Polishing a turd is one thing. Sending out a first-vomit draft is its opposite. Neither is good and this is why “never rewrite” is like nails on my own very personal chalkboard. And no, it’s not the editors job to fix it.
I keep telling myself I will take snapshots of my scenes in progress and put them here to show you how much of an iterative process this is, but in truth, I always forget until it’s too late because I never know which ones will go through the most revision, rewriting, redrafting, whatever you wanna call it.
Scenes where I’m in Flow and the character I’m channeling and I are jiving are the ones that look most like the finished product and need the least revision. Usually, scenes from the antagonists, bridging scenes (the ones used to connect things) and parts of scenes written for continuity’s sake, as well as any scenes that require a greater narrative distance than I like, are the hardest for me.
Lately, the brain fog of menopause has handed me an ungodly amount of blank pages that refuse to allow me to fill them and it seems I spend a lot of my time walking away from my keyboard so I won’t bludgeon my monitor (because of course it’s all its fault). And Snape is staring at me, going “Shouldn’t you be writing right now” and I want to punch his face in too.
It is these difficult first-vomit scenes that I know I will have to re-write.
These scenes usually start with distance via telling. They usually start with a summary opening or introduction, told in past perfect1. They have to, because that’s the only way the story is flowing right now, so I leave them be. At first, my goal is to get something, anything on paper, because you can’t edit a blank page. The more I struggle with something, the more I tend to tell rather than show.
I do it by summarizing (i.e. past perfect), by filtering, by naming emotions, by defaulting to the ease of adverbs, adjectives, linking verbs, and abstract language. I do it by focusing on conclusions. These are all more granular telling issues which I may talk about in a later post.
Summarizing, filtering, etc., all make for weak writing but I do it anyway because right now I’m trying to get Story on the page, to see if it works. I’m trying to get to the point where I can edit it, i.e. rewrite it, polish it. I’m trying to determine if it’s a turd or not. If it is, it’s a lot easier to dump 500 badly written words of summary than a well-written 2000-word scene full of depth and characterization.
So, here’s an example from my WiP:
The compound on Theta Thaes was essentially its own city. The people that worked there were mostly scientists or technicians and the guards and support personnel who existed to serve their needs. It would not be an error to call it a colony, one devoted to research.
This is a summary opening, a bird’s-eye view. It tells you that it’s a city and tells you a little bit about it.
It then goes on for several more paragraphs, adding a bunch of fake details to the narrative.
There were several reasons for its isolated location. Theta Thaes was deep in what had once been Kabrin territory. Now it was, more or less, House Kone’s, although at one point Tarmo Kabrin might have contested that. His death at Dobromil’s order had brought his objections to an end.
Theta Thaes had few of the trappings of a prison, although it did have a small one buried deep within its sublevels. The colony did however have many of the trappings of a garrison. The assets within had to be protected and controlled.
Most of the scientists, engineers, and technicians who labored in its labs, went home to families at night, enjoyed entertainments on their days off, and were only reminded of their status as chattels when they questioned their orders. There was a very clear delineation between humans and donai, and not just that of master to slave. Theta Thaes was unique in that it harbored no mixed-bloods—none at all. The mixing of blood was the only capital offense on Theta Thaes, outside of treason.
If you’re thinking that it reads like a report, you are right, it does. And if you’re thinking that I’m exploring and discovering it as well as info-dumping it as I write, you’re also right. This was my fourth or fifth attempt to write this scene whose purpose is to introduce a couple of the assistant antagonists and flesh out the relationship between them, one that will be vital to the story’s pinch-points and eventually, the story solution. And I want/need to maintain some distance and not characterize them so they’re too sympathetic. If I do that I’ll have to kill that sympathy later. [Makes a note that this might be something I have to do].
I am not proud of these four paragraphs. They are shallow, surface writing and lack any kind of depth. They lack a viewpoint character, which is intentional, but always something that makes me want to create one anyway.
My inner editor wants to take these four paragraphs and “show” them to you instead. It wants to drop you into Theta Thaes as viewed through the eyes of one of its denizens, perhaps one of the scientists. It wants to show you why it’s a plum assignment as compared to others. It wants to show you a day or a few in the lives of these people, the interactions between the humans and donai, and worldbuild, worldbuild, and worldbuild some more until you, the reader, have drawn your own conclusions that would read very much like the report I just shoved down your throat.
These are the kind of paragraphs that could very much earn one a complaint about it being telling, because it is.
So let’s look into the why’s and why-not’s, shall we?
What are some reasons you should leave paragraphs like these alone and then just flick the bird to anyone who whines about it being telling? Except the editor writing you a check. Listen to them.
Well, first of all, in order to dramatize these four paragraphs you’re going to not only have to create a bunch of new characters and their backstories, but you’re also going to have to tell an actual story. We don’t want to dramatize these paragraphs merely for the sake of avoiding telling. Which means you’ll also need, conflict and tension as well as goals and motivations.
The bigger question is, would that serve the story that you’re telling or would it distract from it? What will adding this side story do to your main story’s structure? It could be an ideal subplot, or the antagonist’s storyline, that’s fairly clear, the kind of thing you might well see when the book is converted into a series (rather than a movie).
Think about it. All the cool kids are doing it: buying rights to an IP and then fleshing out all the minor characters and the throwaway backstories or continuity paragraphs. Where did the Ewoks get the dress that they gave Leia to wear in RoTJ come from? Fear not, intrepid consumer, we have a story for you that will explain it all. Carnivorous teddy bears for the win. [Do not point out that the Ewoks don’t have the right kind of teeth to be carnivorous. Don’t. Just move on.]
Things like this are why I think that mass-media tie-in consumers have a lot of complaints about “show-don’t-tell” in regards to IPs that have not been developed to the degree that something like SW, ST, LOTR, etc. have. Most of us don’t have an 80-year history like Marvel and LOTR to peddle. Plus, it’s fun to trot out that show-don’t-tell criticism because it’s the one thing that was taught in English class, so everyone knows it. What wasn’t taught in English class? Pacing, perspective, structure, and when to tell.
I went on a rant about this a few months ago:
You, as actual writers, have the bigger problem of determining when to actually show and when to tell, mass-media tie-in expectations be damned.
And this is what I’m going to do, after I am done with this scene, after I see where it’s going, and if it works. In order to do this, I have to look at it as a first-vomit type of scene, not something I would send in to any editor. Or even share with buyers.
After the first five paragraphs of summary, I floated the narrative camera and brought it in closer, focusing it on one of the assistant antagonists, using her as the filter for the narrative. I already have a fairly good idea of how I want to manipulate the reader here and why, mostly because I want to keep the tension ramped up and not just have it be an “introduce people and milieu” scene. We’re too deep into the story for that. This is in Act 2A, the Big Swampy Middle.
For the record, I’ve already written three iterations of these characters being introduced alongside their own goals and motivations, none of which worked (they became too sympathetic), and that is why I started with a clean slate once again.
Most of what I have so far is full of fake details. The setting is very sparse, there’s almost no filtering through the characters’ senses and there is no psychic2 penetration to their thoughts and opinions. Like I said, I want to make sure this works for the overall story before I flesh them out and I might decide not to go too deeply into their hearts and minds in order to withhold information from the reader. I first have to decide whether or not knowing said information is going to ramp up the tension or not. And tension is my goal.
The first-vomit draft is very sparse on description because coming up with immersive and new prose for such is one of those things that’s very likely to turn into a squirrel—oh look, I can just hop onto Pinterest and look up “futuristic bath tub.” Two hours later, I have a great description of said bathtub, along with 50 other things3 I didn’t need or want for this scene, but my writing time is gone and I’m still at roughly the same word count as before. So that descriptive and specific rather than abstract language will have to wait for when I’ve decided this scene is a keeper.
What we’ve discussed so far has been, like the opening summarization, a bird’s-eye view of show-don’t tell. The more granular version of show-don’t-tell is prose-level show-don’t-tell—it’s the part about the the type of verbs, about filters, the things that will take those fake details and turn them on their heads.
So once I’ve decided that the Story told by that first-vomit draft works, it will be time to flesh it out. Even if I’m going to keep the five introductory summary paragraphs, once I zoom in to the first character, I’m going to switch from giving readers a report to letting them experience the story —this is the essence of showing. Even if I’m using first-person retrospective (where the story is over), it’s time to bring the story into real story time and give readers specifics. It is time to evoke emotion by switching to active prose rather than the passive narrative we have so far. This is how you create escapism.
And do be warned, there is a risk of misunderstanding and misinterpretation when we bestow on our readers the responsibility to interpreting things for themselves, i.e. we stop giving them conclusions as if they were reading non-fiction.
In other words there really is peril in being a show-don’t-tell writer. It’s much safer to tell if your goal is to deny misunderstanding, but the peril there is that you’ll deny them immersion, so pick your peril, I guess. And some readers love being told what to think, so consider that and if they are your audience.
Did you find this article useful? Become a paid subscriber and get access to the archives as well.
Past perfect is when you use “had” to indicate an action in the past. Not past tense narration, which is real story time, i.e. now. “I had eaten breakfast” is past perfect. “I ate breakfast” is not and is story time that is unraveling for the character as we read, i.e. now even though it’s in past tense. If you are defaulting to past perfect for the entirety of a paragraph you are likely summarizing a past action for the reader, one that is already over. This is different from a flashback which is its own separate scene that is told in past tense, not past perfect.
By psychic penetration I don’t mean telepathy or the abomination of head-hopping. I mean it in the sense of how deeply the narrative camera penetrates into the characters’ hearts and minds (ref: OS Card). It also has nothing to do with narrative schema. An omniscient narrator can penetrate just as deeply as a deep/close-third one can as long as he stays in author-narrator voice and makes proper transitions from one character to another, so the shifting isn’t promiscuous. For the best examples of what NOT to do (promiscuous head-hopping) see Herbert’s Dune.
Probably worse than the illusion that your “research” here is actually writing is if you’ve decided to do something with those 50 other things, like save them for later. You won’t ever look at them again and if you do, you won’t find that one neat thing you think you put in that list either, cause it’s in a totally different place (not Pinterest). I’ve tried queuing up scene info about 20 different ways and yeah, it’s a great time sink. Doesn’t keep me from doing it despite knowing better.
I think, and its been a long day so I've not checked, that I commented on your FB page that its okay to tell on the first draft... I mean Nancy Kress did, and she's not the only one.
Having said that, I'd probably start the secene with ways that we can first see our Antagonist at his best... before we see him, or her at the worst. For A companion to ASH, I have one of my antagonists start by coming into where he works. On the way in he catches an employe with her daughter, as the mother is packing up to end her shift. The girl is coloring in a coloring book, on the left there are a few places where she's accidently collored outside the lines. They talk about, of handedly, about how good it is to color inside the lines, and how she's getting better at it. He's a man that believes in classes, and their lines, and this girl and her mother are, he believes his inferiors (If you know about my machinamentum ideas, you have an idea who both are). It is very formal, very scripted in the interactions with this character. Later when I have a character distracted with other issues giving a report, and not demonstrating the level of formality required, our antagonist strikes him. Thus we have briefly the normal expectation of the world hinted at, then tension and conflict at its violation, without having to have the character really think about it, and give the audience lots of telling internal dialogue.
The question is, how can you show your antagonist's world, as he sees it, as he thinks of it, running smoothly, then how can you show his reaction to the things he cannot abide? Maybe someone questions, or someone representing someone questions some order given? Perchance, we have a department head, perchance with a few of the scientists active in the department coming before our antagonist as part of a typical meeting. You can give your audience the ritual of the dance of these meetings, who can speak, who can't, or at least who can speak less often, and when. A nice neat ritual, and then possibly the questioningof orders, the seriousness of this violation, and the response to demonstrate how this is just not done. Things can briefly return to normal, and this crucial violation might get him to think on how there are only two violations, and then leave it hanging, or at least with some . vagueness to hint that it will come later. Perhaps you could reveal this when he meets your FMC, and/ or when he realizes what she is. Just some thoughts.