ON BECOMING A WRITER
I hope you’ve had a great week of writing, and that the muse arrived at your desk early. If not, don’t worry—we’ve got plenty of great information in today’s post that’ll call her to the table. And just FYI, I started writing this blog to teach others how to write. But it's also to remind myself of everything that writing requires. Use this blog to learn, but also to remind yourself of the elements of fiction. And please pass the site to your writer friends.
iN PREVIOIUS POSTS we’ve gone over compelling openings, and building your characters, creating chapters (or not), learning the rules of writing, and we’ve seen examples of each of the elements we’ve covered when it comes to writing a novel. Now we’ll jump into the oft-repeated rule of Show Don’t Tell, and we’ll talk about Voice and Point of View as well so you can dive right in on becoming a writer.
So, Show, Don’t Tell. If there’s one rule that gets pounded into fiction writers, Show Don’t Tell has got to be it. It’s a simple phrase, a short phrase, and about as important a rule in writing you’ll come across. Readers want to “see” what’s happening in fiction, they don’t want to be “told” what’s happening. They want to experience the world of your novel—with the smells and sounds and feelings and movements and the great descriptions that pull it all together; they don’t want to be passed the cliff notes about what’s happening, because that’s boring, and writing can’t be boring. Our characters need to be active (not passive).
And since that’s the case, our jobs, as writers, is to show, through action and scene and description, what our characters are doing, and who they are physically and psychologically in the process. How do we do this? Well, we do this through scene, with or without dialogue. Your characters doing things accomplishes our need to show, because we use action verbs to describe what’s happening. When we do that, our readers can deduce for themselves the facts and details we might ordinarily tell them through exposition. So, for instance, here’s an example of showing rather than telling: “Kathleen turned toward Jim and put her hand on his leg and said something he couldn’t quite understand. “What’s that?” he said, leaning in. She looked up at his dark eyes but had to look away. He reached over and pulled her face back to his.” This is showing. We can visually see what’s happening, and the reader can deduce something of Jim and Kathleen’s physical characteristics (Kathleen had to look up into his eyes,” and then she “had to look away.” Hmm. What might that be about? Whatever it is, we get a sense of their relationship in the process of what’s happening by the way they act and by what they say.
Telling, of course, is anything that’s not action. Telling is exposition. It’s explanation. It’s telling the reader what’s happening rather than providing the reader with the visual of what’s happening. They need not deduce anything, and so it’s less interactive, and thus less engaging. When you tell rather than show, the reader pulls back a little bit in terms of interest. As writers, that’s not what we want them to do. We want them engaged. We want them to have an interactive experience with our characters and the world in which they live.
An example of telling would be something like “Kathleen never understood how a man like Jim could live like he did. He was bent on remaining an unmarried man, and he was happy living alone. She said, “I know that you’re upset about Mary’s passing because I’ve seen you crying because she left you alone with children who are too young to care for themselves, but you shouldn’t hide yourself away in a haze of vanilla-smelling candle smoke to grieve alone because you feel grieving before others is a weakness.” That just sounds horrible, and we want to avoid that. Besides telling, that was an information dump told through dialogue.
Telling is summary. Ideally, at best, it complements the scenes and gives the reader information and a break in the action, but since there is no action going on to keep the reader visually interested, you’ll need to do a great job in what information it is you’re passing along by telling your readers rather than showing them. An example of good telling would be when you’re avoiding long, drawn-out scenes of mundane tasks that need to happen for the plot to progress but that, if shown rather than told, would take up too much space on the page. What we can do is condense whatever it is that needs to happen by simply telling the reader it happened. To return to our hero climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro from last week, we know she’ll need supplies, and perhaps need to hire a guide to help her manage the risks of climbing, though maybe not—it isn’t Mt. Everest, right? Anyway, we can show the reader asking a local what the list of supplies she’ll need to buy is—waterproof hiking boots, a sturdy duffel bag, a sleeping bag with a certain temperature rating, T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, a headlamp, and so on, and watch her try them all on, maybe bargain with the sales person and so on, or we can just get right into scene and show the reader later how all of these things play into our hero’s journey. That’ll save the reader from a mundane scene, and get our hero up the mountain, where she’ll slip into a puddle but be saved by her waterproof hiking boots and the quick-drying hiking pants she’ll hang to dry over her backpack later on. When it gets dark, she’ll pull the headlamp from her pack and struggle to put it on her head and she’ll huddle in her sleeping bag because her fingers are numb and she’s tired of holding them over her nose to keep the frostbite away. That’s showing—it’s the reader interacting with the written words, and it’s simply more enjoyable for the reader all around.
Now that we’ve covered Showing vs Telling, let’s discuss Voice & POV
Voice is one of the most important aspects of your novel. It’s the perspective that the story is told from. It includes diction, tone, point of view, and it’s the person you’re hearing speak to you, the reader. Google says voice in literature, refers to the rhetorical mixture of vocabulary, tone, point of view, and syntax that makes phrases, sentences, and paragraphs flow in a particular manner. Novels can represent multiple voices: that of the narrator and those of individual characters. For me, it’s who is speaking to me. It’s the who in who’s telling me the story, and how they’re telling it to me. Do I like this person? This narrator? Voice, like anything in fiction, is subjective. You may like the voice, and I may hate it. Either way, voice is critical to your novel. If you want a voice to be interesting and to carry me for 300 or so pages, you’ll have to work on making that happen, and it’s not always easy. Some writers have the voice pop into their heads, and they write or type away with a voice that’s instantly distinguishable from other voices. You’ll likely have to work on your narrator’s voice, whoever she is, and that’s fine. Writing voice is one of the most difficult things to do, so you want to get it right.
Here are some quotes by writers on voice:
· “The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.” – Frank Lucas
· “I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.” – Paula Fox
· “It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.” – Colleen McCullough
· “Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So, you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.” – George Saunders
And here are some fantastic examples of voice from novels you’ve probably read:
This is from William Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY:
“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.
"Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.”
This is Benjy’s voice, and Benjy is a little slow, so he sees the world differently and his voice is different, but there are three other voices in the novel—Jason, Quentin, and the author’s, Faulkner himself.
This one’s from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel LOLITA:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Telling, of course, is anything that’s not action. Telling is exposition. It’s explanation. It’s telling the reader what’s happening rather than providing the reader with the visual of what’s happening
Notice how distinct the voices Faulkner and Nabokov give their narrators, and how they do it—through the words they use, the syntax, the rhythm, the repetition. Not all of us can create such distinct voices for our narrators, but we’ll strive to do it every time we write—voice is that important. For the beginning writer, voice is often mimicked. And that’s okay. You’ll develop your voice as you write and learn and revise. It’s part of the process. For me, it was an aha moment when I realized my voice was distinct, and it may be one for you as well. So, keep at it. Find your voice. It’s a game changer for your fiction.
Hand in hand with Voice goes POV, or Point of View. Point of View tells us through whose eyes we’re seeing the things in our novel happen. It’s the perspective or position from which the narrator tells or conveys the story to the reader. For example, in our Faulkner excerpt, it’s Benjy’s point of view and voice, and Benjy, our narrator, is telling us what’s happening in the first-person POV. The first person POV, in my opinion, is the easiest to write, generally speaking, but again, writing is subjective. In Benjy’s case, his reliability as the narrator is in question. This is one of the issues with first person point of view, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just one of the things to consider when writing in first person. Other things you should think about when thinking about POV is what you’ll need to do and consider, depending on who your narrator is or isn’t. Is your narrator a child? If so, that’ll require you putting yourself in the shoes of a child and how they view the world, what they may or may not know, the vocabulary they might use, and so on. If they know things typically only known by adults, you’ll need to explain, in some way, how they came to acquire that knowledge. What if your narrator is a horse? A book? Or Death itself? Well, your narrator can be any of those things—it’s your decision. You’re the author. And that’ll be the challenge, right? Figuring out how the horse or the book or Death narrates their story. You may need to do some research on how horses think, or brainstorm what the perspective of a book might be, but that’s part of the fun in unconventional narrators. I’m not saying you need to write from Death’s perspective, only that the option is there for you to do so if you so choose.
On Becoming a Writer
1. First Person, which uses I. I did this, I did that. (The narrator’s reliability is called into question, as I mentioned, though not always); but it tells the story subjectively. First person narratives are very common. There are great novels written in the first person, just as there are in third.
2. The next POV you can use is the Second Person point of view. This POV uses the pronoun You. You run to the store and open the door. You look inside. You see the man with the gun at the back of the store. You approach him with your hands out in front of you. Second person is the least common POV used by novelists, but there are some famous novels written in the second person including Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Give it a shot; you never know, second person may just be the POV that gets your writing flowing.
3. Next is Third Person, which uses the pronouns he, she, or they. There are multiple types of third person points of view, and each has its pros and cons. You’ll need to understand what those are before you start writing, or, hopefully, early on in your writing, otherwise you may need to go back and revise looking for those places in your novel where you slipped up somehow and jumped into another third person POV.
4. The first third Person point of view is the Limited third POV. Limited third is common in contemporary works, and there are a variety of them including our previously mentioned classic, George Orwell’s 1984. Others include the Harry Potter novels by JK Rowling, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and The Mad Women’s Ball, by Victoria Mas. As part of this lesson, I’ve included a companion PDF with real examples from novels that show how each POV works, as well as the limitations and benefits of each.
5. The next third person POV is the Third person Limited Subjective POV. Similar to the first-person point of view, third person subjective allows us access to a character’s thoughts and feelings and opinions through the narrator. What a character can surmise about other characters is based on conjecture or inference, not objectivity
6. The third person Objective POV allows us to watch our character, but we don’t know what she’s thinking, and we don’t get that from another character either. Events are described, but the narrator knows or at least reveals nothing besides the external facts. The reader is not provided with the feelings, motivations, or internal thoughts of the characters.
7. Third person omniscient POV, on the other hand, is where the narrator knows everything about the characters (what they’re thinking, feeling, their motivation for doing the things they do, and so on) as well as the places and settings in the novel, the action and events, and everything else. It is the most flexible of point of views. Some examples of third person omniscient POV include Frank Herbert’s Dune, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
You’ll develop your voice as you write and learn and revise. It’s part of the process.
8. Third person multiple POV is similar to the omniscient POV, but akin to a few third-person limited POVs without the author intruding into the narrative.
9. There’s also another point of view, sometimes referred to as the fourth point of view or the first-person plural point of view, which uses the “We,” “Us,” or “Our” pronouns, though it can also use One, Someone, Anybody, Anyone, Somebody, and so on. It is the group or collective POV, and I’ve seen it used well in the recent past. Novels like Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, all of which were wildly successful.
The last thing I want to mention is the ever-dangerous Shifting POV. This is where the narrative shifts from one character’s voice to another character’s voice, most often by accident, but not always. It’s distracting, for the most part, but like anything in fiction, if you can make it work, go for it. Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake uses a shifting point of view. I used different points of view in my novel, The Losses. Six, in fact, though I broke them into 6 long chapters or mini-novellas. Remember, if it works, it works.
Download the PDFs on Voice, and why it’s so important, the Show, Don’t Tell Quick View, and the point of view checklist. Review them. Copy the excerpts by hand or with your computer or typewriter. See how it feels to show and not tell. Try to create a distinct and interesting voice that’ll hook the reader. And experiment with the different points of view available to you as a writer to understand the pros and cons of each. This is how you learn to write. It’s also how you discover what you’re good at, or at least what your preference might be as you write your novel.
I’ve included some writing exercises for you to do over the next week. I know you’re busy, but the exercises will help you advance on your writing journey that much quicker, so take a few minutes out of your day to do them. Here they are:
Writing exercises
Write a paragraph or two that’s all showing and no (or very little) telling. Remember, use active verbs and know that you’ll be in scene.
Write the opening paragraph of a novel using the most original voice you can come up with. If you need inspiration, think about where your character is from, how old they are, where they lived and when (is it today? A hundred years ago? Sometime in the future?), their education level, if they have any quirks, and so on. You can also reference your favorite novels if you’re still stuck—that’s perfectly fine.
Write a paragraph using each point of view that we’ve discussed today. Do any of them feel more natural to you, in terms of writing? If you’ve already started a novel, do you know which POV you’re using?
Practice the different points of view and review the things you learned in Week Two. Combine them in what you’re writing. If you’re already working on your novel, ask yourself if what you’re learning here applies to what you’ve already written. Can you tighten up what you’ve written based on what you’ve learned? If so, do it. But don’t get bogged down rewriting everything if you haven’t completed your first draft yet. Or if you know what you’ve written is completely off, make the call if it makes sense to just scratch what you’ve written and start over, now that you know what you know. Like I said, it’s your call. Do what makes sense. But write.
Remember to download and use the checklists, worksheets, and Quick Views each week. They’re part of this weekly post/lesson.
I’m Cully Perlman and I’ll can be reached at Cully@NovelMasterClass.com.
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