Week 4: Focus on Fiction

Focus on Fiction Workshop: Week Four

“Showing, Telling, or Combining the Two"

-- from Chapter 4 of Ron Rozelle's Description and Setting
F + W Publishing, Inc. 2005.

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As workshop facilitator, I’m highly endorsing the books I’m using to prepare information for this fiction workshop. This week’s book,Description and Setting is one of the books in the Write Great Fiction Series, published by Writer’s Digest. These books carry a wealth of useful information for writers, and I hope you will consider purchasing them for your own writer’s library.


The best way to get your reader involved in your story is to make him create your setting, and plot action, inside his head. Creative writing is different from journalistic reporting techniques. Reporting is almost completely made up of telling. When you create a fiction narrative, the writer needs to do much more than just to be told what is happening. You show your reader by using lots of details, and persuade him to get personally involved by making him use his own brain to interpret what you show. Leave some work for your reader in your story. Leave hints to solving a problem. There are things to be “figured out” in every narrative. Give your reader what he wants.

As you compose your story, every so often you need to step back from what you have written, and look at how often you show, and how often you tell.

Most of what you write should be showing things
with lots of details,
and lots of elaborating.

When you show your characters' personalities through their behaviour, you "tickle" the reader's imagination with a sense of what is right and what is wrong in your story line. It is poor writing form indeed to come right out and tell the fact that "this character is an evil man.” It is direct, but it's not very interesting, and it lacks the juicy details that readers love.

Use the senses to convey information about your character: smell, taste, touch, hearing, and vivid and colourful sight descriptions. Visit your local paint color and pick up some colour samples that convey more than the basic colour. My den walls will soon be a unique color of green and gold called “sequin”. I’m debating between “spa” and “tame teal” for my bath. I consider the names of colours worth collecting for future use. I have lots of different things in my writing shoe box. You might consider starting a collection box too.

Have your antagonist slam his front door in mid sales pitch from some desperate salesperson. When he comes home from a stressed day of work, perhaps he kicks his dog instead of greeting him with the usual affection. Maybe this scoundrel sneaks into his girlfriend’s purse and helps himself to her cash and credit cards. Maybe I’ve been watching Judge Judy too much, but a person can sure get a sense of emotional conflict watching that show. Conflict is definitely in the air in your narrative. Something is going to happen to upset your character.

Showing how your character behaves in specific situations is a good way to let your reader discover his personality. Readers get more enjoyment when they get to think about a story point, instead of just taking some piece of information at face value, just because the writer says so. Good fiction writers give plenty of information by showing the particular scene the writer sees in his head; he describes the situation, and has the reader figure out his own conclusions at that point in time.

You could tell in a sentence,
but it's better to show in a number of pages.
That's the art of creative writing.

When you show, you have a great opportunity to use the five senses to have your reader hear, see, touch, taste, and smell the experiences of your characters. Can you talk about entering a movie theater, and paying $10 per ticket, without including the aroma of popcorn? Make your scenes lifelike.

As a hypothetical example (and wishing no one any bad luck), let us consider a traffic accident. What will be the major difference between the written police report, and the long and emotional explanation this daughter goes through so that her parents understand exactly how the family vehicle has become a non-drivable heap of metal? The police report lists a series of verifiable facts.

The daughter's explanation would include sights of blundering vehicles running red lights, and big trucks jumping medians, the sounds of squealing tires, the busted sound of metal crunching metal, and the crashing of falling glass—through her emotionally sobbing breath of the scene she saw last. Then, as always, comes the ambulance siren signaling its arrival, the sound growing louder as it approaches from the distance.

The police report lacks emotion. The daughter's explanation is overflowing with emotions that are overwhelming her, and her senses are still echoing what she just experienced, like an echo in her consciousness. You may feel like you've lived through the wreck yourself.

If you have been involved in a traffic accident yourself recently, try to re-live the experience by writing about it. You'll discover that showing what happens gives a much fuller understanding than telling a fact in a concise, direct, and to the point way. Showing makes a bigger impression on the reader than telling.

Your reader comes to your writing with his own lifetime of experiences to draw from, and relate to, as he reads your narrative. The writer’s job is to bring out the reader's emotions by making him remember his own similar experiences. When the reader connects with a story, he is personally experiencing the emotion you so cleverly set up. He overlays his feelings of his experience onto the situation in your narrative.

Foreshadowing is a great psychological technique to experiment with in your longer stories. Create images, situations, and emotions in your story that have to do with a universal human dramatic situation. Think of a situation that everyone goes through, big things and little things, but some thing that pulled on your emotions. Relay it in delicate portions, like a long elegant multi-course dinner, building the reader's appetite and emotional investment.

By universal, I mean that it eventually happens to everybody. This is the idea of Murphy's Law, as a specific example. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Everyone has experienced some similar situation at some time in his or her lives.

Think about the number of people who are losing a job just before they’re about to close on a new house, getting the flu the day after you’re hired for a new job, or the female celebrity on the way to the televised stage who visibly slips, stumbles, or falls. Have you had a similar experience to the Dancing With the Stars” celebrity who accidentally got her dress caught in the strap of her dancing high heeled shoes, and dusted the floor with her posterior? Set up your story so the reader can easily plug in their life experiences, their expectations, their dreams, and their feelings into the world your story creates.

I viewed "A Raisin in the Sun" last weekend, a 1961 Sidney Poitier, black and white film, set in a one bedroom Chicago tenement. I found the film very emotionally powerful. I recommend it as an exercise for pre-writing. Watch the movie as a viewer of a vehicle that wants you to have your emotions shaken from their slots, and finally perhaps, fall in line with the thinking or attitude of one, or more characters. This is the challenge of creating an empathetic evil character. This narrative written, or via media rental, is worth experiencing. It will shake your emotional base.

Meta messages and self-realizations have occurred for the characters throughout the course of the film, and for me too, sitting on the sofa at home. I was emotionally exhausted when the film was over. Here is a link to a fabulous Broadway production, if you're ever able to catch a production in your local area.

http://www.raisinonbroadway.com/

Lorraine Hansberry wrote the original screenplay for Raisin in 1959. If you want to write a certain genre, such as that of a screenplay, that is where you need to spend a large percentage of your reading time. Writers write best what they know (another universal)!

As a fellow aspiring writer seeking publication, I must ask how much you’ve though about your readers? Who are they? What age are they? How much education have they experienced so far in life? Do they live any place in particular? What do they usually enjoy reading? How often do they read? Are they reading printed books, or are they going to reading e-books? How much can they afford to pay for a soft cover or hardback book? How often? Shoot! Some of these things I have to consider before I go wandering through my local bookstore. Everything costs more these days.

I ask you these questions now, because I spent lots of years basically “writing for myself”. Yes, I wanted to be published, but I never got many writing pieces fully edited and complete enough to send to a literary agent or publishing company.

I started collecting publication opportunities in the annually released Writer’s Market—one very fat book of publishing opportunities published fresh each year. After jotting down pages of possible leads, I realized I wasn’t ready. I had created a long narrative, but now I see it probably didn’t have much of an audience. The main characters were teenage boys. The boys that the characters were based on didn’t read, and I suspect many teenage boys don’t. But, I had a story to tell.

Writing, and knowing that you’re writing in a specific genre, is imperative! I spent a long time drafting my one-day-might-be-a-published-novel by the name of

Ghetto Gandhi: the Urban Legend  (18+) The tale of teenage boys' life in the urban concrete jungle. #741012 by a Sunflower in Texas

.

The link is for those who want to explore what I accumulated toward my novel—not required reading by any means. There are enough chapters to be a book, and I need to go back and add missing parts, and consider whether this would pass for commercial fiction. Now, I don’t think it will, but it might—if I finish it. But a writer can get tired of her own subject. I did. I have years invested in this non-published work of fiction. Gosh! I know I’m not the only one. Writing is a process, and getting published is a process. But, let’s deal with one thing at a time.

As well as showing works for a writer of fiction, no short story or novel can rely on that technique 100% of the time. A spell binding mystery will probably use a combination of both showing and telling. That is what Ray Bradbury does in this excerpt from The Martian Chronicles.

"Mr and Mrs K were not old.
They had the fair and brownish skin of the true Martian,
the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they
had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming
in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them
with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by
the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room."



There are situations where careful intricate showing will be best when followed by rapid telling. If you will re-read one of your own stories with this "show and tell" creative issue in mind, you'll discover that a particular need or circumstance dictates when to show and when to tell. It becomes intuitive after a certain amount of writing. It's an excellent writer's technique to develop, because effective writers do this. At any rate, keep in mind that the creative writer's job is to do more showing of details than telling of direct info.

In dealing with the "show and tell" decision, don't overcompensate (as I think I have begun to do as I try to end this essay) , and shift into overdrive, thereby doing both showing and telling of the same piece of information. See if you can identify the problem in this student's passage:

"Martha Louise considered the three large muffins
in her hand. She thought of the sweet sugar taste of the icing,
and how they would feel as she slowly chewed them, and how they
would taste, like sweet cream and butter and cinnamon. She
even thought of the crumbling bits of muffin that would trickle down
her face and onto her dress.

Then she considered the pair of barefooted girls, standing beside
the wagon near her. Their dresses looked as if they had been
handed down through a family of many children. Their big eyes
were as empty as their stomachs surely were.

Martha Louise sniffed at the muffins just once, then handed
them to the girls. She was a generous child."
.
After all the muffin and girls details, the reader already realizes that Martha Louise is generous. Showing and telling the same event is redundant and doesn't give your reader credit for thinking.
Please, don't insult your audience. Good writing will show OR tell a thing, but not do both.

Actions speak louder than words. We've all seen or heard of television preachers who lash out with waves of fire and brimstone, warning sinners against unethical behavior. When these preachers--verbally virtuous individuals--have been caught in their own scandalous dens of inequity, we realize they don't practice what they preach. They didn't show what they told.

Showing is more credible than telling. Details, details, and more details, will enable a writer to show his readers in pages of story what the author could state and be done with in a couple of sentences. The next time you re-read some of your own fiction writing, you might look to identify a "tell" passage that would work better as a "show" passage, or visa versa. A good writer is a good editor, and the work of a good editor is never done

Show and Tell --Warm up, Exercises, and Prompt

Exercise 1.

Make a chart, and keep it handy for reference. Use a poster board and markers, and keep it by your desk for awhile. Collect some images from magazines or the Internet to paste onto a poster board or two as visual examples along with your verbs or phrases. Look for creative or unusual pictures and images that appeal to you, like a scene from your narrative. Keep the poster around your writing area awhile as inspiration.

Choose a verb, but make it an action verb. Make a list of several common verbs that are generic in their meaning. Pick simple action verbs like walk, talk, and hit. Choose easy verbs you use often. Then, take a few minutes with each verb, and write down as many other verbs or phrases that are more specific in their meaning (skip, saunter, parade, etc.). Your goal is not to create a catalog of precise descriptions, but instead to practice refining an action down to it's most clear description.

You are looking for a description that does paint a picture—in less than 100 words (many less).




An excellent source to use in this process is a thesaurus--either the always within reach, falling apart, hardbound thesaurus used in college (like me) , or perhaps a more recently published edition. The meaning of words does change over time. Every twenty years you would probably NEED a new thesaurus as much as slang changes over time.

A thesaurus, whether it’s published by Roget or Merriam-Webster or whoever, gives you an alphabetical listing of words like a dictionary. However, instead of supplying definitions, a thesaurus will give you a list of words that have similar meaning, and some contrasting, or opposite words, if available. Mostly, it gives you a good chuck of good words. For a thesaurus to work right, you’ll probably need to use a dictionary to look up a few exact meanings to get the word you really want to use. Since I majored in English, I’ve always had a thesaurus by my writing side.

If you don't have your own thesaurus to use, I might question your commitment to writing. It's a writer's tool I couldn't live without (author and facilitator). There are several Internet sites, that will sell you a thesaurus based on specific topics like by different years (Cool, Daddy-O), cultures, vernaculars (fixin’ to), and other options. You can find these available at Amazon.com.

A thesaurus is a gift a writer gives herself (or I did--). A paperback thesaurus can be found for less than $5.00 at a Half-Price Book Store, and then you’ll have a way to always find the word with the exact nuance, to trigger your writer's emotions or make him understand a concept, or view of a scene. You can Google to find online thesauri (plural), or check out these thesaurus useful sites with which I'm familiar.


http://www.m-w.com Merriam Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus

http://www.Bartleby.com/thesauri Thesaurus, and quotes available too

http://www.thesaurus.reference.com Roget's Thesaurus ed. 1995,
1911 ed. available at U of Chicago site

http://www.visualthesaurus.com 3-D planet like association of words, interactive


My favourite is www.VisualThesaurus.com because it delivers your word in a ringed web. You can click on any word that appears in your selected word web, and get a web of words for that entry. If you have an interest in the language part of writing, this program is fun to use for investigating words, and bringing new vocabulary to your writing.

Once, again, in using a thesaurus, you look up a word you can think of, knowing it is similar to the meaning of the word you want to use. When you locate the word, you will find a large list of words with similar meanings. I usually keep my dictionary handy to double check exactly what these similar words mean. This is serious-page-turning- writer's-research!

It's fun, and useful to be a language hound (linguist) when you're a writer. If you can't think of the exact word you want, I find a thesaurus invaluable in finding the right way to put it.



Exercise 2.
Think of, and then write, some ways you could SHOW the things that are told in these short sentences. Have a go at expanding and elaborating these statements.

* The man is nervous……………………………………………………………………

* The lawn has been mown and recently trimmed……………………………………..

* The student is ready for the final bell of the day to ring……………………………….

* The larger of the two dogs is arrogant……………………………………………….



Exercise 3: Your Extended Prompt:

Here are some "telling" statements that you could rework into short compositions that "show". Remember NOT to use telling words and phrases like hears, feels, felt like, smelled like......... This section is encouraging you to SHOW DETAILS of ELABORATION.


* Sunsets are nice at the beach…………………………………………………………..

* A homemaker’s work is never done……………………………………………………...

* He had never looked closely at his father-in-law………………………………………….

* It seemed that the mail would never come……………………………………………….




Please respond to any or all of the exercise prompts by creating a new item with a title you pick. After you have composed and saved your items, please send your exercises, which you have named in some appropriate terminology, to [e-mail]. If you can complete the exercises before the end of the weekend, I’ll have time to read and comment on what you have written. Late work doesn’t present a problem for me. I will accept any exercises from any week of the workshop at any time. I’m here to help you write better. I’ll be happy to communiqué regarding your exercise responses, but if you’re e-mail with your “bitem” is late, your proverbial paper goes to the bottom of the virtual stack. That’s the only repercussion. Some things former teachers just cannot change—like paper habits.

AND, when you find time this week, continue on your own narrative. I’ll be asking you for your word count soon, so get to it…we love to write, right