Important: Don’t Intrude on the Story

In Today’s Journal

* Quote of the Day
* Don’t Intrude on the Story
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Note: This is a very long blog post, but due to the subject matter I didn’t want to break it into two separate posts.

Quote of the Day

“Any time a reader can see the writer—word choice, preaching or teaching, a character who doesn’t speak or act as he should—then the author has stuck a toe, a finger, a fist, or even his mind into the fiction.” The Editor’s Blog (see Of Interest)

Don’t Intrude on the Story

In yesterday’s post on the Koontz interview, I mentioned that although Dean Koontz trusts his characters and lets them drive the fiction (so he writes into the dark), I suspect he probably reviews his pages at times from a conscious, critical mindset.

I hasten to add that if that’s his process, it’s fine with me. But I don’t personally recommend it. There aren’t many absolutes in writing fiction, but here’s one:

ANY conscious, critical mind intrusion, intentional or otherwise, will weaken your work.

Any conscious mind construction looks vastly different from creative mind creation, especially when they appear side by side in the same story or novel.

I’d never read any of Koontz’ novels, but I was so intrigued by his interview that I ordered and started reading The Big Dark Sky.

Now, the purpose of this article is NOT to dissuade anyone from reading Koontz’ works. He’s a multiple bestselling author AND he’s a very good writer. He’s also had lots of practice. Since 1968 he’s written well over 100 novels.

But I’m both a novelist and a writing instructor, facts that make me more sensitive to craft flaws in conveying Story than most typical readers who do not also write fiction.

My premise for this article, as it has always been, is that a writer should put nothing on the page that might distract the reader from Story or interrupt the reading experience.

So what I offer here is for instructional purposes only.

My purpose is not to disrespect Dean Koontz in any way, but only to point out a few craft flaws that popped out at me as I read the opening chapters of The Big Dark Sky. My hope is that this will help you improve your own fiction writing craft.

I’ll begin by repeating one quote I took from the interview:

“When I get mail, one of the things people react to so strongly is the use of the language [emphasis added]. It’s fun to bring it along and keep smoothing it and making it more and more vivid so it flows and those metaphors and similes don’t pop at you like showmanship. …. It’s polishing the prose and making sure that anyone can read it and take something from it.” Dean Koontz, in his “How I Write” interview

The craft flaws I encountered as I read The Big Dark Sky were the use (and occasional conscious-mind manipulation) of the language, and some of the metaphors and similes DID pop out.

And again, it was easy to tell which language occurred naturally and which was ‘forced’ (author intrusion) by his conscious critical mind. And chances are good that he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

There were also a few other instances or types of author intrusion. In every case, those instances strongly called my attention to them, and so they distracted my attention from the story.

In other words, those instances eradicated my suspension of disbelief. I actually chuckled at a couple of them, then took a breath, suspended my disbelief again, and dove back into the story.

So not a big deal, really.

Except that every time you jerk the reader out of the story, there’s a chance s/he won’t come back. As a writer, you never want that.

But after encountering several of those instances in only the first seven pages of The Big Dark Sky, there’s a good chance I won’t finish reading the book.

As I wrote to a writer friend and long-time student yesterday on this topic,

“I’m sure the author intrusion will continue through the story. When writers do this in a few places early on, they continue doing it through the book because they don’t know any better.”

You get only one chance to make a first impression, right? Again, that’s why it’s important to do your best at your current skill level to put nothing on the page that might distract the reader from the story.

For just one example, as I wrote in TNDJ on Dec 15, 2025, “Writing something like ‘He looked at each one in turn’ will also force the reader to take the time to ‘look at each one in turn’ and [that will] interrupt the story.”

Here’s the rest of what I wrote to my writer friend yesterday on this topic (edited slightly):

“As a writer, to me it’s important that NO reader will catch me “telling” the story rather than just reporting it. I don’t want ANY reader to see ANY author intrusion in my stories or novels, and the only way to make that happen is to not allow myself to intrude on the story.

“That’s pretty much my whole philosophy of writing: Don’t do anything to disrupt the reading of your own work. And of course, author intrusion is the biggest disruption a reader can experience.

“Again, as a writer and writing instructor, I’m a more stringent reader than most readers who do not write fiction. So naturally, places where the author DOES intrude tend to pop out at me.

“After that happened several times in the first three chapters of The Big Dark Sky (pages 3 – 10), and given that you wanted to know my thoughts on Koontz’ books, I went back and re-read those pages, this time actually looking for and identifying those intrusions. I even underlined them in my copy of the book.

“In every case, it was the author stepping in between me and the character (so interrupting the flow) and ‘telling’ me something about the character or, in one case, about another writer the character was reading about (an info dump).

“Now, those things probably wouldn’t pop out at every reader (obviously, or the guy wouldn’t be a best seller) and not every reader would notice them at all.

“Another reader might only feel like something isn’t quite right, like s/he’s momentarily a little detached from the story, or s/he might not notice at all. But my point is, why take the chance?

“Before I continue with this, I have to say the book IS well written enough (at least so far) that I might buy his newest release to see whether his storytelling has improved.

“That said, I’ve been a little disappointed so far, given that Koontz is often favorably compared with Stephen King. Of course, this experience also reinforces my opinion that King is the only Stage 5 writer working today.

“In my opinion, Koontz is a late Stage 3 or maybe early Stage 4 writer. His biggest ‘problem’ seems to be that he loves playing with words [vs. letting the POV character play with words].

“At times, he gets so wrapped up in playing with the language that his writing “sounds” like writing instead of like I’m immersed (and HE’S) immersed in the actual story.

“Ideally, the reader should be SO immersed in the story that s/he forgets s/he’s reading a story. S/he should feel as if s/he’s actually IN the story with the characters.

“The Big Dark Sky is a suspense novel, but in my assessment, maybe it’s actually a ‘literary’ suspense novel because of the unnecessarily flowery language that keeps cropping up.

“That includes but is not limited to the use of metaphor and simile he talks about in the interview. He never seems to wander away from Story for very long at a time. The pacing is pretty good, and I’ve seen no flaws with the paragraphing.

“Anyway, I mentioned there were ‘several’ author intrusions in the first 7 or 8 pages of the novel. I went back and counted them:

“There are five blatant intrusions in Chapter 1, two in Chapter 2 (plus an unnecessary tag line—’She wondered,’ following an unspoken character thought that he enclosed in quotation marks—and an unnecessary info dump on a writer named Varlam Shalamov that should be deleted completely). Then there is one author intrusion in Chapter 3. So in 7 or 8 pages, there are 10 author intrusions (including the info dump).

“The only thing that keeps the story readable is the fact that the intrusions seem to crop up only every now and then. Often writers who intrude like that intrude in almost every sentence all the way through. For me, those stories are unreadable.”

That’s it for today. Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Weed Out Author Intrusion I recommend looking around in this blog. If you need a copyeditor, you might want to consider hiring her.

The Numbers

The Journal………………….. 1490

Writing of

Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX

Fiction for March……………………….…. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for March.………………….…. 6150
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 49450
2026 consumable words………………… 49450

2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29