I’m currently reading a novel that’s pretty well done in many ways, but the author has one terrible habit that really annoys the crap out of me: By the Way Writing.
BTW Writing is when you shoehorn facts into the prose when information suddenly becomes necessary for the reader to know. It’s a form of exposition that gives exposition a bad name. Here’s a made-up example:
Jim turned the corner and stopped dead, uncertain if he should keep going or turn back. Up ahead was his old friend Tanner, who would almost certainly demand money, probably framed as a mysterious debt suddenly remembered and now long over due (Jim hated to loan money because of his deadbeat father, who had steadily drained the family bank accounts with constant small loans begged from his mother).
The BTW part is that last sentence; BTW Writing almost always occurs at the end of a paragraph or longer section within one, and often though not always within parentheses. It’s a clunker of an expo drop, and I call it “By the Way” due to the awkward way it’s just shoved in there, because the writer suddenly remembered that they hadn’t communicated that information before. Realizing it was important for context or character development, they just toss it in. It’s literally like saying “By the way, this is why he’s like that.”
Ban the BTW
This is shitty writing for many reasons, but it’s fairly common to see it creep into your first drafts because often when you’re working on a story you do suddenly realize you either forgot to include a detail earlier, or you suddenly realize there’s a detail to include in the first place. I do a lot of first-draft BTW writing myself. It’s often easier to just drop a loaded parens into your paragraph than it is to stop dead and search back to find the right place to bring it up earlier.
The key though is to go back and fix that. Find your BTW bombs and defuse them, sprinkling that information earlier in the draft in a more elegant way.
Like a lot of bad writing habits, this one can be subtle and tough to spot. Sometimes reading your work out loud can help, because BTW lines tend to stop the flow like a truck crashing into a building, and you can feel that when you read it out loud, because you literally have to stop and shift mental gears when you hit one.
By the way, there should be a joke here at the end, but I can’t think of one.