Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

I've finished outlining my fantasy trilogy and finally started writing the thing. Shocking, right? And you thought I was going to talk about it endlessly but never follow through. (That's okay. I kind of did too.)

Now the problem is, I'm terribly out of practice writing fiction. After Kagemusha I swore off novels forever. Then I changed my mind and outlined some stories that turned out to be terrible ideas. And then I started plotting this trilogy...last June. Egads.

During the past nine months, I concentrated my studies on story structure. What is a story, what is a conflict, what makes a conflict interesting, etc. I watched many dramas and read many novels and picked them apart to figure out what made them effective (or not).

But I didn't study writing. Voice. Mood. Pacing. All that good stuff. To recycle a metaphor from an old post, I've become reasonably proficient at baking cakes. But now I have to figure out how to decorate them nicely. And to cite another old post, both substance and presentation are important in writing.

So I'm slowly redirecting the focus of my musings from creating stories to writing them. The topic for today is that infamous adage, "Show, don't tell."

What Showing Is and Isn't

The word showing is misleading. In everyday use it means "to cause or allow something to be seen," so you might think narrative showing means writing a novel like it's a play-by-play of a movie. Describe all emotions through facial features, all reactions through body language, all scenes like the reader is watching them unfold on a screen. I've seen writing articles advocate describing "what the camera sees." This is a terrible misunderstanding of what showing means.

Books aren't movies. Reading a book is a very different experience from watching a movie. The advice to "show, don't tell" doesn't mean you should give visual descriptions of everything. Rather, it means you should provide solid evidence of characters' thoughts and feelings through their choices and experiences.

Let's say you're writing a romance and want to communicate that your hero, Daniel, is in love with your heroine, Sarah. You can take several approaches.

First, you can tell. The hero says to his best bro, "I think I'm in love with Sarah." Or during a scene with Sarah, you tell us point blank, "At that moment, Daniel realized he was in love."

Second, you can show the way a movie does. You can describe Daniel's eyes softening, his heart pounding, his fingers tingling when they brush against Sarah's.

Third, your hero can demonstrate his feelings through his actions. At the scene level, he might subtly show off his best traits around Sarah, find excuses to sit close to her and touch her hand, or go out of his way to make her happy. At the plot point level, he might sacrifice something he values to be with her, like a precious friendship or a career opportunity.

The three approaches above are in order of narrative impact. Telling has the least impact and elicits the smallest emotional response from the reader. Showing the physical symptoms of an emotion is okay in small doses, but too many bitten lips and thumping hearts will come across as lazy attempts to dodge telling. Demonstrating the hero's feelings through his choices and behavior is the most powerful way to do it.

When Telling Is Best

Many writers think of telling as a deadly poison so toxic that the tiniest whiff of it will kill a book dead. But there are many times when telling is the best approach.

When an event is inherently boring, showing it won't make it more interesting. For anything mundane that doesn't move the story forward, you can simply tell it and get it out of the way. There's no point in showing readers how a gentle spring breeze caressed the heroine's face during the short walk from her sky-blue convertible to the cafe, and a bell on the door jingled as she entered, and she closed her eyes and inhaled the comforting scents of coffee and scones, and then she glanced at the antique clock on the wall and realized she was ten minutes early, so she ordered a mochaccino with extra whipped cream and sipped the hot, sweet liquid while waiting for her friend Jane.

You lose nothing by cutting that out and telling us, "Sarah arrived at the cafe ten minutes early. She sipped a mochaccino while waiting for Jane." Then Jane arrives and interesting things happen.

Telling can also be necessary for clarity. Sometimes writers, including me, try too hard to show things creatively. For example, a writer determined to be clever might show that Sarah is ten minutes early by saying, "She glanced at the antique clock on the wall. The long pewter minute hand pointed at the X."

This sentence shows "what the camera sees," so it's great writing, right? No. Not right. It's horribly confusing. A movie audience can look at a brief shot of an analog clock and know what time it is, but a reader has to envision the thing, mentally convert the Roman numeral to a digit, and figure out what it means when the minute hand points at the 10.

When Showing Is Best

The point of showing is to transform reading from a passive activity to an interactive one. When you show things instead of stating them outright, readers engage with the story by immersing themselves in the scenes and using their imaginations to interpret them.

There's no point in making a reader work hard to interpret what time it is, so telling is the better choice in the theoretical example above. But there is a point in making a reader work hard to figure out what characters are thinking and feeling and what they might do next. The process of interpretation creates sympathy.

If you want to convey that Sarah is angry, you could write this.

Sarah smiled and thanked Johnny for the souvenir, but inside she was seething.

This does indeed convey that Sarah is angry. But readers will simply think, Okay, she's angry. They won't feel anything.

Instead, you could write this.

Sarah smiled and thanked Johnny for the souvenir. She kept on smiling as Johnny winked and left the room. She picked up the snow globe. Glitter swirled around the plastic Statue of Liberty.

She threw the globe at the wall. The glass shattered. Sparkling slime dribbled down the dark wood.

Now to understand Sarah's actions, readers will put themselves in her place. They'll remember times when they too felt the urge to smash things against walls. They'll feel that rage and frustration afresh. This is sympathy. (Of course they won't realize they're doing all this, because it's instinctual. We're very social creatures and develop empathy naturally by the age of six or seven.)

Therefore, showing is the better choice for any concept or event that should have emotional impact. If you want the reader to cry, swoon, rage, or cheer about something, you must show it. Telling won't cut it.

Last month I read a high fantasy about a teenage girl, we'll call her Georgette, who has a gift for Dragon Magic. It's illegal for females to use Dragon Magic, so she disguises herself as a young boy, George, to train as an apprentice Dragon Master.

The first quarter of the book builds up to the annual ceremony to select a new Dragon Master. All seems lost when the dragon chooses another candidate. But then the ruler of the dragons, the Dragon Queen, appears in the mortal world for the first time in centuries—and selects Georgette. To bond with her, Georgette must call out her true name. But revealing her name would reveal her sex, and then she would be executed. So she instead shouts that her name is George, and the Dragon Queen fades away in disappointment.

This is the most dramatic scene in the novel so far. The reader is supposed to sympathize with Georgette and feel the terror and desperation that drives her choice. Instead, I felt impatient.

The problem: this book tells the reader that a girl using Dragon Magic is punishable by death, but it never shows the danger the heroine is in. Georgette says several times that she'll die if anyone discovers her secret. But the reader doesn't see any actual threats to her life, or to the life of another girl who committed a similar crime. For example, Georgette could have witnessed the beheading of a woman who'd taken her brother's place in the army, or she could have had a friend who died in the past after getting caught practicing Dragon Magic. Then readers would have shared Georgette's terror and felt the full weight of her plight.

But because this "certain death" was purely theoretical, I felt nothing. When the Dragon Queen demanded Georgette's true name and she thought, No! That would mean my death!, I thought, "Girl, if you say two syllables you'll be the most powerful person in the empire. I'm pretty sure that enormous dragon can take on an executioner with a dinky little axe." The scene was a great idea, but conveying Georgette's internal conflict through telling alone sucked the tension out of it.

Now for a positive example: Harriet Bulstrode from Middlemarch. Harriet is a bubbly woman who loves fashionable clothes and fancy hats. When a scandal ruins her husband's reputation, this is how she reacts.

She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist.

...[As] she went towards him she thought he looked smaller—he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly—

"Look up, Nicholas."

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side.

This scene wouldn't be nearly as touching if Harriet had instead made a big speech about how she'll stand by her man, as characters in modern novels often do.

I think the art of showing has deteriorated somewhat because standards for communication are much different now than they were in 1874, when Middlemarch was published. In days of old, reading between the lines was an important social skill. As a young man says to his Victorian father at the end of The Age of Innocence, "You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath."

But these days, we in the Western world value frankness and have little patience for people who beat around the bush. We don't try to read minds or expect other people to read ours. When we want to express something, we simply say it. We don't come up with sneaky ways to demonstrate our intentions, like 19th-century grand dames expressing severe disapproval by serving low tea on the cheap china.

Because writers today are more likely to tell than show in real life, showing in novels has been reduced to clenched fists and somersaulting stomachs and "what the camera sees." Think bigger! Think Victorian! Think about how a character expresses himself through actions and how his choices contradict his words, not just about whether his eyes are stormy or twinkling.

Every writer agrees that conflict is the basis of story, but we all seem to define "conflict" a different way. Here are some sample definitions I see around the Internet.

• Something that creates dramatic tension.
• Something that prevents a character from getting what he wants or values.
• A struggle between two or more forces which drives the action of the plot.

Though these are all accurate, I don't think any of them are quite complete. Dramatic conflict is difficult to define succinctly because, though it's a noun, it's not a "thing." It's a descriptor of the relationship between things.

An external conflict is the relationship between a character with a goal and other characters or forces that prevent him from achieving it. For example, the piglet Wilbur wants to live happily with his spider friend Charlotte, but Farmer Zuckerman wants to slaughter him. Only one of them can get what he wants, so these two characters are in conflict.

An internal conflict is the relationship between two aspects of the same character, like what he wants to do vs. what he must do, or who he wants to be vs. who he is. For example, Anne Shirley wants to be a respectable young lady, but she's too impulsive and gets herself into many comedic scrapes. Her wishes and compulsions are in conflict.

Why is conflict important?

The first suggested definition of conflict, "Something that creates dramatic tension," is very vague, but it gets at the root of why conflict is so important. Conflict creates tension, the excitement an audience feels when anticipating how characters will react to a situation. Tension is what makes fiction interesting and addictive. Readers keep turning the pages to see whether Wilbur will outwit the farmer and survive, or whether Anne will grow up and be accepted by the people of Avonlea.

I thought I understood conflict and tension pretty well, but then last month I read Mary Kole's Writing Irresistible Kidlit and had a Eureka! moment. Kole presented two graphs like these.

My moment of insight was that these two graphs show the same thing. The graph of narrative tension shows the distance between a character's emotional state and happiness. Introducing conflict takes a character further away from happiness, which creates anxiety in the audience as they sympathize with him and root for him. Resolving conflict drains narrative tension by allowing the character and audience to feel at ease.

Perhaps instead of happiness, I should say "potential for happiness." There's no tension when a character sits around moping about the pointlessness of life. There is tension when a character wants very much to live happily ever after with his college sweetheart, but she disappears without a trace, and he's desperate to find her. This creates a conflict between the hero and the unknown enemies that ruined his future, and resolving it will drain the tension. In a feel-good resolution, the hero might fulfill the potential for happiness by reuniting with his true love. In a tragic one, he might lose the potential for happiness forever by discovering she was murdered.

Of course most stories are more complex, with many serial conflicts and side conflicts to raise the tension up to the climax. Enemy forces aren't what they seem to be, characters hurt themselves because they don't recognize what will really make them happy, etc.

Plot Point	Conflict/Resolution
The hero wakes up on the day of his wedding and finds that his fiance has disappeared.	Conflict #1: hero vs. the unknown
The police assume the bride got cold feet, and nobody takes the hero's concerns seriously.	Conflict #2: hero vs. authority
A hiker finds the fiance's body in the woods.	Tragic resolutions of #1 and #2
In his grief, the hero vows to find and exact revenge on the person who killed the love of his life.	Conflict #3: hero vs. the murderer
The hero finds the murderer, but he also finds a letter his fiance wrote in captivity, asking him not to let this evil person destroy his life as well as hers. The hero is torn.	Conflict #4: the hero's bloodlust vs. his desire to honor his fiance's wishes
In the final showdown, the hero points a gun at the murderer. He struggles between the urge to pull the trigger and the memory of his fiance's last words. He decides his fiance wouldn't have wanted him to become a monster himself, and he lowers the gun.	Resolutions of #3 and #4

Whether that last table row provides a satisfying conclusion to the story depends on the genre. Noir-type audiences can tolerate the hero walking away and the culprit disappearing into the mists, but cozy audiences won't feel that Conflict #3, between the hero and murderer, is truly resolved until they see the bad guy dead or incarcerated. They need the threat of future conflict eliminated completely to feel at peace.

What makes a conflict interesting and effective?

Adding effective conflicts to stories isn't terribly difficult. You simply need to identify what's vital to a character's happiness, then threaten it or snatch it away. Even better, pit it against something else that's vital to the character's happiness, but she can't have both.

For example, in a cute chick lit novel, the Manhattanite heroine might find happiness by forgiving her repentant ex-boyfriend and giving their relationship another shot. But that's hard for her to do because...

• ...her pride is very important to her. She wants to kiss and make up, but she stubbornly gives him the cold shoulder instead. (Internal conflict)
• ...her family is very important to her. Her parents care a lot about their reputation in high society and dislike the ex-boyfriend because he's a starving violinist. (External conflict)
• ...fidelity is very important to her, and she's now dating a kind and handsome stock broker who adores her. (Both internal and external conflicts)

Interesting conflicts force characters to face tough choices and evaluate their priorities. Their resolutions will push the story forward by creating more conflicts.

Say the heroine is facing all three conflicts above. She conquers her pride and confesses to the stock broker that she still has feelings for her ex. But instead of bowing out, the stock broker shows up at one of her mother's charity events, where the ex is in the string quartet providing entertainment. In front of everyone, the stock broker gets down on one knee, proclaims his undying love, and proposes with a giant diamond ring.

Now we have an exciting new batch of conflicts. If the heroine turns the stock broker down, she'll humiliate him and her parents. If she accepts, she'll hurt the man she loves and trap herself in an engagement she doesn't want. Either decision will create even more conflicts that must be resolved before she and the violinist can live happily ever after.

Do bigger conflicts create more tension?

While raising the stakes of a conflict can increase tension, raising them too high can backfire. If the character's plight becomes too unbelievable or unrelateable, readers won't care anymore.

In our hypothetical chick lit novel, say the heroine's father is the CEO of a sports apparel company, and his biggest client is a department store owned by the stock broker's father. This would make the proposal scene more interesting because it makes the heroine's decision more difficult. If she embarrasses the stock broker and angers his family, she could endanger her parents' livelihood.

But say, instead, that the heroine's grandmother has a heart condition, and the heroine is afraid that the shock of a scandal will kill her. This would just come across as melodramatic. Everyone in contemporary America can sympathize with the fear of causing offense and alienating important people. Nobody worries about accidentally killing grandma by turning a guy down.

The key to raising tension isn't necessarily making conflicts "bigger," but making them more painful. If your fluffy romance is boring, you won't fix it by dropping in some mobsters to shoot the hero and kidnap the heroine. You should instead fix it by making the relationship, or the obstacles to it, more heartbreaking for the characters involved.

Writers have intense feelings about outlining. Some love it and actively advocate for it, while others despise it with a startling passion. To me, outlining is like exercising. I don't love or hate exercising; it's simply something I must do to stay healthy. I don't love or hate outlining, either; it's simply something I must do to write good stories.

Outlining is hard work. It's not "fun." It's fun to get excited by an awesome idea for a novel and start writing it immediately. It's not fun to critically examine your awesome idea, find out it's not so awesome after all, and rack your brains to figure out how you can make it awesome. Outlining forces writers to confront brutal truths about their stories, so it's only natural that many invent excuses for skipping straight to the fun part. I've seen the following arguments against outlining on the Internet and even in writing advice books.

• "Plotters" who stick to rigid road maps of how a story should go end up forcing characters to behave unbelievably.
• Outlining is all about external plot. It doesn't take character development or themes or story questions into account.
• Outlining robs you of the joy of discovering the story and characters along the way. Then writing is boring and there's no point in doing it.
• Outlining stifles the creative juices and leads to writing that's forced and flat.

These would be damning flaws of outlining if they were true. But each of these downsides isn't a result of outlining itself, but a result of either (a) outlining poorly or (b) writing poorly and blaming outlining for it.

Outlines are flexible project plans, not rigid road maps.

Some of my middle and high school teachers tried to teach good writing habits by first assigning outlines, then rough drafts that followed those outlines, then polished final papers. They had admirable intentions, but they may have accidentally taught a fatal misconception about outlining. An outline is not something you make once at the beginning of a project, then follow to the letter. It should instead be a living document that you tweak continuously throughout the writing process.

When my team at PCC was redesigning the library website—a project that required cooperation between many individuals and departments—we kept a comprehensive project plan in Google Sheets. Every week we reexamined this plan and made adjustments. Are these due dates realistic? Do we need to add anything? Is there anything we can drop? By the time the new site went live, the plan looked nothing like it had when we'd first written it up the year before.

Nobody comes up with flawless ideas during brainstorming sessions at the start of a project. After you outline a story, you're going to start writing and find your original ideas don't pan out, and you'll want to take the characters in different directions. So what do you do? Do you trash the outline and wing it from there?

Imagine an architect is building a house based on original blueprints. After construction starts, the builders find that the measurements in a couple of the rooms aren't quite right. So the architect crumples up the blueprints and says, "Guess blueprinting doesn't work. Let's just make it up as we go!"

Plans are never perfect, but that doesn't mean there's no point in making them. When you find a character's behavior unbelievable, or a scene nonsensical, you should go back to your outline and plot a new course. It's foolish to force your story to stay on a bad path, but it's equally foolish to dash off on an alluring new path without stopping to think about where you might end up.

Outlining forces you to evaluate everything, not just plot.

The criticism that outlining sacrifices character development for plot makes little sense to me, because characters drive plot. A plot consists of characters making decisions and dealing with the consequences. If it doesn't, you don't have a story—you have a bunch of stuff that happens.

So in order to outline a story in the first place, you have to know your characters. You have to examine them after each plot point and figure out the next point by asking, What are they feeling? What do they want? What will they do next to achieve their goals?

Once you have the outline, you'll also be forced to look at its themes and overall arc...or lack thereof. I first started writing Kagemusha with no outline; it was just a series of screwball episodes. Then when I was ready to commit to completing the novel, I wrote brief synopses of the episodes in a logical sequence on my whiteboard. I remember staring at the result for a bit and then saying, "Fudge, this book has no story." So I had to come up with an antagonist whose interactions with the main character pushed the book towards some sort of conclusion.

Outlining doesn't make writing boring. Boring stories make writing boring.

My father watches 1776 every year on July 4. My mother pounces on every print edition, audio recording, and movie adaptation of Middlemarch she can find. Sweetie has seen the Star Wars movies so many times he's nearly memorized the dialogue.

Truly great stories can be enjoyed over and over, because the fun of reading or watching them isn't in learning what happens. The fun is in witnessing how it happens, and in freaking out or swooning or laughing along with the characters.

The same is true of writing. If you feel bored while writing, it's not because you know what happens next. It's because you're writing a boring story.

I've had many novel ideas die in infancy. My writing folder is a mass grave of ideas for upmarket historicals, contemporary rom-coms, cozy mysteries, and YA fantasies. After I outlined them, I lost interest in writing them.

But there are other ideas that interest me months or years after coming up with them. I can replay the imaginary scenes in my head daily and never tire of them. I can write a hundred pages of notes and still feel excited to work on the real thing.

If outlining kills your story, it probably wasn't a viable story to begin with. If you'd forgone outlining and jumped right in, after writing the bulk of the first draft you would've come to the same conclusion: this story is boring. This story isn't worth writing. Then you'd feel defeated and spend the next week soothing your battered ego with soy ice cream and Filipino soap operas. (This has never happened to me, of course. Nope. Not a once.)

Outlining feeds creativity.

Some people say they hate outlining because it "boxes them in." They don't like feeling restricted and say they can write well only if they're free to explore the story world on the page.

But in my experience, outlining opens up possibilities, while writing linearly closes them.

I have yet to meet a "pantser" who can get to the end of a project, admit that it's not working, reevaluate the story to find the root causes of the problems, and try again. Instead they'll write themselves into corners and stay there. They'll insist the corners can work. They'll fight to keep their corners and try to minimize gaping holes in the walls by revising only one chapter or one minor character. (This has also never happened to me. Not a once. *cough* Bubbles Pop *cough*)

When you write blindly, it's easy to get trapped on a path that leads to disaster...or at least to mediocrity. But if you outline first, you can look ahead to many paths. You can make infinite changes without committing to anything. You can change the characters, fix plot holes, spice up scenes and raise stakes, until you hit on that story that keeps you excited after a hundred pages of notes.

***

Putting together a good story is hard. Telling it well is even harder. Doing both at the same time is nearly impossible.

To express yourself coherently, you need to first figure out what you want to say, then figure out the best way to say it. Writing without knowing exactly what you're writing is simply rambling.

Maybe the word "outline" puts writers' guards up because of traumatic experiences with those well-meaning K-12 teachers. You can call it something else. A project plan. A story diagram. A skeleton draft. At outline doesn't have to be the strict hierarchy of Roman numerals you were forced to make in eighth-grade Language Arts; it can take whatever shape is most useful to you.

If you don't want to write anything down, you should at least outline in your head. Figure out where you're going and what you want to say. Identify the conflicts, the story questions, the character and narrative arcs. Then the most unpleasant work of writing a novel will be largely taken care of, and you can throw yourself into the fun part.