A few writing “rules” that could / should be broken – occasionally

 

Show don’t tell

Yes of course, we all know that one. It’s a lovely tool for editors, creative writing teachers and for critique group members.  ‘Show don’t tell.-  you’re  telling us and you could be showing  us.’   Except that sometimes you need to tell otherwise you’re stating the obvious.  Showing absolutely all the time really slows your pace. The advanced skill is knowing when it is acceptable to tell rather than show. And don’t forget: story tellers tell all the time.

 

Write what you know

OK. So, what about fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction?  So, modify that one: write what you know in order to find out what you don’t know. Write about how the human will feel and act in a world where magic is the norm, in a futuristic world that has done away with money and in a world where there is no water on tap.  

 

Young adult novels are always fast-paced

Except they’re not all of the time and in fact they include several narrative elements that slow the pace right down:

• a lot of “show don’t tell” because you’re writing for a reader who has less experience of life
• a lot of emotional closeness as this reader often reasons with their emotions  rather than the area of the brain that houses common sense
• a lot of interior monologue
• The narrative voice anyway is often first person where the narrator is talking to a trusted friend and they haven’t really figured out what’s going on yet.

You lift the pace again by creating very high stakes, plenty of tension, cliff-hangers and some action scenes with very short sentences.

 Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Always write in full sentences and with correct grammar

I’m quite a stickler for this in fact when I mark, edit or critique work. If work is tightly written it is easier to sell to multiple markets.  You should only break these “rules” if doing so will render your work more effective than the correctly written text.  And that is the point. You need to appreciate the norms so that you can measure whether your bending of the rules is effective or not. In particular you need to work out when to ignore “Fragment, consider revising”.

 

Stay with one point of view

Well Dickens didn’t. Neither did many of his contemporaries and those that wrote novels before him. However, we’ve grown to dislike head-hopping and we favour a first person or close third person point of view.

It is in fact more comfortable for your reader if you only change point of view for whole chapters and most modern readers still prefer the close point of view even when that changes.

Take care also of zooming in and out too quickly.  Modern texts work better if you keep the distance between the protagonist and the reader the same throughout.

However, the omniscient author is currently making a bit of a comeback and one or two writers are zooming successfully.  Again, though, you have to know what you’re doing to do this successfully.

Don’t use too many adjectives and adverbs

But use a few and be discerning. Consider the difference between “walking quickly” “hurrying” and walking briskly”. Can you find something better than “big”, “small” and “quiet”?

 

Avoid the imperfect

No, don’t. “She sat” is NOT the same as “She was sitting” and certainly very different form “She used to sit” / “She would sit” – other versions of the imperfect.  The imperfect exists in every language for a reason. Why waste the richness of our language?

 

Avoid the pluperfect

Again, don’t.  It refers to one stage further back in the past and is useful in pinpointing when action took place. I admit, I tend to have one or two and then go to a perfect of imperfect. E.g.

“He had finished dinner and had cleared the table. He was now stacking the dishes in the dish washer. The television was already on.”

 

So there you have it.  A few justified broken rules. Would you care to suggest some others?  

Stages of Revision 12: Show, don’t tell

That old chestnut.  And I’d argue that the more advanced skill is knowing when it’s right to tell instead of show. However, no matter how experienced a writer you are it’s worth doing a separate check on this one. There are a few vey specific things you can look out for:

 

Precision

Don’t just say car – be precise. Is it a little run-around or a gas-guzzler? Is it old or new? Is it clean at the moment or could it do with a wash? What is the interior like?  Now, you don’t need to include all of those details but you at least must know them. If the picture’s clear in your head it is more likely to also be so in your reader’s

 

Writing with the senses

What can you, your character, narrator or protagonist hear, see, smell, feel and taste? Again you don’t need to be exhaustive but you will convince the reader that the story is really happening if you can make them actually experience the scene. Be aware that often we rely too much on the visual. Use the other senses from time to time. Also be aware that one sense brings the other. If you invite the reader to smell the bacon cooking, they’ll probably hear it sizzling as well and might even be able to taste it.  If you have a scene involving good food, make them hungry.

Real time

Is what you’re relating happening in real time? Your action should take as long as it takes you to write it or read it out loud.

A film in the head

Are you creating the same film in your reader’s heads as you started out with? You might be able to check this by showing your work to a writing buddy, your critique group or a reading group. . Let them read your work and then ask them some questions about it. Some surprising things can happens sometimes. You may not have mentioned the colour of your character’s hair in this passage but they may have got it anyway.

Image by sipa from Pixabay

Convey emotion through body language

Don’t tell us that he looked angry.  Show us his frown, the clenched fists or the flashing eyes.

Dialogue and body language

This is a better way of showing how a character reacts than merely telling us about it.

Showing versus fast pace

If you are showing instead of telling well you will inevitably slow the pace. However, you are sharpening the involvement of the reader. To increase the pace again you can use lots of action words and short, sharp sentences.  Short chapters help as well, especially if they have cliff-hangers at the end.  Anyway, if you have a really good story where the stakes are high that will create its own pace and tension.  In addition the real-time pace holds the answers back and this increase the reader’s tension in any case.    

Writing about a Material World

 

This is an interesting debate. Is the world material? Is it just energy? Is it just a construct of our thoughts and imagination? How do things like The Secret work in a totally material world?  

The video It's an Immaterial World discusses these ideas. 

But what about the writer? Do we live in our heads or are we engaged with the physical world? 

"Write what you know," the gurus tell us.  But if we wrote only what we knew, surely there would be no Star Wars, no Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings. Neither probably would there be any historical fiction. However, we do write what we know in answering the question "What if?" What if there were a universe full of inhabited planets, at war with each other? What if there were a school for witches and wizards? What if there were some rings that had supernatural  powers? What if the only place for the poor were the workhouse? We work out how all of that would feel like from our experience of our physical world with a little emotion thrown in to salt it.  

"Write with your senses," I tell my students. This means being precise about what they see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Feel can be used in both senses. It always produces effective writing and helps them to "show not tell". This is so very much about the physical world. 

A writer may seem locked up in her head. But all of those ideas that buzz around in there relate to the physical world. We write about scenery, human beings, sounds, what people say and do. This is all physical. A film plays itself out in our heads and we write in order to create the same film in our readers' minds. 

Go to any beach or airport, and you will see many people sitting close to each other, all immersed in other worlds. What is going on in their heads? Ask them to define it and they come out with words which are physical entities: sounds in the head or little marks that mean something on a page.

Many texts, of course deal with the inner monologue of its characters. Even these characters always think in words and words have that physical presence described above. 

Many writers like to experience the physical world they write about. They notice more when they are in the park, the prison cell or the sailing boat than when they just rely on their memory or imagination.     

So how do affirmations and dream-confirming work? In a material world? Well, when we write we isolate certain details we deem important. We focus on them. When we make affirmations or reiterate our dreams we also bring a focus. The former is our creative act. The latter reminds us of what is important to us and is also a creative act.      

The beautiful irony is that matter is mainly empty space. What looks like real matter is actually energy.