Best way to revise?

It sounds like "show versus tell" advice.

Readers like to see events happening, rather than be told about them. There are dozens of threads on "show/tell" in this forum, and there's an FAQ stickied to the top with several links.

Heh. I send emails like this all the time to my writers.

In a nutshell, what Chaos said. Instead of telling the reader what YOU think they need to know, let them see it. It's like this. You want the reader to be fully engaged in what's happening right? Well, in between you and them is an invisible wall--the story is behind it, the readers in front. Instead of narrating what's going on behind that wall, let them "watch" it.

Make it active instead of passive.

Here's a quickie to try:

If any characters does a "looked and saw" or "Jane watched as..." in your narrative, do a global search for those and excise them.

This is very basic show, don't tell editing. It takes practice, but you'll get the hang of it. Writing is like learning to play music, you need to practice at it to get good.

Here's an example I posted for a different thread:

The wall fell with a crash!

(Narrative is rarely made more exciting with over the top punctuation, BTW.) The following is a better alternative to flat description of what's happened:

Something heavy shifted above me. The wall, solid a moment ago, swayed like a ship's sail. It belled outward in the same way, making grinding, cracking sounds. Heart in my throat, I bolted. It crashed into the space where I'd been; dust billowed up in choking, blinding clouds. I'd missed death by inches, but kept on running, certain there was more to come.


You can check through any blocks of narrative and see if there is a different way to write them.

It helps to read things out loud. If it seems to drag and you can't wait to finish a paragraph and move on to one that's more interesting to read, you've probably found a flat spot needing a fix. That's what the agent is after.

Good luck!

If you feel up to it, you could pop your first 1000 words or so into the SYW Forum.

Looks like scissors may be needed coupled with re-phrasing to take the authorial 'telling' aspect out and give the reader a greater sense of experiencing things through a POV character's perspective.

To have specific examples of how to achieve the above may be of help. (ETA - as per previous post).



good luck.

The truism, 'Show, don't tell,' covers a lot of territory.

On a 'whole-story' level this means plotting that uses dialog and action and internals to tell the story
rather than narration.

Not -- Twelve battalions converged on the small town of Chesterton, determined to quench the fire of the rebellion.
But -- Tony looked out the window at dawn. Rose-white lights circled the horizon, strangely, horribly beautiful. Campfires. The enemy had arrived.

'Tell' tells the story.
'Show' puts us inside the story.

Plotting for 'show-not-tell' on a whole-story level,
means general avoidance of scenery, exposition, description, backstory, explanation
and all the other ways the author speaks directly to the reader,
where action can be used instead.



On the level of a scene, 'show-not-tell', means information is conveyed not in narration, but in action and dialog.

-- Information comes to the reader through the filter of a character's perception.

-- It comes in real time, at the speed of the character's emotional response. (One way to 'show-not-tell' is just to slow the hell down.)

-- 'Show' concentrates on specifics that can be touched, smelled, heard and seen. 'Show' is about close stuff. About pokable, sniffable, pick-it-up stuff.

-- When we 'show' ... every object is in an intimate and immediate context. The world is stripped of what happened three years ago or in another country or the everyday usage of the object or what they called the dumwhizzle thingum in Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty.
Objects and actions are about what's happening now.

-- The scene is focussed by the character's attention. The reader 'sees' only what the character is interested in.


Not -- Jeremy was a hopeless gawk. He'd been that way since High School.
which is narration and the writer speaking to the audience.

But -- Jeremy untangled himself from the front door mat, Karen's dog -- appropriately named 'Trip' -- the overturned aspidistra and his shoe laces. What a klutz. "You haven't changed a bit," she said.
which is action, an internal, and dialog.

Deep character Point of View tends to keep us in 'showing' mode.
So a good, easy, natural path to 'show-not-tell' is to review deep POV and learn to get into it and stay there.


In the interests of not throwning the baby out with the bathwater --

let me add that sometimes you find yourself with information to convey that can't be easily put into a character's internal monologue or dialog or shown by a character's actions.
(This is a good time to ask yourself if you really need this information. Hmmm? Do you? Are you sure?)

If you need the specific info,
this may be one of the many times the writer conveys complex information economically and simply by 'telling'.

Joshua lifted the cup to his lips. Coffee. The true bean of it, and fresh. Coffee came to Latruria by caravan over the hills of Ghangith. That path had been blocked for months by the mountain bandits. The only other source was the sea route. Smugglers. Jandru's smugglers.

He set the cup down without drinking. "How long have you been in Jandru's pay, Madame?"


So sometimes we 'tell-not-show'.

It's not that 'tell' is wrong and 'show' is right.
They serve different purposes.

But basically -- nobody ever felt her heart going all pitter patter because the narrator says 'John explained to Myra how much he loved her. He was extremely eloquent.'

Showing sucks us into the story. Telling informs us.
You need both.

Ideally, you know when you're showing and when you're telling, and you know why.

So is mine.

The same standards apply. It doesn't mean your MC is standing dead center out front telling the reader what's going on. The narrative of the story is internal dialogue/recollection from a single POV. It just has different pronouns. Sure; it's going to be colored by the perception of the character but instead of relating it the character is experiencing it and that brings in the reader in a more intimate fashion.

Gillhoughly's example was first person.

sleepsheep said:

This is fantastic advice, but I think my case is particularly difficult because my story is a first-person narrative!

Click to expand...

sleepsheep said:

This current request for revisions is more abstract. For example:

> I need to SEE things. This advice sounds a bit like Fiction Writing
> 101, but really, the book is a lot of heavy summation at times, and
> not enough visuals. I don't need paragraph after paragraph of
> description, but in order to become more engaged with the story, the
> reader should be able to visualize things fluently and clearly on
> his/her own accord.

How do I approach this?

Click to expand...

It sounds like you're over-describing things. For example, when you introduce a new character, you don't need paragraphs of what they're wearing, what they look like, where they grew up, etc. Instead pick two or three things that are important to the story and work them into the narrative. Your reader will fill in the rest.

This is true with people, places and, er, things. The trick is deciding what is important for the reader to know and what the reader can make up for themselves. Paragraphs of description and info-dumping will drag your story down, so reducing this is critical.

sleepsheep said:

This is fantastic advice, but I think my case is particularly difficult because my story is a first-person narrative!

Click to expand...

What might be called 'depth of POV' works in both First and Third Person.

It's about how close the reader is to the character. It's about looking through the eyes, feeling through the skin of the character. About 'being there'.



Shallow Depth or Distant Viewpoint or whatever you want to call it, in First Person --

The red SUV Ranger just grazed me. I rolled down into the tall, thick weeds in the ditch by the side of the road. I lay still at the bottom, badly hurt.

Deep --
Red and bright chrome flashed out of nowhere. The shock of wind hit like a fist.

The road slammed me and hurled me sideways. Gravel clawed my face. The sky spun by, then the screaming red of the car, then black dirt.

My mouth was full of weeds. I lay, gasping, in the slimy water. Choking. Shock receded slowly, letting the pain settle onto me, heavy as rocks, pulling me down.


This is kinda classic 'show versus tell'.

Deep POV is immediate and sensory. It's all about the perception of the viewpoint character. It -- you can see this above -- is generally longer.

Shallow POV is informational. It's a survey.

For me shallow POV is a first draft. It's the skeleton I use to build the body of the story.

Okay, here's a first person example of how not to mechanically describe an event:

Anyone watching two women trying to hitch a caravan to an ancient car could have been forgiven for thinking they’d booked tickets for a pantomime. Okay, so the car didn’t have a towing ball thingy, but a rope threaded round the back bumper should have done it. When the bumper started to bulge, we attached the rope to the roof rack. Well, at least the roof rack didn’t slide to the ground until I’d managed to advance nearly three feet. After wrapping rope round the whole car, we did wonder if the windscreen would take the strain, but the front of the caravan immediately digging itself into the ground meant that wasn’t going to be a problem.

We were taking a break to get our breath back and drink coffee when Terry the burly postman arrived. Saying not a word, he walked round the two vehicles, twanged the rope, nodded and got back into his van.

‘Thanks, mate,’ muttered Sarah. ‘Just walk off and leave us to it, why don’t you?’

‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘For a minute there I thought he was going to help, but he obviously changed his mind.’

‘Are you sure he’s got one?’ asked Sarah.

We got the answer to that when Terry’s postie van trundled back down the lane, followed by a tractor.

It only cost a couple of beers for Farmer Sutton’s cowman to move the caravan to the side of the house.

I wish I had a monkey with a stick that watched me write so it could give me a whack whenever it saw me telling to much.

mscelina said:

For me shallow POV is a first draft. It's the skeleton I use to build the body of the story.

Click to expand...

Draft does tend to be a sketch, doesn't it? Lots of 'telling' that we turn into longer, more detailed 'showing' later on.

I'm a big fan of brackets ... [They go upstairs and make love] or [He hits Gerard and they roll on the floor and fight].

In terms of 'show versus tell' ... this is often so over-simplified.
I always feel like I have to defend 'telling' a little bit. We need a lot of,
'She hurried through the store, buying supplies almost at random. She made it back to the jeep just as Homer limped out of Doc Martin's office.
in any manuscript.

What we do is recognize the difference in the reader's engagement with each part of the scene ... and why we've chosen one level over the other.

We pick our distance. We move in close and then back out some.

Great thread.

I'm off to re-read my WIP...

Yes, like many before me have said, more showing and less telling.