Show Versus Tell

by Janis Patterson

One of the most contentious subjects in the writing/reading world is the evergreen argument of show versus tell. For the few non-combatants in this ongoing war, show is where the reader actually sees what happens as it does, instead of being told that it has happened. (By the way, this has nothing to do with past or present tense - it is a construction tool.) 

Both sides have their advocates and logical reasons for believing so. ‘Showing’ brings the reader into the action; ‘telling’ is off-putting and remote, say some. ‘Telling’ gets the action across; ‘showing’ is sometimes clumsy and crude, say their opponents.

I say both tools have their uses. Some things should be shown; some things should not, and I’m not talking just about intimate bodily functions.

When the heroine is creeping through a darkened cellar, unsure if the villain is in there with her, I think the reader should experience every nuance of fear (and hopefully relief when she is rescued by the hero); such emotional involvement is why we read books. This is show at its finest.

On the other hand, imagine a book where every move the hero performs from when he wakes up in the morning, walks into the bathroom, takes care of business then showers, dries off and shaves, finally brushing his teeth before going into the bedroom to dress, taking at least half a page to decide between the blue suit and the brown, the striped tie or the one with little horse figures and finally decides on the one with the gold medallions then takes the elevator down so he can get to his meeting with XYZ Corporation... I’m glad he’s awake, because after all that the readers probably won’t be!

How much simpler to say something like, “After following his normal morning routine Hero hurried to his appointment with XYZ Corporation, his confidence raised by the knowledge he looked very successful in his brown suit and new tie with the gold medallions.” (And even that’s a little wordy, but it beats two or three pages of mind-numbing minutiae!) Telling, not showing.

So, like all the ‘rules’ about writing, you really can’t pin down anything to an absolute always-every-time yes or no. Every writing device - show, tell, backstory, flashbacks, interior dialogue, dialogue tags and the hundreds of others we all know - are just tools, and like every other tool of every kind can fulfill their purpose if used properly.

That’s the telling phrase - if used properly. I am a believer in craft over story. It makes no difference if you have the best story in the world if you can’t convey it to your readers in an intelligent and useful form that tells your story the way it should be. Conversely, there are books where the story is desperately fragile and practically transparent, but the writing is so superb you find yourself reading on in spite of it. Craft over content. Ideally your story should have ample helpings of both, but if one has to be topmost, give me craft.

Can You Hear Me Now?

 

by Kathleen Kaska (Fifth Saturday Blogger)

            It might be a scream, a whisper, an insult, or a humorous comment. It’s what causes me to listen and understand the emotions it needs to convey.            

            It’s a writer’s voice.

            If I can’t hear it, chances are I’m not going to like the book.

            I recently attended a writers conference and listened to a publisher explain her definition of voice. It rang true and clear, so I decided to share my thoughts on this element of writing that is often a challenge to define.

            When I began studying the craft of writing in the early ‘90s, my focus was on plot mainly because I hadn’t a clue how to construct one. I hadn’t given much thought to voice until I picked up a novel by an author I’d never read before. It was his fourth one and it had landed him on the bestseller list. I’d heard so much about the book, I was prepared not to like it. Oh me of little faith. At first, I thought it was the story and characters that grabbed me and whirled me along for the more than four hundred pages. When I finished the book, I rushed out and bought his first three. I struggled through each one and only completed them because I was curious to learn how this author developed his craft. Then I realized that it was his voice that captured my interest in novel four. It was also clear to me that I was unable to hear that voice in his first three novels. Maybe he was still struggling to find it. Who knows? Since then, I’ve read everything the author has written and he’s now one of my favorite contemporary writers.

            So, how do you define voice? What I gleaned from the publisher’s talk was that voice is the emotional thread that connects the writer to the reader. It’s the writer’s unique style of expression, which adds a personal element to the story that character, plot, and setting can’t do alone. Every book I keep has earned its place on my bookshelf because the writer has connected with me on a deep level. Without that connection, even if I finished and enjoyed the story, that book will mostly likely end up in my giveaway box and I will probably not wait in anticipation of the writer’s next one.

            Think about Harper Lee’s voice in To Kill a Mockingbird. Her method and style of telling a story of social injustice and prejudice by having Atticus Finch fail to save the innocent Tom Robinson was so much more powerful than finding him innocent and allowing him to go free. Who doesn’t relate to some sort of injustice inflected upon them? Who hasn’t felt that pain and learned from it? That was the connection for me. I learned something by listening to Lee’s voice.

            Leave a comment and let me know how a certain writer’s voice connected with you.

Kathleen Kaska is a writer of mysteries, nonfiction, travel articles, and stage plays. When she is not writing, she spends much of her time with her husband traveling the backroads and byways around the country, looking for new venues for her mysteries and bird watching along the Texas coast and beyond. Her third Sydney Lockhart mystery, Murder at the Galvez (LL-Publications), was released in December. It was her passion for birds that led to the publication The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story (University Press of Florida).

http://www.kathleenkaska.com/ 
http://www.kathleenkaskawrites.blogspot.com/

Grammar Rant by Christine Duncan

First off, let me say that I do not believe that I am the person to consult when you have a grammar problem. I don't even like reading grammar posts; they tend to read holier than thou. Yet, I had thought that by now that most writers knew that they had to edit their own writing-correcting their own grammar, making things clear and concise. Unfortunately, lately I keep reading things that are clearly unedited.
Here are a couple of the mistakes that I keep seeing over and over again, even with accomplished writers:

There/They're and Their

If it has to do with place, or location, if it can be replaced with the word here add a T and make there. Example: Put it here. Put it there.
If it can be replaced with the phrase, they are, take out the a and replace it with an apostrophe, and close the gap between the words to make one word-they're.
Example: They are too good to be true. They're too good to be true.
If it has to do with ownership, think of the word, heir. Add a T for their.

Its/Its
One of my English teachers long ago put this one into perspective for me. She said that we don't expect to add an apostrophe to the possessive of any of the other first, second or third persons so why would it be different? Think about this--his, hers, yours, mine, ours; so in keeping with all of that, you have its as the possessive. No apostrophe. (Yes, that is a sentence fragment. I believe in breaking the rules for emphasis.) An example might be: the dog has its own bed.
Whereas, if you can replace the word in your mind with the phrase, it is, then you need the apostrophe. Example: It is going to be a good party. It's going to be a good party.

Settings R Us...Generic or Unique?

Settings are so important or their generic and of little importance, depending on the author's interest in making the setting another and interesting character in and of itself, or simple and quick and easy with little or no reason to be inserted into the storyline anymore than necessary.

I have read books wherein the setting is a generic city--any town USA, a rural setting that could be anywhere on the continent, and I have read books where the city or the town or the country dominates the story. What's the difference? Why make the setting "all important" to begin with?  Isn't that a lot of work, making the setting unique and special to your character?

I have a habit of going more John Grisham than Elmore Leonard, while I respect both methods; I have great admiration for those who can quick-sketch a scene and a setting and move on with story.  By the same token, I am compelled myself to make a scene come alive via the five senses and perceptions of my characters, be it Dr. Jessica Coran in Hawaii or Inspector Alastair Ransom in 1893 Chicago with the World's Fair a thorn in his side.  For me setting has to be another and important character in the story, one with which the main characters interact.  Sure a classroom is a classroom is a classroom and often it is best to move on, but the overall setting, say New Orleans must come alive in my tales.

As a reader, for me it can go either way; I respect the Elmore Leonard approach to making Arizona in 1844 come alive with a few quick brush strokes, but I also love the detail of a John Grisham describing a courtroom - a special courtroom to Grisham and his readers--an Oxford, Mississippi courtroom.  Leonard would just call it a courtroom while Grishan would spend three or four pages on the place.

What about you? Which do you prefer? The quick-sketch setting or the fat, juicy, larger than life setting?


Robert W. Walker
Children of Salem - 1st 20 pgs. free @ http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

When Men Craft Women, Women Craft Men Fiction

THE PERILS of PAULINE IN THREE-PART HARMONY–

CRAFT COMPELLING FEMALE & MALE LEADS NO MATTER YOUR GENDER

PART ONE

To pull off the so-called “impossible” –getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman OR a man of substance” that you embed and imbue inside the VOICE that you create for this character.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like any electrical plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMES your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset, and is normally willing to follow it, so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable. But a blowhard voice, a whining constant victim voice, or a wishy-washy narrative voice—no, nah, no way.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Masculine authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the lasting effect it has on a reader. Do you recall the details of your favorite child’s book?)

If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.

Thanks much and know that today's thoughts come straight out of DEAD ON WRITING, available in paper from http://www.wordclay.com/ and in ebooks at www.Amazon.com/Kindle.com

Name My Next Book Contest & Vote ongoing can be found on Google at Dirty Deeds - Advice

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