Day 06 – Show, Show, Show

Anyone who’s been serious about novel writing for 5 minutes or more knows the mantra, “Show don’t tell.” How exactly do you do that?

Fulfill the following two conditions and you’ll have the bulk of the job done:

• Specify
Some words are general: they stand for a general class of things. If I refer to “my house,” I’ve revealed nothing specific. It could be a log cabin, a Tudor mansion, a rickety old halfway house, a cottage in Truro. You don’t know: I’ve kept you from knowing.

Choose instead words that specify:

a Victorian
a skyscraper
a rickety old Boston three-decker.

The more specificity in the word itself, the better it is for fiction.

• Cut the Explanations
Hemingway filed reports for the Toronto Star about refugees fleeing the Greco-Turk War. In his dispatches he described the 25 miles of dazed humanity, and added. “They don’t know where they are going.”

When he adapted the scene as fiction, for In Our Time, he dropped that sentence. Why? Because the job of fiction is to convey, without stating the obvious, the emotional meaning of an event.

The tools of that job are image, action, gesture-description itself. Any sentence or passage that intercedes to explain what we’re seeing is like an alien hand, reaching into the story from somewhere outside to point out what should be already obvious.

It’s not only unnecessary, it’s unwanted, irritating, and destructive to the inner narrative. Gertrude Stein had a term for that kind of writing. She called it: “the Village Explainer.”

Today’s mini-task: write a short scene involving two characters.
I really mean short: one to three paragraphs. Make it do these 2 things:

1) Something should happen.
By the end of the scene, something should have changed for one of the characters – something significant. By that I mean something either mildly significant – Bob sees rain out the window and tells Mimi her birthday party will have to be moved inside. Or It can be hugely significant – Bob’s physician tells him he’s got an incurable disease. Whatever. It’s the change of state that’s important.

2) NO general words (see above), NO phrases that tell, NO “explaining.”
If you need to convey Bob’s deep shock at being told he’s incurably ill, don’t TELL the reader: “Bob had never been so shocked in his life. He felt suddenly ill and overcome with helplessness.” Do SHOW the reader: “Bob heard a ticking – Dr. Cohen’s vintage Swiss watch. Incurable. Face burning. He was falling. The watch. Please stop the watch.” Okay, a little melodramatic, but the reader experiences it rather than is told what it is, what it means.

There it is. 15-30 minutes. GO.