jpskewedthrone | Writing: Show VS Tell and Confidence

Before the writing talk, here's a link to a review at SFFWorld of The Cracked Throne by Rob Bedford. He also did a review of The Skewed Throne, and mentioned me in his review of 2008 as his "Favorite Undiscovered/Overlooked Gem of 2008." He's also recently finished reading The Vacant Throne, so I hope to see a review of that up shortly as well.

It's been a week since the official release of The Vacant Throne in paperback. At this point, I don't have any report on numbers or anything, but more sales couldn't hurt. So if you haven't checked out the series, hopefully those reviews will help you make a decision to pick them up. If you have read the series, and enjoyed it, thanks! And remember you can always buy an additional copy for a friend. *grin*

In case you want to post it on your own blog or website, copy and paste this:

OK, enough with the self-pimpage. On to the writing discussion.

I've been critiquing a few things on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (OWW for short) and while writing up one critique had the following revelation: the "show vs. tell" problem for beginning writers is all about confidence. Or rather, the lack of confidence.

One of the main issues that any writer deals with is the show vs. tell problem. You want to show as much as you possibly can with your writing, rather than just tell the reader what's going on. If you're showing, rather than telling, then the reader is experiencing the story along with the characters, rather than just reading about the story. There's a huge difference in how the reader is reacting to what they're reading in either case. If you're telling too much, it starts to feel like you're reading a textbook, not experiencing the lives of the characters. So showing is much more effective. This is not to say that you should show everything in your writing; there will always be some telling as well. But you want to have more showing than telling overall.

But this isn't really a post about the two, it's more about why I think beginning writers suffer from telling too much, rather than showing. And I think it's all about confidence. Here's why.

When I first started writing, I was excited and nervous, but mostly excited. So I sat down and started writing and I was happy and involved in the story and it was going to be a bestseller guaranteed, as big as Terry Brooks, and wow! where did that come from, it's so cool! Etc., etc., etc. As I wrote, I was unconsciously learning about how to write, and after a while I was consciously learning how to write by paying attention more closely to what I was reading. In any case, by the time I finished the first draft of that first book (called Sorrow and as yet unpublished) I went back to the beginning, still excited, still stoked . . .

And found out it sucked. Not just sucked. It SUCKED. Why did it suck? Because it was almost all tell. At the time, I had no clue about the whole "show vs. tell" thing. I was doing this completely on my own, with no writing group or online writing workshop or anything like that. (Yes, I'm a home-grown author for the most part.) But by the time I finished that book, I'd learned that sentences that showed events, rather than just told about the events, worked better. And I was doing all telling at the beginning.

So I started again. I still didn't know consciously about "show vs. tell." But I knew that THIS was much better than THAT. So I worked on getting more of THIS in the second draft.

And the second draft was much better. But I was still learning along the way (still on my own) and by the end I went back to the beginning . . . and it still sucked. But it didn't SUCK. It had gotten better. And what I'd learned along the way was that the more "show" there was, the better the reading experience. Still no concept of the "show vs. tell" issue though, I could just SEE that it was better and as I'd written that second draft, I'd gotten better at putting in the "show." So much better that the ending was infinitely more readable than the beginning.

And I also noticed something else. That at the beginning of that second draft, I wasn't confident enough with the show parts, so what I'd do was write a sentence that showed what I wanted . . . and then immediately follow it with a sentence that told the exact same thing. This is a stupid example, but I'd write something like: "Given a platter loaded with apples, grapes, and a strange green fruit, Ara reached for the grapes. She liked grapes." (BTW, it's incredibly hard to write a "bad" example now, because I automatically attempt to fix it while typing. I literally had to force myself to type that. With physical effort. *grin*) Anyway, what you can see in that example is that in the first sentence, having Ara reach for the grapes SHOWS us that she prefers grapes. But back then, I wouldn't have been confident enough that the sentence did the job, so I'd follow it up with the telling sentence and literally say she liked grapes. Because I wanted to make certain the reader got the point: she liked grapes. I didn't trust the first sentence to do its job enough to just leave it. I had to add that extra little tell to make certain.

Now, by the end of that second draft, I'd learned to trust the first sentence and I'd leave off the second completely. Which is why the first part of that draft sucked (but didn't SUCK) and that's why I ended up doing a third draft.

I think it's all about confidence. And trust. You have to trust the show sentences to do their job and resist the urge to make certain and put in the tell sentence aftewards. I see alot of this in what I read on OWW, and when I read a friend's work outside of the workshop as well. My usual response is that they need to cut out at least half of the words, because they're using too many of them. What I realized the other day while writing the critique is that what I really mean is that they need to cut out all of the tell and trust in the show. In the "bad" example above, you're cutting 3/20 words. In a real example, the tell is usually more than that. (Remember, I had to FORCE myself to type those 3 words.)

In any case, I did the third revision and I think I solved all of the show/tell issues at that point. I still had much more to learn about the writing process, so there was a 4th and 5th draft, but the third was the first that had any chance of being published. It caught the eye of a few agents and editors and writers who gave me good advice for the next revisions. Eventually that book might be published. I think the only reason it didn't get published is because it lacked a significant "big idea" to entice the publisher to take the risk on a new author.

So, moral of the post: trust your show. Be confident that it can do what it's meant to do without resorting to the tell just to be certain. Now go forth and write!