Show Your Story
- by ria, on Thursday, 8th July 2010, 12:35pmI ‘tell’ an awful lot in my novel. It annoys me, because I read over my work and think it’s boring, or it’s missing something. Until now, I had a vague idea that I was missing out on emotion, on characterisation. But that wasn’t it.
Recently, Nathan Bransford linked to an old post of his where he discusses the old adage, ‘show; don’t tell.’ The main point I took from his article was: have your character react. That’s what my novel has been missing, that reaction to events, or to emotion. It’s all fine and dandy to say, ‘he was angry,’ but Mr Bransford drove home the idea that having your character react to his anger will make a far better impression on your reader.
So, when you are writing characterisation, and your character is angry, you have to ask yourself, ‘how does he react because of this anger?’ The answer is what you write in your MS (manuscript for all you exceptionally new to writing).
tags: character, emotion, showing
category: writing
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Askea
says:Mad, that may be it. You might have solved you problem. You did always write the emotions.
I didn’t know what MS was so thanks for the explination.
14th July 2010 at 10:50am |Moses Siregar III
says:While there are good times for telling, more of the time showing seems to be the right move. I’ve heard people say that you should tell the boring parts and show the interesting parts. I think that’s a pretty decent rule of thumb.
Btw, I’m reading book 2 of Malazan right now. I skipped book 1, because I’d heard it’s more challenging to start with. Not sure if I’ll go onto #1 or #3 after #2.
15th July 2010 at 6:48pm |ria
says:I’m enjoying book 1. I like the way Erikson doesn’t reveal everything – it’s his way of building tension. The main reason I’m enjoying it so much is because I haven’t a clue what’s going on.
16th July 2010 at 12:35pm |Well, I’m into chapter 5 now, and I have a good enough idea, but up until chapter 4 I was doing a lot of guessing. I like books that make you work to figure stuff out.