Everything I need to know about writing I learned through extensive study and occasional quotes
I've been thinking a lot about writing, lately, especially about the tricks and traps of it, the, as m_macgregor put it, the "art and science" of it. I've been thinking especially about the words of advice given to me throughout the years by teachers and professional writers, and how that advice has shaped my process, my voice, and my style today. I've been thinking about these things primarily due to the fact that I'm, like, totally blocked writing-wise, and it's frustrating the hell out of me, because I know exactly where I want to go with "But Deadly", and I know that I can, actually, force myself to write and still have it come out well, as was the case with almost the entirety of "Fools for Lesser Things". I've been thinking about writing because, dammit, thinking about writing is just about the best damned procrastination from actual writing that there is.
So to push myself beyond the thinking about writing stage back to the actual writing stage, I'm writing down my thoughts about writing. And unlike my previous post on the subject, this post -- and the ones to follow, as there's a crapload of things I'd love to share about what I've learned about my lifelong favorite craft -- is about how to be a better writer.*
So, let's get started with something that we've all heard and learned to loathe hearing, shall we?
Show it, don't tell it
This is the first and most frequent piece of writing advice that just about any writer will ever encounter. It is a very, very easy piece of advice to give. It is, in my opinion, a much harder piece of advice to understand. I, myself, did not feel I properly understood it until I had been studying writing specifically for many years. It's a piece of advice that encompasses many other excellent pieces of advice that I've heard and taken to heart over the years, things that I think helped me to understand just what "show, don't tell", really means.
The first of these secondary pieces of advice is to give your readers credit for their intelligence. I'll explain this with an example.
When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher attempted to teach us how to "show, not tell" with our writing. Her example, the one that has stuck with me through all of these years, involved a character being embarrassed. How do you say that a character is embarrassed without simply stating "She was embarrassed"? Well, how about if the character blushes? This is a typical indication of embarrassment. So, of course, you might say "she blushed." This is simple, straight forward, and impossible to misunderstand. It also fails to give your reader proper credit.
The second is to describe the blush. You can do this from an outside perspective (for example: "the tips of her ears turned pink") or an inside perspective ("she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks"). In both cases, your reader will know what is happening without you stating it explicitly. Your reader, in all likelihood, has seen someone blush. He or she has blushed. It's an experience all of us have gone through. By describing around the action, you are not only appealing to the reader's intelligence by saying you know that they know what you're talking about, you are also appealing to the reader's empathy -- they not only know what you're talking about, they also know what your character is feeling.
A third way is to further explore the embarrassment. What else might a character do if they're feeling embarrassed? Would there be toe-scuffing? Looking down or away? Perhaps they cover their face, force themselves to smile, or squint their eyes shut. What other senses can be employed in noticing embarrassment? Does embarrassment have a smell1? Are there any sounds that go along with an embarrassed blush? Feelings -- and I'm talking primarily physical here -- that surround a blush? Is there a taste to it?
In the case of blushing, the answers to a lot of these questions may be "no". But with emotions especially, there's always a different way to describe it without simply coming out and saying that the character felt that particular emotion. What happens to your body, physically, when you get angry? Perhaps there's a tightening of the muscles in your chest. An upset in your stomach. A headache or a physical tick. How does your body language change when you're happy? Are your gestures larger? Is your voice louder? Well, these are things your reader has experienced, too. Use them; they'll understand what you mean.
This, of course, leads us into another common and excellent piece of writing advice: avoidance of the passive voice. When your voice is passive (as opposed to active, as in action, as in movement and physicality), you're no longer showing your reader what you want them to know. The simplest way to understand passive voice is to see if you're using the word "was" (or "had"). "He was jumping" is passive. "He jumped" is active. There are all sorts of grammatical terms for tenses that can help indicate a passive voice, but since many educational systems are overlooking things like the names of cases and tenses in teaching, I won't go into them now2. Suffice to say that you want to be using the most present tense possible within your narrative. No, that doesn't mean write everything in present tense3. It means that if you are writing in present tense, you want to avoid going into the past ("jumps" versus "jumped"). If you're writing in past tense, you want to avoid going a step further back ("jumped" versus "had jumped" or "was jumping"). The more you can keep your story "in the moment" of the actual scene, the better. Stepping back in your tense and going into passive voice removes your reader from the thrust of your story, and can bring down the pace and tension of your work.
It's next to impossible to avoid passive voice entirely, especially in the case of giving exposition. It's important to realize this, as otherwise you'll likely spend all your time wanting to rip your hair out, or start to lose your reader because you haven't given them enough information.4
The final bit of advice that really cemented the idea of "showing, not telling" for me as a writer is one of the ones that I repeat to myself the most often as I write: avoid cliches.
I'm going to take you back again to my public schooling days, this time my high school German class5. Our teacher was attempting to give us a little bit of German culture by introducing us to some German cliches. To do this, however, she had to try to explain to us what a "cliche" was. To do this, she attempted to solicit typical American cliches, getting us started by using the example "that and a nickel will get you coffee".
Unfortunately for Frau Fandey, this was a cliche that none of us had ever heard, and she eventually had to give up on the lesson entirely.
I reencountered the idea of cliches several times after that class, but didn't feel I really understood what the Frau was getting at until my sophomore year of college, when I enrolled in a One Act Play workshop. The second day of class, our professor sat us down and said "the last thing you want in your writing is a cliche." And when we blinked blandly at him, he explained that a cliche is a marker, a phrase which we have received, through hearing or reading, so many times in our lives that we no longer bother to think about the meaning of it. "If you hear that something is 'quiet as a mouse'," he asked, "what does that tell you?" And when we continued to blink blandly at him, he nodded. "What if I told you it was 'quiet as a whale'?"
Cliches don't just apply to analogies, either. I was informed in my first fiction writing class that the phrase "he shrugged", which I used repeatedly in a story6, was, as I was using it, a cliche.
How can two words, describing a single action, possibly be a cliche? How about "he sighed", which was also pointed out in that particular story? Simple: when my readers saw it, they didn't picture the character shrugging. They didn't think about what the shrug might mean for the character's emotional state or thoughts on the matter at hand. It was a place marker, a way to indicate in two short words which character was the focus of that particular sentence. It was two words bereft of meaning.
It was telling. Not showing.
These days, I, as a writer, fall down as much as the next person on the "show, don't tell", the "avoid passive voice", and the "avoid cliches" business. I also fall down on the adverb rule, which I've gone into on this journal before. Adverbs are, by the way, another instance of telling, rather than showing. Saying, to use an example from my big bang, that Dean stared at Sam contemplatively in the car after leaving Bobby's to go find Jo does not give the reader credit. Saying that Harry Potter reacted "angrily" to Dumbledore does not help us feel the power of Harry's adolescent wrath (and also fails to give the reader credit). In the first case, I chose to leave out the adverb, instead having Dean run his fingers over his chin as he stared. A simple action7 to indicate thoughtfulness, which, when added to a description of Sam's increasing grip on the steering wheel and the physical (and analogous) sensation that Dean's stare was stabbing him in the cheek, served to tell the reader exactly how Dean was staring at Sam without ever having to use the dreaded "ly". As for Harry Potter's ire at Dumbledore, it was Stephen King who pointed out in his review that J.K. Rowling's work might be only half as long if she removed all of her adverbs. The trick I've found, as a writer, is to allow those errors as I go, to let myself fall into placeholder phrases, passive voice, and cliches, so that I can finish the scene and find out exactly where it is I want things to go. It's on the next (and sometimes only) readthrough that I start looking for those things, diving in deep into the sentence structure and word choice in order to ferret out the telling and replace it with a full, proper picture. That is what drafts and editing are for. It's what editors and beta-readers are for. To find the traps you let yourself fall into in order to get the story out, and clear them out of the way to make the story the best it can be by the time your reader gets to it.
Endnotes
* It's just, you know, about how to be a better writer by following the oft-repeated and sometimes seriously frustrating advice of other, better writers. Which basically means I'll give you a quote or a bit of advice and explain to you what I've taken from it, how I understand it, and how it affects my work as a writer. Because being a writer? Is totally actually all about me. Or you. It's really a damned selfish thing to be.
1 This might get a little icky.
2 Besides which, I've misplaced my notes from when I learned them, back in '05 while learning to teach English as a second language.
3 Though it may be employed in certain instances if you're looking to increase the tension of your piece.
4 Exposition is, as a rule, the most awkward, painful, and aggravating part of writing and reading a story. But that's a subject for another time.
5 Much of what I learned about the English language in my public schooling days I actually learned in German -- so all you grammarians watch out for me ever talking about "a-KOO-sah-tiv" cases.
6 It was a story about a man meeting his fiance's father for the first time only to discover that his fiance's father was, in fact, a sock puppet she wore on her left hand. This is a concept I still love, if nothing else for the fact that she became so enraged by his insistance that her father was a sock puppet that she removed the sock puppet from her hand in order to rip off the ring and throw it at him -- then replaced the puppet to have it glare balefully at the man as she stalked out of his apartment.
7 Albeit a cliche action in a movie villain kind of way.
So to push myself beyond the thinking about writing stage back to the actual writing stage, I'm writing down my thoughts about writing. And unlike my previous post on the subject, this post -- and the ones to follow, as there's a crapload of things I'd love to share about what I've learned about my lifelong favorite craft -- is about how to be a better writer.*
So, let's get started with something that we've all heard and learned to loathe hearing, shall we?
Show it, don't tell it
This is the first and most frequent piece of writing advice that just about any writer will ever encounter. It is a very, very easy piece of advice to give. It is, in my opinion, a much harder piece of advice to understand. I, myself, did not feel I properly understood it until I had been studying writing specifically for many years. It's a piece of advice that encompasses many other excellent pieces of advice that I've heard and taken to heart over the years, things that I think helped me to understand just what "show, don't tell", really means.
The first of these secondary pieces of advice is to give your readers credit for their intelligence. I'll explain this with an example.
When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher attempted to teach us how to "show, not tell" with our writing. Her example, the one that has stuck with me through all of these years, involved a character being embarrassed. How do you say that a character is embarrassed without simply stating "She was embarrassed"? Well, how about if the character blushes? This is a typical indication of embarrassment. So, of course, you might say "she blushed." This is simple, straight forward, and impossible to misunderstand. It also fails to give your reader proper credit.
The second is to describe the blush. You can do this from an outside perspective (for example: "the tips of her ears turned pink") or an inside perspective ("she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks"). In both cases, your reader will know what is happening without you stating it explicitly. Your reader, in all likelihood, has seen someone blush. He or she has blushed. It's an experience all of us have gone through. By describing around the action, you are not only appealing to the reader's intelligence by saying you know that they know what you're talking about, you are also appealing to the reader's empathy -- they not only know what you're talking about, they also know what your character is feeling.
A third way is to further explore the embarrassment. What else might a character do if they're feeling embarrassed? Would there be toe-scuffing? Looking down or away? Perhaps they cover their face, force themselves to smile, or squint their eyes shut. What other senses can be employed in noticing embarrassment? Does embarrassment have a smell1? Are there any sounds that go along with an embarrassed blush? Feelings -- and I'm talking primarily physical here -- that surround a blush? Is there a taste to it?
In the case of blushing, the answers to a lot of these questions may be "no". But with emotions especially, there's always a different way to describe it without simply coming out and saying that the character felt that particular emotion. What happens to your body, physically, when you get angry? Perhaps there's a tightening of the muscles in your chest. An upset in your stomach. A headache or a physical tick. How does your body language change when you're happy? Are your gestures larger? Is your voice louder? Well, these are things your reader has experienced, too. Use them; they'll understand what you mean.
This, of course, leads us into another common and excellent piece of writing advice: avoidance of the passive voice. When your voice is passive (as opposed to active, as in action, as in movement and physicality), you're no longer showing your reader what you want them to know. The simplest way to understand passive voice is to see if you're using the word "was" (or "had"). "He was jumping" is passive. "He jumped" is active. There are all sorts of grammatical terms for tenses that can help indicate a passive voice, but since many educational systems are overlooking things like the names of cases and tenses in teaching, I won't go into them now2. Suffice to say that you want to be using the most present tense possible within your narrative. No, that doesn't mean write everything in present tense3. It means that if you are writing in present tense, you want to avoid going into the past ("jumps" versus "jumped"). If you're writing in past tense, you want to avoid going a step further back ("jumped" versus "had jumped" or "was jumping"). The more you can keep your story "in the moment" of the actual scene, the better. Stepping back in your tense and going into passive voice removes your reader from the thrust of your story, and can bring down the pace and tension of your work.
It's next to impossible to avoid passive voice entirely, especially in the case of giving exposition. It's important to realize this, as otherwise you'll likely spend all your time wanting to rip your hair out, or start to lose your reader because you haven't given them enough information.4
The final bit of advice that really cemented the idea of "showing, not telling" for me as a writer is one of the ones that I repeat to myself the most often as I write: avoid cliches.
I'm going to take you back again to my public schooling days, this time my high school German class5. Our teacher was attempting to give us a little bit of German culture by introducing us to some German cliches. To do this, however, she had to try to explain to us what a "cliche" was. To do this, she attempted to solicit typical American cliches, getting us started by using the example "that and a nickel will get you coffee".
Unfortunately for Frau Fandey, this was a cliche that none of us had ever heard, and she eventually had to give up on the lesson entirely.
I reencountered the idea of cliches several times after that class, but didn't feel I really understood what the Frau was getting at until my sophomore year of college, when I enrolled in a One Act Play workshop. The second day of class, our professor sat us down and said "the last thing you want in your writing is a cliche." And when we blinked blandly at him, he explained that a cliche is a marker, a phrase which we have received, through hearing or reading, so many times in our lives that we no longer bother to think about the meaning of it. "If you hear that something is 'quiet as a mouse'," he asked, "what does that tell you?" And when we continued to blink blandly at him, he nodded. "What if I told you it was 'quiet as a whale'?"
Cliches don't just apply to analogies, either. I was informed in my first fiction writing class that the phrase "he shrugged", which I used repeatedly in a story6, was, as I was using it, a cliche.
How can two words, describing a single action, possibly be a cliche? How about "he sighed", which was also pointed out in that particular story? Simple: when my readers saw it, they didn't picture the character shrugging. They didn't think about what the shrug might mean for the character's emotional state or thoughts on the matter at hand. It was a place marker, a way to indicate in two short words which character was the focus of that particular sentence. It was two words bereft of meaning.
It was telling. Not showing.
These days, I, as a writer, fall down as much as the next person on the "show, don't tell", the "avoid passive voice", and the "avoid cliches" business. I also fall down on the adverb rule, which I've gone into on this journal before. Adverbs are, by the way, another instance of telling, rather than showing. Saying, to use an example from my big bang, that Dean stared at Sam contemplatively in the car after leaving Bobby's to go find Jo does not give the reader credit. Saying that Harry Potter reacted "angrily" to Dumbledore does not help us feel the power of Harry's adolescent wrath (and also fails to give the reader credit). In the first case, I chose to leave out the adverb, instead having Dean run his fingers over his chin as he stared. A simple action7 to indicate thoughtfulness, which, when added to a description of Sam's increasing grip on the steering wheel and the physical (and analogous) sensation that Dean's stare was stabbing him in the cheek, served to tell the reader exactly how Dean was staring at Sam without ever having to use the dreaded "ly". As for Harry Potter's ire at Dumbledore, it was Stephen King who pointed out in his review that J.K. Rowling's work might be only half as long if she removed all of her adverbs. The trick I've found, as a writer, is to allow those errors as I go, to let myself fall into placeholder phrases, passive voice, and cliches, so that I can finish the scene and find out exactly where it is I want things to go. It's on the next (and sometimes only) readthrough that I start looking for those things, diving in deep into the sentence structure and word choice in order to ferret out the telling and replace it with a full, proper picture. That is what drafts and editing are for. It's what editors and beta-readers are for. To find the traps you let yourself fall into in order to get the story out, and clear them out of the way to make the story the best it can be by the time your reader gets to it.
Endnotes
* It's just, you know, about how to be a better writer by following the oft-repeated and sometimes seriously frustrating advice of other, better writers. Which basically means I'll give you a quote or a bit of advice and explain to you what I've taken from it, how I understand it, and how it affects my work as a writer. Because being a writer? Is totally actually all about me. Or you. It's really a damned selfish thing to be.
1 This might get a little icky.
2 Besides which, I've misplaced my notes from when I learned them, back in '05 while learning to teach English as a second language.
3 Though it may be employed in certain instances if you're looking to increase the tension of your piece.
4 Exposition is, as a rule, the most awkward, painful, and aggravating part of writing and reading a story. But that's a subject for another time.
5 Much of what I learned about the English language in my public schooling days I actually learned in German -- so all you grammarians watch out for me ever talking about "a-KOO-sah-tiv" cases.
6 It was a story about a man meeting his fiance's father for the first time only to discover that his fiance's father was, in fact, a sock puppet she wore on her left hand. This is a concept I still love, if nothing else for the fact that she became so enraged by his insistance that her father was a sock puppet that she removed the sock puppet from her hand in order to rip off the ring and throw it at him -- then replaced the puppet to have it glare balefully at the man as she stalked out of his apartment.
7 Albeit a cliche action in a movie villain kind of way.