

I’ve offered this special monthly Q&A for over a year. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions about writing and publishing and made me think harder and more creatively. Well, it’s happened . . . I’ve finally run out of questions to answer. So this monthly extra in my weekly posts will pause for a little break. Please check out my past posts—over 800 of them!—on my home page here on Substack. And if you think of questions for future posts, feel free to send to me via message here on Substack or by email to mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com.

Q: In some of the writing workshops I’ve taken from you in the past, one of the most valuable insights I took away was about how clueless (my word, not yours!) many of us are about our natural tendencies as writers. We don’t know what we don’t know—until we run into the mirror of an agent or writer’s group or class feedback. Maybe this is good, because it protects us somewhat, allows us to create unimpeded. But I’m all for knowing what my unconscious shortcomings are!

Can you share more about the tendency to expand or contract? That’s one lesson I could use more about. Thanks!

A: My theory is that we all have certain natural tendencies as people living in the world—what we notice, how we feel about it, how we act or not. It’s part of being a unique human being, and it’s often something to celebrate as writers. It contributes to our individual voices and to our characters and setting and plot. Everything comes from who we are and how we see the world.

That’s my humble opinion, after years of teaching and editing.

The trick, though, is to get these natural tendencies to work for us, rather than against us. There are two steps to this. First, to become conscious of the way we unconsciously lean. And second, to consider what we need to do, to balance this.

How we are wired affects how we write

In my career as a writing teacher and editor, I found much to love. My personal goal with each writer was to honor their natural tendencies and celebrate what they did best. When those tendencies got in the way of the writing, though, I sought ways to point this out kindly and constructively.

Not to change the writer at all. But to allow the writer to grow past their tendency to overwrite or underwrite.

As a teacher and editor, I saw how each of us is naturally wired to either overwrite, or expand in our expression on the page, or underwrite, or what I call contract. I noticed this in almost every manuscript I read. (I also have to say that the terms overwriting and underwriting only touch a portion of what I mean by expanding and contracting. Each is a good school-level term to lean on, but read on to find out a bigger view.)

What are these extremes?

Here are my short definitions of these terms we learned in school.

Overwriting: Did the writer go on for pages about a beloved topic, to the point where it became tangential to the story? Did they dwell on setting so much, we lost the thread of the plot? Did the variety of locations, the crowds of people, or many multiple events blur the meaning because they were so numerous?

This showed me the writer has a natural tendency towards being an expander. They felt more was better.

Underwriting: In the opposite tendency, did the story feel so condensed that it flew by too quickly to grasp? Was the description super minimalist, and this (although fine otherwise) didn’t particularly serve to deepen the story? Was the character mostly inside their head, ostensibly alone for many pages?

This indicated a contracting writer, possibly, someone who believed less was more. Or who couldn’t think of what else to say! Or, often, was fearful of saying more—for any number of reasons.

I’d start with these basic definitions of what I was seeing on the page. As I got to know the writer behind the words, while working on their manuscript, I often noticed this tendency manifesting in their lives as well, also unconsciously.

Whichever it was, it brought them some happiness. It also could make their writing lives more challenging.

Balance of both

In my thirties I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My job was to tempt a reader to try a certain food or a recipe. I loved lyrical food writers like Laurie Colwin (Home Cooking is one of her best; check out this review in The Guardian if you’re not yet familiar with her work).

I learned to explore the meaning of food in our lives through its sensory details (taste and texture, for example). Some of my editors also called my writing “lyrical” and I loved that. Some just wanted the list of ingredients, the recipe, no description of the meaning of the food I was creating!

To stay in business with both kinds of editors and their readers, I learned how to limit my love of the lyric. I let my drafts be wild expansions on the page. But my revisions always reined in my tendency and created the balance that worked better.

(It helped that my columns were only 600 words each week. Only so much you can say, even if you’re an expander!)

It wasn’t so much overwriting, in that I went on too long about irrelevant things. It was that I felt the meaning behind those things was equally important. And I wanted the reader to feel this way too.

My editors helped me see exactly how much I could get away with, before I lost the reader (and my job) as well. This was highly valuable education, for me as a writer.

Luck of a good teacher (or editor)

Fast forward twelve years. I decided to move into fiction. Here, I thought, I can really let loose and live my natural love for lyrical writing.

Then I met the wise head of the grad school I attended. He knew better. He saw that my education would further benefit from working with a skilled novelist who was a minimalist at the core. For two years, she was my adviser. I got my writing hand slapped whenever I ventured into too much expansion.

She forced me out of my box! I read minimalist authors (I hated this at first). I found a new way to write that both incorporated what I loved and balanced my tendency.

I didn’t really appreciate these editors and teachers until later in my career when I began teaching myself. It was clear to me how many of us are blind to our own tendency towards either expansion or contraction.

Or we use both, alternating through a piece for no real reason. I learned that this creates even more problems: a jerky prose that feels too much and too little at the same time.

Maybe you have had to face your tendency as a writer, via rejection or good instruction. Do you know whether you’re expansive or contractive? Can you tell the difference on a page of your own manuscript—or, as a starting point, on others’ work? Maybe in your writer’s group or class, when you give feedback, you feel the two extremes—most of us do. But have you ever gotten trained in seeing them in your own writing?

How can you tell?

Here’s a fast way to tell what you do naturally.

1. Take a paragraph from your current writing—any paragraph will do.

2. Expand it into three paragraphs. 

3. Then condense it back into one, but different. 

Which is harder for you? Expansion—did it come easily? Were you able to write more, without too much trouble? Contraction—could you condense back, using different words but retaining the meaning?

This might hint at your natural tendency. The more experience you have working with editors, the more you publish, the more feedback you’ve gotten, the more balanced you’ll likely be with these two extremes. But this little test can show you where it’s still innate in you, as an individual.

Placement of camera

Here’s another way to look at it: If you are the eyes in your scene, how far is the camera zooming in or out?

Looking at a scene in your current writing, pretend you’re the eyes looking through a camera viewfinder, studying this scene on the page.  Using your camera’s zoom feature, get closer to the scene, then further away. Which is easier?

When you zoom in: the movement of the scene gets slower, steps are very detailed, we go deeper into meaning. Pace can be slow.

When you zoom out: everything speeds up, we flash by huge vistas, time passes quickly, we don’t pause for meaning. Pace can be fast.

Out gives a distant overview, in gives an emotional punch.  If you want, mark in the margin where you zoomed in and where you zoomed out. Can you tell? Is there a back and forth of these two, creating a balance within the scene? 

So that’s step one: the awareness. I found, in the response from my editors and in my MFA program, that I learned to tell when a writer was expansive or contractive. I knew I loved lyrical and I wrote it intuitively. But I also began to see in my own writing, thanks to my study of other writers, where I needed to pull in or contract. Where the pace needed to be faster, to serve the story. Where long lyrical descriptions of setting or character, for instance, were boring to everyone but me!

Step two: learning to balance tendencies

It took me a number of years and wide reading and good feedback to recognize when I let my natural tendency take over. At first, it was hard. Truthfully, I didn’t want to change how I was. But I did want to get published.

Because this mattered to me and because I also wanted to learn new skills as a writer, I tried to let go of the preciousness of my tendency and embrace other ways of writing.

Reading was the best way to get there. Because of my adviser, I read a lot of writers from other cultures and saw many more approaches to telling a story. Although I naturally gravitated towards writers who loved setting and character as I do, I let myself read widely, trying to learn from everyone.

Balancing tendencies is part of maturing as a writer, I found. Letting go of what I referred to above as the “preciousness” of how I saw the world and wanted to write about it. Of course, I kept ahold of my uniqueness, my individual voice. I didn’t let that fade, if I could help it. But I did learn to see when I was being unconscious or too attached to my way, and it was not serving my story.

Working with hundreds of students, I counseled time and wide reading and being open to feedback. None of this comes easy.

Pain of change

You may understand this: it’s hard to change our natural tendencies. We get mad when someone suggests it. We cling tightly to who we are. But over time I realized, for myself, that my writing tendencies were just a learned way of seeing the world. And that can change as we grow.

To ease my students into this idea, I suggested these two exercises. They come as step two, after the writer gets a glimmer of their tendency. Here’s how to practice another way to see.

Two ways to change your tendencies

If you’re an “expander” by nature, you might benefit from this exercise, which my adviser gave me back in the MFA program.

1. Take a page of your story and condense each paragraph to one sentence.

2. Copy the sentences onto a new page.

3. Do any of them duplicate the purpose of another? (Sometimes I’d find, to my horror, that all the paragraphs said essentially the same thing!) Can you eliminate those paragraphs?

If you’re a “contracter” by nature, here are two ways to balance this.

1. Find a scene that feels too tight.  Add one of these items: body sensation, memory, future fear or longing, gesture

2. Looking at a whole piece that you might need to expand/develop, first free write for 10 minutes and list questions that a reader might ask. Then from those questions, begin to list scenes, people, or descriptions that might develop this section.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, what you might try from this, what you’ve learned in your own writing life.  

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“First Sunday” Q&A is where we dissect and discuss your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. You can send them to me via message on Substack or to my email at mary@marycarrollmoore.com. Your subscription supports me continuing to write my free newsletter each Friday since 2008. I’m grateful!