This Year You Write Your Novel Read online

  This attempt to present your protagonist’s experience of a wildwood area works better than

  The sun-beaten woods were rank smelling, filled with dissonant sounds. Oddly, Mary felt at home there.

  I hope that these examples begin to illustrate the difference between showing and telling in fiction.

  To simply say that Lance Piggott is a violent man is less persuasive than portraying him as a time bomb loose on the world.

  Of course a character that is violent, or seems so, might not have the physical attributes or traits that describe his or her nature. Your character, let’s call her Fawn, might be petite and sweet-looking. In this case you could choose the actions she takes when she’s alone to describe her. She could torture small animals or imagine tormenting and killing a rival; she could, talking sweetly but breathing hard, tell a friend that she would beat in her head with a baseball bat if that friend ever crossed her.

  A character talking is an action too.

  I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all, telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.

  For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic Moby Dick. Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”

  What’s the difference between the two beginnings? The first is definitely stronger on its own. But why? I believe that it is because the original introduction is active; it invites the reader into conversation with a character who, the reader feels, intends to stay around for a while. The character is going to introduce the reader to his world.

  “His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.

  The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately, it attempts to include the reader by engaging with him on a personal level. In this case, Ishmael is conversing with us. In the first example concerning Mary, she not only smells the forest, but the pine tar and eucalyptus burn her nostrils. This is something else that the reader can imagine feeling.

  So I suppose the clearest difference between telling and showing in fiction is, generally, the difference between a purely informational statement and one that attempts to add a human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.

  There are many ways to show in language. Below you will find a few of them.

  sensations

  When experiencing life, we often have physical sensations. Our tongues go dry, the hair stands up on the backs of our necks, our eyelids start twitching. Some people become flatulent when they’re afraid. If you can include the physical reactions to the emotional situations that your characters find themselves in, you will be bringing your readers closer to the experience of the novel.

  If the sensation is one that seems out of place, the reader will want to understand, will want to know more. For instance, a police officer in the execution of his duty is restraining a woman who is trying to stop his partner from arresting her husband. In the struggle with the screaming, clawing woman, the restraining officer experiences an erection. You could say that he experienced sexual arousal—you might decide that this is the best way to put it. Readers will certainly wonder what’s going on with that cop.

  emotions

  Gazing into her walnut-colored eyes, he saw a speck that reminded him of that island he dreamed of as a boy, that place he’d always yearned to be.. .

  I know, maybe a little sappy, but you see where I’m going.

  Emotions inform our responses to the physical world, and our language reflects those responses: I saw red; her heart skipped a beat; I turned to jelly; my blood ran cold. These are all common phrases used to express what we feel in our bodies. To say “I love you,” or “I love him [or her or it],” rather than using a more vivid expression is not strong enough for fiction. You have to get down to the place where the character (and therefore the reader) feels the emotions that drive your novel.

  Maybe your main character as a rule experiences the world as loud sounds and sharp edges. He winces when his boss speaks; he feels the rims of his shoes biting into his ankles when he walks. But when he goes to lunch with Marianne, all of a sudden things become soft and rounded—the air, which burned his lungs on the street, is now soothing him, restoring him. His feet have stopped hurting, and the music being played in the background transports him to a sylvan childhood scene.

  Making emotions physical or imagistic helps bring your reader more deeply into the story. Of course you will have to have many simple informative sentences about the characters’ feelings throughout the text, but you must question every time you use flat descriptive language to describe an emotion, impression, or realization.

  the pedestrian in fiction

  Maybe your main character gets up out of bed and walks across the room to the mirror. You need her to see the bags under her eyes and lines on her aging face. That’s good. But in order to have us feel what it is to get up out of that bed, we might want to add a little more: the sound of the sheets falling to the floor; the urge to urinate, which the protagonist resists in order to see what time and life have wrought upon her visage; the grit beneath her bare feet on the floor; the pain in her left knee that has been with her since a time, years ago, when she twisted her ankle on a stone stairway while attending her mother’s funeral—the mother whom she now so very much resembles. Every one of these details tells and also shows us something about our protagonist and/or her world.

  Most of the details are pedestrian. Why, you might ask, would we want to make the experiences of our character ordinary? Because everyday experiences help the reader relate to the character, which sets up the reader’s acceptance of more extraordinary events that may unfold.

  If your audience believes in the daily humdrum physical and emotional experiences of your characters, then your readers will believe in those characters’ reality and thus can be taken further.

  metaphor and simile

  Lemon Turner was a lion among sheep. Whenever he entered a room, men and women shied away, huddling together behind tables and glancing nervously toward the exits.

  The above example uses metaphor. Lemon Turner is not lion-like—he is a lion; the people around him do not resemble sheep—they are sheep. Lemon’s mere presence turns human beings into herd animals that bleat and run.

  The metaphor is the strongest imagistic intimation in the writer’s bag of tricks.

  Haystack Olds was a brick wall, while Mike Minter might as well have been made from straw. You got the feeling that every punch Mike threw hurt him more than it did Haystack.

  Tyne was a clean, clear northern wind blowing away the detritus of Charles’s messy home.

  The metaphor helps broaden the appreciation of the reader. When, later in Lemon’s tale, a young woman comes up to him holding her head in such a way that she bares her throat, we achieve an added feeling of tension because we know Lemon’s nature. When an unruly child comes into Tyne’s space, we wonder if he will be blown away or sat up straight.

  The metaphor definitely shows us something—something that we both see and imagine. Tyne cannot look like an invisible gale, but her wake and her energy remind us of an open window on a gusty day. Lemon might not have a great mane of hair, but the reader’s imagination will imbue him with a feral voice or lithe step.

  And it’s not only human beings that are transformed by metaphor; anything in the writer’s realm can also be something else.

  The sun, for instance, can be a grueling taskmaster who, with solar whip in hand, drives your characters across the vast plain of your novel.

  Once you set a metaphor in a reader’s mind, it will stay with them for many pages. It will free their imaginations and help you with the telling of your tale.

  But be careful: you shoul
dn’t overuse this tool. A man who is straw, another who is brick, a lion loose in the house with a woman who is also a wind—all together these could be too much. Overuse of metaphorical language will test a novel’s credibility.

  You must also be true to the metaphors you use. If a man is a lion, leave him that way. Don’t make him into a wall or a wind too. This is called mixing metaphor—a sure way to lose your reader.

  Sometimes you need an image, but the full-blown metaphor is too strong. That’s okay. We have a tool for the milder image making—the simile.

  Her skin was like fine china, white and brittle-looking, etched here and there with faded blue images—tattoos that would mark her for life.

  We are not afraid to touch this woman. We know that she actually has human skin—skin that is reminiscent of fired clay. We hold the cobalt-glazed-porcelain image in our minds, knowing all the while that if she fell, she would not shatter.

  There are all kinds of similes. You could say that her skin was like china, her eyes like angry skies, his fists like stone, or their combined presence and mien was as a stand of great oaks—dignified and somber.

  The simile tries our credulity less than the metaphor; it also creates a weaker image.

  But the simile allows the reader to see more clearly the two sides of the subject—that which is its normal state and also the image it is compared to. Sometimes this sort of double vision fits the novelist’s purposes more closely than the dynamic metaphor.

  Depending on the demands of your story, you may have either similes or metaphors—or both—in your novel (the one you are writing this year). They will enhance the reader’s vision of the places and characters you are presenting, and they will show the reader, without lifeless explanations, what that world looks like and how it feels to be there.

  final note on showing and telling

  What you must always remember is that the novel is more experiential than it is informational. Your reader might learn something, but most of what they learn is gained through what they are shown about the lives and circumstances of the characters therein.

  character and character development

  All novels, short stories, and plays, and most poems, are about human transformation. The subject of the novel is the human spirit and psyche—how the characters interact in their relationships with other souls and with the world in general. In some stories the human being might be replaced by a metaphor-made-real such as a robot with a soul or a pig with the ability to speak and think—but these simulacra are just another way of looking at ourselves.

  In the novel there has to be movement in the personality structure of the main character or characters. This is to say that, in part, the purpose of the novel is to map out the events in the protagonist’s life that cause her to change. This change and the events that flow from it are why we read and write books.

  And so the characters in the novel must be completely believable. They will have to stand up to the closest scrutiny by readers, editors, and critics. One of the most important things that you will do this year will be to create complex, authentic characters that begin at one point in their lives and advance (or devolve) to another.

  The following example is a longish outline of a dramatic arc that will serve to not only elucidate character development but also introduce you to other aspects of writing that we will cover later on in this book. Bear with this story, and I promise that your tolerance will be repaid.

  Bob Millar and his family, while traveling through the southwestern desert, are kidnapped by a gang of brigands who brutalize Bob; rape and murder his wife, Amy, and his daughter, Leanne; kill his son Aldo outright; and blind his youngest boy, Lyle. After this first wave of violence, the attackers, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, fall into a stupor. Bob, badly beaten and half blind himself, takes Lyle up in his arms and runs three miles through the desert night.

  When he is maybe a mile away from the killers’ encampment, he hears a wild cry from their maniacal leader. Bob continues to run, followed by the yells of his pursuers, finally coming to a road, where a passing moving van stops to help him.

  The above is the central event of the novel.

  I might begin the book with Bob running through the desert, his disoriented son swooning in his arms, asking, almost incoherently, about his mother and siblings. While running, Bob obsessively remembers the drive into the desert and the petty argument he was having with Amy. Underlying this spat was a suspicion that Bob has harbored for years: he has long suspected that Amy and his friend Alfred Jones had an affair.

  In this way I get to know Bob at the fundamental moment of his transition. We see the husband and wife taking jabs at each other, and then we hear the bloodcurdling screams in the darkness.

  Maybe we also learn that the child, Lyle, loves chocolate.

  And there we have it. Bob Millar, with his blind son in his arms, running out of his old life and into a terrible new phase in which he will have to learn many things: He will have to forgive himself for failing to protect his family. He will have to help his son deal with the pain of his losses. Somehow he will have to overcome the terror wrought upon him by the land pirates who decimated so many lives.

  Looking at the beginning of a novel in this way, we are confronted with many of the basic elements of fiction writing. There’s the story, the plot, the characters, and the serious underlying question—what is the novel about?

  But right now all we care about is character and character development, and the only character we will discuss in detail is Bob and his redemption—or his downfall.

  Bob is a weak man in many ways. He suspects that his wife had a passionate affair with his friend and even that his youngest son, the blind boy in his arms, may be the fruit of that union. But despite his suspicions, he has remained silent all these years. He has become spiteful and petty. His marriage has turned into a bitter dance in which he and Amy move around each other in a ballet of continual resentment.

  After the truck driver takes father and son to the police, Bob collapses. Amy’s parents come to collect Lyle. They try to talk to Bob in his hospital bed, but he sees them as if they were very far away. His lips are numb and his voice is strained. He wants them to leave.

  When he is told that he’s lost the sight in the injured eye, he doesn’t seem to care. When he’s told that his son will be raised by his in-laws, he says, “He probably wasn’t mine anyway.” Bob’s boss sends his secretary, Ramona, to tell Bob that he’s being replaced but will receive unemployment insurance and disability.

  Bob’s response to his loss of employment is to tell Ramona that they never liked him at work. He seems to have developed a very clear vision of himself—an almost objective POV that allows him to know things that he never was able to understand before. This knowledge, however, is impotent—it does not push him to take action.

  “No one has ever really known me,” Bob says. “If I was someone else, maybe Brian [his boss] would have found a place for me. I wouldn’t have stayed, but. . . #8221;

  Failing to lighten Bob’s mood, Ramona promises to return. Bob forgets her immediately upon her departure.

  For a while Bob wonders about himself. He remembers his children and his wife, the days spent criticizing Amy. These memories might be punctuated with the last moments of each family member’s life.

  He remembers his mother (Bernadette) and how unhappy she was living with his stepfather, Simon.

  There is no solace in Bob’s earlier life memories. He has, it seems, always been taciturn and bitter.

  The doctor informs Bob that his insurance will not cover any further time in the hospital. While he is dressing to leave, the police come and inform him that they have caught the killers; they need him to come down and identify them. He tries, but the moment they open the curtains to the lineup, he faints.. .

  We now have Bob’s character set in our mind. We know who he was before the vicious attack. We know what a wreck he is now. We also see the possible ways
he might go. Will he gain the courage to face his attackers? Will he forgive Amy? Will he and Ramona have something more than he’d known before? Will he find out that Lyle is not his son and love him anyway?

  What will become of Bob? Who will emerge from the novel?

  These last two questions are difficult. They represent the structure of Bob’s character-to-be. It doesn’t matter how the author treats him. Maybe Bob sinks into a malaise and dies unredeemed. Maybe his son rises as the hero of the book. Maybe Bob smuggles a gun into the trial and kills the (so far) nameless psycho that murdered his family.

  Maybe he forgives the killers.

  What matters is that you hook the readers on Bob’s predicament (in this case, a crisis) and make them intimate with his limitations and the issues he has to resolve in order to overcome the impediments in his path. There is no novel unless Bob experiences a transition. And there can be no meaningful transition unless we feel deeply for Bob.

  And it’s not only Bob. Every character we meet in this year’s novel must have something uniquely human about them—the waitress (who appears only on one page of the book) with the remnants of a shiner about her left eye; the killer who regrets his acts; the wife who, in Bob’s memory, holds on fiercely to her independence and the value of her life.

  Lyle, Bob’s sole surviving child, must come to grips with his blindness and his father’s abandonment. Ramona has to have a reason to want to help Bob. This means that she has a history that we must at least partially uncover in order to understand her motivations.

  Most novels follow various central characters to differing degrees. Each of these people must have a definite nature that engages the reader’s attention.

  A character is made up of many attributes: the way he talks; her age and education; his level of cleanliness; his bravery or cowardice; their love of life or sex or food.

  As with the metaphor, you should not give your character too many traits or tics. You must choose those attributes, features, characteristics, or qualities that help to define this character—to make him memorable and, to some degree, predictable.