On Writing: Telling and Showing

November 6, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Like many new writers, I have a hard time with “show, don’t tell,” but today I came across a graphic example of the difference between the two.

I was reading an article in a sports magazine about a baseball player who was an all around good guy. He was honest, had integrity, was kind, was raised right by his parents. This “telling” of his virtues continued for page after page without once “showing” us an example of his honesty, integrity, etc.

At the very end of the article, though, the writer finally showed us who the athlete really is. After receiving a $400,000 signing bonus, this very fine, honest, upright athlete went to Wal-Mart and bought the furnishings for his apartment. He kept the receipts (taped them to the merchandise so he wouldn’t lose them) and returned the used products in ninety days.

If the article had been about screwing Wal-Mart (or rather the Wal-Mart customers who would have bought the used merchandise thinking it was new) then this example would have fit. If the article had been about the athlete’s frugal ways, then the example would also have fit. But in a story about a person of integrity? No.

One of the lessons I gleaned from this is that if I am going to tell, don’t show. What I might think is a good example, readers might not, and I run the risk of alienating them.

The other lesson I learned is that I shouldn’t try to foist my feelings for a character’s action on readers by telling about the action. I need to simply show the action and let the readers decide how it makes them feel about the character.

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Describing a Scene in an Interesting Way

November 5, 2007 — Pat Bertram

One of the search engine terms somebody used to find my blog was “Describe a Scene in an Interesting Way,” and I thought it would be a great subject for today’s post.

The trap even the most successful writers fall into when describing a scene is to simply list the objects in a room or landscape, and a few adjectives thrown about for color or texture do not make the description any more interesting. Writers often cheat by pretending to see the scene through the character’s eyes, but it still comes down to being nothing more than a list.

We are not children padding our flimsy essays with adjectives and adverbs. We are adults who know that the number of words seattlein a story mean nothing; it’s only what the words mean that counts. And in description, those words must count twice: to give us a feel for the setting, and to give us a feel for the character.

Description by its very nature is static; we need to find ways to make it flow with the story. One way is to have the character interact with the setting: to sit in a mahogany armchair with a faded green cushion; to hear the deep notes of the grandfather clock in the corner; to feel the texture of the oriental carpet underfoot, to smell the old leather bindings of the books. Without ever stepping away from the character, we know what the room looks like, including the parts that were not described.

Another way to describe a scene is to pick one significant item and describe it. Perhaps the dusty lace curtains, or the stains on the ceiling where the roof leaked. Even better would be to show what the curtains or stains mean to the character.

We can also describe a scene by showing contrasts. Yellow is brighter when it is next to purple than when it is next to green. Green is brighter next to red than it is to blue. The color combination with the strongest visual impact is black on yellow. I’m not suggesting that we use color in such a way; these are merely examples of how one thing looks different when it is next to something else. Those dusty lace curtains may be in an otherwise spotless room. Or they might be scrupulously clean in a dusty room. Either way, it says more about the character than just describing the curtains or the room.

Describing scenes by sound rather than sight can give the scene movement. We do not perceive sound as being static. A train whistle in the distance is not always the same pitch, is not always the same volume. Even taste seems more dynamic than sight; for example, the taste of the smoky air on a winter day. And smell is the most evocative of all the senses; perhaps the smell of lilacs makes one think of grandmother’s house.

However we decide to describe our scenes, we need to keep our characters in mind. They and their problems are the story. The scenes need to reflect this, to be a part of it.

When we get to the point where we can suggest our character’s inner conflicts by the way we describe the scene, we will be on our way to mastering our craft.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

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He Said/She Said: Speaker Attributes

November 4, 2007 — Pat Bertram

For my study of bestselling authors, I have switched from a romance novelist to a thriller writer. Thrillers are more my style, so I expected to enjoy myself, but it’s not happening. In his own way, the author of the thriller is as terrible a writer as the author of the romances, which doesn’t say much for the taste of the people who buy these books.

Perhaps I’m too fussy now that I have a basic knowledge of the craft, but some elements cry out for commentary, such as his speaker attributes.

His characters never just said something. They agreed, cautioned, reminded, mimicked, answered, contributed, guessed, explained, responded, admonished, confessed, encouraged, clarified, blurted, pointed, winced, replied, corrected, acknowledged, returned, laughed, challenged, chided, objected, contested, quipped, offered, moaned, complained, repeated, stammered, pleaded, inquired, mumbled, interrupted, confirmed, addressed, countered, advised, completed, allowed, supplied, ordered, asked, continued, chided, answered, whispered, teased, requested, hollered, echoed, declared, informed, spoke, bellowed, spit out, thundered, hissed. All within a few pages. Whew!

The best speaker attribute, as we all know, is the word “said.” Like “the,” our brains barely register it, so it doesn’t yank us out of the story world. But the few times this thriller writer used “said,” he ruined it with an adverb. A professional, he should know that the only time to use an adverb with “said” is when the character’s words are at odds with his mood, such as: “I had a great time,” he said sadly.

In many cases, the writer would have been better leaving off the speaker attributes entirely, particularly when the dialogue was between two characters. It’s not difficult for a reader to figure out which character is talking when there are only two of them. And, to remind us who is talking, all the writer would have had to do was in insert an occasional beat.

Beats, those small actions that accompany a character’s dialogue, help set the stage, tell us about the character’s personality, and vary the rhythmn of the dialogue. Overdone, the beats are as distracting as any other speaker attribute, so the secret is to pay attention to the flow. Do you want short snappy dialogue? Don’t use beats. Do you want to slow things down a bit, keep the dialogue from seeming too disembodied? Use a few beats.

If the thriller writer had followed these simple rules, his work would have been much more enjoyable for me. But I guess I shouldn’t complain. He did give me a topic for today’s post.

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Whose Story is This?

November 2, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Every story is someone’s story. Whether we are writing about war, child abuse, romance, murder, or any other topic, we must make readers care about a character. Readers want someone to root for, to bond with, to love. Once they have found that, they will be eager to read further.

One of the hardest things for us new writers is to decide whose story we are writing. We create a lot of characters while writing our novels, and we fall in love with all of them, even the villains. We feel disloyal to our creations if we give one character more consideration than others, and we believe the story needs all those points of view. Perhaps it does. But the reader doesn’t know that. All the reader knows is what is on the page, not what is in our minds, and all those equally significant characters become confusing. Readers need to know whose story it is. Or whose story it mostly is.

One way for us to decide this is to figure out which character has the most at stake, which one will change the most. If we are lucky, the two will be the same, and we will know whose story it is. If not, we have to make the character who will change the most into the main story character while upping that character’s stakes.

A character with nothing to lose is not one people will care about. If someone in the story parachutes out of a plane for fun, readers might find it entertaining, but they won’t be concerned. But if someone wearing a faulty parachute jumps out of a plane into flames to save a child lost in the middle of a forest fire, everyone except the most curmudgeonly will care.

The same is true of character growth. A character who remains static, who learns nothing from experience, is not someone readers can love. A story is always about change, and since a story is also about a character, that character must grow. A timid character must learn to stand up for himself. An arrogant character must learn a touch of humility. The essence of the character does not need to change. A timid reporter who turns into superman is the stuff of comic books, not a realistic novel. But a character who grows, who learns, who comes back from his or her experiences with something to share, that is a character readers care about.

And that’s whose story it is.  

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The Scan Test: Paragraph Size, Italics, and Dialogue

November 1, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Appearances count. This might sound like grade school all over again, but I’m not talking about the neatness of your work. I know your work looks great; you are or you want to be a professional, and you act like it. What I am talking about is the overall appearance of the printed work; what the book, blog, or article looks like as a whole.

You have a great beginning, so you sit back smugly thinking that all a reader has to do is pick up your work and they will be hooked. Not so fast. Even before people read that first line, they quickly leaf through the book or scan the article. If they don’t like what they see, that fabulous first paragraph will never be read.

So, what is it they are looking for?

First, potential readers look at paragraph size. If the paragraphs are too long, they feel that the work will be ponderous; if the paragraphs are too short, they think it will be lightweight. And if all paragraphs are more or less the same size, they get an immediate impression of stagnation. An experienced writer knows how to vary the lengths of the paragraphs according to the flow of the story. Since everything in a story is connected to everything else, the size of your paragraphs should be connected to the rhythm of the story: short paragraphs for action scenes, longer ones for a respite. A variety of paragraph sizes from one to ten lines tell readers you will keep their attention.

Second, potential readers look for italics. An occasional italicized word is good for emphasis. An occasional italicized sentence is a way of indicating the character’s thoughts. But when there are long italicized paragraphs, or even entire italicized chapters, readers lose interest. Italics tell them that those passages are not part of the story, and can be skipped. So if you know most readers won’t read those passages, may even use the sight of them as an excuse not to read the entire work, figure out another way to present the material. I know that some experienced writers fall into the trap of italicizing flashbacks, but they (or their editors) should know better.

Third, potential readers look at dialogue. Long dialogue looks like preaching, and few readers are interested in your sermons. And long sections of one or two word dialogue looks inane. And generally is inane:

“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you.”
“Fine, how about you?”
“Can’t complain.”

Even worse is using dialect. Too many apostrophes say that you do not know how to write dialogue. It’s better to use colloquialisms like “That dang fiddle-foot don’t rightly know what he’s talking about.” It gets the point across, and is easier to read.

Now that you’ve passed the scan test, you are ready to hook your reader.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

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Hooking a Reader

October 31, 2007 — Pat Bertram

The age of writing long descriptive passages (or even short ones) at the beginning of a novel is long past. Today people want to be drawn immediately into the story without wading through unnecessary verbiage. An editor might look at the first five pages before tossing aside your manuscript, but potential customers will give you a mere twenty seconds to draw them in. Once you have caught their attention, they might read a little further, and perhaps they will even buy the book. They certainly will not wade through the first five, ten, fifty pages until they get to “the good part.”

That “good part” must be right up front, especially if you’re a first-time writer. That’s all you have going for you — the ability to get off to a fast start and capture the reader’s attention. Your name certainly won’t do it; no one knows who you are yet. Your credentials might help, but only to establish your credibility after a potential reader has been hooked. And they will never be hooked by your ability to turn a clever phrase.

So what will hook the reader?  A character. Always a character. No one reads a book for a description of the weather, a place, or an issue. They don’t even want a description of the character. They want to meet him, to see life through his eyes, to bond with him. They want to know what he wants, what his driving force is. And they want to know who or what he’s in conflict with.

Without conflict, there is no story, but without a character for the reader to care about, there is no story either. Character and conflict are inextricably combined, and together they create the tension necessary to sustain a story. I know you think it’s okay to let the tension rise slowly, which it is, but the tension level at the beginning must be high enough to let the reader know something is going on.

A practiced writer knows how to adjust the tension by temporarily letting up on the main conflict and interjecting intermediate conflicts, or even adding inner conflicts to shadow the outer ones, but all conflicts must be somebody’s conflict. For example, you might be concerned about war, but seeing a specific soldier dealing with his experiences makes you care, maybe even makes you cry. And you will want to know what becomes of him.

That’s what hooks a reader.

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Cultivate Subtlety: Throw Out Your First Chapter

October 30, 2007 — Pat Bertram

What is the first thing you should do when you finish your novel? Celebrate, of course. Though there are millions of us worldwide who have written a novel, there are billions who haven’t. When we try to break into print, however, we enter a different dimension where everyone has written a novel, and we begin to feel as if we’re facing impossible odds in the publishing lottery. And it is a lottery, no matter what the insiders want us to believe. The right book on the right desk at the right time is the name of the game unless you are an extremely talented writer. But if you are that talented, you would be reading your contract, not this blog.

So, for us normal folk, what is the second thing to do when when the novel is finished? Start the editing process. And the first thing to do is throw out the initial chapter. Beginning writers tend to tell too much too early, thinking that’s the only way a  reader is going to know what’s going on, but by not telling, we add a little mystique and perhaps some subtlety to our writing. Being subtle is the sign of a great writer. Not everything needs to be described; not everything needs to be explained. If you let your readers create part of the story, they become part of the story, and they will remember it. (And you, too, the next time they are looking for a book to buy.)

I can feel you cringing, thinking that you need that first chapter, that it contains information necessary to the story. Don’t worry. If that vital bit of information is not mentioned elsewhere, simply add it to a later chapter. But if you are like me, you probably already have a second mention of that information in the body of your work, in which case it won’t be missed when you get rid of that first chapter. Don’t get delete happy though; be sure to save the chapter. You will need it for future reference as you revise the book.

One other reason to throw out the beginning: when you wrote it you were a neophyte. By the time you finished the entire first draft, you were a writer. You learned how to put words together to create an image, you learned how to make characters come alive. That experience needs to be exhibited at the start.

If you don’t like the idea of throwing out your first chapter, do what Margatet Mitchell did. She wrote Gone With the Wind from back to front.

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Conflict: Where a Story Begins

October 29, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes it seems as if most books and movies today are glorified comic books, epic battles between the good and the impossibly evil. Conflicts in which there are no shades of gray must be satisfying for many people, but I like a little more subtlety in my conflicts, a little more reality.

In a world that seems to be run by the major corporations, the stories where a lone hero takes on a megalithic corporation, brings down the owner of the company, and saves the world just are not plausible. Though I’m sure the presidents of the major corporations think they are indispensable, they are not. If they are eliminated, there will always be others to take their place, and the corporations will go on doing whatever it is that they do.

Because I know this and cannot escape it even in a world of my own creation, the conflicts in my books tend to be less clearly defined. Of course I have heroes and villains, but the villains are not always dastardly ones, though my other characters may perceive them as such. The villains are the heroes of their own story, and though a corporation is often the villains’ vehicle, my heroes don’t bring it down.

I like my heroes to find a romantic partner, a co-protagonist. It seems to dissipate the energy of the story if the two are always in conflict. I prefer it when they bond together in their struggle against fate (or an employee of a corporation as the personification of fate). To me, the biggest villain around is fate. What is more unfair, more murderous, more disastrous than fate?

My heroes never bring on their fate. Perhaps my books would be more dramatic if they did, but I cannot sympathize with characters who are the cause of their own problems. And why do they have to when life itself is always ready to cause problems for them?

When fate comes knocking on the door, everything changes. And that’s when a real story, not a comic book, begins.

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Be Your Own Editor

October 28, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 Today I took a break from my study of a bestselling writer, (I can handle only so much romance before it makes me cynical). Instead, I picked up a thriller. To say I found it less than thrilling is an understatement. (See what I mean about becoming cynical?) I hope in my search to become a publishable writer I do not lose my love of reading, but I can feel it happening. I get caught up in the words and lose the story.

And the authors are not helping.

In this particular thriller, a character was supposed to be a precise individual who did not use contractions. The writer did fine for most of the first chapter, then forgot what his character’s persona was and started contracting all over the place. So, is the character precise? How do I know if the author does not?

According to Emerson, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Some authors must think any consistency is an indication of a small mind, or they do not know the meaning of the word. The only consistency I see is poor writing.

Okay, so I will give the author the benefit of the doubt. I know that sitting at a keyboard for any length of time can be rough, and that one can get so involved in one’s own story that one loses track of the words one is typing, but that’s why there are editors.

Are there editors, though? I don’t see much indication of it. Too many elemental mistakes are being made by authors who should know better.

The moral of today’s tale? We must learn how to be our own editors if we hope to reach the brass publishing ring. This blog is no place for a tutorial on editing, but you know how to do it anyway. Make sure you use proper grammar (except for when you purposely do not want to use it). Take out all unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, remembering that most of them are unnecessary. Remove anything, no matter how much you love it, that does not move the story along.

And be consistent.

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Write Intelligently Until You Become a Bestselling Author

October 27, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been reading the novels of a bestselling author, trying to figure out the secret of her success, and for the life of me, I don’t see it. Perhaps it’s hidden beneath her appalling writing style, but most times her poor writing dims any possibility of my enlightenment.

Even a neophyte writer knows that any action a character undertakes must be motivated. Although in life we often act on a whim or a hunch, when a character in a novel does it, it comes across as too slick, too much author convenience, as if the writer couldn’t be bothered to take the time to come up with a plausible motive for the action.

For example, in one book, the writer has someone searching the character’s house for a set of papers, which weren’t there because the character had removed them on a hunch. You and I could never get away with that! We’d have to come up with a motive, and it’s not that difficult. The character could have taken the papers to a diner to peruse them during lunch. Or maybe taken them to a safe deposit box. Or any reason other than a hunch.

Even worse, when the character found out her house had been searched, she was stunned. Then why the hunch to remove the papers? Maybe she was expecting rats to eat them.

In a roundabout way, I suppose I did learn something: write intelligently.

At least until one becomes a bestselling author.

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