Showing versus telling: tread the minefield...

This is a subject I've spent the last few weeks exploring and have come to the conclusion that novice authors must slavishly stick to the rule "show and don't tell", whilst those with a track record sometimes break this and many other rules such as author intrusion (which is a form of telling), going off at tangents, shifting viewpoint etc. This is because they have an established readership, which, in theory, means a ready market for future novels.

Showing rather than telling is also a thing of literary fashion. Many Victorian writers did it with impunity. Dickens did a whole load of telling, especially of the author intrusion kind, but, in doing so, provided us with a wonderful social history of the time.

Put simply:

"telling" is desciption,
"showing" is dramatisation.

You don't write: Suzie looked really sad.  ...telling
You do write Suzie slumped in her chair and hung her head. ...showing


You don't write: 'You are so annoying, I could punch you,' James said angrily.  ...telling
You do write: James punched the wall and then shook his fist at Luke. 'I'll rearrange your face if you don't shut your fat gob.' ...showing


And now an example of a first draft extract from my novel for older children. I've coloured green anything constituting "telling", when "showing" would do better:

A smooth-talking presenter, called Denis, flashes a smile stuffed with polished dentures at a rather dim-looking woman called Bev as she coos over a velvet-lined box of cheap jewellery that Denis is holding. His hands have immaculately manicured nails emerging from pinstriped shirt cuffs fastened by gold-plated cufflinks with pretend diamonds.


Apart from having obvious examples of telling, there is also too much information in these two sentences. This holds up the story. The reader doesn't need all this detail, because the reader is intelligent enough to fill in the gaps for himself. Make it as simple as the brush strokes in a Japanese painting and leave the rest to imagination.

And now a revision of the earlier draft:

The presenter, Denis, flashes his false teeth at a woman called Bev, who has straightened hair and a fake tan. She shrieks with delight at some gold loop earrings that Denis shows her, as if they're special, when I've seen ones exactly like them in the Pound Shop. I expect Denis' cufflinks are from the Pound Shop, too.


In the first draft, the author speaks. The twelve-year-old first-person narrator, Noah, might as well have disappeared off for a cup-of-tea backstage. It is a description with all the gaps filled in and with no room left for imagination. Also, all of us have different ideas about what constitutes a "dim-looking" or "smooth-talking" person.

The rewrite is a narration from Noah's point-of-view and in terms that relate to his life experience. The word-count of the two examples are about the same but somehow the second one reads faster and is simpler to take in. This is further assisted by dividing it into three shorter sentences rather than two longer ones.

As a general rule, be sparing with adjectives and adverbs. If you're using too many of them, you're probably also doing too much telling. Especially don't use adverbs in dialogue, as above in "James said angrily".

Of course, sometimes telling is a perfectly justifiable way of building a narrative bridge between scenes. For instance, you don't want a scene dramatised with a whole load of action and dialogue, when you need to get a character from A to B and the finer details of the journey are not essential to the plot. You don't need to describe every time someone stops at a traffic light in their car, or how many trees they pass on route, or if they have to stop for a pee, and so on. But you would want to dramatise a journey in which a deer runs across the road in front of the car and causes an accident, or your wife goes into labour miles away from civilisation.

On closer inspection, often a bridge passage can be dumped altogether in the same way that scenes are cut in films.

Summarising is another form of telling and a cop-out at the end of a novel for which your readers may not ever forgive you. Novels must have a dramatic conclusion and not give an impression of the writer having run out of steam or lost interest in the project. Summaries at the end of books are for non-fiction.

How do I know all the above?

...Because I'm savagely revising my novel for older children and wincing every time I come across blatant examples of inappropriate telling, or the author standing on her soapbox moralising about some environmental or social issue, when the story is meant to be told in the voice of a 12-year-old.

...Because there's a whole chapter towards the end of the book, posing as one of the book's characters telling their side of the story to Noah, when it is really a summary.

In the above instance, the use of summary isn't because the author was getting bored with the novel, but because she was getting worried about whether publishers would consider her word-count too high for a first novel!

In conclusion, it is quite permissible for a first-draft to contain too much telling, author intrusion, summaries, over-use of adjectives and adverbs, misspellings, grammatical errors etc., as the most important thing is that nothing should interfere with the author's flow of thought as she gets her idea down on paper. But the author must acknowledge it is a first-draft and not final copy.

The majority of published authors have done numerous revisions prior to seeing their final work in print.    
        
Good luck ...  



   
      

Constructive criticism:heed it or stay on the slush pile

When someone in the publishing industry tells you why they're turning down your work, by all means punch a pillow or kick a door to deal with your hurt pride. You may then shove the rejected typescript into a drawer, not wanting to risk further rejection. Alternatively, you may send it out again to someone else, thinking the first person has poor judgement.

Maybe at this stage it's better to tell yourself,  if a publisher or agent has bothered to say anything outside of the standard rejection, then it's probably a compliment to me (unless it's to tell you you're absolute rubbish and to give up writing for ever).

If a second or third publisher or agent says the same thing, then don't waste postage on sending your typescript out to anyone else until you've given the offending flaws in your writing major consideration.

This is when it's the right time to put your work aside and examine the alternative techniques successfully published writers employ to say what they want to say. Sometimes you'll come across the very flaws in their writing that you're meant to possess. These flaws, apart from making you wonder how they've managed to get published, will probably also irritate you like crazy.  The difference between you and them, is that they have a publishing track record and you're an unknown. This means you can't get away with breaking the rules like them.

One agent, two publishers, and now my son (who is reading for a BA in Creative Writing) have told me that my writing is really good, except for a couple of faults. The first is an occasional slip into telling rather than showing, for example, using adverbs and adjectives where dramatisation would work better. The second is author intrusion, especially when I go all preachy over some moral/ethical issue that I feel strongly about, so it's no longer my fictional character's voice but my voice talking. 

Whoops ... I do hope you don't think this post is preachy!

I'm off to do a strenuous rewrite of my latest novel now, having already found a model of brilliant writing in Philip Pullman's "Dark Matter Trilogy", which I've spent the last couple of months reading.

My next post will show some "before" and "after" examples of my work subjected to the literary pruning sheers.               

One publisher's meat is many publishers' poison

The list below speaks for itself, although it's impossible to vouch 100 per cent for its accuracy as different sources do quote slightly different figures, but the overall impression is of some shockingly bad calls on the part of publishers and agents over the years.  In their defence, they do have the fairly awesome task of second-guessing what novels the reading public will want one year to eighteen months in advance. Also, the version of a novel they reject may not be the one that finally sees print.


Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (J.K. Rowling):
8-14 rejections... SOLD 400 million copies of all her books added together.

Watership Down (Richard Adams):
26 rejections... SOLD  1 million+ copies.

Lord of the Flies (William Golding):
20 rejections... SOLD 14.5 million copies.

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (Richard Bach):
140 rejections... SOLD 40 million copies.

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller):
29 rejections... SOLD 10 million copies.

Lust for Life (Irving Stone):
16+ rejections... SOLD 25 million+copies.

A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle):
30 rejections (took 10 years to get published)... SOLD 6 million+ copies.   

Carrie (Stephen King):
30+ rejections... SOLD has sold over 350 million copies of all his books together.  

The Thomas Berryman Number (James Patterson):
24+ rejections...SOLD 160 million copies of all his books together.

A Time to Kill (John Grisham):
45 rejections (15 publishers/30 agents)... SOLD 60 million + of all his books together.

Does this list encourage or discourage aspiring novelists? Which of the above novels were taken on in a recession? Would they be taken on in this recession if they had landed on a publisher's or an agent's desk? Were there more publishing houses then than now? How many fewer publishers/agents accept unsolicited submissions? Are there any junior editors in the employ of large publishing houses with the time to discover new talent, or guide a promising writer through a rewrite? 

To close on a positive note, there is still such a thing as the love factor an editor has for a particular novel. It does happen and why shouldn't it happen with my novel or yours? Meanwhile, us aspiring novelists must keep up our self-belief and determination.       
  

        

Bad school reports maketh the writer

From the age of 14, Roald Dahl's annual school reports indicated that he couldn't even construct a grammatically correct sentence, let alone write a decent essay.

In 1942, having been invalided out of the RAF in 1942 at the aged of 26, the writer C.S. Forester sought Dahl out to write about his heroic and daring combat flying exploits. His first story, titled A Piece of Cake was published in the Saturday Evening Post, and many others followed in national magazines.

When Dahl had run out of true stories, he started making them up. He enjoyed writing his children's stories the best, and the popularity of these are probably down to his never patronising his audience; acknowledging children's ability to understand dark humour involving rudeness, naughtiness, nastiness, and a fascination for the scatological. He also dared to show just how beastly adults can be to children.

When my children were at preparatory school, they were given a reading list for the Summer holiday, which to their disgust banned all Roald Dahl books. ...Why? Not because the stories were shocking or lacking in literary merit, but because his were the only ones the pupils read, given a choice.

That says it all, and certainly something to aspire to, which is excellent news for me, as I got bad school reports, too!              

Stephen King on not wasting money on bullshit

Of his book titled On Writing, Stephen King says "This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit". He goes on to explain that most fiction writers, including himself, have no idea what makes their work good or bad. He recommends just one book as worthwhile - The Elements of Style  by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White.

Reviews for this timeless and entertaining 97-page guide to English usage, include such as "No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume" -The Boston Globe, and  "...should be the daily companion of anyone who writes for a living and, for that matter, anyone who writes at all" - Greensboro (N.C) Daily News.

Amongst a plethora of handy tips imparted within the book's covers, I mention just two. Regarding figures of speech it says "When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don't start by calling something a swordfish and end up calling it an hourglass", and in avoiding fancy words, "Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able".

Both The Elements of Style and On Writing are books to buy and inwardly digest. ...And a tip from me, never lend them out, as you'll probably never see them again and resent the borrower/inadvertent thief forever!   

     

The demise of the mid-list

Publishers and agents view hybrid novels (ones that cross-genre) as too high a marketing risk if submitted to them by a new author. They prefer to stick to safe formulas that sit comfortably on labelled shelves in book shops and only break the rules with their established authors, often begrudgingly.

One of my favourite authors, Dean Koontz, refuses to churn out the same old thing time and time again. Some of his most successful novels have been of the hybrid variety, which his editor wanted shelved. He fought him, and thank goodness for that; to have had all those words buried forever, would have deprived millions of readers of an enriching experience.

This begs the question, how many "word" funerals take place a week involving unknown literature lost forever in paupers' graves?