Help!! Please be patient with the Newbie

Maybe it'll help if you think of a telling scene as a summary of what happens. Look at one of the scenes in which you find yourself telling what happened, and think, "Okay, this is how I would tell a friend how this event took place. But what actually happened?"

I do better explaining by example, so:

I went to the grocery store and found the owner dead in an aisle.

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That's the way you would relay the story to your best friend. But what if you described the event as it happened?

I pushed open the doors, because for some reason the sensor wasn't working. Something horrendous assaulted my nose. "Good grief, John, what's that smell?" I called out to the store's owner. "Did the meat cooler die again?"

No one answered, and the silence unsettled me.

I walked past the bread aisle trying to find the source of the smell. The odor grew stronger, and I had to swallow to keep from losing my lunch. I reached the cookie aisle, and I hesitated. The smell was strongest here.

"Hello? Is anyone here?" I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Opening them, I looked past the endcap of beef jerky down the aisle.

Boxes of vanilla wafers lay scattered all over the floor. The boxes had been ripped open and crumbs and bits of cookies lay everywhere. John rested on his back in the middle of the mess. He looked at me with wide, unblinking eyes.

"Hey, John, you okay?" Even as I said it, I knew by the pool of red beneath him and the neat dark hole in his forehead that he wasn't.

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A lot of infodumps are in the story only because the writer feels the reader needs to know the information. Many times, they can be removed without affecting the story. If you find yourself relaying information to the reader, see if you can remove it. Also, learn to trust your reader. They figure out more than you expect.

And if you have two characters passing information along to each other that they would already know, try your best to remove it. If you can't, consider using the ignorant secondary character.

Simplistic example:

Doctor: I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith, your husband died of a myocardial infarction.
Mrs. Smith: What's that?
Doctor: A heart attack.

But when Doctor A tells Doctor B that the patient died of a myocardial infarction, don't let Doctor B ask what that is unless you know for a fact that Doctor B wouldn't know what that is. It makes your characters look stupid and takes the reader out of the story.

One of my favorites is "Fiction First Aid." I know it helped me a lot in the early stages, and it covers a lot of common problems.

Aside from books though, one thing you can keep in mind when you write is your point of view. If you consider every line of exposition (and this includes description, internalization, setting) and think about how your POV will see it and more importantly, how they feel about it and how they'll judge what they see, you'll start showing more than telling.

For example, a born and raised New Yorker walking down the street will notice things a lot differently than a small-town Midwestern girl on her first trip to a big city. How you choose to describe the city will be colored by who is looking at it. I doubt city folk would notice the trash, the smell, the homeless, but the newbie probably would, and she'd see them in a much scarier light than the native. There's wouldn't be "gum stuck to the pavement" but "a gooey pink breeding ground for all the diseases her mother swore she'd contat as soon as she got off the train."

Same with action. It's easy to get caught up in the events and forget about the emotional aspect. Give your POV time to react and judge what's going on around them. They'll certainly have an opinion about it, even if it's just a line or a few words mixed in here and there to break up the descriptions.

As for info dumps, most of the time they're "the author" sticking her nose in where she isn't needed. Ask yourself if that bit of info is vital to understand what's going on in that scene at that moment. If not, cut it. If so, how might you re-phrase it so it sounds like your POV thinking/talking about it? Also, how might you make that same info do double duty? If you need to get a bit of info across, can you mix it up in dialog, give your POV an internal musing, make it part of the description? You might want the reader to know "that 30 years ago a cruel baron ruled the land" but instead of saying that outright, maybe have the POV think, "Wow, he hadn't see such cruelty since Baron Whatshisname had them under his thumb" or the like.

A solid POV can shift things into shown mode easier than anything I've ever tried.

Hope this helped!

Well - I don't have much to add... except a little hint - if you feel like you're telling, look at the scene as if you are the character - put yourself in his/her shoes and experience it yourself. Use your senses - as many as you can.

Hope this helps

PhoenixSaga said:

My main problem... Info Dumps and Telling and not showing.

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Danthia is spot on.
Infodumps and 'telling' -- and many other problems -- arise from being insufficiently immersed in the character.

Two exercises to get inside the character --


Exercise One --

Pick a spot in a scene. Sit at the keyboard and close your eyes. Go inside the character. What does she feel and smell? (Only those senses.)

Quickly, just spewing it out inaccurately, type what she is feeling and smelling.

How is her body positioned? How do her clothes feel on her? The surface under her? The swish of air? Heat from a window or a fire? Vibration? Her body moving through space? Hunger, thirst, cold, sore muscles?

When you can feel these things, you are inside your character.


Exercise Two --
Stream-of-Consciousness.

Pick a scene. Eyes closed and typing just as the words spill out of you ... what is every single thought in your character's head?

Type the thoughts as they skip through her mind. These are irrelevant thoughts. The stupid, private thoughts. These are the half-thoughts.
(Dip into Ulysses to see this done.)




Last advice --

Try, if you can, to write drafts one, two and three
without worrying about the background and backstory at all.

Put scads of it in place or leave it out altogether. Do whichever feels comfortable.
But don't try to fix it in the first draft.
Set the whole backstory problem to one side for a while.

The job is to write the story that's unrolling in realtime. Use the realtime to say what you have to say. (Don't use her abused childhood to show us she's vulnerable. Use an incident that happens in front of us. Don't tell us the long story of how he got to be ubercaptain of the guard. Show us why he's a good one. )


Later,
when you get to about draft three,
and the plot of the story is worked out,
then fold in words that explain how Joel's grandpapa bought a treasure map and Mary's first husband was abusive and dragons can fly because of the Etvas magic.

Technical stuff, explanatory stuff, descriptive and enriching stuff, stuff that happened long ago and far away
is not the story.
It's not structural. It's periferal.

So just go ahead and write the story as it happens. Trust yourself to spiffy up the infodumps and backstory later.

PhoenixSaga said:

Can you give me any advice or what books would be good that have more information and examples on Showing not Telling ???

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Telling is an attempt to force the reader to feel something. Showing allows the reader to develop their own feelings based upon the character’s actions or reactions. One way to determine if you’re telling rather than showing is to look for what are called emotional qualifiers. Words like angry, devastated, happy, scared, resentful, and hundreds of others. They usually follow the word “was”. Jane was happy. Jim was scared. Bob was devastated. Then ask yourself if you would be better off having Jane do something happy or Jim react in a scared manner or Bob appear to be devastated through his actions.

As an example, let’s take "Jane was happy".

Telling: Jane was happy. She had met Jim and they seemed made for each other. At last, she had found someone whom she could love. No more heartache. No more pain.

Showing: Jane danced around her apartment like a ballerina—she felt lighter than air. Her faced ached from smiling so much—more than she had smiled in months, maybe years. The bruises from her last relationship, both physical and mental, had finally faded. She kept repeating one word over and over, a word that brought a smile and a rush of heat through her body. Jim.

Nowhere do we say that Jane was happy. But the reader knows she is through her actions.

Telling: Bob was scared. The noise from outside his tent had to be a bear, a big bear. There was nothing between him and the hungry beast but a flimsy layer of canvas. And all he had for a weapon was a flashlight.

Showing: Bob awoke from deep sleep to the sound of heavy breathing. It came from just outside the tent, so close he could hear the moisture inside the nostrils of the beast. It had to be a grizzly. His hand shook as he reached for the flashlight. Stupid. It would only attract attention. But the animal must smell him. There was only one way out of the flimsy canvas tent, through the open flap. He sucked in his breath as he shined the light at the opening. Staring into the menacing eyes of the beast, Bob screamed.

Again, nowhere do we say that Bob was scared. But you know he is through his actions.

A sure sign of telling is describing feelings and emotions using the narrator’s voice. If you write, Jane was happy, ask yourself: whose opinion is that? The narrator’s or the character’s? And a good identifier of showing is that an emotion is conveyed through the words or actions of the characters without ever using an emotional qualifier. In other words, don't TELL the reader how a character feels, SHOW the reader through the character's actions or reactions. Never let a character's emotions be limited to the opinion of the narrator. I hope this helps. Good luck.

One lie is that good writers always show and never tell. Telling can be okay too in its place.

All excellent advice here, but I might add that telling sometimes comes out of a rush to get the scene down. Your mind flashes on a situation, you see the character dynamics, the dialogue, and you want to get it down before you forget it. We all do that.

Editing, tightening, showing, requires a slow-down. Every piece of advice above involves getting inside your character, doing a lot of mental reflecting, NOT writing until you have the inside perspective. It's tough to do, but it may be that you're just ready now to tackle it. You've got your story arc down, identified your characters and got them through the journey to the end. Now you can go back and, working more slowly, treat yourself to a the rich words that, as some say, put flesh on the bones.

DeadlyAccurate's example of telling vs showing covers that topic brilliantly.

In my opinion, the single greatest cause of infodumping is thinking the reader needs to know all the background in order to appreciate the story. But that's a fallacy. There are a gazillion details you, the author, need to know in order to give your story richness, depth, and consistency. You don't need to mention them in the story. Think of it as an iceberg. Only a tiny fraction is visible; the rest is hidden underneath, supporting the visible portion.

For the remaining details--the ones you do need--use "infosprinkling"[1]. Give only one detail at a time, and work it into the action of the story.Did you even notice that I described the character's physical appearance in that paragraph? But not his entire appearance. I only mentioned one detail--hair color.

[1] OK, I confess. I just now invented that word. I like it though--I think I'll keep it.

ETA: While I was writing this, some other great answers were posted. I agree with a_sharp that in the first draft you do whatever you need to do to keep the story flowing. It's fine to wait until revision to worry about this stuff.

Danthia said:

One of my favorites is "Fiction First Aid." I know it helped me a lot in the early stages, and it covers a lot of common problems.

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Yes, a very good book indeed (by Raymond Obstfeld). Another to accompany it is Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King.

As to "show, don't tell," I find this is often overinterpreted, and that writers end up dramatizing every little thing. Narrative summary has its place and shouldn't be avoided. Narrative summary is good for wide-angle views of a scene, or for transitions. (Most good writers use narrative summary; and now you find people pointing at brilliant passages in excellent books, and shouting "oh, no, telling!" and "look, infodump!")

Just keep in mind that the place for narrative summary is never in the heart of a major scene, and almost never in explaining the emotions of characters.

Prawn said:

One lie is that good writers always show and never tell. Telling can be okay too in its place.

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Yeah, it's a mistake to believe every single thing in your story needs to be shown to the reader -- because some things just need to be mentioned in passing. Or "told."

That said, most newbies really do need to work on showing as much as possible, because telling tends to be a newbie weakness. Understandable.

And you've gotten some excellent advice and examples in this thread. Study it all.

If it's still not clear to you, then post some examples in SYW, not whole scenes but just snippets, especially if you're not sure whether you're telling or showing, and I'm sure some of us will be happy to point out which you're doing.

Just post the material and title the thread "Am I telling or showing?"

That's the sort of thing we really don't need story context to be able to critique.

I had this problem MAJORLY in one of my first books. I love the book's idea and plot, but I killed it with far too many infodumps, and now I can't even bring myself to go back to it because it's going to take TONS of work to fix.

I really love this advice:

job said:

Try, if you can, to write drafts one, two and three
without worrying about the background and backstory at all.

Put scads of it in place or leave it out altogether. Do whichever feels comfortable.
But don't try to fix it in the first draft.
Set the whole backstory problem to one side for a while.

The job is to write the story that's unrolling in realtime. Use the realtime to say what you have to say. (Don't use her abused childhood to show us she's vulnerable. Use an incident that happens in front of us. Don't tell us the long story of how he got to be ubercaptain of the guard. Show us why he's a good one. )

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Think of revealing information in a story like performing a fan dance. The audience wants to be teased. Telling every bit of back history at once destroys the mystery. Give the readers the chance to figure out what's happening based on the clues you give.

TheIT said:

Think of revealing information in a story like performing a fan dance. The audience wants to be teased. Telling every bit of back history at once destroys the mystery. Give the readers the chance to figure out what's happening based on the clues you give.

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This is so col.

Here's a fun thread from a while back with lots of examples.

I'm similar to you. Because I've been writing my story for about 3 years and I feel that I still don't know how to do the "show, not tell" very well.

I guess you could describe it as if you were silently in the room( or any place) where the stuff of your story is happening. and you were in communication with somebody else who couldn't see it and you had to describe what was happening through a walkie-talkie.
Like a live report.

"Now they're moving to the door. The guy X is opening it. He doesn't seem to be liking the smell coming out from behind the door, from what I see from his face. The whole group seems to have a distaste for it. I smell the sea, the ocean, salt water...and a horrible stench of rotten eggs. They're going in, even so. They closed the door."

Then you jump to the next scene.
"Alright we're on a beach, incredibly enough, the door lead to a beach where a beached whale appears to having been decomposing for a long time. It's a huge whale! Omg! I have to stretch my neck back to be able to see where it ends! I almost loose my balance. The smell makes my eyes watery! I have to get away from this!" Perhaps this gives you ideas of what the characters could do or say.

when you think about it a book, usually fiction, is a sort of listening to a tape of somebody telling you what happened here and there. You automatically start creating image in your head if you're listening to a report of some kind.

Then imagine the guy on the other side, whom you're transmitting all of this, asking you questions like "For how long would you say it's been decomposing? Does it have its guts out??"
These questions can either be what the reader would ask in his head, or what the characters could be asking each other, in dialog.

Another way you could get into describing things is as if you walked into a bar and your friend was seating on one of those high chairs, talking with the bartender.
And you sat next to him and had to tell him something really privately...quietly.
You'll inevitably talk in past tense. "They weren't listening to Michael! They were throwing, like, the chairs at the wall, it even hit his mother's portraits! Oh it's horrible. I don't know what's wrong with them! And they threw Michael out the window and he's dead!" (of course you wouldn't say it like that to your friend...just like that. If it makes you laugh when it's supposed to be serious, you should tell things in a different way).

The questions from this friend of yours could symbolize what the readers would ask or what characters could think or say.

I guess these exercises can help you to come up with descriptions AND dialogs. They can work both ways.

Perhaps you could leave the "telling" for dialogs and the showing for narration.
Perhaps telling in narration is usually a bad idea.


I don't know. May I remind you that I don't have any "experience" to give "expert advice". I'm just telling you what works for me.
Another advise is... Don't' explain things as if the reader was stupid.

I've read many examples on this thread where I immediately, without them describing, or even mentioning the surroundings, I fill in the blank spots of information automatically, without thinking.
I know you want the reader to see images in their minds, that's one of my goals as I write my stories(that's what makes reading fun in my experience)
And the scene is a perfectly fine scene that you could see in a book of whatever genre.
The brain does it all by itself. You don't have to worry to cover every pixel of the "Screen" in the reader's mind.
If I say Dinning tale at christmas time. Fireplace lit. Family enojying the meal in the living room. The kids screaming next to their parents. Conversation.
the key words alone could make you see this christmas time scene automatically. With tons of stuff I didn't describe.
Did you see a numerous family? With lots of cousins? or just a mother anda father and two kids?

Imagine describing a dinner table. Are you going to cover every single plate and cutlery and the wines and the main entry and how the cook chose to display the decorative fruits and the light and the people and the sounds of their conversations and whatnot?

If you do, I would close your book and burn it and blow away the ashes to the ground and stomp on them.
I'm joking!!

But think about this! When you were reading what I typed about the dinner table....did you imagine stuff in your mind? Pictures? even if for just a fraction of a second?
If so, it tells you that you don't need descriptions for the readers to "get it".
Just me mentioning a few things makes your head go on a exponential "filling in the blanks", and it gives you what would be a cool image of a majestic dinner table.
Describing a dinen rtable? Done!
Of course you have to unite all those key words with sentences and adjectives tha tmakes the imagination richer.
The better you do this, perhaps people's opinion of your writing will rise too!

Don't Tell everything and Show what matters.

Cut the reader's some slack when you tell them stuff, when you describe things.

PhoenixSaga said:

I really want to get this right. I have been working on my MS for 11 mos now and I am still making newbie mistakes. I have read several books on writing, style and grammar. I am in my rewriting stages. I have at least several versions of each chapter and I really want to get this right.

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You should give yourself a lot of credit, Phoenix, for recognizing the trouble spots in your ms. I think that you can put yourself above newbies since newbies are people who don't even realize that they are making mistakes. Also, you've come looking for advice and are willing to take it. Again, newbies seldom do this (I certainly didn't at first!!)

Go you!!

I've got a great example of showing not telling. It's YOUR short story that you just posted today in SYW Romance/Women's Fiction.

Here's the link if anyone else wants to crit: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83796

And I second the kudos to you for working so hard and being so receptive to constructive criticism.

c.e.

PhoenixSaga said:

Can you give me any advice or what books would be good that have more information and examples on Showing not Telling ??? !

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Yes:

Read voraciously the best novelists who ever lived. Absorb how they did their magic in the marrow of your bones. No "Idiot's Guide" to writing fiction will ever give you what they will.

Read: Twain, Dumas, Steinbeck, McCullers, Wharton, Cather, Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Rex Stout, Zane Grey, Max Brand, James M. Cain, H. G. Wells, Hammett, John D. MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Faulkner, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Tony Hillerman, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Stephen Crane, Shiva Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Alan Paton, Richard Wright, Stanislaw Lem, Heinrich Boll, Joyce Carol Oates, Virginia Woolf, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Irving, Jim Harrison, Don DeLillo, Raymond Chandler, Victor Hugo, Harper Lee, Shirley Jackson, Elmore Leonard . . .

That's a good start.

caw

PhoenixSaga said:

Can you give me any advice or what books would be good that have more information and examples on Showing not Telling ???
.....
Any help is amazingly appreciated!!

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In answer to the OP,

IMHO: The best book covering show/tell is Dwight V Swain "Techniques of the Selling Writer." It's just the best on the technical basics of writing; Swain has credentials and writes well, making it an entertaining as well as revelatory read.

IMvHO: The technical trick for showing not telling is really simple. Have your character in dialogue with the world. Make them take turns. This gives you:
Anything that doesn't fit that structure is suspect (but could be OK). So if you find yourself saying "Amy felt bad about/when she saw..." then you're probably telling.

FennelGiraffe said:

In my opinion, the single greatest cause of infodumping is thinking the reader needs to know all the background in order to appreciate the story. But that's a fallacy. There are a gazillion details you, the author, need to know in order to give your story richness, depth, and consistency. You don't need to mention them in the story. Think of it as an iceberg. Only a tiny fraction is visible; the rest is hidden underneath, supporting the visible portion.

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My favorite example of this is the director's cut of Terminator2. It's about 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release, and all the extra footage is explanatory. James Cameron, the director/co-writer, openly admits (on the commentary soundtrack) that the shorter studio-edited version is superior, and the cut version was a lesson for him on just how little has to be explained in order to tell a story.

If you have info dumps that are strictly explanatory (i.e., can't really be "shown," instead of told), always try cutting them first. Willingness to cut one's work is one of the biggest dividers between professional writers and wannabes. Cut anything that can conceivably be removed, and nine times out of nine and a half, you'll see your writing improve before your eyes.