Category Archives: telling not showing

Guilty!

by
Charlotte Firbank-King


As a new or accomplished writer, what are you guilty of?

Are you guilty of being arrogant? Is your reader the enemy you’re writing at because you really need to put your brilliant prose on paper? Of course, ninety-nine point nine percent of readers are about as bright as an amoeba on a bad cell day, so your genius is totally wasted. But this is about you and your obsession to write. Right? —WRONG.

Are you guilty of being clever? You use words, scientific or otherwise, that have readers paging through a dictionary like a chipmunk on crack to understand what the heck you’re talking about. For example: Cavernulous – just say porous already. Otherwise, you’ve killed the flow and probably the reader’s enthusiasm to read your story.

Are you guilty of gimmick writing? You write everything in the present tense because it suits your literary genius. Or you exclude a word you hate from the entire manuscript, like that, said or had. I’m all for cutting down on these words, but sometimes they’re needed. Do you omit punctuation or new paragraphs, or remove dialogue all together and just narrate? It can work, but you have to be inventive to hold the reader’s interest. There are many versions of artifices that only stroke the author’s ego and cause the reader to tear out his hair. All you do is make the experience of reading your story uncomfortable. You put a barrier between the reader and the story until all they see is the author intruding into their pleasure of the story.

At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself if you value your reader. Do you really want your reader scratching his head, paging back to try to understand what you’re saying, or skipping paragraphs that are annoying? Is your aim to make him think about the deep meaning of your story, or to make your reader feel dense?

A reader may not remember all the details of a story, but he will always remember how you made him feel. Readers want to laugh, cry, hold their breaths, or sigh with relief. Are you guilty of not evoking any of these emotions?

Are you guilty of telling the reader a character is being funny or sarcastic? Like, writing, “she teased lightly,” or “his words dripped with sarcasm.” Make your writing speak with actions, emotions, and dialogue.

Are you guilty of swamping the reader with details that don’t add to the story or of repeating information in case he “didn’t get it” the first time round? Giving readers every detail of what characters are doing is tiresome. Readers are smart. They will fill in details like characters needing to put on shoes and a jacket and fetching an umbrella before going into a howling rain storm. It’s okay for them to just shrug into a jacket and go—have them flick open the umbrella as they walk out. In short, don’t make shopping lists of actions and don’t give readers every detail from the socks to the hat to the brushing of his teeth.

Are you guilty of not editing, editing, and editing multiple times before sending the manuscript to an editor or launching it on Amazon? Can you be sure there are no plot flaws, typos, or grammatical errors? Show respect for your reader—and editor, for that matter, and EDIT, over and over before releasing the manuscript.

Are you guilty of creating too many coincidences to make your plot work? Every action and scene that leads to the climax must be believable. If a character says, “I can’t believe that happened!” the reader will probably be thinking me neither. If it’s improbable, set it up ahead of time. She fell off the mountain and a piton caught her jacket, saving her. Show us the piton long before it catches on her jacket—set it up, make it feel probable.

Are you guilty of throwing readers constant curveballs, then leaving then hanging while you move on to another scene? You can get away with this once, but not in every chapter. They want to know if the gun fired at the character killed them or not—and they want to know in this chapter. They don’t want to wait three chapters to find out, while the second character is hanging from a cliff by their jacket in the next chapter. It’s all about seamless flow—making it a great reading experience.

Are you guilty of misleading the reader with a “hook” in the first paragraph of the first chapter that doesn’t fit the plot? Your story is a thriller and the lead characters are making out in a park while their children play on the swings. Sonny Jim disappears and a frantic hunt ensues. If your book is about kidnapping or some other dark plot about kids being snatched, then you have the right hook. But if these characters never again show up in the book and your story is actually about an affair at an office, you’ve got the wrong hook.

Readers are not reading the story to admire your literary genius—they want to be entertained. It’s all about them and what they want and need. After all, they PAID for the book.

Above all, clothe yourself in humility. Realize that as a writer you are nothing more than a servant applying your skill to please your master—the reader.

Picture a world where you’re surrounded by people who can’t read. Would you still write?

Some pearls of wisdom:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

—Oscar Wilde

It’s the rare writer who excels at all aspects of the craft. There are masterful stylists who, at bottom, have remarkably little to say. And there are vigorous thinkers whose sentences plod along like the lumbering steps of a draft horse.

 —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

—William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

 

Be a Cinematic Novelist

by
Charlotte Firbank-King

As a break from my study of the novel, I’m studying scriptwriting. In the process, I realized that perhaps we novelists should follow the scriptwriter’s methods—meaning we should write more concisely and keep the action moving at a fast pace. Most movies are just under two hours long, some less. Can you read your novel in that amount of time and pack in as much action and drama as a scriptwriter does? Scriptwriting is all about economy of words.

When explaining what makes a good story, Alfred Hitchcock said, “Life, with the dull parts taken out.” We need to visualize the movie and write with that vision in our brains. The story needs to be all about action—showing, not telling. For example, we can eliminate internal monologues and allow our reader to reach his own conclusion about what our character was thinking by the way we’ve described a look or an action.  

Scriptwriters can argue that writing is easier for a novelist. They can switch heads at will and go into any character’s head, whereas a scriptwriter has to show all this. So, take a break from all the tools you have available and try writing like a scriptwriter by showing your reader. When you’re about to switch heads to tell the reader how the other character feels, pretend you’re making a movie. How would you make the audience see what you want them to see?

When we first learn to write fiction, we may think that writing dialogue is all about making it sound like real life. More experienced writers know it’s basically smoke and mirrors. You make the reader feel as though they’re reading real dialogue, but it can’t be, because real-life conversations are mundane. Listen to people talk. Most talk is repetitive and downright boring, even if the dialogue is a heated argument. I would go so far as to say record an argument on your mobile phone and then edit it—you’ll take out most of what is said.

Dialogue is a tool used to illustrate a character’s personality or even the character of the person being addressed or discussed. It’s a way to reflect a character’s mood and emotions, or it can convey the relationship the characters have with each other. Dialogue can expose a motive or hide it. Dialogue must always have a root in what was said or what happened before and must lead smoothly into what happens next. It must convey meaning pertinent to the story, and it can be a portent of what might happen next. Above all, dialogue must be concise and easy to understand, not convoluted like real life. Again, see dialogue as if it is in a movie. Make your characters act it out rather than telling the reader what happened.

Scriptwriters have what they call subtext. It’s the understated scene. For example: 

A single mother comes back from a double shift at work. She worked the extra shift to help a friend who needed to attend her little girl’s school play. Dark rings underscore the mother’s eyes and she drags her feet as she walks into the sitting room. Her teenage son sits hunched over, glaring at the TV.

The mother drops her bag on the floor. “How was your day?”

He transfers his glare to her. “Just great!” He jerks up and stomps from the room, punching the wall on his way out. 

The mother sighs heavily. But as she’s about to walk to the kitchen, she stops and stares at her shattered glass-top coffee table. An MVP Trophy lies in the center of the ruin. Tears fill her eyes and she bites her lip.

 

He said his day was “just great.” Obviously, it wasn’t. He feels rejected and angry that his big day was forgotten by the only parent he has. We can see she feels guilt and regret. She sacrificed her son’s big day of getting this prestigious award so a small child’s mother could see one of perhaps many plays.

This is the under text. It isn’t served to the audience on a plate. They must figure it out on their own. On a subliminal level, this makes the reader/viewer feel clever for having figured it out. Although the writer could have done the work for them and written the scene out with a lot of dialogue and argument, it would still be showing. Many times, the understated is best.

Leonardo da Vinci said: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

As a novelist, we need to kick it up a notch and describe the scene because it isn’t a movie and the reader cannot literally see the characters in action. But if we can start off by doing what a scriptwriter does by just describing the action, then later we can add the bits between. With clever writing, our characters’ actions, emotions and dialogue should have filled in most of the blanks—the things a reader can’t see like a movie-goer can—and we should have a tighter story that is much more powerful.

Deadly Sin Two: Telling Not Showing

by Sandy Tritt

The First Rule of Writing is Show, Don’t Tell. That sounds easy, but what, exactly, does show mean? It means we must act out our scenes using action and dialogue in such a way that our reader can visualize exactly where he is and who he’s with—all while keeping him on the edge of his seat. Let’s look at an example:

Carey ate breakfast, then he took a shower and went to the store. At the store he met a girl and they talked for a long time. Carey liked her but she blew him off. Then he went home.

Tells you a lot about Carey, huh? Okay—so this example is exaggerated, but it hits home the necessity of showing and not telling. What can we do to fix it? We need more detail, especially in dialogue and action. Consider:

     Carey studied the frozen dinners. He’d had turkey and dressing for the last four days, so Salisbury steak would be good for a change. But did he want the “Big Man’’ or the regular?
     A scent teased his nose. Not the overwhelming smell of fish and frostbite, but a fresh smell, like the smell of skin just out of the shower. He glanced sideways and saw the most perfect arm he’d ever seen in his life. Long, slender, graceful, full of sinewy muscle and smooth skin. His eyes followed the arm to the shoulder and then the head. Her head. A head covered with long blond hair and containing a face that made his heart stop.
    “Hi,” she said, her voice rich and melodious.
     Carey’s mouth didn’t work. He tried to return her greeting, but only a grunt came out. He tried to smile politely, but his face erupted with a grin as large and toothy and goofy as a cartoon character’s . . .

So now you have the idea. We need details. We need to know thoughts, feelings; we need to smell the perfume, taste the wine, feel the cashmere. It is especially important to act out emotions and emotionally-packed scenes. This is the writer’s opportunity to shine. Never tell us what a character is feeling. Show us. Anything less cheats the reader from experiencing our imaginary world.

Bad: John was angry.
Good: John’s eyes narrowed. He slammed his fist on the table.

We also find the “show, don’t tell” problem in less-apparent ways. For example, in description.

Bad: Mary was a pretty girl, with blue eyes and blond hair.
Good: Mary’s blue eyes glistened with joy, her blond hair bouncing with each step.


Bad: Molly is a wonderful person.
Good: Molly is always there when anyone needs her. She’s the first to arrive with a casserole when someone is sick, the first to send a note of encouragement to those who are troubled, the first to offer a hug to anyone—man, woman or child—at anytime.

Instead of saying Sam is a talented musician, let us hear the crowds cheer, let us feel his passion. Take us into his head as he strokes the piano keys:
     
     Consummation of the soul. That’s what Sam called the gratification he received from music. When his passion became so intense it begged to be satisfied, pleaded to be released, and he was helpless to resist its urges. When his fingers assumed a life of their own, titillating the ivory keys with the complex music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, and he became one with the cadence, breathing with the crescendos, his fingers caressing the melody, until everything else faded, everything else disappeared, and only the music existed.

Dialogue is another area where we have the opportunity to show or to tell. “I love you,” she crooned. “I love you, too,” he sputtered. And I cringe. First, using creative dialogue tags (crooned, sputtered) is telling, not showing. Let the power of your dialogue and the accompanying action show your readers the tone of voice and the emotion. Consider:

     “I love you,” she said, her voice smooth as her fingers massaged his Rolex.
     “Love you, too,” he said. His glassy eyes roved over her naked body, his mouth too wet and limp to properly form words.

You can’t tell us someone is a wonderful person, a talented musician or a spoiled child. We won’t believe you. You must show us. Throughout your manuscript, look for any opportunity to show us in real time, to act out, to let us feel.

But—does this mean we should act out absolutely everything? Uh-uh. Let’s face it—if we showed everything, our novels would run tens of thousands of pages—and readers would die of exhaustion. So what do we do? We must decide what information the reader needs. Just because we know everything about our characters and just because we spent weeks researching, it isn’t necessary to share everything we know with our reader. We must choose only the details we need to authenticate our story and omit everything else.

One of the most difficult and most crucial elements in story-telling is knowing when to give play-by-play action and when to back off and summarize. Play with this. If a scene doesn’t hold your interest, maybe it is better to summarize it in a sentence or two and go on to something more important. However, if it is a pivotal scene in the plot or critical to our understanding how our character reacts in a given situation, go for it. Give us action, give us dialogue, and let us experience and savor every single moment of it.

BONUS TIP: Never name an emotion. That’s a sure-fire giveaway that you’re telling and not showing.

© 2008 Sandy Tritt. All rights reserved.

For more tips visit www.InspirationForWriters.com