Category Archives: Show don’t tell

Your Writing Voice: A Different Take

Some time ago I wrote about finding your writing voice. Recently I read a post by Jessica Wildfire and it forced me to think deeper.  

In my original post, I said a writer’s voice included two aspects: the stuff she writes about, and the way she writes it. In other words, (1) the topics and (2) the style. My suggestions on choosing topics are still sound. But Ms. Wildfire introduced some new thoughts about style.

Her 11-item list of style principles is so good I won’t repeat it here and will merely urge you to read her post. (Here’s that link again.) I’m just going to emphasize the part I found most disruptive.

She suggests reading Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, and I intend to do that. But she goes on to advise writers to toss The Elements of Style in the garbage.

Really, Jessica? Throw away my copies of Strunk and White? I couldn’t bear it.  

I understand why she says that. The Elements of Style dates from a century ago, and contains numerous rules presented in a way that sounds rigid, overly prescriptive, and archaic. I’m guessing those are the parts she ‘hate-reads’ to her students as counter-examples.  

But the overall message of Strunk and White, the vital essence of the work, is timeless and I hope Ms. Wildfire would agree. Elements is a plea for the writer to keep the reader always in his thoughts. Yes, your job as a fiction writer is to entertain, but to do that, you must first be understood.

As you look over Ms. Wildfire’s 11 principles of style, you’ll see she doesn’t care much for the old rules—the ones about grammar and showing rather than telling. But what comes through in her principles is a message Strunk and White would agree with. Write for the reader. Never confuse or bore the reader.

She advises writers to tell their stories in a voice readers can connect with. To do that, listen to the way real people talk. Notice the flow of words, the rhythms of their speech. If faced with a choice between clarity and correct grammar, opt for clarity. Delete the boring parts and cut to the chase. 

Okay, Ms. Wildfire, I’ll follow most of your advice. But I’ll never throw away the Strunk & White I got back in 1976. I consult it occasionally and re-read it just a couple of months ago. Elements will remain on the bookshelves of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 30, 2019Permalink

Describing Your Characters’ Feelings

How are your characters feeling?  It’s important for your readers to know.  I’ve written an earlier post about conveying a character’s thoughts, and another one about facial expressions, but it’s time to tackle emotions.

For this blog post I’m going to regard ‘feelings,’ ’emotions,’ and ‘moods’ as being synonymous, even though neuroscientists draw distinctions between these terms.

Emotions are part of the human experience, and seem to result from how we’re hard-wired, what our individual background has been, and a recent external or internal stimulus.  Since we all have emotions in the real world, the characters in your fiction must have them too, to make them convincing.

Whether there are six basic emotions, as depicted by Dr. Paul Ekman…

Emotions

…or eight as pictured by Dr. Robert Plutchik…

591px-Plutchik-wheel.svg…writers just need to know there are many emotions, and characters can feel them in combinations and in various intensities.

As a writer, it’s your job to convey these emotions to the reader with clarity and accuracy.  There shouldn’t be a doubt in the reader’s mind about what a character is feeling.

How do you do that?  Here are some guidelines to follow:

  • Make sure the emotion is appropriate.  Remember, it’s based on a character’s background, but is also a response to a recent stimulus.
  • Show the emotion through the character’s actions:  speech (not only what is said, but word choice and tone of voice), facial expressions, hand motions, or body posture.
  • Show the emotion by describing the character’s thoughts or mental state.
  • Use metaphors and similes, but shun clichés.
  • In certain situations (fast action scenes, very short fiction, or if applicable to a minor character or sub-plot), just tell the character’s emotion.  This is not as effective as other methods and indicates amateurish writing  if used too often.

If you get stuck trying to portray a character’s emotion in words, one technique that might help is to recall a time when you had that feeling yourself.  See if you can draw on that memory and maybe even recreate the emotional state within yourself.  If you can conjure up within yourself the same emotion your character is feeling, you stand a good chance of finding words to describe it.

There are some helpful websites that list adjectives useful in describing emotions, notably this one and this one.  But I caution against an over-reliance on such adjectives.  It’s more effective to show emotions through a character’s actions or by describing what’s going on inside the character’s mind.

How did this blog post make you feel?  Are you now confident you can convey a character’s feelings in a more precise way?  I welcome comments from you on this topic; in fact few things in life bring greater joy and serenity to—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

April 21, 2013Permalink

Giving and Receiving…Critiques

‘Tis the season for giving and receiving, so I thought I’d discuss critiques of fiction manuscripts.  Last time I did so, I said I’d let you know how to give and receive critiques.  My critique group meeting 2experience is based solely on twenty years of being in small, amateur, face-to-face critique groups; not writing workshops, classes, or online critique groups; so the following advice is tuned to that sort of critique.

First of all, to give the critique, keep the following points in mind:

  • Read the submitted manuscript straight through once, and just note where you were “thrown out of the story” for some reason.  Jot down why and come back to those points later.
  • Re-read the manuscript again. You could mark some of the grammar or spelling problems, but don’t concentrate on those.  The author wants you to find the bigger stuff.
  • Where there are stand-out positives (“Eyeball kicks” in TCL parlance) note those and praise the author.  The word critique should not have solely negative connotations.  A positive comment from you could keep the author from later deleting a really good description, metaphor, or turn of phrase.
  • Be clear and specific in the comments you write; avoid ambiguity.
  • Look for the following story elements and comment if they’re not present or they’re weak:

1.  Strong opening or hook

2.  Compelling, multi-dimensional, non-stereotypical protagonist with human flaws

3.  A problem or conflict for the protagonist to resolve

4.  Worthy secondary characters, different from the protagonist, who do not steal the show

5.  Vivid settings, not overly described

6.  Consistent and appropriate point of view

7.  Appropriate dialogue that moves the plot and breaks up narration

8.  Narration that shows and doesn’t tell.

9.  A plot that builds in a logical way, events stemming from actions that stem from understandable motivations

10.  A story structure complete with Aristotle’s Prostasis, Epitasis, and Catastrophe (beginning, middle, and end)

11.  Appeals to all five senses

12.  Active sentence structure, using passive only when appropriate

13.  Appropriate symbolism, metaphors, similes

14.  A building of tension as the protagonist’s situation worsens, followed by brief relaxing of tension before building again

15.  An appropriate resolution of the conflict, without deus ex machina, resulting from the striving of the protagonist, and indicative of a change in the protagonist

  • If your group shares comments verbally, do so in a helpful, humble way.

You think all that sounds pretty difficult?  Ha!  It’s much harder to receive a critique.  When doing so, here are the considerations:

  • Submit your work early enough to allow sufficient time for thorough critiques.  Be considerate of your group members’ time.
  • While being critiqued, sit there and take it.  No comments.  No defensiveness.  Just listen to the honest comments of a person who not only represents many potential readers, but who wants you to get published.

So, when it comes to critiques, is it better to give than to receive?  In contrast to most gifts, it’s harder to receive them, but it’s still a toss-up which is better overall.  But perhaps both are just a bit easier for you to deal with now, thanks to this post by—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

December 30, 2012Permalink

Turkey City Lexicon

In any specific human endeavor involving more than one person, the people involved soon find themselves repeating the same phrases over and over.  It’s inevitable they should seek some shorthand way to avoid that.  So they develop jargon, specialized terminology suited to their activity.

Turkey City LexiconSome time ago, in science fiction writing workshops, the participants worked out a vocabulary of writing terms called the Turkey City Lexicon (TCL).  There is no authoritative source for the TCL, nor is it copyrighted.  It’s available on many websites; just search for “turkey city lexicon.”

I won’t reiterate the list here.  My purpose is just to introduce it to you and comment on its usefulness to me.  I encourage you to search for and read through the list, then come back to finish reading my blog entry.  Several of the items are humorous to read through.

A few TCL terms are more applicable to science fiction (The Jar of Tang, Abbess Phone Home, Reinventing the Wheel, and Space Western), but the vast majority of the terms are applicable across all fiction genres.  TCL might be useful to you even if you don’t write SF.

A number of the terms are disconcerting for me to read through since I’ve committed these errors before.  These include Burly Detective Syndrome, You Can’t Fire Me–I Quit, Fuzz, and Bogus Alternatives.

But that gets right to the value of this list.  Most of the terms describe deficiencies common to beginning level writing.  Worse, they describe failings even experienced writers can succumb to, like a bad habit.  Even just reading through the list periodically can refresh your resolve to avoid the bad habits.

I’ve found it vital to subject my writing to the crucible of my critique group just so they can identify faults I don’t see.  Once you’ve been accused of any of the items in the TCL, chances are you’ll hear that accusatory voice again in your head while editing all subsequent stories.  Thus will your writing improve.

My critique group has found three TCL terms to be the most useful—Infodump, As You Know Bob, and Telling Not Showing.  I’m not sure why those three dominate, but they do, at least for us.

Do any of the TCL items ring embarrassingly true for you as you think over your own writing?  Are there other fiction writing failings that should be recognized by the TCL but aren’t yet?  If so, leave a comment for me and let me know.  On a mission to improve own writing and that of others, I’m—

                                                   Poseidon’s Scribe

 

December 23, 2012Permalink

Do the Objective Correlative

No, the Objective Correlative isn’t a dance step, so far as I know.  It’s a literary term that can be hard to comprehend.  Let’s see if I can explain it in words even I can understand.

Imagine you’re an author writing a scene in which a boy encounters a rather scary bear.  You want to convey to the reader the emotion felt by the boy when he senses the bear is watching him from somewhere, but he can’t see the animal.  You could simply state the boy was scared.  That would violate the principle of show, don’t tell we’ve discussed before, and it’s rather on the amateurish side. You could instead paint a word picture of the scene, as William Faulkner did in his story, “The Bear.”

He heard no dogs at all.  He never did hear them.  He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off and knew that the bear was looking at him.  He never saw it.  He did not know whether it was in front of him or behind him.  He did not move, holding the useless gun, which he had not even had warning to cock and which even now he did not cock, tasting in his saliva that taint as of brass which he knew now because he had smelled it when he peered under the kitchen at the huddled dogs.

First we have the sudden silence of normally noisy animals–dogs and a woodpecker.  We have the sense of “blindness” in that the boy cannot see the bear.  Faulkner describes the boy’s only potential weapon in countering the situation as “useless” and not even cocked.  There’s a cold, metallic taste in his mouth.  Finally we find the dogs huddled, hiding.

In a few sentences, Faulkner shows us that terror of being watched, vulnerable, unable to even confront the danger.  Never once does he mention the boy’s emotion, and yet we feel it nonetheless because of the situation, the chain of events, the details chosen in the passage.  Moreover, a single one of the details wouldn’t have sufficed; the combination of several details completes the effect of evoking the emotion.

That is the Objective Correlative.  The artist Washington Allston coined the term around 1840 and meant it to be applied to painting.  T.S. Eliot later revived the term and applied it to literature.  I came across the concept while surfing the web one day when I came across this site.

T.S. Eliot said there are ways to fall short of having the right objective correlative.  The details in a scene might not leave readers with any particular emotion, or maybe with the wrong one.

You can use common literary symbols as part of an objective correlative.  Some of the many symbols used to represent an emotion include the color blue to mean calm, darkness to mean fear, rain to mean sadness, and a mouse to represent shyness.

Of course, readers vary by culture and background and some words do not convey the same emotions to all.  Still, the objective correlative is an effective tool for maximizing the emotional impact of your writing.  I encourage you to ‘do the objective correlative’ even if it isn’t a dance.  Did this blog entry help you understand the term?  Leave a comment and let me know.  Dancing here in this little corner of the Internet you’ll find–

                                                  Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

August 26, 2012Permalink