“Showing vs Telling: How to Make the Decision”

Every storyteller and writer of fiction has to decide how to proceed through the decision in the title above.  It’s a daily decision:  should I tell the reader what Jamie is thinking or should I show his thoughts in some kind of action or reaction?  Should I tell how the Seomish city of Omsh’pont was destroyed by the Ponkti or should I show it happening, from someone’s point of  view?

As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a time and a season for everything.

When and why should you tell the reader what is happening:

1. When the event or the story moves better, faster, more believably by telling.  Sometimes, events in the story occur over many days or even years, even centuries.  You can’t dramatize every single day…the book would be 10,000 pages.  Use the ‘tell’ method to summarize in some kind of compelling way what happened and why.  Use tell to telescope story time.
2. When you need to add explanatory background to the story.   Why exactly does Dobie really hate that little town of Cypress Hills?  You could have Dobie explain why to someone.  That would be showing versus telling.  Or maybe the real reason is something Dobie won’t even admit to himself.  Explanation time.  Or maybe another character could make this observation.  Fiction techniques offer a wealth of possibilities.  Whatever moves the story along is best.
3. Internal narrative.  This idea is from autocrit.com.  Here’s the deal: Showing relies on a character’s actions.

“He shoved back his chair and slammed his fist against the table.”

This might show us that a character is angry, but we have no idea what he’s actually thinking. Maybe he’s not really angry, but scared. Or maybe he’s secretly thrilled but is pretending to be outraged. We don’t know unless you tell us.

Yes, in nine cases out of ten, it’s infinitely preferable to show John is angry by describing the way his fist hit the table or how hard he slammed the door on his way out of the room. But sometimes, you just need to tell it like it is.

When and why you should show what is happening:

1. According to autocrit.com, showing is always preferable to telling.  Generally, I would agree, but there are exceptions. Showing provides immediacy.  Showing provides or allows better empathy between reader and a character. 

In a nutshell, showing is about using description and action to help the reader experience the story. Telling is when the author summarizes or uses exposition to simply tell the reader what is happening.  Autocrit.com provides this example:

Telling:

John was sad to see his girlfriend leave.

Showing:

John wiped tears down his face as he watched his girlfriend board the plane.

 Here’s a longer example:

Telling:

The house was creepy.

Showing:

Only a single dim candle lit the room. The house smelled like dust and rotting wood, and something faintly metallic that made John think of blood. Stuffed animals were mounted around the room: a wild-eyed buck, a grizzly frozen in fury, a screech owl with sharp yellow talons.

In both examples, showing makes the writing vivid and more descriptive. Showing also helps readers experience the story by allowing them to interpret the descriptions of places, actions, and scenes.

Telling, on the other hand, is flat and boring and limits the experience for the reader. It also tells editors and agents you’re an amateur. After all, if the very first rule of writing is show, don’t tell, then telling says you don’t know the first thing about writing.

Where autocrit.com is really helpful is in describing how to turn your tells into shows.

1. Use strong verbs: Don’t use walk if you can say gallop, skip, saunter, stroll or amble.
2. Use specific nouns and clear adjectives in descriptions that paint a picture for the reader. Don't just tell us Grandma baked a pie; say a cinnamon-apple pie with a golden crust rested on the windowsill above the sink.
3. Include sensory details—describe how something sees, smells, sounds, tastes, and feels
4. Use dialogue: ‘“Don’t you walk out of here!” Mom yelled’ is better than Mom was angry.
    
   Every rule of writing is made to be broken, but it’s better not to break them without first learning how the rules work.  They’re called rules for a reason and you ignore them at your storytelling peril.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on October 2.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B

 

 

 

 

 

“Water Clans of Seome: Writing about Alien Cultures”

One of the greatest challenges as a writer of science fiction, and at the same time, one of the joys, is writing about alien cultures.  In my own recent sf novels The Farpool and The Farpool: Marauders of Seome, I describe a marine civilization of intelligent, sentient creatures who have created an entire civilization below the waves of the ocean planet Seome.

Every sf writer approaches worldbuilding a slightly different way.    In my case, I wrote a novel called The Shores of Seome many years ago (which mutated into The Farpool) and in the process created a lot of background for this world and its inhabitants.  In fact, I created an Appendix containing much of this material  and stuck it at the end of The Farpool.

Writing a story about aliens and setting it on an alien world is a real juggling act.  You want to convey a true sense of alienness without turning off the reader.  You don’t want to write an encyclopedia or something like National Geographic.  You still have to have a compelling story and somehow work in enough alien details to transport the reader to this other world and its people. 

In my case, I created background encompassing the following areas and then wrote extensive notes to give my background some depth.  When and where I could, I worked this background bit by bit into the story.  I even hit on the plot device of having a sort of universal translator called an echopod, which had some encyclopedia functions.  When the human characters needed to know something and an info dump was unavoidable, I had the aliens tell them to trigger the echopod and it would spit out material from my background.  As long as I didn’t overdo this, it seemed to work pretty well.  I tried to keep these passages to less than half a page.

Here are the categories I tried to develop pretty extensive background for:

1. The language with key words and concepts and a few notes about grammar
2. Maps (entire globe and by quadrant)
3. Description of the world itself as a planet
4. The major cities and settlements and their key features
5. The physiology of the Seomish (remember, these are talking fish)
6.  The biology of Seome (other plants and animals)
7. Theology and first Things of the Seomish people
8. The Hierarchies: Government, Politics and Organizations
9. Commerce, Industry, Crafts, Trades, Science and Technology
10. Communications and formal relations between the Kels (tribes or clans)
11. Education and training
12. Entertainment and recreation, diversions and amusements
13. Home life and intra-kel relations
14. The Kels (tribes or water clans): their history, key details, etc
15. More detailed description of one kel including cuisine, history, architecture
16. A brief chronology of Seomish civilization
17. An historical timeline and key events, notes on timekeeping
18. Seomish rituals and customs
     
    Was this a lot of work?  It was and most of it was done 40 years ago.  I never tried, in writing the actual stories, to get all of this into the story.  But by having it as background, the detail dictates some aspects of the story, such as how events might unfold one way versus another way, always in keeping with the background.  This kind of detail is like a crutch in that I can always look up how one of my characters might do something and I can be consistent across a number of stories in how I describe things.  An echopod in The Farpool works the same as an echopod in The Farpool: Marauders of Seome.  And sometimes having this level of background will suggest obvious plot developments and natural conflicts that can be used.
     
    One of the greatest mistakes as an author is to try to get all of your background into the story, at the expense of the story. Story comes before everything else.  I have found that a little background goes a long way.  If you do your job right as a storyteller, you’ll find the reader more than willing to help out by filling in some details with their own imaginations, even if you didn’t supply the details.  In fact, many readers prefer that since it engages their faculties even more…adding to their enjoyment of the story. 
     
    Give your readers enough detail, well described, believable and internally consistent, to transport them to your alien world and then let the natural conflicts and the characters carry the story.  You’ll even find that once in a while, something will crop up in the story that you never expected, something lurking just below the surface of your feverish brain, that is triggered by a background detail you worked out months before.  At that point, you say wow! And then put it in and pat yourself on the back for having thought that up.
     
    It was all because you were steeped in the alien culture from the beginning.  Maybe it is like working for National Geographic. 
     
    The next post to The Word Shed will come on September 25.  In this post, we’ll look at something that every writer of fiction must face: when to tell the reader something and when to show it.
     
    See you then.
     
    Phil B.

 

“He Said What?  Effective Dialogue for a Good Story”

Every writer of fiction, every story-teller, must deal with fictional dialogue.  Writing dialogue is a true art.  That’s because dialogue has to serve many masters in any story.

Here’s snatch of dialogue that opens my sf novel The Farpool, from the very first page…

 

Angie Gilliam squirmed a bit more but it was no use.  Something sharp was pinching her butt.  The weight of Chase Meyer on top of her made it hurt like crazy. 

“Ouch…that hurts like hell…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry…just trying to…it’s the Cove.  Water’s choppy today—“

Angie twisted and contorted herself to ease the pressure.  That was better.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, huh?”

They had packed a meal and grabbed a boat from Turtle Key Surf and Board—that was Mack Meyer’s shop, Chase’s Dad.  They had puttered along the coast off Shelley Beach until they came to Half Moon Cove—they always did it in Half Moon Cove—and found a secluded spot a few dozen meters off shore…right under some cypress trees.  Always smelled great there.

Then Chase and Angie wolfed down their sandwiches, dialed up the right music on Chase’s wristpad so they could slam some jam properly and settled down to business.

That’s when the wind fetched up and the Cove got way choppier than it usually did.  Most of the time, you could lay a place setting on top of the water and have dinner like home, it was so placid.  But not today.

“Ouch…look…let’s give it a rest, okay…something’s not quite right…”

Chase groaned and pulled out of her, cinching up his shorts as he did so.  He lay back against the side of the boat, and turned the volume down on his pad…whoever it was screeching on that go-tone needed a few more lessons.  He checked the growing waves beyond the Cove and that’s when he spied the waterspout.

“Jeez…look at that!” 

Angie pulled up her own shorts, ran fingers through her dark brown page-boy hair and sucked in a breath.

“Wow---that’s so wicked--“

There was a strange, wave-like agitation on the horizon just beyond the Cove, maybe a few kilometers out to sea, past Shell Key, easily.  For a few moments, a slender multi-hued waterspout danced just above the waves, like a gray-green rope writhing and hissing on the horizon.  It only lasted a few moments, then it collapsed.  There was a calm period, then the ocean began seething again and became more agitated than before.  Waves piled into the Cove, nearly upending the little boat.  Before long, another spout had formed, all in an odd sort of rhythm. 

 

In the dialogue above, notice that I’ve thrown in some colloquial sounding words, some slang, chopped it up a bit, yet you can tell what’s going on and how the characters feel about what’s going on.

Okay, so what’s going on here?  Dialogue serves many purposes…

1. Dialogue has to sound real, without being real.

Think about the speech you hear around you all the time.  It’s filled with ums, uhs, fits and starts and circuitous, poorly constructed, often grammatically incorrect sentences.  That’s the way real people talk…in any language.  Dialogue has to sound like that, without actually being like that.  That’s why it’s an art.  A few selected ums and ahs goes a long way in fictional dialogue.  It leads the reader’s inner ear to hear something that sounds real but it also performs other fictional duties as well.

1. Dialogue has to advance the story.

Look again at the passage above.  What do you know about the story: two lovers are getting it on in a canoe in some kind of cove.  Their little tryst isn’t turning out so well, so they stop.  They see a water spout.  The ocean starts heaving.  Strange things are happening.  All this on one page.  All dialogue has to do something to move the story along and it has to do this through the words of the characters.  They see and experience things.  They report and comment on what they see or hear or experience.  They respond verbally to what’s happening: “…ouch, that hurts, stop doing that….”  The reader lives vicariously through the characters so dialogue is really important….it has to sound real.  You want the reader to empathize with your characters.  Dialogue helps make the connection.

1. Dialogue has to reveal character and convey feelings and emotions.

There are ways other than dialogue to do this, narrative ways.  The writer could just say: “Jane felt sad and wished the pain would stop.”  But in general, it’s always better to show rather than tell.  Show Jane reacting in a way that conveys sadness.  “Tears flowed down Jane’s cheeks and she sighed, ‘I wish I was dead…I can’t take this anymore.’”  This reads a lot more powerfully and dramatic.  The dialogue, when done well, puts the reader in the character’s shoes and practically compels sympathy, empathy, all those things a writer or story-teller wants.  Now we want to know more about why Jane wishes she were dead, what’s driven her to this point.  Hopefully, the writer and the story will reveal that.  Done well, dialogue can really establish a strong emotional bond between fictional characters and the reader.

Fictional dialogue carries a lot of weight.  It’s not easy to do well.  You don’t normally talk in stilted, formal phrases (unless the story requires it) so your characters shouldn’t either.  Write dialogue like you talk and like you hear other people talking.  Then clean it up a little and bend it to the story’s needs.  As for me, whenever I hear a particularly colorful word or phrase, I write it down.  Usually it’ll turn up somewhere later in a story.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on September 18.  In this post, we’ll look at a few tips and do’s and don’ts about describing and writing about alien cultures.

See you then.

Phil B.