Listen to the Experts: Show, don't tell

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As you know, it’s the last week of April. And also the first partial week of May… so we’ll be finishing up our series on editing, this week! And I have two things to talk to you about. Two sides of a coin, as it were, because both sides deserve some merit, if you ask me.

I sincerely hope that you’ve had as much fun as I have this month, and that you’ve learned something or maybe even found a way to connect with writing or editing as a whole, as we’ve explored everything this month. If there’s anything you’d like me to go into more detail with, be sure to drop a comment and let me know! For now, let’s get into the good stuff.

Listen to the Experts: Telling, not showing

It’s one of the first things you hear when you start writing and ask any writer for advice. How do I do this and do it well? They’ll all say, “Show, don’t tell.” And they’re right. The vast majority of the time, readers would much rather be shown a story than told a story.

What’s the difference?

I can tell you a story fairly simply, like so:

Jack went to fetch a bucket of water. When he reached the well, it was dry. He came down very sad, and very thirsty, but he learned to never trust that water will always be at the bottom of a well.

Showing it, on the other hand, takes much more finesse:

Parched of thirst, Jack stumbled over the rough, cracked ground toward the old water well. The sun beat hard upon his back, parching him evermore by the time he reached the shade of the dilapidated well. He cast the bucket, rusted and burning with heat, down into its depths, but only silence greeted him from the bottom. He’d thought certain he would find water here. Where could he go now, with the well gone dry? Quiet sobs tore through his heart as he collapsed against the failing bricks, all hope now lost.

See the difference?

Well, that’s what you need to look for in your manuscript, while you’re editing. You need to look for moments in time that are important, that are necessary to move the story forward, to connect your readers to your characters, to add emotion or tension to pivotal scenes, and make sure that you’re showing and not telling.

It happens to the best of us, that we skip over the showing and start telling when we have something more interesting on the horizon, but it’s your duty as a writer (now wearing your editor hat, of course) to make sure those moments are few and far between. You owe it to your readers, to show them a story, to allow them to be a part of this story. Don’t just tell them a fairytale, don’t just try to give them a moral lesson in as few words as possible. And train your eye to find the moments where you’re telling, so you can make sure you show instead.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Let's Set the Scene: How much exposition is necessary, anyway?

Hi everybody! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. All month long, we’ve been talking about editing. We’re talking about those dreaded first drafts, that horrible first round of editing, and all the things we have to train our eyes to find when it comes to those edits. We’ve talked about everything from plot holes to grammar and sentence structure, and this week, we’re going over the things that I think can take the longest to learn. If you haven’t checked out Tuesday’s post yet, be sure to do so!

For today, let’s talk about…

Gratuitous Exposition

As you know, Tuesday we talked about the opposite: dialogue. Those are the two types of writing you’ll have in your manuscript. You’ll have dialogue, and you’ll have all that other stuff. And, like we discussed on Tuesday, dialogue tends to be what draws a reader’s eye—because of that, we need to make sure we’re not overusing our exposition.

Where dialogue needs to be pointed and necessary, where dialogue draws the eye and allows readers to get to know characters a little bit better through their word use and actions during speech, exposition is the filler. It’s where readers find the real story, where readers discover through sight, smell, taste, touch, and feel. It’s where we writers get to introduce emotion and feeling, where we get to explore every little thing and show every tiny detail we’ve discovered about this world we created inside our writer brains.

And that’s also why we need to watch ourselves, and make sure we don’t overdo it.

I’ve been known to overdo it. I’ve been known to have to go through and cut down on my exposition, because I’ve described the same tree five times in two pages, and I know my readers just won’t care that much about this one specific tree. I’ve also been known to spend too much time in a single character’s head, to focus in on them and allow them to go down the rabbit hole of thought that so many people go down a million times throughout the day—and I know for a fact that nobody really wants to read that.

Just like with dialogue, exposition needs to have a reason. The only difference in how much exposition you’ll need to cut and keep lies in your genre, if I’m being honest. If you write thrillers, then you’ll probably want to limit your exposition. You won’t need to describe as many things as much as you’ll need to precisely use your exposition to maintain the tension of the story. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you write sci-fi or fantasy, then you get creative license to describe things a little bit more. If you’re making a whole new world out of nothing, your reader will want to be able to see it, to touch it, to make sense of it. So you’ll get to take that extra time to reproduce the vision you see in your head.

It all comes down to genre, yes, but the point will always stand: if you have too much exposition, your reader (especially if you market to the US) will get bored, and may put the book down. We don’t want that. We want readers to love our stories as much as we do.

That’s why we edit them so much, before they hit the shelf.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Shut Up: Knowing when your writing has too much dialogue

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and that you enjoyed your Easter Sunday. I got to spend the day playing board games with my family, which was so much fun (I won Catan!). I also want to wish a happy birthday to my mum, even though it’s a day late and I got to spend all day yesterday with her anyway. She’s such an amazing person, a fantabulous mother, and I love her oodles and caboodles (you would too, if you knew her). So, happy birthday, Mum!

And now that I’ve spent too many words on my intro, let’s talk about…

Gratuitous Talking

As you know, we’ve been spending this month talking about editing our first drafts, polishing them to a lovely shine, and training our eye to find things that just don’t belong. This is one of those things.

There are times, in our writing, where we use dialogue as a crutch. There are times when, to move the story forward, we have our characters have a conversation that no one would ever have in a million years, just to get the story to be where we want it.

And you need to train your eye to find those times, and remove them.

Personally, I’m also guilty of adding dialogue for the sake of my word count. I generally try to make my scenes even lengths with each other (or work it out so each chapter ends up around the same length), but sometimes this means that I need a few extra words here or there to make the scene match or fulfill the length I need from it... and I tend to use dialogue for it. 

Don’t do that. Don’t be me. Because I always have to go back in and cut it, and for some reason I still haven’t taught myself to just not write like that in the first place.

Dialogue is one of those things that draws people’s eye. If there’s dialogue on the page, a lot of readers (myself included, sometimes) will skim the exposition before it just to get to that piece of dialogue. Often forgetting that to make sense of that dialogue, we need to read the exposition… but that’s beside the point.

Point is, your dialogue needs to have specific meaning within it. It can’t just be there to be there. Dialogue has to have a sharper meaning, a specificity to it that exposition doesn’t necessarily need to have at all times, because dialogue will draw the eye of your reader, and it needs to be pointed. It needs to be necessary.

I know, I know, some of those conversations your characters had were really fun and helped you to get to know your characters—but does that dialogue need to be there, the way that it is right now, in order to move the story forward? If not, then it might not need to be there (of course, if it’s a pivotal way for your reader to get to know your character, then it might actually need to be there, too—but you know, it could also be moved or split into a few scenes, couldn't it?).

There’s a delicate balance, as with everything else in editing. You need to train your eye to find what’s necessary, to see what pieces of dialogue you need and what ones can be cut. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Me? I’ve gotten to the point where I cut dialogue like crazy, because it’s not doing much of anything in the story.

You’ll get there too. You will.

[love]

{Rani Divine}