Thirty-two was too young for spider veins.
It was also too young to be hit on by Wendell Pickering, art director of Bloom and Bulb magazine, a lanky man with thinning hair and pale eyes. He made the pass once he finished nitpicking the six-page spread on perennial borders Cydney had stayed up until 3 A.M. to finish.
“I'm afraid I can't approve this,” he said. “I might be able to over dinner this evening if you think you can make the corrections by seven-thirty.”
Then he smiled and laid his hand on her tush.
It was now 2:30 in the afternoon. Cydney had a parking ticket in her purse, a headache and no Tylenol, a notebook computer with a blown graphics card that thought it was an Etch a Sketch, a roll of film a client had accidentally exposed and would have to be reshot, a broken heel on her best pumps, and now a man with a neck like a chicken who actually thought she'd go out with him to salvage a $2,500 photo layout.
“I'm busy tonight, Wendell,” Cydney said in her iciest voice. Sticking my head in the oven, she thought. “Now take your hands off me while you still can.”
By giving the details of Cydney's day and showing Wendell right down to his hand on Cydney's rear, Michaels has given the readers all the evidence they need to form their own conclusion. She's also presented Cydney in a positive light — appropriately assertive but not nasty, even though Wendell deserves it.
Summarizing — telling — is an occupational hazard for every novelist. Because you, as the author, can so clearly see the action, hear the words, and smell the scents of the story as you're writing it, it's sometimes easy to forget that the readers don't automatically have the same grasp of the scene.
The readers can only see, hear, and smell the things you put in front of them, and unless you give them the details that will help them experience those sensations, they can't possibly react the same way you do to the story.
Showing the story means giving the readers the same kinds of information they would get if they were sitting in a theater watching a play. In a theater, you don't get ultrafine detail, but you get the big picture that helps you make up your own mind about the setting. You see the characters' actions, props, and costumes, so you can draw your own conclusions about the kind of people they are.
A stage play doesn't give you all the details, just the ones you need in order to understand what's going on and to form a background for the story. You aren't told what the main character ate for breakfast, unless perhaps he's going to suspect in act 2 that his corn flakes were poisoned. You don't see what's beyond the doorways at the edge of the stage; you know there are rooms there, but you don't need the details.
In the same way, you don't need to give your readers every detail of your characters' lives and actions. Skip over the less important details and concentrate on the facts that help the readers picture the scene. If your heroine is driving to work, you don't need to describe every gear change or list every intersection. You might, however, note the fact that the heavy traffic frays her nerves, or comment that she's already so stressed by the hero that she doesn't even notice the traffic — because those things tell the readers important things about the heroine.
SELECTING DETAILS
Details are most effective when they build on what the readers already know. If the setting is a living room, the readers don't need to see a dozen other rooms in order to assume the one in front of them is attached to a regular house. On the other hand, if the setting is another planet, the readers will need considerably more information in order to form a mental picture.
The tricky part of including detail is sorting out the significant details from the mass of information inside your mind. As you write a scene, you know what everyone looks like, what they're wearing, and what color the upholstery is. Most of that information isn't critically important because the readers know about people and clothes and furnishings and can provide that picture for themselves. Yet it's important to give the readers enough information to be able to picture your room and your character.
How many details do you need to give, and which ones are important to help the readers form a picture in their minds? You can determine this by considering the following questions:
How familiar are the readers with this type of location, person, or event? (The more commonplace the location, person, or event, the fewer descriptive details the readers need to form a picture.)
What makes this place, these people, or this event different from the ordinary? What makes them stand out from similar places, people, or events?
What do the readers need to know in order to understand why these characters react as they do?
Think about what you as a reader would like to know about this story, these characters, and this situation. What do you need to know in order to understand what's going on? Then share those facts — and no more — with your audience. Let the readers have the fun of imagining the rest.
And when you want to describe a room or a person, give your point-of-view character a reason to stop and take a good look. Is this the first time he's ever been in this location or seen this person? Is the room different from what he expected? Has the character he's looking at changed since he last saw him?
In her paranormal single title Undead and Unwed, MaryJanice Davidson shows us her heroine, a brand-new vampire, as she begins to realize what's happened to her:
I opened my eyes to pure darkness. When I was a kid I read a short story about a preacher who went to hell, and when he got there he discovered the dead didn't have eyelids, so they couldn't close their eyes to block out the horror. Right away I knew I wasn't in hell, since I couldn't see a thing.
I wriggled experimentally. I was in a small, closed space. I was lying on something hard, but the sides of my little cage were padded. …
I wriggled some more, then had a brainstorm and sat up. My head banged into something firm but yielding, which gave way when I shoved. Then I was sitting up, blinking in the gloom. …
Then I realized I was sitting in a coffin. …
I nearly broke something scrambling out. … I burst through the swinging doors and found myself in a large, wood-paneled entryway. … At the far end of the entry was a tall, wild-eyed blonde dressed in an absurd pink suit. She might have been pretty if she wasn't wearing orange blusher and too much blue eye shadow. …
The blonde wobbled toward me on cheap shoes — Payless, buy one pair get the second at half price — and I saw her hair was actually quite nice: shoulder length with a cute flip at the ends and interesting streaky highlights.
Interesting Shade #23 Lush Golden Blonde highlights. Heyyyyy …
The woman in the awful suit was me. The woman in the cheap shoes was me!
I staggered closer to the mirror, wide eyed. Yes, it was really me, and yes, I looked this awful. I really was in hell!
Davidson's heroine has a great reason for looking around carefully and noting details, since her surroundings are like nothing she's ever experienced. And although the author employs an overused device — the heroine catching sight of herself in a mirror — as an excuse to describe her, Davidson has added some wicked twists. Her heroine literally being caught dead in a suit, shoes, and makeup that she would normally never have worn makes the cliché fresh and new.
SHARING DETAILS
How do you share the details of your all-important story with the readers? There are five main ways:
Narrative: describing what happens in more-or-less sequential order.
Exposition and Summary: telling about or recapping the action rather than showing it.
Flashback: showing a character reliving an event that happened before the current story.
Introspection: detailing what the characters think.
Dialogue: sharing what the characters say.
We'll look at dialogue and introspection in chapter twelve, but let's take a closer look at narrative, exposition and summary, and flashback techniques.
Narrative
Straightforward narrative
involves presenting events to the readers in the same order in which they occurred. In its simplest form, narrative is almost a list. Narrative is what the Red King from Alice in Wonderland wanted when he said, “Begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, and then stop.” It's the technique a first-grader uses to tell you what he did at the zoo: “First I saw the giraffes, then I rode on the elephant, and then I petted a goat and he tried to eat my sleeve.”
The action is much more complex in romantic fiction, of course, but the principle for presenting it is the same. Close your eyes and watch the scene in your mind as it unfolds. What happens next? What do your readers need to know in order to understand the scene? What details will help them picture the location, characters, and events?
Have you ever struggled to make sense of a story told by a scatterbrained individual who started the tale in the middle, left out the most important facts, forgot the punch line, and kept saying, “Oh, I forgot to tell you …” or “I guess I should have said …”?
If so, you appreciate the value of straightforward narrative — simple words, simple (though varied) sentence structures, and events coming one after another in the same sequence in which they actually occurred. Using simple words and uncomplicated sentence structure does not make a story dull. In fact, straightforward writing is more difficult to compose well than more complex and literary flights of fancy because every word counts. Writing so the story will be easy for the readers to comprehend is not a simple task.
EVERYTHING IN ORDER
When you're writing, keep in mind the order in which things actually happen, and follow that order. Tell the readers that someone new has come into the room before the new character starts talking. Show the event and then the reaction. It's far easier for the readers to follow and enjoy action when they see it happening in real time and in order.
Don't let your point-of-view character react before you tell the readers what she's reacting to — as I've done in this example:
Jane's stomach jolted. She couldn't believe what he'd just said. Had she really heard him say that Edward had married Helen?
Notice that I've put Jane's gut reaction first, then a more reasoned reaction, and then finally the comment that caused the reaction. The result will probably make the readers go back and read the paragraph over again to figure out what happened when.
But when you share events in the order in which they happen, the readers are right there watching, as in this example from Susan Elizabeth Phillips' First Lady, when her hero, Mat, is driving Lucy and her baby sister to a lab for blood tests to prove he's not their father:
After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life. [Mat] shook his head in disgust. “This thing is a piece of crap.” … He glanced into [the Winnebago's] side mirror and backed out. “You know, don't you, that I'm not really your father.”
“Like I'd want you.”
So much for the worry he'd been harboring that [Lucy] might have built up some kind of sentimental fantasy about him. … “Here are the facts, smart mouth. Your mother put my name on both your birth certificates, so we need to straighten that out, and the only way we can do it is with three blood tests.”…
They drove the rest of the way to the lab in silence, except for the Demon Baby, who'd started to scream again. He pulled up in front of a two-story medical building and looked over at Lucy. She was staring rigidly at the doors as if she were looking at the gates of hell.
“I'll give you twenty bucks to take the test,” he said quickly.
She shook her head. “No needles. I hate needles. Even thinking about them makes me sick.”
He was just beginning to contemplate how he could carry two screaming children into the lab when he had his first piece of luck all day.
Lucy got out of the Winnebago before she threw up.
Phillips gives us enough details to picture the scene as it's unfolding, and it's important to note what she doesn't tell us: how many miles it is to the lab; how many red lights they stop for; how many dents the Winnebago has; whether the lab building is brick, frame, or stone. Instead, she focuses on the events that are important at this point in the story: Mat starts up the mobile home with difficulty, drives to the lab, and parks; Lucy gets out and throws up. Showing the sequence of events in neat chronological order actually builds suspense, because during the drive to the lab, our suspicions are growing that this can't possibly go as smoothly as Mat hopes it will.
Narrating the events in order automatically limits the amount of information the readers get. When you're telling about events and people, it's easy to tell too much. But when the readers see and hear what's going on for themselves, they have some limitations — and they become more involved with the story as they try to figure out what's going on.
Exposition and Summary
Story-showing has limits. Not every event is important enough to be worth the time and space required in order to show every instant of the action. Not every movement or thought is crucial to the readers' comprehension. Many episodes can be made clearer with a single summing-up sentence than with pages of descriptive detail. Summary and exposition are the tools you use when you need to let readers know something but using story-showing details would only slow things down.
Summary is a concise statement of facts or the order of events; it's straight telling, without using dialogue or action. Summary is “just the facts, ma'am.”
Exposition is summary with a twist — it tells what happened, but it also explains why. Exposition doesn't simply show the action and allow readers to make their own judgments; it tells the readers what to think.
The single sentence “Sara hadn't seen Max in years” is a summary — it simply and efficiently states a fact that readers need to know. This simple sentence is much clearer than a paragraph or two giving the details of Sara's confusion and happiness and memories at the encounter. And especially if Max isn't critically important in Sara's life or her story, the space you save by summarizing could be better used for other things.
Exposition is a little more problematic. If your heroine is chatting with an old friend and you break off the conversation to say, “Sally met Jane when they were in kindergarten and Jane had been her best friend ever since,” you're using exposition — you're telling readers rather than letting them discover for themselves. Whether readers need or want to know that these two characters have been friends for twenty years is another question altogether, and that's where the use of exposition becomes clouded. Is it better to tell, or is it better to show Sally and Jane reminiscing about their school days? The answer will depend on the story. If what happened in kindergarten is important in Sally's current story, perhaps you need to show it through dialogue or even flashback. If it isn't, the single line of exposition is preferable — if you need to explain anything at all.
In Tanya Michaels's romantic comedy The Maid of Dishonor, the heroine is attending a cocktail party, but the conversation isn't important to the story — so Michaels wisely opts for two paragraphs of summary instead of giving all the details:
Wide French doors opened onto a well-manicured lawn, and Sam hurried through them, anxious to escape the cloying, suffocating atmosphere of the room. Each conversation opener she'd heard tonight had been a blatant status announcement. Why didn't the guests just lay their bank statements and family trees out on the enormous mahogany dining table and give up the pretense of small talk?
Thank God this is not the life I lead. Despite the condescending gazes she'd drawn when she told people she was a piano teacher, she'd never trade her job to be one of the wealthy elite inside…
By summing up the unimportant talk, Michaels quickly moves her heroine out to the terrace where the next important event will take place.
WHEN NOT TO USE SUMMARY AND EXPOSITION
If you introduce your main character by saying “Sally Jones, who was the personal assistant to a powerful businessman, answered the phone,” you're telling the readers about Sally, her boss, and th
e office, rather than letting the readers find out for themselves. You're cheating the readers out of a chance to see Sally in action.
If you stop in the middle of your main characters' quarrel to explain why they've never been able to get along, you're taking away from the readers the joy of figuring that out for themselves.
Sometimes, especially when a passage of this sort goes on for a while, it's referred to as an information dump — as if the author has upended a basketful of facts over the reader's head.
WHEN TO USE SUMMARY AND EXPOSITION
As we saw in the storytelling and story-showing examples at the beginning of the chapter, giving all the details so readers can make up their own minds takes a great deal more space. If the action isn't concise and fast moving, or if it isn't particularly important, summary may be the best way to handle it. If all you're doing is moving your heroine across country, you probably don't need to detail every stop sign and road change. It's better to write, “The journey seemed to take forever, and the endless parade of gas stations meshed into a blur in her memory,” and let it go at that.
Summary and exposition can be very useful to set the stage, giving the details necessary for readers to create a picture in their minds. “In matching fireplaces at each end of the room, gas logs flickered, banishing the gloom of a rainy afternoon,” gives the information succinctly. You could have the main characters chat about the fires and the weather instead, but it would take up half a page and not add much to the story.
Even in a long novel, your space — your number of words — is limited. Use them for showing the important things, and let the readers fill in the rest from their experience and imagination.
Flashbacks
Sometimes, especially when a story takes place over a period of years or has its origins in a long-ago event, flashbacks are a useful story-showing tool.
On Writing Romance Page 14