In books that shift across time, space and characters, it’s a good idea to head a chapter or section with the date, place and character the scene is about, e.g. James. Sydney. September 1951.
Often connecting scenes simply requires a sentence that starts with something like: ‘Two days later …’ or ‘They drove to the beach and …’ or ‘When he arrived at school …’ These kinds of connecting sentences or paragraphs are one place where ‘telling’ is better than ‘showing’. We actually don’t need to know every step the characters took to get them to the next important event, so a summary is all we need.
If you don’t like this style of transition or don’t consider it necessary to mention the events or time frame between the main scenes—perhaps you’re aiming for a choppy, cinematic style in the book—you still need to give the reader sufficient information to enable them to make the connections themselves.
Movies jump from scene to scene and the viewer follows without the need for transitions because we instantly get the information we need from the visuals. If you’re taking the same approach in your fiction, then you need to provide the same kind of cues immediately at the start of the scene.
So if you’re going for that style, then make sure that your scene changes start with the POV character’s name in the first sentence (if it’s different to the POV character in the previous scene), along with something in the first paragraph that sets the scene in time and place. I explain more about this in the section on writing like a movie.
Showing and Telling
When you look over your work after your first draft, note the scenes and sections that are ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’. Mark them, decide which parts need to be shown rather than told, then go back and re-write those sections. For maximum impact, you’ll want to make sure your action scenes are shown and, for the modern reader, it’s advisable to have considerably more showing than telling in the book overall.
What Telling Is
Telling has a narrator between the reader and the action, so the reader stands outside the action and somewhat remote from the character. Readers are constantly reminded that they are reading, because the narrator tells us that the character did, saw, heard or felt something. Telling also talks about something that happened in the past, so the scene has little immediacy. Telling can cover a lot of ground quickly, so it’s useful for non-pivotal connecting scenes.
Telling is a natural part of omniscient point of view because it’s written from the POV of a narrator rather than the POV of a character, so the reader is always one step removed from the action. This means that authors writing in this POV need to write well if they are to fully engage their readers. They also need to understand what they’re giving up in terms of immediacy when they choose omniscient POV. Telling can be considered a stylistic choice for those who know what they’re doing, but unless the telling is done well, books that are all telling are generally not as engaging as those that have a balance between showing and telling.
Poorly written expositional prose (telling) is usually passive, but there’s nothing passive about the following excerpt, an example of excellent expositional prose from Talion by Mary Maddox:
Lu barely survived ninth grade. She had nightmares about school. In them she stood at the brink of two corridors, scuffed linoleum floors and banks of gray metal lockers stretching off forever in mirror images of each other. The odors of dust and floor wax and sweaty gym socks drifted back to her. If she chose the right corridor, she would make it through the day without being hassled. In these dreams she agonized over her choice, knowing it didn’t matter, that she was doomed to make the wrong one every time.
Contrast this with the same paragraph written using some of the elements of passive writing that I suggest avoiding—unnecessary adverbs, over writing, and passive verb use:
Lu had barely survived ninth grade. She had so many horrible nightmares about school where she was standing morosely between two corridors that had scuffed linoleum floors with banks of gray metal lockers stretching off forever in mirror images of each other in both directions. She could smell dust and floor wax and sweaty gym socks drifting back to her from along the corridor somewhere. She knew she had to choose the right corridor if she were to make it through the day without being seriously hassled and possibly beaten. In these terrifying dreams she agonized and sweated over her choice, knowing it didn’t matter which way she chose, that she would be making the wrong choice every time.
At this stage, you may not see a huge difference between these examples, but hopefully by the end of this book, you’ll understand why the first is much better. If you learn how to avoid the elements that make writing passive, then your writing will improve no matter whether you are showing or telling.
What Showing Is
Showing describes what that character sees, hears, does and so on directly, as if the action takes place now, right in front of the reader. It’s more immediate and places the reader right in the action. Why try to make our writing immediate? Because it engages readers in a very powerful way.
Telling: Sam was sad.
Showing: Sam’s shoulders slumped and his eyes lost their shine.
Here’s an example of a shown passage from my book Prunella Smith: Worlds Within Worlds:
My feet pounded the hard earth, jarring my bones, but I couldn’t stop. The monster closed in behind me, his breath coming in hard, loud pants. I tripped and stumbled over a fallen branch, only just saving myself from a fall. An evil chuckle reverberated through the darkening forest.
‘I’m going to get you, bitch.’ The chill in the beast’s voice sent shivers down my spine.
I ran faster, my legs burning with the effort, and looked desperately for somewhere to hide, somewhere to escape this monster set on destroying the very fabric of my life. But I knew this forest, and knew there was nowhere here that could keep me safe from this thing bent on revenge.
Now take a look at this passive version of the first two sentences: My feet were pounding the hard earth, jarring my bones, but I couldn’t stop. The monster was closing in behind me; his breath was coming in hard, loud pants.
The telling version of this might be something like: I ran through the forest looking for somewhere to hide with the beast crashing through the undergrowth behind me. He left a trail of evil chuckles in his wake as if he knew what I knew—there was nowhere in this forest that could hide me from his revenge.
The passive telling version might be: I was running through the forest looking for somewhere to hide and the beast was crashing through the undergrowth behind me. A trail of evil chuckles was left in his wake as if he knew what I knew—there was nowhere in this forest that could hide me from his revenge.
Beginning writers mostly tell their stories, and often in a passive way. Learning how to show a story in an active way takes a bit of study and practice. The rest of this book will help you along that path.
Is Telling Wrong?
The ‘show, don’t tell’ instruction/advice has, for some, become a rule, and wherever they see writing that is somewhat expositional, they scream BAD. What they forget or never realised is that expositional writing has a place in fiction and is, to some extent, a matter of style and personal choice. It is also a matter of fashion. The emphasis on showing rather than telling in fiction came from modern America and has been picked up by Australia and other countries. As I understand it, the advice about showing rather than telling began with Chekhov and the ways he found for implying emotions rather than stating them. TS Eliot was influential along similar lines, with his ‘objective correlative’, and possibly the spread of creative writing programs in schools and universities has contributed to these ideas becoming the prevailing fashion. British and European writers will tell you that it is less of an issue there, and it wasn’t an issue at all until this century—take a look at the classics and books published last century.
Telling is also a necessary shortcut for linking scenes and brief inserts of back-story
—just don’t write all your scenes as shortcuts or let your back-story languish in huge chunks.
Why then are writing gurus always telling authors to show rather than tell? Two reasons come to mind: It’s harder to hold the attention of modern readers who, since they are used to watching movies, require more immediacy to keep them engaged than readers of the past. Also, it’s harder to write good fiction in an expositional style because it requires an understanding of rhetoric that goes beyond describing in detail what happens. To tell effectively, the writer must weave descriptive details and imagery into a narrative that may span weeks, months, or even years. In other words, the writer has to be familiar with expository writing, which takes formal education and/or wide reading.
This advice is also given because much modern writing is in first person or third person intimate point of view (POV), which demands immediacy and identification with the character. Without it, writing in those POVs comes off as a little flat. But omniscient point of view and telling a story go together. This is because omniscient POV is written from the perspective of a narrator who stands outside the story and knows everything. So we should expect more telling in an omniscient POV novel along with a sense of the narrator’s presence. We can also expect that the narrator will tell us about more than one character’s thoughts and emotions, and in a true omniscient POV novel that is not head-hopping. In third person intimate, distance from the characters is a drawback and the author’s presence an intrusion; in omniscient POV, distance from the characters and a degree of author presence comes with the territory. (Writing well in omniscient POV is a lot harder than most people think.)
The criteria in the Awesome Indies for ‘showing rather than telling’ has the proviso of ‘where relevant’, and this is because a talented author can ‘tell’ a story brilliantly. In such cases their prose is so good that whether it’s shown or told is irrelevant. The task of the critic is to recognise where that is the case rather than see exposition and immediately think ‘bad’.
Expositional writing is only ‘bad’ when it isn’t done well, and most of what I see in self-published books isn’t. If you want to write fiction that competes well against other books on the market and engages the widest possible number of readers, then—no matter whether you call it genre or literary fiction—unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s best to follow the general advice to show rather than tell.
The task of modern authors is to learn how to recognise when their prose is passive or expository, learn how to write active prose, and know when it’s appropriate to use each one.
Mary Maddox, one of the Awesome Indies reviewers, told me: “I leaned the ‘show, don't tell’ rule in high school. Since then, I’ve figured out that both showing and telling are necessary to storytelling. Dramatic scenes usually include some telling, and expository narration and extended transitions nearly always contain elements of showing.”
Take a look at the famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’ opening establishes the wide scope of the novel and introduces an omniscient narrator who will be commenting on events, but having done so, he must move into the narrative, a transition from abstract to concrete. He does this elegantly using imagery structured with repetition and contrast describing the kings and queens of France and England.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
Later in this book, I (and many other writing coaches) recommend not using phrases such as ‘it was’ and ‘there were’, particularly at the beginning of sentences, but here, the usage works and the repetition is powerful. The repetition I’ll later advise you to avoid is the unnecessary, cluttering kind, not the kind done for conscious emphasis as it is here. This is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t get rigid and emotional about guidelines; what we should do is learn the guidelines and the reasons for them so we know when they aren’t relevant. The saying that you must know the rules in order to break them effectively is very true.
Think in Scenes
One way to help you show rather than tell is to think of your book as a series of scenes, like a movie. Pull out the pivotal ones and make sure you write them in an active way, as if they are happening in front of the reader’s eyes, not as if you are telling someone the story afterwards. Report what you see, smell, and hear in the scene, as if you’re the movie camera. Between the major scenes, you can have some expositional writing, but break up the telling with scenes where you show the action. When we tell the reader about people and events, they don’t care that much about them. If you show, they get involved and start to care, because showing is more engaging.
Make sure that you set each scene in a place so the reader can visualise the setting, and use odours, tactile feelings, sounds, and tastes as well as sight in your descriptions—these add texture that draws readers into the scenes in such a way that they almost experience them. Just as a movie director will make sure the lighting is right for the mood of a scene, describe the light quality in your scenes. And don’t forget that each scene needs its own story arc and tension. If a scene seemed rushed or ‘thin’ with too little detail and texture, then write more words to draw out the action and suspense.
Also, don’t forget that when something happens to a character, or around a character, the character must respond. The reader wants to know how your character felt, and what they did and said in response to the action. It’s an important part of character development. This seems obvious, but beginning writers often forget to show the responses of characters before moving on with the plot.
Write Like a Movie
The potential audience for books have many other—and, for many, easier—ways to entertain themselves. The biggest competition novels have today are movies and television, and this has altered the kind of novels that are most successful in today’s market.
Movies are a highly visual, auditory, immediate and immersive medium. These are the qualities that your novel needs in order to hold someone who might otherwise be tempted to watch a movie. The key to writing that way is in the movie approach itself. If you write your novel as if it were a movie, you’ll be on the right track from the start.
How?
Don’t think about your story, SEE it as a movie.
Visualise it—don’t forget the lighting effects—
and hear it in your mind.
See it as a series of scenes.
Plot your story arc like a screen play.
Immerse yourself in the characters and scenes as you write. Be in the movie. Write what the character hears, sees and feels.
Write as if you are in the scene and it is happening to you and around you now.
Even though in a movie we do watch from outside the characters, it is still an immersive experience for the viewer due to the visual and auditory power of the medium. In order to give the same kind of immersive experience as they get from a movie, you need your readers to identify with the characters, to get inside them and really know and feel for them.
In summary:
Learning the craft of novel writing and the techniques of writing immediate and engaging prose are vital, but imagining your story in a form that is conducive to that kind of writing
and organisation can be a big help. Imagine your novel as a movie, be in it as you write, and you’re at least halfway there. For some, this is a challenge, but it’s one worth taking on because it could revolutionise your writing.
Here’s an example from Stalking Shadows, the second book in my Diamond Peak series. When I wrote it, and now when I read it, I see it like a movie in my head:
A ripple spread from the centre of the lake. Kestril cursed under his breath and Ariel shuddered. Nick rowed faster, arms straining as the lean, elegant lines of a giant serpent’s head pierced the surface of the lake and swivelled towards them. Ariel stifled a scream. She could feel the serpent’s ominous black-eyed gaze boring into them. The Gana’s head tilted to one side as if considering whether to bother with them or not, then it began to swim towards them. Its graceful body undulated behind it like the Loch Ness monster.
Nick heaved at the oars, and though they sped through the water, it would never be fast enough. Kestril took his wand from his belt, stared at it for a moment, then took a deep breath and muttered something under his breath. Music flowed from his wand, a fine sweet voice singing a haunting melody. The song flowed over the lake like something tangible, and it seemed as if the water took up the song until the air itself shimmered with its magic.
The huge serpent slowed, but two more heads broke the water, looked around and fixed their piercing gaze on the travellers. After a moment’s consideration, all three sped towards them.
I’m not suggesting you all write like me, not at all, just that you imagine yourself in the midst of your story as you write. Be in it and the reader will more likely be in it as well.
See the Difference
An example of a told passage:
The idea was that she would forget Aarod, but as the days passed, his handsome face kept swimming into her mind and the only way she could get it to go away was to remind herself that he was a murderer. When she remembered the last time she’d seen him, she saw Daniel’s face on one of the Magan corpses and the man’s haunting eyes became her brother’s. The sick feeling that accompanied the memory erased most of her longing, but the sickness lessened with time.
The Elements of Active Prose Page 4