![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaDon't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.--Anton Chekhov
# # #
Showing and not telling. What in the HAY-UL do they really mean by that?
I think it's better described with the terms "narrate VS dramatize." And I think not everything needs to be dramatized in a scene. Before you get too carried away making everything into scenes, you need to decide what deserves to be dramatized and what should be narrated or left as a bridge/transition (a couple of sentences, indirect dialogue, or a brief thought in sequel.)
_Per exemple_, there's no point in dramatizing this: "She parked in the handicapped spot, put the sunshade across the inside of the windshield, turned the ignition off, and pulled the key out. She got her crutches out of the back seat for balance. Gingerly stepping up on the curb, she cursed the people who put the curb cuts far away from the parking spots for the disabled. She walked up to the store entrance and pushed the door open." *yawn* This is all stuff we can take for granted. You could just summarize this with: "She used her crutches for balance as she entered the store." Or something like that, depending on the detail(s) you are going to need for the next scene.
If you find that you have dramatized the parts that are boring and that readers skip, just replace them with a summary sentence or some other transition. Often, you can just do a scene break and readers will know that time has passed or that the heroine has traversed the parking lot. "She drove across town to Benny's without even stopping for a BiggieGulp. A red Corvette was parked in the driveway. Still, she managed not to slam the door of her Beetle, remembering the urban legend about that causing a vacuum inside the car. Not that ol' Lovebug couldn't stand a bit of vacuuming."
Yeah, that's probably too long, too. But if Dave Barry had written it, I'll bet he would have gotten away with it.
You'll have noticed by now that showing (dramatization) takes up a lot more space/words than telling. This is why we have to be discerning about which scenes are really interesting and where the details just can't be left out. Telling can "telescope" time: "Several days later, Jillie still hadn't returned my call." "When she awoke, the sun was streaming through the sheer curtains." You can tell/narrate some things much more sensibly than others and get to the real action faster.
Here's another clever bit about telling. Let's say that your POV character thinks that Joe is a great guy, and says so, yet later a scene shows that Joe is on the take or has other "fatal" flaws. Then we know that either our POV character is in denial or hasn't noticed this behavior--or approves of it. Perhaps our narrator is unreliable . . . that's a tough one to handle properly, but Phil Dick did it in _Confessions of a Crap Artist_ and John Updike did it in _Roger's Version_, so it's possible. Our Hero may tell his wife that Joe is wonderful and honest, but a few scenes later we catch Joe in an obvious, self-serving lie. Either Our Hero doesn't know a jerk when he sees one, or he's in collusion with Joe, or perhaps he simply doesn't see Joe for who he is because of past baggage (Joe saved his life in Vietnam or when they were children . . . you know the drill. Bzzzzapp.)
Sometimes you can signal unreliability in a character through a tic. Perhaps a characteristic little bit of action like tugging at her earlobe when she's lying can irritate Our Hero at first--until he figures out that she's always fibbing with a white lie or telling the incomplete story when she does
it, and this can reveal to the hero later that she's not telling him the whole truth about that old boyfriend of hers who shows up later.
At any rate, Swain and his protege Bickham admit that ya just can't act everything out. There isn't time.
Another place we can summarize is when you've already dramatized/shown an event, and now you need your POV character to communicate this to someone who wasn't there. "Quickly I explained about the arson and the sneaky way that Jon had escaped." "She filled him in as they drove to the doughnut shop." Strangely enough, this was one of the big flaws in that mystery I recently said I hadn't enjoyed: the author kept retelling stuff that she'd already shown us. She didn't usedta do that in her other series.
She even had stuff like, "Quinn poked the red button on her cell phone to make the jabbering stop." That was kind of cute, but I'll bet I would have been dinged for it being too Fey or Twee or Cutesy. She could have just written, "Quinn hung up in the middle of his tirade and sighed." Or, "Quinn closed the cell phone, silencing the voice of her self-appointed Jiminy Cricket." See, I'm doing it again. ANYway, editors today would probably rather you simply implied that the gal hung up the phone.
Rule of thumb:
TELL when you just need to get the information across and move on.
SHOW when you want the reader to have a vicarious experience.
Your vivid scenes ("the vivid, continuous dream," as one teacher puts it) will give readers the sounds, smells, and visuals that make them experience what's happening as filtered through the senses of your POV character. You will make them experience the story as a form of reality. Things that aren't really scenes don't need to be scenes.
Also: everyone's so visual these days, but we have to write with these funny little ink marks, not with cartoons or pictograms.
You are not a film director, so your "picture" has to be made out of words. I often hear people say that they feel it's "overwriting" or "purple prose" to have some really powerful words in a paragraph, so you'll have to use your judgment, but I like to see people with a talent for the turn of a phrase. You'll want to search for cliches and replace them. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" could become, "A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation," or "A canary in the mine is worth a flock of them in the White House." Hmm, you'll have to work on those a bit more.
The Telling Detail: it can be part of telling, but it's certainly part of showing. Any detail that gets put into an opening is something that sticks with the reader, and is supposed to intrigue or inform so you can process the scene to come. The only reason that detail is there is to start telling/showing the reader how the viewpoint character's mind works. She thinks at a certain level of detail about music; therefore, you know she's a musician and she's pretty accomplished. We can assume she knows what she is doing if the author tells us that she's playing Bach and Schubert. Thus, later in the scene when the talent scout shows up to
try to hire her for his agency, the reader will say, "She's good enough!" If you'd said that she was having trouble reading the notes in Music Primer #1, or that she just couldn't sing along with a rap song because she had no sense of rhythm, we'd have a different idea of the character.
A couple of notes about psychic distance in third-person viewpoint.
Being "in viewpoint" means that everything you write goes through the filter of a particular character's mind. The details are the ones
that person would notice, and the thoughts are in his/her "voice."
Here is embarrassment seen by an outside observer:
At last Mix's patience was ended, and he let his anger boil over. His face and scalp turned an angry red, and the veins in his neck stood out like ropes. He waved his arms and the magic spurted out every which way, clipping a horse's tail and narrowly missing the corner of a building.
Uh-uh. Too many tired phrases ("ropes" and "angry red"); also, who's seeing this? If someone else is seeing it, and you want to be in his or her viewpoint, you can have someone talk:
"Mommy, look!" Bryne tugged at Mistwind's robes. "When that man gets mad, his whole head turns pink!" Lines of force, blue majickal light, began streaking out from the magician's fingers, and the child's eyes
bugged out in wonder even as Mistwind grabbed him and made for the mouth of the cave.
But if Mix is our lead character, it would make for better reader identification to go "into viewpoint" with Mix.
"That's the last straw!" Mix felt his face burning as blood rushed to it, and the veins in his neck strained toward the surface like goldfish trying to breathe in a too-tiny tank. He knew he was going to cast a
spell; the only question was, could he stay calm enough to choose the proper one? He could feel the energy rushing out of his fingertips already, before he was ready for it, and knew it was going to be a magic storm.
Even better, get inside Mix's head. Listen:
"That's it. That's the camel-breaker!" Forgetting that he'd sworn to remain indifferent to the children's taunts, Mix let loose with a spray of magic in all directions. "You're going to be sorry, you little brats. Why doesn't your mother spank you?" The heat rushed down his arms and
exploded out his fingertips. _Shit-oh-dear--I don't think I'm going to be able to control all this._ WHAT was that blinding light? Not
something he'd done, surely! _Hell's bells and damnation!_
In the last example, we shouldn't need a "he thought" with the underlined (italicized) internal monologue. One school of thought says that if you do this correctly, the reader will be "in" Mix's mind sufficiently that she will just know that's a thought. Direct
thoughts are usually underlined, unless style conventions are different at a particular publishing house. Yet I still got "dinged"
for a "second person sentence that's authorial intrusion" in a contest, when what I was really doing was a direct thought without the "she thought." I'd written:
"You know what they say--'Never take a leper to bed.'" Jinks pulled the rope and brought the dinghy back in. Leave it to Indoline to go off forgetting that other people might need the small craft if the ship took on water. How could anyone make her see that she wasn't
the only person in the world? You never knew how people were going to react. You couldn't trust anybody, not even your own sister.
No, it was more basic than that: You can't win.
That last sentence was a direct thought, a "he thought," and I deleted the "he thought" at the urging of the critique group, who claims the "he thought"s and "she said"s add a level of distance. The submission for the contest didn't have all the underlining it was supposed to. Thus, I got dinged. Hmph!
So you have to be sure you're doing this right. But I think it's worth the extra effort.
Now, if only I could figure out how to do it right.
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."--W. Somerset Maugham
Showing and not telling. What in the HAY-UL do they really mean by that?
I think it's better described with the terms "narrate VS dramatize." And I think not everything needs to be dramatized in a scene. Before you get too carried away making everything into scenes, you need to decide what deserves to be dramatized and what should be narrated or left as a bridge/transition (a couple of sentences, indirect dialogue, or a brief thought in sequel.)
_Per exemple_, there's no point in dramatizing this: "She parked in the handicapped spot, put the sunshade across the inside of the windshield, turned the ignition off, and pulled the key out. She got her crutches out of the back seat for balance. Gingerly stepping up on the curb, she cursed the people who put the curb cuts far away from the parking spots for the disabled. She walked up to the store entrance and pushed the door open." *yawn* This is all stuff we can take for granted. You could just summarize this with: "She used her crutches for balance as she entered the store." Or something like that, depending on the detail(s) you are going to need for the next scene.
If you find that you have dramatized the parts that are boring and that readers skip, just replace them with a summary sentence or some other transition. Often, you can just do a scene break and readers will know that time has passed or that the heroine has traversed the parking lot. "She drove across town to Benny's without even stopping for a BiggieGulp. A red Corvette was parked in the driveway. Still, she managed not to slam the door of her Beetle, remembering the urban legend about that causing a vacuum inside the car. Not that ol' Lovebug couldn't stand a bit of vacuuming."
Yeah, that's probably too long, too. But if Dave Barry had written it, I'll bet he would have gotten away with it.
You'll have noticed by now that showing (dramatization) takes up a lot more space/words than telling. This is why we have to be discerning about which scenes are really interesting and where the details just can't be left out. Telling can "telescope" time: "Several days later, Jillie still hadn't returned my call." "When she awoke, the sun was streaming through the sheer curtains." You can tell/narrate some things much more sensibly than others and get to the real action faster.
Here's another clever bit about telling. Let's say that your POV character thinks that Joe is a great guy, and says so, yet later a scene shows that Joe is on the take or has other "fatal" flaws. Then we know that either our POV character is in denial or hasn't noticed this behavior--or approves of it. Perhaps our narrator is unreliable . . . that's a tough one to handle properly, but Phil Dick did it in _Confessions of a Crap Artist_ and John Updike did it in _Roger's Version_, so it's possible. Our Hero may tell his wife that Joe is wonderful and honest, but a few scenes later we catch Joe in an obvious, self-serving lie. Either Our Hero doesn't know a jerk when he sees one, or he's in collusion with Joe, or perhaps he simply doesn't see Joe for who he is because of past baggage (Joe saved his life in Vietnam or when they were children . . . you know the drill. Bzzzzapp.)
Sometimes you can signal unreliability in a character through a tic. Perhaps a characteristic little bit of action like tugging at her earlobe when she's lying can irritate Our Hero at first--until he figures out that she's always fibbing with a white lie or telling the incomplete story when she does
it, and this can reveal to the hero later that she's not telling him the whole truth about that old boyfriend of hers who shows up later.
At any rate, Swain and his protege Bickham admit that ya just can't act everything out. There isn't time.
Another place we can summarize is when you've already dramatized/shown an event, and now you need your POV character to communicate this to someone who wasn't there. "Quickly I explained about the arson and the sneaky way that Jon had escaped." "She filled him in as they drove to the doughnut shop." Strangely enough, this was one of the big flaws in that mystery I recently said I hadn't enjoyed: the author kept retelling stuff that she'd already shown us. She didn't usedta do that in her other series.
She even had stuff like, "Quinn poked the red button on her cell phone to make the jabbering stop." That was kind of cute, but I'll bet I would have been dinged for it being too Fey or Twee or Cutesy. She could have just written, "Quinn hung up in the middle of his tirade and sighed." Or, "Quinn closed the cell phone, silencing the voice of her self-appointed Jiminy Cricket." See, I'm doing it again. ANYway, editors today would probably rather you simply implied that the gal hung up the phone.
Rule of thumb:
TELL when you just need to get the information across and move on.
SHOW when you want the reader to have a vicarious experience.
Your vivid scenes ("the vivid, continuous dream," as one teacher puts it) will give readers the sounds, smells, and visuals that make them experience what's happening as filtered through the senses of your POV character. You will make them experience the story as a form of reality. Things that aren't really scenes don't need to be scenes.
Also: everyone's so visual these days, but we have to write with these funny little ink marks, not with cartoons or pictograms.
You are not a film director, so your "picture" has to be made out of words. I often hear people say that they feel it's "overwriting" or "purple prose" to have some really powerful words in a paragraph, so you'll have to use your judgment, but I like to see people with a talent for the turn of a phrase. You'll want to search for cliches and replace them. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" could become, "A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation," or "A canary in the mine is worth a flock of them in the White House." Hmm, you'll have to work on those a bit more.
The Telling Detail: it can be part of telling, but it's certainly part of showing. Any detail that gets put into an opening is something that sticks with the reader, and is supposed to intrigue or inform so you can process the scene to come. The only reason that detail is there is to start telling/showing the reader how the viewpoint character's mind works. She thinks at a certain level of detail about music; therefore, you know she's a musician and she's pretty accomplished. We can assume she knows what she is doing if the author tells us that she's playing Bach and Schubert. Thus, later in the scene when the talent scout shows up to
try to hire her for his agency, the reader will say, "She's good enough!" If you'd said that she was having trouble reading the notes in Music Primer #1, or that she just couldn't sing along with a rap song because she had no sense of rhythm, we'd have a different idea of the character.
A couple of notes about psychic distance in third-person viewpoint.
Being "in viewpoint" means that everything you write goes through the filter of a particular character's mind. The details are the ones
that person would notice, and the thoughts are in his/her "voice."
Here is embarrassment seen by an outside observer:
At last Mix's patience was ended, and he let his anger boil over. His face and scalp turned an angry red, and the veins in his neck stood out like ropes. He waved his arms and the magic spurted out every which way, clipping a horse's tail and narrowly missing the corner of a building.
Uh-uh. Too many tired phrases ("ropes" and "angry red"); also, who's seeing this? If someone else is seeing it, and you want to be in his or her viewpoint, you can have someone talk:
"Mommy, look!" Bryne tugged at Mistwind's robes. "When that man gets mad, his whole head turns pink!" Lines of force, blue majickal light, began streaking out from the magician's fingers, and the child's eyes
bugged out in wonder even as Mistwind grabbed him and made for the mouth of the cave.
But if Mix is our lead character, it would make for better reader identification to go "into viewpoint" with Mix.
"That's the last straw!" Mix felt his face burning as blood rushed to it, and the veins in his neck strained toward the surface like goldfish trying to breathe in a too-tiny tank. He knew he was going to cast a
spell; the only question was, could he stay calm enough to choose the proper one? He could feel the energy rushing out of his fingertips already, before he was ready for it, and knew it was going to be a magic storm.
Even better, get inside Mix's head. Listen:
"That's it. That's the camel-breaker!" Forgetting that he'd sworn to remain indifferent to the children's taunts, Mix let loose with a spray of magic in all directions. "You're going to be sorry, you little brats. Why doesn't your mother spank you?" The heat rushed down his arms and
exploded out his fingertips. _Shit-oh-dear--I don't think I'm going to be able to control all this._ WHAT was that blinding light? Not
something he'd done, surely! _Hell's bells and damnation!_
In the last example, we shouldn't need a "he thought" with the underlined (italicized) internal monologue. One school of thought says that if you do this correctly, the reader will be "in" Mix's mind sufficiently that she will just know that's a thought. Direct
thoughts are usually underlined, unless style conventions are different at a particular publishing house. Yet I still got "dinged"
for a "second person sentence that's authorial intrusion" in a contest, when what I was really doing was a direct thought without the "she thought." I'd written:
"You know what they say--'Never take a leper to bed.'" Jinks pulled the rope and brought the dinghy back in. Leave it to Indoline to go off forgetting that other people might need the small craft if the ship took on water. How could anyone make her see that she wasn't
the only person in the world? You never knew how people were going to react. You couldn't trust anybody, not even your own sister.
No, it was more basic than that: You can't win.
That last sentence was a direct thought, a "he thought," and I deleted the "he thought" at the urging of the critique group, who claims the "he thought"s and "she said"s add a level of distance. The submission for the contest didn't have all the underlining it was supposed to. Thus, I got dinged. Hmph!
So you have to be sure you're doing this right. But I think it's worth the extra effort.
Now, if only I could figure out how to do it right.
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."--W. Somerset Maugham
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 05:00 pm (UTC)Something I try to keep in mind is that when I tell something, I tell it once and consider the message given. ("Jordy was naive, a touch insecure, and a bit young for his age.") If I'm going to show that, the effect is cumulative. I don't show a single example of the qualities I want the reader to get, but the cumulative effect of the little choices I make in what he thinks about and things he notices and comments he makes should give the reader the picture.
(Actually, it worked on my writing group: I read them the first page and a half of my current work and afterwards the comments were along the lines of, "I perceive your character is naive, a touch insecure, and a bit young for his age!")
Anyway, this rule is so important I always like to see it brought up and then appropriately illustrated. Hmm.