Digging Deep Without Hitting the Gas Line

Sharon encouraged us to dig deep as writers. It amazes me how frequently my “fight or flight” instinct kicks in on behalf of my characters.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better (I hope) at recognizing those moments and steering into traffic instead of swerving to the curb. Here are three reasons and three techniques for digging deep in your writing.

1)   Speak to your reader. Reason one for digging deep as a writer is so that you can reach out to your reader and say what they need to hear. You can’t do that if you skim the surface, write tip-of-the-brain plots and scenes. It’s the difference between a chat around the water cooler, and a conversation that runs deep into the night.

       2) Stop lying to yourself. Last year, I wrote a blog post about how reading fiction brings us closer to our true experience as human beings. “Fiction is the story of you living a different life in order to be able to see yourself in a new way and make sense out of the life you are living.

You’re broken.

You’re hiding it.

And it’s making you crazy.

Fiction says, “Welcome home.’”

A writer will never truly become a writer until she can face her humanity full on and tell the truth without trying to justify it.

3) The more personal the pain, the more universal it is. That stuff you’re ashamed of? So are we. We all have those charred marbles rolling around in our souls, those broken off pieces, long dead yet still so powerfully able to bend us low. Those questions you have—more like doubts, really—yeah, we’ve all got them. The skilled writer takes the reader by the hand, walks her into the pain, and teaches how to stare it down. And don’t you want to be that kind of writer?

Here are three techniques for digging deep.

1)   Listen to the scene. You’re writing and things are flowing, then BANG, you hit a wall. The words dry up and you’re scrambling to push through to the end of the scene. Most often the reason your creative tap turned off is because you fudged a deep truth, a difficult reality in order to preserve your emotional distance from the scene. Go back and pin point where you hedged or skimmed when you knew the right thing to do was tell a stark truth. Likely, it will take the scene in a different direction (maybe even the story) then you intended, but your intentions don’t matter. The story matters.

2)   Read your work aloud. There are a million good reasons for doing this frequently: you spot typos, missing words, misspellings. You also will hear places where you’re lying to yourself. Say the words aloud and if they are true, you’ll hear that truth ringing clear. Fudged, shallow words? You’ll hear that too.

3)   Kill off the bad nouns. “Terror”, “horror”, “hysteria”—kill them all. I’ve read sentences like, “Her heart filled with dread.” Um. Gee. That’s too bad. Maybe she should look at getting that fixed. Now, before you jump on the “here’s how to show and not tell” bandwagon, let me stop you there. People’s hearts filling with dread is never the point. It’s too late by then. What’s important are the few seconds just before her heart filled with dread. What was going on then? What clues were in the room that let her in on the fact that dread was knocking on the door? Write that. No pat phrases, no emotional shorthand.

Here’s your Novel Matters Assignment, should you choose to accept it: Write/read through your WIP—as much as you dare—and follow these three techniques. I follow them and its made a huge difference in my storytelling. Share your additional ideas/experiences in the comments section!

Show Me Don't Tell Me How To Show Not Tell

Happy birthday to Debbie Fuller Thomas! She's 39 again and we wish her every happiness today!

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I've seen explanations like this: 

"The difference between showing and telling in writing is simple! 

Telling: Becky was sick. 

Showing: Becky sniffled into a tissue, then vomited.

 Voila!"

Hmmm. Not so much.

Perhaps we need to take the discussion of Show vs Tell and throw it in the same place as Becky's crumpled tissue. Writers need to stop talking as if Showing is some easy literary device. Something you can choose to employ or un-employ at whim.

It is, instead, the preferred method of storytelling. Method - not device. It is part of the theory of the modern novel. It is the discussion of intent, not meaning. It is the unveiling of the human condition, not the opening of a toolbox.

Didn't know there was a theory of the literature? There are several. But that is for another blog.

If Showing were simply about writing long and detailed explanations of the chain of action-reflection-reaction-action, no one would ever get a book written - moreover, no one would care to read the thing anyway. Who wants to read an encyclopedia of people in motion? 

This explanation doesn't give insight into why some of our most beloved novels have wide swaths - pages and pages - of narrative summary. These often pop up in fascinating tangents where a character has experiences something, and then ponders the nature of the experience at length. Is that "showing"? The answer is: Yes, in part.

Something much more interesting is going on when we speak of Showing. An author who shows the story is an author with a light touch - one who respects her character's choices, who balks at easy answers, and stares messy incompleteness in the face. A writer who shows is a writer able to capture the subtleties and nuance of human hearts in motion. 

Showing isn't really about an explanation of the action occurring in a novel - it is an exploration of the people themselves. It is taking the characters, laying them flat and rolling, like a scroll, their essence. Recognizing the inadequacy of our efforts, we, the writers, pull out what it is to experience the story we are telling. We examine a facet here, an angle there, all the while weeping for the parts we cannot tell within the limitations of the medium.

Showing is to cause the reader to be awash in the experience of your characters. It begins with word one, and ends as the last page is turned. It is the author's ability to step aside, and let the characters experience the story. It has nothing - I repeat - nothing to do with how many words you use to help the reader picture the turning of a door knob.

Sometimes you just need to get the door open and who cares how it got that way - if I explained the tedious gripping of a handle, the turning of a wrist, the click of tumblers, it would slow the story down - bog it down, actually. Instead the door is opened. Ah! A greenish Becky enters, crumpled tissue in hand. Oh good!

So what do we call it when the author pushes aside the doldrums of "Becky was sick" in favor of "Becky sniffled into a tissue and vomited"? I would call it being precise.

Showing vs. Telling - What IS Showing? Really.

You know how we love to talk about how pat answers and cliches in fiction do more harm than good - leaving the story flat, the reader unsatisfied?

Yeah, well I feel that way when I read or hear people talking about Showing Vs. Telling in fiction. Mostly what I hear is pat answers and what is increasingly becoming cliche definitions. I understand this is mostly an attempt to find a simple answer to a complex question, yet I get the feeling that in our search we've forgotten that the question IS complex. Multi-faceted. Difficult.

Ah, difficult. How we do run from difficult. All of us do it to varying degrees. But the vision of the fiction writer is to embrace difficult (do you recall Patti Hill's wonderful imagery of wrestling an octopus into a mayonnaise jar?) We eat difficult for breakfast.

My goal for this post is not to be the teacher in the front of the room with all the answers. I'm so over myself about needing to have all the answers. Instead, my goal is to open the discussion and invite you to wrestle with the complexity of creating the story world through the device of showing.

What Showing ISN'T.

We often see people explaining showing vs. telling in terms similar to this: Telling is just saying what a character is doing. Showing is describing what the character is doing.

Not so much.

It isn’t enough to describe events in detail – there must be a purpose for both the details you are describing and the characters that are performing the actions.

What is often left out of the showing vs. telling discussion is that there are reasons why a writer would choose to use either telling or showing at different points in the story. There are aspects of your story you are best to tell - details of time and place, clothing details, sometimes setting a scene up quickly requires telling because to show it all would distract from the story.

Showing isn't detail - showing is story.

Telling isn't lack of detail - telling is story.

How often have you heard "Show, don't tell"? Does that mean you are being asked to describe things in detail? Yes and no.

Let me give you and example:

She hurried down the path toward the dark palace, the cloak draped over her arm. The birds over head sang their goodnight song. She shouldn't have stayed so long at her friend's house. She walked faster, picking the hem of her skirt up with her free hand. She pushed a low hanging branch out of the way as she hurried past. She reached an opening in the trees that lead to the valley that would take her to the doors of the palace. She stopped and draped the cloak over her shoulders and tied it at her throat. She checked inside the bag that was slung across her torso. Fire sticks, water, a small cloth, her Father's book of Hope and a forgotten apple.

She pulled the apple out of the bag and bit into it. She made quick work of the apple and threw the small core and stem into the forest behind her. She slapped at her dress, removing most of the dust from its folds, then took the small cloth from her bag and wiped at the stains around the hem of her dress. She replaced the cloth and stepped into the grassy meadow. It was wet with evening dew. She picked up her skirts and rushed on toward the place gates.

Showing galore, right?

Nope.

For all the detail about what the character is doing, the passage is still telling. It’s flat. A list of mundane activities being spelled out in succession. It doesn't connect us to the story world.

The above passage is missing essential components of showing - and this brings me to the point I made at the beginning of this post - the literary device of showing is complex. It isn't one thing - it is made up of several other devices used together to create the illusion of reality.

I want to touch on two components of showing that I feel are essential. Point of View (POV) and subtext. Then, I want to invite you to share your perspectives, insights, and knowledge.

Parts of Showing

POV:

POV is a pillar of “showing” – it’s a brace for the concept, because POV not only introduces characters to the reader, it grounds the reader immediately, creating a safe and trustworthy place. Without POV what we are left with is a picture of what a character is doing – but we don't know or care about the character. POV establishes how the reader will relate to the novel and the subject matter. It sets the tone and takes the reader by the hand, leading her deeper into the story.

Let me just say, I'm not talking about whether you tell your story in first person or third person or if you write in present tense or past tense. I'm referring to POV as the presenting characters in a well rounded sense, utilizing character information from their mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects. POV that is a multi-dimensional presentation of character that begins the moment the novel opens and continues to develop until the end of the book.

Let’s get back to our example. The author of this scene tells us the character hurries and races, but there is nothing to ground us to the character – who is she? What is she thinking? Why are her actions important to me as a reader? There is no glimpse of the inner world of this character. And that, in part, makes the scene telling rather than showing.

A second component of showing that I want to talk about is subtext.

I started my creative life as an stage actor - I still have sawdust between my toes. A huge part of learning to act was learning to portray subtext, the hidden but most truthful motivations and meanings of a characters words and actions.

Subtext is more easily recognized by its absence - oh blah, the story is flat and clichéd - than it is by its presence -the words lingered long after I put the book down.

In his book, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, Charles Baxter says subtext is ". . . the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken." He also uses the phrase, "unspoken soul-matter".

It may sound mysterious, but it isn’t as vague as it may sound at first brush. It is the art of leaving something unsaid about the stated theme and mood of the book. Your story has a plot, setting, a theme, a message – all of which are stated in the book, through story and the things you explore.

Subtext is used to paint depth of meaning into the pages of your story. It is felt by the reader more strongly than if you stated the meaning. It is the ultimate tool of showing vs. telling.

Rather than me giving definitions of subtext – lets do a short exercise.

Settle on a character. Could you from the book you are currently working on, one you're recently read. Or one you make up for the exercise. Got one? Good.

So, your character says, “I don’t understand why you’re arguing with me.”

Imagine a scene – a snapshot in your mind where one character is saying this to another character. Very quickly – what are you seeing in your snapshot? Write it down.

Now, think about the same line of dialogue, but add a subtext of meaning – the character still says "I don't understand why you're arguing with me." but what the character is feeling underneath the statement - what the character truly means to say, but cannot is: “I want you to love me.”

Write the scene with this subtext.

What changes in your scene when you add the subtext of “I want you to love me”?

Something that would change for me would be the way the character is standing, perhaps her posture, or what she does with her arms and hands. The expression on her face changes, the tone of her voice – the way she says the words, not in the clipped tones of someone in charge, but in pleading bleats that trail off, and lack conviction.

Okay, those are two components of showing. But, of course there are more. This is complex. Share your thoughts. What confusing things have you heard about showing and telling? How have you worked with the device in your own writing? Can you share a great example of telling? Share!