The Joys of Talking Writer to Writer

by Janis Patterson

Last week I got a kind of vacation - The Husband and I drove up to a secluded Arkansas hideaway where we had been invited to stay as part of an invitation for me to speak at a local writers’ group. Aside from an almost hurricane-force storm that flooded the area and cut short our holiday, it was a great trip.

Though I used to do it often, I had not spoken to a group of live people in a very long time (drat the covid crazies!) and was a little nervous, but that went away as soon as we got to the meeting. The ladies (all were ladies) were so warm and welcoming it was heartening. Best of all, they were all so anxious to learn.

There were only two published authors in the group - the leader, a long-time multi-published professional whom I have admired for years, and one member who had recently self-published a book she probably shouldn’t have in its current form. As I said, what was wonderful was how everyone wanted to learn.

Considering everyone’s overwhelming newbie status I started at the very beginning. The problems and perils and protocols of traditional publishing. The dangers both artistic and financial lurking in vanity/’assisted’ publishing. The risks, rewards and hard work of self-publishing. By the time I finished with that they were looking a little shell-shocked, but I’m not sorry. Being an author is so much more than sitting at a desk and writing stories. Sometimes it seems as if that is the easiest part! Writers both published and aspirant have to know about the nuts and bolts of publishing - all kinds of publishing. They want to be published but most of them have no idea of the realities of the business. 

And one of the biggest realities of the business is to sell something by any method you should have something decent to sell - although some of the more rapacious vanity houses will ‘publish’ any sort of trash, as will some untutored self-publishers. So I switched the lecture to writing. I stressed the importance of knowing what you’re doing - knowing how to use your tools, those tools being spelling, grammar, punctuation, tense, and all the other parts of language. We covered where and how to use proper English (definitely in the prose/descriptive portions) and when dialect/bad grammar is acceptable, such as in quotes or interior thoughts, where you can do pretty much what you want - but only if it is congruent with the status/etc of the character himself. In other words, you don’t have a duchess talking like a dockworker unless there is a solid reason in the story for it!

Then we went on to the construction of the story. How once you create a world - whatever it is - you have to stay true to the rules of that world throughout the story. Person, tense, general atmosphere, pacing, quotes from other works, allusions, prologues/epilogues... there wasn’t a tool or technique that we didn’t touch on. We also discussed plagiarism, info dumps, alliteration and everything else we could think of.

Of course, although we touched on so many things, those things were necessarily light and fleeting. It is no small exercise to condense 40+ years of experience (good and bad) into a 50 minute talk. Plus, since this group of writers was primarily interested in mysteries, there was a lively discussion about exactly what is a cozy mystery. No, we didn’t come to a pithy single sentence consensus, though the ladies now know more about cozies than they did before.

All in all, it was a great experience and the ladies, obviously being gluttons for punishment, said they want me back. I can’t wait.

UPDATE : For those of you who are following my republishing blitz, my Regency romance novella SARACEN’S GIFT - #13, which means everything is right on schedule! - releases today, June 21! The blitz is now officially half over!

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.