Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Here’s another critique, this time of Alie’s two paragraph submission:

The monotone voice of the Pastor filled the chapel and pulled Tara’s attention back to the service. Tara blinked heavy eyes in rapid succession before gazing again at Chandler’s hunched shoulders. Any time now he would take the podium and sing his mother’s praises. He could always admit he killed Emma. That would please half the congregation. She glanced at Sergeant Harold Taylor two rows behind Chandler.

Suddenly Chandler moved. Here he goes! Tara flipped open the notepad in her lap, but instead of standing to go to the podium, Chandler turned his head and stared straight at her. Stunned, she returned his gaze. A scowl cross his face before he turned away.

Randy sez: This looks to be part of a fairly dramatic scene (and unfortunately we’re only seeing a tiny snippet of it). I see a couple of time-indicators that I would eliminate (”before” and “suddenly”). I would also break up paragraph 2 into more paragraphs, since what we have here is a quick succession of Motivations and Reactions. (To reiterate, a reference on Motivations and Reactions is on my Perfect Scene page.)

I am also going to insert one emotive reaction for Tara. Finally, there are some sentences I would suggest breaking up. Here’s my suggested revision:

The monotone voice of the pastor filled the chapel.

Tara forced her attention back to the service. She blinked heavy eyes in rapid succession, then looked again at Chandler’s hunched shoulders. Any time now the creep would take the podium and sing his mother’s praises. He could always admit he killed Emma. That would please half the congregation.

Tara stole a quick glance at Sergeant Harold Taylor two rows behind Chandler.

Chandler moved.

Tara’s heart lurched. Here he goes! She flipped open the notepad in her lap.

Instead of standing to go to the podium, Chandler turned his head and stared straight at Tara.

Tara couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but return his gaze.

A scowl crossed Chandler’s face and then he turned away.

Randy sez: There are some judgment calls here. I make ‘em one way. Another writer would make them another way. It’s all a matter of taste, so don’t imagine that my way is the only way to do things. Mainly, I want to let you see what happens when you pay strict attention to those pesky MRUs.

For those of you just joining us, we’re in the middle of a discussion on Motivation Reaction Units (MRUs). For some background on this, see my page on Writing The Perfect Scene.

Last week, I invited people to submit 2 paragraphs for me to critique. I promised to critique some of them. Today, I’ll work through the second submission, by Caprice Hokstad. Here is her original version (and by the way, ya gotta love the name “Caprice”):

Duke Vahn was glad he wore his sword to The Pickled Squid. The weathered wood and broken windows suggested this was not one of Ny’s most reputable establishments. His first step inside confirmed his suspicions. The air reeked of sweat and cheap mead. Men with dirty, unshaven faces looked up from their tankards. A few whistled at his raiment. It wasn’t often Vahn felt so out of place.

“I’m looking for Gil Hocar.” It felt odd not to use “Lord” with the name. He’d always given the poorest of peasants that respect as a matter of course, but after what Timmilina had said, he couldn’t extend the courtesy to this man. “Can anyone direct me?”

Randy sez: This has some good “atmosphere” to it. What I see here is that paragraph 1 has several very short Motivations and Reactions, one after another, and some are in the same sentence. Paragraph 2 is one rather longer Reaction. My hunch is that the segment will run a little smoother if we clump together the Motivations and the Reactions in paragraph 1 so that they are fewer and longer. I’ll try not to do violence to Caprice’s writing in the process. I’ll reorder things to begin with a Reaction, and each change from Reaction to Motivation to Reaction will trigger a new paragraph:

The weathered wood and broken windows of the Pickled Squid suggested this was not one of Ny’s most reputable establishments.

Duke Vahn stepped inside, gripping the hilt of his sword.

The air reeked of sweat and cheap mead. Men with dirty, unshaven faces looked up from their tankards. A few whistled at his raiment.

It wasn’t often Vahn felt so out of place. “I’m looking for Gil Hocar.” It felt odd not to use “Lord” with the name. He’d always given the poorest of peasants that respect as a matter of course, but after what Timmilina had said, he couldn’t extend the courtesy to this man. “Can anyone direct me?”

Randy sez: The original had 3 Reactions and 2 Motivations in 2 paragraphs. My revision has 2 Motivations and 2 Reactions in 4 paragraphs.

38 of you were brave enough to post a sample of your writing last week for me to critique. As I said, I can’t critique everyone, but I’ll do a fair number. The first person to post was Yeggy, and I think being first should count for something. Here’s Yeggy’s sample:

I tried to ignore the knocking on the door. If I pretended not to be here, whoever, or whatever was giving me a headache would soon get bored and leave. My life would return to normal. But the knocking didn’t stop and my life didn’t return to normal.

I huddled further under the bedcovers and chewed viciously on my fingernails. From the moment I woke up, I knew something was wrong. The weight and texture of the blankets had been a dead giveaway. Something was terribly wrong.

Randy sez: OK, this is a mixture of showing and telling. The main issue I see here is that we are not seeing the passage of time. This feels “out of time”. That’s a symptom of telling. The solution is to rewrite it using those mighty MRUs. (For a review of MRUs, see this article.)

I’ll take a shot at rewriting the piece. (This is always hazardous, so be warned that I may end up disimproving the section. You can be the judge of that.) I’ll start by showing the implied motivation that preceded the sample. You’ll note that I always put motivations and reactions in different paragraphs.

The knocking at the door came again.

I froze, clutching my sheets and trying not to breathe. If I ignore them, they’ll go away.

Knock, knock!

I huddled further under my bedcovers. Just . . . go away!

Knock, knock!

My teeth clamped down hard on my fingernails. I tasted blood. Go away!

Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock!

The blanket felt like a sandbag, pressing me into the bed. It smelled like a wet gunny sack.

I fought the urge to puke. Something is wrong. Something is horribly, horribly wrong.

Randy sez: The above has the advantage that it’s happening in real time, blow by blow. The disadvantage is that it takes a LOT of words. That’s the nature of showing. You use a lot of words. I’m sure a literary novelist could tell all this and capture the flavor in three paragraphs, but I’m no such beast.

I’m almost afraid to ask this, but . . . did I make it better or worse? And why?

Tomorrow . . . another critique. Maybe more than one.

Wow, you folks are amazing! Currently, there are 36 comments in response to yesterday’s call for some samples for me to critique. I will work through a good selection of these over the next few days. I just wanted to let you know that I think I’ve got enough for a while!

So the bottom line is that no more entries will be accepted. I hope to do this again in the not-too-distant future, so if you didn’t post a comment yet, just hold that puppy in reserve for the next time around.

I’m really tired right now, so I’m going to fight off the temptation to critique a couple of samples tonight. The alarm went off at 4 AM this morning. It went off at that hour yesterday too, but there was a REASON for it yesterday. Today, the only reason was that somebody forgot to disable the blasted thing last night. And the only “somebody” available to blame is me.

Tomorrow, I’ll do a few critiques. See ya then!

I read through all the comments that everybody made on showing versus telling. The one I liked best was the one by . . .

Mary DeMuth (relevantgirl). Mary wrote her comment in verse. As poetry, it was simply awful (it was clearly intended to be bad). It became worse and verse the further I read. And yet it told a story. Here’s what Mary wrote:

When I started writing, I hadn’t a clue
About that venerable and pesky MRU
I wrote a scene; it dragged, it bit
I didn’t like it. My characters had fits
So then I bought Randy’s Holiest Grail
By Dwight B. Swain; it came in the mail
My prose did soareth on MRU wings
Motivation and reaction, my scenes they did sing
The book before Swain lies dormant and whiny
But my second was published; it’s really quite shiny
Sometimes I do tell, as the story dictates
With MRU DNA, I know when to deviate
There’s power in that as I write novels galore
For publishing houses who’ve opened the door
for books three, four, five and six
I thank you, Mr. Swain, for your bag of tricks.

Mary’s right. When you’ve got MRUs in your DNA, you know when to use them and when not to.

The key thing is that the scene has to work. What I mean by that is it has to give the reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. “Showing” is a proven way to do that, but sometimes a bit of “telling” works better.

Showing is wordy, whereas telling is efficient. So there’s a tradeoff. The art of fiction is knowing how and when to make that trade.

The problem for writers is that “showing” is pretty unnatural. If you look at the classics, you’ll find a LOT of “telling,” because that’s the natural way for humans to tell a story. But as storytelling evolved, we writers learned that we could capture the story more vividly by “showing” it rather than “telling” it. Because “telling” is natural and “showing” is unnatural, it’s imperative that writers master “showing,” because otherwise their natural instincts would push them into “telling” most of the story.

Mary wins a prize: a critique by me of a page of her writing. (Like she needs a critique by me. She’s more literary now than I’ll ever be.)

I can’t critique a page from everybody, but here’s what I can do for the rest of you: Let’s have a little MRU clinic.

Post a comment with 2 paragraphs of your current work in progress. I’ll pick a few of them to critique over the next few days. If your sample needs MRUs, I’ll show you how I’d do it. If it doesn’t need MRUs, I’ll explain why I don’t think you need them.

Sound fair? Post your samples! But don’t get carried away. Two paragraphs, max.

I read with interest all the comments today on showing vs telling. It’s not quite midnight yet, so I haven’t chosen a winner, but there are a couple of standouts. I’ll decide tomorrow who the winner is.

In the meantime, I have another observation to make. Good, commercial writers do a LOT more showing than telling. By “commercial writers” I mean “writers who sell a lot of books but who are NOT literary novelists.”

Novices typically do a LOT more telling than showing. The reason so many writing teachers hammer on that “show don’t tell” thing is because this is the quickest way to get novice writers to improve their craft enough to get published.

However, there is another class of writers who do a lot of telling. Literary novelists. Some of these folks seem to tell way more than they show.

And yet it works. Literary fiction tends to pack a lot more “stuff” into the same number of words. But literary fiction also tends to move slower. So there’s a tradeoff.

I’m reminded of the novel MY NAME IS ASHER LEV by Chaim Potok. This is one of my favorite books. In the story, Asher Lev is a young Hasidic Jew who wants to be a painter. His rebbe hooks him up with a world-class mentor, Jacob Kahn, who of course paints and sculpts abstract art.

But when Kahn begins training young Asher, he doesn’t let him begin with abstract art. He forces him to learn the traditions of art — which means painting representational pictures first. Asher has to master all that before he starts doing abstract art. Asher, in fact, has to paint nudes — much to the fury of his papa.

I think there’s a strong analogy here to writing. When we start writing fiction, we need to first master the traditions of our craft. And that means learning how to show the scene. If we want to progress to literary fiction, then we may well end up doing a lot of telling.

I think the key point is that you have to know the rules before you can break them. Dali had to know how to paint a flat clock before he could paint one all droopy.

I got an interesting email today from one of my loyal readers asking about those pesky MRUs. If you don’t know what an MRU is, you can read all about them in my article on Writing the Perfect Scene. Or you can get into them in great depth in my Fiction 101 and Fiction 201 courses.

The question (thanks to Jason Epperson for this question, which I have sharpened up slightly) is the following: “Is it really true that every single scene you write should be composed of MRUs and nothing but MRUs?”

This question really boils down to this one: “Is it really true that you should always show and never tell?”

Jason pointed out an example in my own novel OXYGEN which was not written in MRUs. (I don’t want to quote it here because it’s near the end of the book and would be a spoiler for some people.) He apologized for pointing it out, because he didn’t want to be rude, but he did want to understand this thing. It didn’t bother me to see this example of my apparent hypocrisy, because my coauthor, John Olson, actually wrote the paragraph in question.

But I didn’t change John’s paragraph, because . . . well, I won’t tell you just yet why I didn’t change it.

There is more here than meets the eye. I have some tentative opinions on the “showing versus telling” question, but first I want to hear from you all, because the collective wisdom of you folks is pretty high, and I’d like to hear what you think before I go pontificating. What do you think? How would you answer Jason’s question?

The best answer (in my sole judgment, by midnight Pacific time on Wednesday) will win a free critique by me of a one-page sample of your work in progress. (The value of this prize is somewhere between 12 cents and $7 billion.)

So tell me what you think! The clock is ticking . . .

In my last post on writing, I talked about the two doors one can choose as a writer–writing for “the market” and writing “for myself”.

As some of you pointed out, it ain’t necessarily an either-or proposition. As writers who are artists, we have an obligation to write authentically. As writers with bills to pay, we have an obligation to write something that will cover that pesky mortgage. I believe we can meet both obligations.

The key thing, I think, is not to lose the connection between “why I write” and “why I read”. As a number of you noted, the “why I write” often boils down to “it changes me emotively.” And the “why I read” boils down to “it changes me emotively.” There will be a disconnect if the thing that changes the author emotively doesn’t change the reader emotively. But there will be a powerful author-reader connection when the author and reader are moved by the same thing.

I have said this many times, but it bears repeating: your goal as a novelist is to create a Powerful Emotional Experience in your reader. That’s what it means to be marketable. And you can do that best as a writer if that Powerful Emotional Experience is one that you have first experienced yourself. That’s what it means to be authentic.

The trick, of course, is to sift through all that therapeutic writing you do and filter out all the stuff that nobody is going to care about. What you want is to find those Powerful Emotional Experiences within yourself that are going to resonate with somebody other than you.

This is one reason we have editors–to point out those parts of our work that nobody is going to give a flip about. And to highlight those parts that really resonate.

Thanks to all of you who gave me good advice on how to handle a hyperactive dog. There were a lot of good suggestions that I’ll be following in training her in the next few weeks. I went to PetSmart today and bought a bunch of gear to help with that. I got a decent leash and one of those clicker things and a whistle and a bunch more stuff.

Then I took Happy out today and ran her around until she was exhausted. LOL, she’s sleeping it off now and probably won’t make a peep all night. Let me tell you, that dog can RUN.

She has a thing about gloves and leashes, though. After we ran around a bit and played Fetch with one of her new toys, she came and attacked my hand. I was wearing leather gloves, and she went at them pretty hard. She got one in her teeth and would NOT let go. I finally let her have it and she ran off shaking it like a rat. Later on, she came back and sank her teeth in the leash (which I’d taken off her so she could run all around our yard). I’m wondering if maybe her former owner did mean things to her with gloves and leashes.

In any event, I think part of our long-term solution is going to be completing the fence around our yard. We’ve got more than 2 acres of land, and the two long sides of our lot are fenced with dog-proof chain-link fence, 4 feet high. The far end of the lot is bordered by a rail fence, which is NOT dog-proof, but it shouldn’t cost too much money to attach chain-link fencing to it. The near end of the lot is nearly spanned by our house, so it wouldn’t be too hard to complete the enclosure, giving Happy a big area to run around in without a leash. Then she can wear herself out without me needing to be there to supervise.

So thank you, all who contributed ideas. I’m a lot more hopeful today than yesterday, when I was about at the end of my … leash.

In the past week, we’ve talked about why you WRITE and why you READ fiction. And they’re not identical. Oh sure, there’s some overlap.

But scan through all those reasons people write fiction and you’ll find something interesting. For a lot of us, writing is therapy. Cheap therapy, but often amazingly effective.

On the other hand, most of us read fiction as a way of escape from our present wretched reality.

In both cases, it’s all about me. When I wear my writing hat, it’s all about me and my life. When I wear my reading hat, it’s all about me getting away from it all.

Now the problem is that our readers are not us. (Oh, those pesky readers!) Our readers, bless them, are wanting to get away from THEIR wretched reality, and they don’t necessarily want to wade through OUR therapy to do so.

There are two extremes we writers can choose:
1) I can “write for the market” and produce stuff that the readers want to read, even if it doesn’t contain a lot of inner truth to it. (I.e., MY inner truth.)
2) I can “write my truth” and produce fiction that is deeply meaningful to me (but maybe not to another soul on the planet).

What’s a writer to do? If we choose Door Number 1, then we’re “market whores.” If we take Door Number 2, then we’re “self-obsessed artistes”.

Every writer has to choose where to be on this spectrum. The ideal situation is to write fiction that is deeply meaningful to ME and appeals to zillions of readers. This is a lot harder than it looks. A LOT harder.

I don’t have an easy answer on this one. If it were easy, most writers would be writing best-selling Pulitzer-Prize-winning fiction. But most writers aren’t, and never will.