Publicity

Talked to friends about publicity.

One of them, D --, has just e-pubbed with Wild Rose, so we had lots to chat about in re publicity..

I recommended she try Poddymouth and Smart Bitches to see if she can get a review there.
She has a website set up and will soon be posting her cover.
I thought she might slip into MySpace and see if she thought a presence there would be useful. Somebody over on Books and Writers Forum said that was a good place to make connection with readers.

We discussed other options ... local newspaper, request at the library that they buy the book, note to local Writer's Group to put in their newsletter, dropping by local Barnes and Noble to talk it up, put cover up in the published authors page of Virginia Romance Writers,
and maybe do a sale and signing at the next Festival of the Book ...

That was about all we could come up with. She mentioned bookmarks. I dunnoh how well those work ...

Cleaning of the Blog

Went through the blog today and cleared out some old boring posts.

Left most stuff.
Labeled.

Spiffy clean blog now.

Line Edits of Anneka -- Day Two

Worked through the real simple word changes up to page 267.

Solved two or three of the little questions.
Did some work on two of the big clarify-what's-going-on problems.

Progress.

I still don't know what I'm going to call Anneka. It's hard to think of another name.

Link of the Day -- Storytelling

Ira Glass on Storytelling here.

thanks to Slithytove

'There are two essential storytelling elements: the interesting anecdote, and the 'moment of reflection'. And raise questions as you go along.'*


JoB
*from Slithytove, under Fair Use

Line Edits on ANNEKA

Line edits are coming.
They should get here tomorrow
or the next day.

(Snoopy Dance)

I have to change the title of the manuscript and the name of the protagonist
but whot the hell archie toujours gai

Publishing date is December 07

Visualizing Eleven

The JESS 'Synopsis and Three' are polished and done and mailed ... so that's one thing out of the way. One of the great joys of having this under contract is that I don't have to write a query letter. Oh Joy.

The ANNEKA revisions have not yet landed on me.

So it's back to writing JESS.

Chapter Ten ended with Jess and Sebastian facing off in her office, both of them filled with suspicion, each with an agenda.

Chapter Twelve seems to be that scene at the party where Adrian confronts Jess ... and probably a few other things happen.

I need a bridge.

It might be time for Jess to go talk to her father.

If I do this chapter, I need a core action and purpose. Jess' growth? Hmmmm ...

So far, I've just walked in the front door of Meeks Street. Lots of excitment tomorrow when Jess faces her father.

Chapter Nine done

And moving into Ten ... inside her warehouse, in Sebastian's POV.


final working draft of JESS

Rules for Writing Historical Fiction

The Rules for Writing Historical Fiction

here

" No matter how prevalent the practice at the time or how wealthy or high-born the heroine is, she must be shocked and appalled at the idea of having a marriage arranged for her."

Oh giggle

Technical Topic -- Prologues

Seems to me there are three ways to feed necessary backstory into the beginning of a ms.

-- You can feed it in, line by tedious line, across the first several chapters. Skilled writers do this without endangering the pacing and focus ... but it's seldom an improvement to said pacing and focus.

-- You can heap your backstory together in a paragraph or two and 'tell' it, assigning it to a character or placing it in narrative. Good writers do this without imperilling the pace and focus, but, as above, it's never a positive poke to prod the story along its way.

-- Or you can write a vignette. You can present the backstory as 'story' -- a miniscene of elsewhere and elsewhen. Good writers slip these backstory vignettes in skillfully, even use them for story purposes. But the miniscene remains inescapably a diversion from the storyline.


A prologue has the advantages of a backstory vignette -- it can be active and engaging 'story'. A prologue has none of the disadvantages of inter-laced backstory. The prologue doesn't distract from focus or impede pace.

Where prologue is intriguing in its own right, where it slingshots the reader into the ongoing action of Chapter One, and where it offers a true sample of the story flavor, I say, 'Go with it.'

Now, why does this scene or vignette become a prologue instead of, say, Chapter One?

Because Chapter One is the start of the story.

Generally -- not always but generally -- Chapter One is the first essential action of the story line. It is the inciting incident. The big change. The pebble that starts the avalanche. The turning point from which there is no retreat or emendation. The first hundred notes of Beethoven's Fifth.

Backstory is a whole 'nother animal. It can be interesting and essential to understanding the story .... but it is not IN the storyline. An inability to distinguish between backstory and the storyline has led to many dull first-three-chapters which were later, mercifully excised.

Prologues are not a replacement for Chapter One because they are not part of the story action.

A prologues is a nugget of backstory so powerful and necessary, so inciting and harmonious to the mood of Chapter One, that its inclusion prepares us for the storyline action.

Prologues are antipasti. One does not serve the antipasto on the same plate as the veal piccata, nor as a side dish. One does not sprinkle it over the pasta. To do so is missing the whole antipasto point.

March of the Librarians

March of the Librarians

here

The Machine is Us

The machine is us.

Here.

The medium is the message is the mass age is the web ...

Technical Topic -- The First Big Edit

So, you've finished the manuscript.

You've finished the big, fat first draft
What next?

Next comes editing.

-- Trust yourself.

-- Expect to go through the whole ms many times.

-- Look at the plot and make sure everything makes sense and all the characters are acting logically and you've wrapped up all the loose ends. Try to see the plot as a whole structure ... maybe even visualize it in shapes and lines and boxes and graphs if that's the way your mind works.

-- Pick out the ten most exciting, heated, high-tension moments in the story. Draw a line that represents your total words ... 150,000 words, 90,000 words. Whatever. Write an X where each of these ten high-profile moments occurs with a really big X for the three largest. Do you like the way this looks?

-- Write your synopsis. It'll help you see plot structure and you'll have to do it sometime.

-- Do a readthrough for one character. Follow him. See what he's up to and how he feels in each scene and whether that's the way he should be feeling when he walks on stage. Then go on and do the same for every character.

-- Toy with the idea of eliminating the first three chapters or picking out and removing a subplot. This may be a perfectly horrible and stupid idea ... but let it pass through your mind at least once as a possibility. This is a good way to shorten the manuscript if it needs it. It's a good way to tighten the plot of any manuscript.

-- Read through the ms slowly, tightening language. Strike out every word and phrase you can. Be especially stern with modifiers. It helps to do this in a new font.

-- Print the manuscript out. Edit by hand. Read it aloud as you go.
-- If you can, set the ms aside for six or eight weeks and return to look at it with new eyes.

-- Hand the ms as a whole to a beta reader. Or more than one beta reader if you are very lucky. (You've done all the stuff above before it goes to the beta reader.)

-- Start working on your query letter.



-- Once all this is done, the minor housekeeping remains.... check the historical dates and the name of the thingie that holds the wick in a period lantern and whether chartreuse had been used as a color before it became a liquor.

... Make sure all your ellipses have only three dots instead of four and your periods are one dot, not two. Look for commas after 'and' and before 'and' -- are you using the Oxford comma? Check that your periods are followed consistently by one space or two, whichever you choose.

... Do a search for your favorite weird words -- excruciating, abrogate, inherent, sleeve, muffin -- whatever it is that your subconscious is in love with, and get them under control. Search also for the common flabbies -- very, somewhat, actually, really.*

... 'It', 'there', 'was' and 'that' are not signs of a weak sentence, but they appear in the weakest sentences. A quick runthrough of these four words may signal some sentences that could be recast a bit.

... Do the spell check.

... and bob's yer uncle. Send out those queries.


* For what it's worth, my own list of words to check includes but is not limited to:
and, but, abrupt, actually, almost, annoy, appear, awful, bastard, because, become, began, begin, bit, bleak, breath, business, careful, chuckle, close, confront, course, dance, deuce, devil, drew, drily, exasperate, eye, face, fact, faint, feel, felt, finger, flat , frown, froze, gaze, gentle, glance, glower, good, grimace, grin, grip, hand, heel, hoarse, hold, instant, irritate, just, know, laugh, lean, lips, listen, little, look, loom, matter, minute, moved, murmur, nervous, nice, nodded, no, now, oh, palm, point, pretty, push, quite, rather, reach, really, scowl, seem, shake, shock, shook , shoulder, silence, slow, smile, snap, snort, soft, somewhat, sort of, sound, start, stood, stop, stroke, studied, subtle, sudden, swallowed, that, then, thoughtful, tight, touch, truly, turned, twitch, very, voice, warm, walk, want, wave, well, whispered, yes.


One compiles this list by noticing as one writes what words are overused and adding those to the list.

Hail

Hail this morning.

(No, this is not a greeting to the dawn but a meteorological observation.)
It had barely started when the cat yowled at the window and came racing in.


Cat: What IS this stuff? What are you DOING to me?
Me: Sorry.
Cat: Snow was bad enough. This is just stupid. Stop it.

Jess Synopsis

Jo worked on the synopsis of JESSAMYN today. Jo has a nice final draft of the synopsis. Good Jo.

I used as my template the synopsis I submitted to Miss Snark way back when the story was still a series of 'this scene introduces so-and-so who does such-and-such'.

I had to modify matters in the last half of the synopsis because it turned out so-and-so not only didn't do such-and-such – sometimes so-and-so didn't even make it to the next draft.

I have set the synopsis aside to cool for a day. I'll come back for a new read which will tell me if it is (a) comprehensible, (b) logical and (c) if the weak attempts at humor should be removed.
(They probably should.)

Oh goody. I just remembered I will be seeing friends on Wednesday. I can ask them for an opinion.

Lucky friends.
I will warn them.

I have four or five days before I'm supposed to send this synopsis and Chapters One to Three to Superagent.
Are we cutting this close?
Yes.

In other news ... have hacked my way through the first third of Chapter Eight, leaving the topiary of a final draft behind me. Have established Sebastian's attitude towards Jess nicely.

The chapter, unfortunately, is talking heads to some extent. I better revv up the Adrian-Sebastian conflict.

(Is that too many –ians? Am I going to have to rename Sebastian?)

Cold

Cold.

Not cold for Green Bay, maybe, but frigid for a place where folks talk with So'thrn accents.

I get up every morning in the winter and make sure there's liquid water in the dog's dish outside. I keep water out there for the generality of animals, wild and tame. It's not so much for the dog; she doesn't sit outside on the porch because that would interfere with her canine goal of keeping within paws' reach of me all day long and tripping me every time I get up.

Anyhow, when it's freezing, my first act of the day is to beat the solid ice out of the dish ... whomp ... and pour in hot water from an IKEA plastic pitcher.

Did it this morning.
Steamy water.
Good

Looked out at 9 o'clock and the dish had frozen over solid. Bunch of disconsolate chickadees peering down at it.

Technical Topic -- Pitching Your MS

Sometimes, at a conference, you'll have a chance to pitch a book to an editor or agent.

The editor knows she will not come out of this session knowing whether you can write,
which is what she really wants to know, of course.
She has to open the ms to find out whether you can write.


At a conference pitch session the editor asks herself five, fairly simple, questions.

-- Is the ms finished?

-- Is it, indeed, a Romance? (Or whatever it is claiming to be.)

-- Is the mss in a subfield of Romance and of a length she handles?

-- Is your storyline hackneyed,
or poorly thought out,
or wildly improbable,
or one she has just bought three of?

-- Do you understand enough about writing to have constructed a workable plot?

You want to answer these five questions for her.


First -- give her the title, type of work, length and your assurance that 'yes, it is done.'
Next give her a 100-word summary of the story.

That answers the first four questions.

Then you'll show her you understand the process of constructing a story.

Here's how --

Instead of spending the rest of your time relating the INCIDENTS of your story ...
(... then Fordham goes to Philadelphia, see, and meets her father and they quarrel about the land distribution and when he comes back to the farm, Milly has a fight with him because he upset her father and then she ..)

you will talk about the PLOTTING ...
(... has to choose between her father and her lover. One choice, she grows and takes responsibility for what she's done, the other, she remains a child. This is set up to be a painful choice for her ... I do some backstory stuff with her mother's death to establish this as an emotional trigger. She blames Fordham for forcing her to make this choice. That anger motivates the big fight scene which forces the hero and heroine apart for the next hundred pages or so. We continue with two lines of parallel and intersecting action. His action is ...)

You don't tell the editor the story.
(She has no interest in hearing about Milly and Fordham's tribulations for 5 minutes. Trust me on this.)
You tell the editor ... 'I understand writing.'

Once the editor has answered her five crucial questions
she will just want to chat.

Chatting, she will discover if you would be easy to work with
and if you're crazy.

Reassure her on both these points.

Standard ettiquette all round ---

Shake her hand only if she offers it, do not wear perfume to the meeting, keep an eye on the time, get up when she starts to, thank her warmly but not effusively, leave promptly, do not hand her mss or writing samples, do not assume she will recognize you if you run into her later.

Technical Topic - Drafts

EDITED TO ADD: I've gone back to this post several times, refining it and adding to it and looking at my actual process . . . (As opposed to what I think the process is.)

Ahem ...

The first thing about drafting is . . .
you're doing it right.

It doesn't matter how you do it ... whatever way you organize yourself is the right way
for you.

-- Some folks make outlines and sketch out scenes and make lists and generally develop a strong overall sense of the manuscript before they sit down to write.

-- Some folks put their butt in the chair and start writing at the beginning and see where the story takes them, approaching it linearly, but without preconceptions.

-- Some folks write the scenes they 'see' clearly, then move them about and stitch them together to tell the final tale.

-- Some folks sketch and move on, and then return to tweak, and then return to polish, and then return ...

-- Some folks don't leave a scene until it's perfect.


Every single one of these approaches is right.

Now you know everything useful I can say about drafting.

Do you want to know what I do?
In painful detail?
(ummm ... why ....?)

What I do --
I go through six drafting stages.

Story Notes
First Rough Draft
Second Rough Draft
Plotting Draft
First Polishing Draft
Submission Manuscript Draft



1) Story Notes.

This is what happens before I start writing. I generally have some core that the story's going to coalesce around. This is when I first see the characters and some of their action and the scenery. I get some 'scenes' in completeness.

The scenes that come through at this stage are often my favorite scenes. It was at this stage that I 'saw' Sebastian and Jess in the back garden with him reciting poetry. I 'saw' Jess confront Lazarus before I had any idea what the rest of the story would be.

I wouldn't call the notes I make in this early stage a 'draft', exactly. But some lovely words emerge here. What gets written out is so strongly visualized that I hate to waste it. The 'rabbit scene' from Maggie is an example of a 'story notes' scene and the 'knife throwing' scene that got cut from MLAS .

This 'story notes' period is a good time for trying out really stupid ideas.


2) The First Rough Draft which includes the Outline

I do this linearly. I sit down and close my eyes and visualize the story, scene by scene, in the order it happens.

Loose and sloppy and fast, I spill everything out on the page. Fast fast fast. It's a real mess. It's without punctuation or spelling or caps or sentences. I repeat myself. I write the same scene out three or four times.
I do not go back and fix anything. If I have a better idea, I write it out and add it.

At the end, I have a bloated nonsense monster. Nobody else could make head nor tail of this word carnage.

Much of what I throw down on the screen at this stage will make it all the way to the final submitted manuscript in some form or other.
A lot won't.

OK. In terms of how-I-actually-do-it organization --

Each of these 'proto-scenes' I write in its very own document. I name the doc something that tells me what the scene is about. 'Doyle and Maggie in the Stable' is an example. See how I don't use numbers or anything?

When the scene is visualized and tied down in words, I move the whole set words into my Master Document'.
The Master Document always named 'Working Copy of [name of ms]'.


Ok.
The Outline.

Parallel to writing all these scenes, I'm creating an outline of the story.
This is a separate document, named 'Working Outline of [name of ms]'.

Again, scenes are not numbered or anything. They're named. And I work by scenes, not by chapters.
So Teh Outline looks something like:

-- Adrian leaves the House in the Marais

He goes over the wall, following his own, and Lazarus' agenda. He's excited to be going into action and not thinking too far ahead.

-- Doyle talks to Carruthers

They're in the parlor, front of house, second floor. Carruthers suggests killing Adrian.

When I make the Outline, this is me plotting.
I also plot with handwritten post-it notes, moving them around, worrying over them.
I also plot with action lines on long papers and doodles and Venn diagrams and me just laying my head in my hands and suffering.

But this is the archival, written-down part of plotting.

I make notes on the Outline to remind myself about plot points.
I do it in color. Green fwiw.

The outline with notes looks something like:


-- Adrian leaves the House in the Marais

He goes over the wall, following his own, and Lazarus' agenda. Remember to add scene earlier to define Lazarus' orders. He's excited to be going into action and not thinking too far ahead. This happens at the same time Maggie is talking to Guichet.

-- Doyle talks to Carruthers

They're in the parlor, front of house, second floor. Carruthers suggests killing Adrian. Why do they let him go?

I agonize over plotting decisions right up to the day I send out the submission manuscript. I change things. But when the First Rough Draft is finished, the backbone of the plot is in place. Theoretically, everything makes some kinda sense even if I haven't added all the sense to the ms.

Now ... IMO ... this is where brainstorming and writing friends can do the most good. This is where I ask about plausibility and motivation. Mostly I don't change anything because of these comments, but I listen to what folks say and think about it.


3) The Second Rough Draft

The Second Rough Draft is transforming a misspelled, repeat-repeat-repeat bunch of crap into coherent scenes full of clumsy, rough, ugly words that someone else could read and understand.

In terms of working technique:

(a)I copy a scene out of my 'Working Copy of [ms name]'. I'm copying the First Rough Draft (FRD) words. I do this in linear order, working my way through the ms.

(b) I paste the FRD scene, whole, into a new document which I name for the action of the scene. 'Doyle and Adrian across from the Conciergerie'. 'Maggie and Doyle Make Love'.

(c) When I'm through messing with that scene, I drop my new, exciting, improved words into the 'Working Copy of Maggie' and take out the old unimproved words and throw them away.

In this way the First Rough Draft slowly becomes the Second Rough Draft, scene by scene.

Incidentally, I change the typefont of what's been improved into SRD so I know what I'm looking at in that huge document. I use Arial 16 for the FRD old stuff and TNR 11 for the SRD new stuff.

Do not throw any words away really.

I can discard those old words from my document without fear because I have been saving a complete copy of 'Working Copy of Maggie' every few days. These old copies live in a totally different folder, far away from my working folder. I call the old copies 'Maggie 030309' and 'Maggie 030709' (for March 7 2009) and so on. All the stages of creation exist in fossilized form in case I ever need them.

I also send the entire 'Working Copy of Maggie' to my gmail account when I stop working for the day.


OK. Moving along to what the Second Rough draft actually is.

Second Rough Draft draft contains lots of brackets like:

[find a better word] or,
[did they do this in 1793? -- check] or,
[fight scene] or ,
[they go upstairs and make love] or,
my own personal favorite,
[why?]

Second Rough Draft still contains all the alternative ways to get through a sentence. I put in the three or five different word choices and don't try to pick the perfect one,

Why leave all these alternatives in place?
IN SRD stage I might agonize for ten minutes over a phrase
and then end up discarding it altogether in the next draft
because I used words too much like this four chapters onward.
And then I go back to eliminate one of the echoes and there I've lost all those useful alternates I started out with.

That's why the SRD has the choices intact.
We get:

Maggie [waved her hand, made a gesture, flicked her wrist, turned her hand over] and went to,

This SRD turns out to be the lion's share of the writing process. Maybe 95% of the final submission manuscript words are here in the SRD.
The plot should be pretty bullet-proof at the end of the SRD.
(Though it seldom is, alas.)

None of writing is easy. But this SRD is the hard part.

4) The Plotting Draft and the Research MS

In the Plotting Draft I have to finally get serious and make decisions as to what scenes to include
and what to leave out
and why folks do what I just had them do
and how I'm going to show that in the ms
and is the pacing right
and are the H&H apart for long periods of time
and has my subplot taken over
and what am I going to do about that?

How do I improve the plotting?

Well . . . I follow each character through the story all on his own, looking at continuity and motivation and character development and generally evidence that the character's story is being told.

I try, desperately, to find errors of logic in the plot. Do all the pieces of the story fit together? Have I explained everything to the reader somewhere or other?

This is another good time to talk to other folks about my plotting. 'Does this work?' sometimes gets a 'no' answer.

I go back to pacing. Does it drag? Do I need a period of consolidation after a lot of noise and excitement? Do my high points and resolutions fit the story?

I also generate a Research Manuscript.

I copy the Second Rough Draft in full as a new document named 'Research Draft of [name of story]'.

Look. Every story is going to have lots of bits and peaces of little research.

The best place to store all this information is directly IN the manuscript. Then you always know where to find everything. And when your excellent copyeditor comes back and says -- 'huh?' you know exactly where you found that historical tidbit.
But you don't want this cluttering up your working doc, so you create an evil twin.

The Research Manuscript contains long, interpolated notes in red.

This is where I say to myself --
"I've checked the history of this word in Google books and it's contemporary ok." -or
"they served oats to horses in French inns according to this ref -"Three Normandy Inns, 1803,"

Best of all is when I add an actual URL or page reference. This is so I don't have to go back and repeat the research when I forget whether I've looked something up.


5) The First Polishing Draft

I guess you could call this the end of writing and the start of editing.

This is where I fiddle with the words.

Now I'm doing this all along, every time I read a page of the manuscript. But now I make a concerted straight-through-the-whole-thing effort.

I look at dialog in isolation from all other narration and action and so on. Is it responsive? Does it make sense? Is it well tagged? Are all pronouns obviously referenced?

I look at cadence and the beauty of language. I go back and nudge this word here and that word there and make decision on all the words I was waffling about. I look for echoes. I scrape out cliches.

All this stuff I'm writing about in the 100 Best of the Worst posts -- this is when I look at that stuff.

I change the font on the screen.
I print it out in hard copy and look at it.
I read it aloud.

This is the niggling draft, the agonize-over-a-word draft, the let's-change-the-minor-character's-name-from-Kilroy-to-Kilburton draft.

99% of the final words are in place when this draft is completed.

Lots of folks do this niggling, effort-ful precision editing as they go along. I don't like to waste all this work, so I save it till I'm sure I'm not spending it on some scene that I'll kick out of the story.

This is an example of 'Everyone's Process Is Right'. This is my process.
Yours is just as good.

6) Submission MS Draft

This is all Housekeeping.

Spell check, doublecheck historical facts, follow continuity of the character's actions, look up the dates of words and the usage of any words I might think I know and don't.

Check comma placement and the extra spaces that might have crept in and the number of dots in the ellipses and double periods at the end of sentences and ,. at the end of sentences. Re-check the stupid little stuff in the Chicago Manual of Style about hyphens and commas.

Put the ms Times New Roman 12.

This is where I send the ms out to beta readers.

When I get it back from them, it's ready to submit.


That's what I do.
It doesn't mean that's what you should do.

Technical Topic -- The Dreaded ING

The –ING form of the verb is namby-pamby. Doesn't matter whether it's a gerund or a participle, INGs are just sissy words.

Using –INGs as adjectives works fine.
Manic driving lessons ...
An obliging dwarf ...

--INGs also splice different sorts of time together. Nothing better.
Denton, humming cheerfully, lifted the ax.
We need the –ING to relate these two events. –ING shows they happened at the same time.

Both of those are good, necessary uses.


Everything else an –ING does is mostly crap.
Toss out the –ING,
find another tense.
Do it.
Really.

Not – John was stringing beads. But – John strung beads.
Not – Mary was killing time in the café. But – Mary killed time in the café.
Not– Bernard, casting aspersions, made himself ridiculous. But – Bernard cast aspersions and made himself ridiculous.
Not -- Umberto failed by trying to do too much. But – Umberto failed because he tried to do too much.
Not – Devon's planning led to disaster. But – Devon's plans led to disaster.

Production writing

I've been doing Elizabeth Bear's novel-in-90 challenge.
What this is ... it's getting down 750 words a day, every day.
For three weeks now, I've been doing it.

Here's why I'm doing it.

For five years or so, I've worked at writing fiction with fair seriousness.

I've written and written and fiddled with mss, which is how one learns to write. I've also thought and researched and pondered and critted other folk's work, which is also how one learns to write.

In this preliminary process, when there's no contract, you're kinda doing 'boutique' writing.
You can make it perfect, no matter how long it takes.

The next step, with a contract, is what I think of as 'production' writing.
Writing to deadline.
Producing mss fast enough that the readers remember you and look for you.
This is what a career writer does.

So. Lets see how I do in the 750-words-a-day challenge. Lets keep it up.

This is the next step ...

Technical Topic -- Show, Don't Tell

The truism, 'Show, don't tell,' covers a lot of territory.

On a 'whole-story' level this means plotting that uses dialog and action and internals to tell the story
rather than narration.

Not -- Twelve battalions converged on the small town of Chesterton, determined to quench the fire of the rebellion.

But -- Tony looked out the window at dawn. Rose-white lights circled the horizon, strangely, horribly beautiful. Campfires. The enemy had arrived.

'Tell' tells the story.
'Show' puts us inside the story.

Plotting for 'show-not-tell' on a whole-story level,
means general avoidance of scenery, exposition, description, backstory, explanation
and all the other ways the author speaks directly to the reader,
where action can be used instead.



On the level of a scene, 'show-not-tell', means information is conveyed not in narration, but in action and dialog.

-- Information comes to the reader through the filter of a character's perception.

-- It comes in real time, at the speed of the character's emotional response. (One easy way to 'show-not-tell' is just to slow the hell down.)

-- 'Show' concentrates on specifics that can be touched, smelled, heard and seen. 'Show' is about close stuff. About pokable, sniffable, pick-it-up stuff.

-- When we 'show' ... every object is in an intimate and immediate context.
The fictive world is stripped of what happened three years ago or in another country or the everyday usage of the object or what the dumwhizzle thingum was called in Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty.
Objects and actions are what's happening now.

-- The scene is focussed by the character's attention. The reader 'sees' only what the character is interested in.


Not -- Jeremy was a hopeless gawk. He'd been that way since High School.
which is narration and the writer speaking to the audience.

But -- Jeremy tangled himself in the front door mat, the dog -- appropriately named 'Trip' -- the overturned aspidistra and his shoe laces. What a klutz. "You haven't changed a bit," she said.
which is action, an internal, and dialog.

Deep Character Point of View tends to keep us in 'showing' mode.
(There are so many reasons to write in Deep Character Point of View.)
So a good, easy, natural path to 'show-not-tell' is to review deep POV and learn to get into it and stay there.


In the interests of not throwning the baby out with the bathwater --

let me add that sometimes you find yourself with information to convey that can't be easily put into a character's thoughts or words or shown by a character's actions.
(This is a good time to ask yourself if you really need this information. Hmmm? Do you? Are you sure?)

If you need the specific info,
this may be one of the many times the writer conveys complex information economically and simply by 'telling'.

Joshua lifted the cup to his lips. Coffee. The true bean of it, and fresh. Coffee came to Latruria by caravan over the hills of Ghangith. That path had been blocked for months by the mountain bandits. The only other source was the sea route. Smugglers. Jandru's smugglers.

He set the cup down without drinking. "How long have you been in Jandru's pay, Madame?"

So sometimes we 'tell-not-show'.

It's not that 'tell' is wrong and 'show' is right.
They serve different purposes.

Basically -- nobody ever felt her heart going all pitter patter because the narrator says 'John explained to Myra how much he loved her. He was extremely eloquent.'

Showing sucks us into the story. Telling informs us.
You need both.

Ideally, you know when you're showing and when you're telling, and you know why.
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