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Reader engagement is one of the hallmarks of a great novel. Think about it, you haven't heard anyone talk about a novel they love without telling you exactly how hard they were drawn into the story. But when reader engagement is such a tricky thing to nail down, it can be difficult to tell whether your draft has what it takes to be a truly engaging read.
Luckily, the components of reader engagement can be narrowed down to a few key components, including the balance between show and tell, use of tension, and voice. The articles below have great advice on how to manage all three, sending you well on your way to creating your most engaging novel yet!
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We're excited to welcome A.J. Steiger to the blog today. A.J.'s debut, Mindwalker, was released on June 9th of this year. Today, A.J. is joining us with advice on breaking the rules.
When to Break the Rules by A.J. Steiger
On my long road to publication, I’ve taken numerous fiction classes, read plenty of “how to write” books, and participated in critique sessions with other writers. There’s no shortage of do’s and don’ts on the subject of writing, and wading through these seas of information can be overwhelming. But the most useful piece of advice I’ve ever received is also the simplest: “Trust your gut. No matter what the rule is, someone is going to break it and break it well.”
Fiction is not an exact science, it’s a primal art which often emerges from a deep, intuitive place. Stories have been a part of human culture since we were painting them on cave walls. Yes, guidelines are useful. But if you treat them as immutable laws, they can easily become a gag muffling your own voice. The key is knowing when to deviate from the standard principles.
With that in mind, here are a few common rules I recommend throwing out the window (at least sometimes).
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By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 11/14/2014
Blog:
Game On! Creating Character Conflict
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There is an art to narrative summary. Ideally the information should be related through the point of view character's lens, not an info dump, like this:
The city was founded in 1779 by tea and sugar plantation owners who commissioned elaborate mansions on top of the hill with a view of the inlet that was large enough to dock their ships. Small villages soon cropped up along the periphery to house the tradesmen needed to service their needs. Over the centuries, the spaces between were filled until it became a crowded, mish-mash of squalor and grandeur.
This passage provides the information, but dully and through the prism of the writer, not the character.
Info dumps are often found in prologues, epilogues, summaries of what happened in previous books, long dialogue passages, as you know dialogue, long explanations of how things work, and extensive backstory.
Here are a few examples of how to use narrative summary effectively.
1. Narrative summary helps you skip ahead.
Sometimes you have to provide important background, condense time, and relate events that don't deserve a lot of page time through narrative summary.
The call came at five o'clock on a Saturday. Dick never forgot the pitch of the sun through the pines or the way his boots sank in the mud as he arrived at a scene to view his first corpse. After fifteen years, he'd seen so many bodies, in myriad locations,and every season.He no longer got the shakes, or the sicks, or the rapid pulse, but the scent of pine, dirt, and dying heat still filled his nostrils when he received a summons. Funny how some things stuck. He snapped on gloves and booties before ducking under the yellow tape blocking a snow-drenched alleyway in the heart of downtown Chicago. "What've we got?"
Narrative skips over the boring bits. Shift it into real-time when possible, particularly if you find paragraphs of it. Use specific details and strong word choices.
1) Narrative summary can offer new information or recap necessary information.
It should support, extend, or refute the information given through dialogue and action. It can add context in a timely fashion and set up expectation. It uses a few words that work hard and lead into or trail action and dialogue. If narrative runs on for paragraphs or pages, you have some editing to do.
The carpet fibers were a dead end: could have come from any low-rent apartment anywhere in town. The call-ins were a bunch of attention-seeking loonies. No legitimate suspects. No obvious motive. No one seemed to know anything about Jane. That was the problem these days: everyone had bloody telephones and computers and social media but never talked to their neighbors. Jane worked from home and played games with virtual friends. She ordered everything online or shopped at big box stores where everyone was strange and a stranger. There were no angles to grab hold of. Who would kill a girl who never seemed to leave her flat? But girls didn't just drag themselves into the woods, cover themselves with debris, and choke themselves with their own pantyhose.
2. Narrative transitions between scenes.
Dick skipped the shower and shave and was at the crime scene by nine thirty. He stood next to the corpse lying on the ground who obviously hadn’t shaved in days either and the bath in the river hadn’t done him any favors.
3. Narrative wrinkles time.
Four days sped by in a series of dead leads and dull conversations. Dick tackled the stacks of paperwork he had successfully ignored for a month, drank gallons of coffee, and smoked endless packs of cigarettes. His anxiety grew like a bonfire as he waited for the DNA results.
Revision Tips
? Read through your manuscript. Highlight areas that contain narrative. Decide whether you should turn narrative into action and dialogue. If not, is it serving a distinct purpose? Does it support, extend, add to, or refute a proposition? Does it condense time or provide important background?
? Does it involve tertiary characters or actions that are of lesser importance?
? Does it involve clichés?
? Have you told the reader what someone thinks or feels instead of showing it?
For more revision tips on revision and narrative summary check out.
We know we're supposed to show and not tell. As beginning writers, we hurl this advice at each other in critique groups and workshops with self-satisfied little smirks, happy to have learned something, anything, to help us improve our manuscripts. Rules are good, right? They give us structure in this magical world of fiction that inherently stretches the boundaries of our imagination.
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| Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) By John Baldessari, at the Saatchi Gallery.Photo by Jim Linwood, on Flickr, CC-BY |
But sometimes we use these rules as crutches, and rely on them until we forget the joy of walking on our own two feet.
Sometimes, we forget that writing is about saying something only we can express.
Sometimes, we edit the joy and individuality and
voice out of our manuscripts. We play it safe.
What is voice? Like pornography, we know it when we see it, but it's hard to define. And it's different for every writer and every book. Often it's easier to recognize when voice is missing than to identify what makes it unique when it is there. No matter how great the plot, how skillfully the writer
shows us the action unfolding and the emotion being experienced, if a novel could have been written by anyone, do we love it as much as those books in which the voice speaks clearly enough to be remembered?
Look at the following examples:
When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news. (Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker)
Long ago, on the wild and windy isle of Berk, a smallish Viking with a longish name stood up to his ankles in snow. (Cressida Cowell, How to Train Your Dragon)
One afternoon, when Bruno came home from school, he was surprised to find Maria, the family’s maid — who always kept her head bowed and never looked up from the carpet — standing in his bedroom, pulling all his belongings out of the wardrobe and packing them in four large wooden crates, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody else’s business. (John Boyne, The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas)
The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. (Libba Bray, Going Bovine)
I'm dreaming of the boy in the tree and at the exact moment I'm about to hear the answer I've been waiting for, the flashlights yank me out of what could have been one of those moments of perfect clarity people talk about for the rest of their lives. (Melina Marchetta, Jellicoe Road)
You can hear the voice in every one of those opening sentences. The authora aren't showing us action; they are telling us something only they or the characters could know.
For me, voice is telling. To be true and genuine, voice has to take us by the hand and lead us into the magical world of the character, or the narrator. But beyond the facts or emotion that the words convey, voice is about the selection of the words themselves. It's that indefinable quality of rhythm and sentence structure and elegance of expression that elevates writing above the ordinary.
Not every book has that kind of voice. The great ones do. As Truman Capote put it, "the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make." Michener, on the other hand, defined voice more broadly as "the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
According to Patricia Lee Gauch, voice comes from within the writer. "A writer's voice like the stroke of an artists brush-is the thumbprint of her whole person-her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms."
Do you have a favorite author whose voice you love? Or an example of voice from your own work? How do you define the indefinable?
Note: This is a repost. We're on limited hiatus through the end of July, with a mix of reprise and new posts coming all month.
Yesterday, I sent Book Two to my editor. (Cue confetti and panic!) Have I mentioned that I've never written a sequel before? Trust me, it's its own peculiar form of torture.
After sending the draft to my agent last week, he called the next day and gave me the 'speed things up at the beginning news.' I knew it was dialogue-heavy, so I was expecting that, and I'd been making notes to myself about how to do that for weeks. But that didn't change the fact that now I had to massively reconstruct the first few chapters because I'd lapsed into what I'd like to call sequel syndrome. I recapped way too much of Book One, in the beginning of Book Two. Ugh.
Fixing the problem involved writing four new scenes and deleting enough word count from the others to make it come out a wash. That gave me a chance to think about the real meaning of the advice we writers hear so often, 'show don't tell.'
And I had an epiphany. Total V-8 moment!
Show over tell begins at the scene level--not at the sentence or paragraph level.
To show a piece of information to our readers, we need to:
- Choose the action that would best demonstrate the information. I have ghost-hunters trespassing on the plantation. Now, I can have someone tell my main character they are there and why it's a problem. My character can be surprised and irate--and all of that can happen in dialogue and make readers yawn. On the other hand, if I let my character see the ghost-hunters, she can react to them more organically. But that means that I have to build a scene that puts her in a position to see them, at the time in the story when it will most matter to her.
- Make the action result in change. Seeing the ghost-hunters can leave my main character mad, but it must also create an effect. If she sees the ghost hunters, but also sees the hand-lettered sign on yellow legal paper that says the plantation is closed to the public until further notice, seeing the ghost-hunters matters more to her and to the reader.
- Make the information matter. Saying the information matters doesn't make it matter, not to the character or the reader. Why does it matter? Having the plantation closed to the public matters because it interferes with my characters goals. It prevents her her from accomplishing what she needs to accomplish, and so now she isn't reacting just to the information, but to something deeper and more meaningful. The more meaningful I can make that, the more I can demonstrate a connection between the character and the information, the more the reader will care.
- Make the character interact with the information to generate emotion. That's key to storytelling--every action needs a reaction. But the reaction should be direct. If the character is troubled by what appears to be a ghost-hunter, she can snap at the person delivering the news, and that can be interesting. But what if she confronts the supposed ghost-hunter instead? Or goes out of her way to avoid him? Or does something to get rid of him? The possibilities are endless, but each of those reaction says something different about who my character is and how she feels. Whatever her reaction, even if it's a small part of the story, I want to choose the scenario that most vividly displays my character's feelings.
Obviously, creating a scene around a revelation or piece of information isn't going to work in every instance. As writers though, it's our job to try to make it work as frequently as possible. If that doesn't deserve a whole scene, then we need to spend time thinking how we can make the information as interesting as possible.
- Make it visual. If the character has a headache, I can have her rub her head and fumble for aspirin.
- Check the timing. If the character realizes something, I can have her act on that information at the most inconvenient time possible.
- Tell it in the most interesting way. I can reveal character emotion and generate reader response by using deep point of view to put the reader inside the character's head, describing what they hear, see, smell, touch in a way that makes the reaction visible and visceral.
A Common MisconceptionIt's easy to mistake dialogue for showing, simply because we can visualize the people talking. But visualizing and experiencing are two different things.
We experience an activity. We witness a dialogue.Choose CarefullyMy
aha! moment yesterday was the idea that for every piece of information I need to reveal, I need to create the most meaningful way and time and place to show it.
Between now and when I get my manuscript back from my editor, I plan to think about how I can dig show my book unfolding at an even deeper level.
What about you? Can you think of a scene you've read or written that revealed something in a truly memorable way?
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Marissa and I are almost back. Promise. And that means she'll be posting contest winners shortly. :D In the meantime, here's another article from the archives....
Deciding When to Show and When to Tell
"Show, don't tell" is probably the most common advice given to writers. But that's not the whole story.
I've been thinking a lot about this issue. It came up in both large and small ways in a number of the critiques I've done for other writers recently, and it was flagged in my manuscript by a couple of the writers in my wonderful critique group. I started thinking about researching my thoughts and doing a blog post, but serendipidously, several of the blog's I regularly read posted articles on the subject last week.
Michael Bourret described how he has been seeing a lot of manuscripts that aren't engaging or engrossing because of too much telling.
Mary Kole had a post on "Good Telling" based on an essay she received from Melissa Koosmann. The Plot Whisperer (Martha Alderson) also had a great post on
how people may hide strong emotions.
So I'm going to tell you what I think. (Because really, when don't I?) And I want to know what
you think. Tell me if you agree or disagree, and let me know how much you think style, skill, POV, and genre fall into the equation.
First, there's a difference between narrative and scene, and each has its role in a novel.
- A scene takes place in real time, in an idenfied location, and it involves action and/or dialogue between characters. By definition, a scene is "show." It engages the reader, engrosses them, and makes them feel connected to what the characters are feeling.
- Narrative summary describes--"tells" about--action or an event, but doesn't show it. Just as you would have a hard time selling a manuscript that's all narrative, you would have a hard time getting a reader to enjoy a book that is all nonstop action. As readers, we need time to breathe and absorb. Narrative serves that purpose.
For me, deciding whether something should go into scene is part of planning the novel, and it comes down to issues of tension and pacing. If you think you need a scene, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Is the event or information significant enough to the story to warrant a full scene?
- Does it move the story forward?
- Does it lead the character toward a turning point or plot point, preferably both, that you want the reader to remember and experience along with the character?
- Are the events action or reaction? In other words, is something happening, or are the characters making decisions based on something that has already happened?
- If it is action, does it directly impact the POV character and are you giving her an opportunity to react to it?
- Is there identifiable conflict between two characters, between what your main character wants and what she needs, or preferably both?
- Are you providing important information that a reader is likely to skim over, misunderstand, or not care about in narrative form? Remember, the reader doesn't know what you know -- that it's important.
If the answer to any of those questions is affirmative, then you probably don't want to put information into narrative. This goes double for plot devices such as memories, monologues, and so forth. Flashbacks and visions, well-crafted and used sparingly, may work as scenes, but bear in mind that you have to give characters time to react to them. They work b
"Show, don't tell" is probably the most common advice given to writers. But that's not the whole story.
I've been thinking a lot about this issue in the past weeks. It came up in both large and small ways in a number of the critiques I've done for other writers recently, and it was flagged in my manuscript by a couple of the writers in my wonderful new critique group. I started thinking about researching my thoughts and doing a blog post, but serendipidously, several of the blog's I regularly read posted articles on the subject last week.
Michael Bourret described how he has been seeing a lot of manuscripts that aren't engaging or engrossing because of too much telling.
Mary Kole had a post on "Good Telling" based on an essay she received from Melissa Koosmann, one of her blog readers. The Plot Whisperer (Martha Alderson) also had a great post on
how people may hide strong emotions.
So I'm going to tell you what
I think. And I want to know what
you think. Tell me if you agree or disagree, and let me know how much you think style, skill, POV, and genre fall into the equation.
First, there's a difference between narrative and scene, and each has its role in a novel.
- A scene takes place in real time, in an idenfied location, and it involves action and/or dialogue between characters. By definition, a scene is "show." It engages the reader, engrosses them, and makes them feel connected to what the characters are feeling.
- Narrative summary describes--"tells" about--action or an event, but doesn't show it. Just as you would have a hard time selling a manuscript that's all narrative, you would have a hard time getting a reader to enjoy a book that is all nonstop action. As readers, we need time to breathe and absorb. Narrative serves that purpose.
For me, deciding whether something should go into scene is part of planning the novel, and it comes down to issues of tension and pacing. If you think you need a scene, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Is the event or information significant enough to the story to warrant a full scene?
- Does it move the story forward?
- Does it lead the character toward a turning point or plot point, preferably both, that you want the reader to remember andn experience along with the character?
- Are the events action or reaction? In other words, is something happening, or are the characters making decisions based on something that has already happened?
- If it is action, does it directly impact the POV character and are you giving her an opportunity to react to it?
- Is there identifiable conflict between two characters, between what your main character wants and what she needs, or preferably both?
- Are you providing important information that a reader is likely to skim over, misunderstand, or not care about in narrative form? Remember, the reader doesn't know what you know -- that it's important.
If the answer to any of those questions is affirmative, then you probably don't want to put information into narrative. This goes double for plot devices such as memories, monologues, and so forth. Flashbacks and visions, well-crafted and used sparingly, may work as scenes, but bear in mind that you have to give characters time to react to them. They work best at turning points in your story, the same way that backstory is ideal at turning points, where information is placed in context of past and present combining to help the character make a decision that will lead to resolution an
Great info!! Thank you for sharing!!! :)
Fantastic post.
I totally agree. I truly believe that a novel should be balanced and "have it all."
You're right, Rowling tells, uses passive voice, and tons of adverbs and tags, BUT, IT WORKS.
Unfortunately agents, editors, and publishers always pound showing. SO how do so many books get through that are passive and telling. Because it WORKS. Balance is the key.
This is a brilliant post! Thank you. It answered several questions for me.
Oh. Wow. You're so right. I need to remember this when I go to critique other people's work. Not just slash instances of Telling, but to see if it actually WORKS first. Great point!
Amazing! From now on I want a little Martina on my shoulder whenever I write.