I want to take some extra time to go into one point on the Elements of Fiction Editing Checklist in detail: ☐ Personal histories are brought into the story organically Backstory is usually a bad word among writers. But the truth is, it’s necessary—to you. Knowing your character’s history is good. …
Tag: Show don’t Tell
Is your infodump backstory, or is it research?
Last week we talked about the kind of infodump in which the character’s full history is dropped in one big block. Often this information—or pieces of it, anyway—does belong in the story. It just needs to be winnowed down to the minimum, and it needs to be woven organically into …
What does ‘show don’t tell’ mean, anyway?
Writers are forever being told “show don’t tell.” I even put it on my Elements of Fiction Editing Checklist: ☐ The author is showing and not telling. But what does this mean? And with every writing instructor in the business teaching this all the time, why do we still see …
Use Narrative Summary Appropriately
Last time, I said Inappropriate Narrative Summary was one of the main “telling” problems I see in manuscripts. Sometimes summary is appropriate. When your hero has to make a long journey, but the journey itself isn’t what’s important to the story, you could put “he traveled across the Atlantic that …
The difference between Storytelling and Dramatization
In his excellent book The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction, Jeff Gerke urges novel-writers to stop seeing themselves as storytellers and instead think of themselves as filmmakers. As you’re examining your manuscript for telling consider this: If your book were a movie, what would the camera record? In …
When is it OK to open your novel with “telling?”
Over on Facebook, I got some pushback to last week’s article “The difference between Storytelling and Dramatization.” One Facebook commenter noted that the “before” examples given in show vs. tell articles like mine are “often deliberately and obviously poor by any standards.” She’s talking about examples like the one I …
How to Go Deeper into Characters’ Emotions
One of the most frequent comments editors make on new writers’ manuscripts is to go deeper into characters’ emotions. Readers come to narrative stories for an emotional experience. So authors, both of fiction and of narrative nonfiction, need to go beyond telling the reader how a character feels. The goal …