Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

My schedule has been way out of kilter lately. My mother-in-law had a bad fall about a week and a half ago, and so my wife has been staying with her pretty much full time. Which means I’ve been doing more driving the kids around and more chores around the house and my blogging time has shrunk drastically. Today, I’ve got a bit of time to blog so I’d like to pick up where we left off.

Last time I began critiquing various sections of the works in progress of my loyal blog readers. Today, I was going to critique Camille’s post, but then I saw that she rather badly violated the six-paragraph rule. Six paragraphs really is enough to critique, and in my view, thirteen is too many.

So instead, I’ll critique the second snippet that Camille posted in response to my latest blog post critiquing Sina’i. This one is shorter, and is actually over-paragraphed, if I’m reading it correctly. Let’s look at what Camille wrote:

Hey everyone - I know mine’s up next… but I’m flying through to wrap up the novel and came across this prime example of what gives me a headache about MRUs. If I follow the mru rules, every sentence is a separate paragraph, I think. But it looks weird. Okay, I KNOW, this text already sounds weird because it’s the mush in the middle of a romance, so ignore that weirdness. Can anyone tell me if breaking each of these lines apart is right or wrong?? Or am I getting way too legalistic here?

========================================
What he was saying didn’t really sink in. The fact that he called and was not upset by her letter eclipsed all other thought. She leaned back against the doorframe and let out the breath she’d been holding.

“I’ll tell you more about it when you arrive—you’re still coming, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Three more weeks . . .

“Emily . . .”

The sudden depth of his voice sent a warm shockwave through her.

“Do you remember when we stopped that night? On the side of the road?”

A shrill scream blasted from the teakettle.

Emily jumped, heart pounding.

“Hang on!”

She dashed to the stove, moved the kettle off the burner, took a deep breath, then put the phone to her ear. But the drumming in her chest made her words come out sounding breathless.

“Yeah . . . I remember.” Are you kidding me? How could I forget?

Randy sez: There is no reason to use so many paragraphs for this. I have often seen this in published novels–an action tag sentence, followed by a paragraph break, followed by dialogue. Honestly, I find this confusing. I interpret a paragraph break as (normally) a change of focus.

A paragraph break normally signals one of the following:

1) A change in focus from the POV character (i.e. a Reaction) to a non-POV character or some other external thing (i.e. a Motivation).

2) The opposite–a switch from any external thing (i.e. a Motivation) to the POV character (a Reaction).

3) Sometimes, a switch from one non-POV character to another non-POV character (i.e. two separate Motivations).

4) Occasionally, a continuation of the action and dialogue when one paragraph just isn’t enough to hold it all (i.e. one multi-paragraph Motivation or one multi-paragraph Reaction).

But here’s an example of the kind of thing I find confusing. This example is made up, but it’s similar to things I’ve seen many times:

“Would you like to go to the Yule Ball with me?” Ron asked.

Hermione glared at him furiously.

“What I can’t figure out is why I like you.”

Randy sez: OK, who said that third line? Was it Ron? Or was it Hermione? As written, there’s no way to know. There’s no dialogue tag. The author might well have intended paragraph two to serve as an action tag, thereby making Hermione the speaker. But the author may also have intended the paragraph break between paragraphs two and three to indicate a change of focus, thereby making Ron the speaker. There’s no iron-clad way to know. You have to read on to find out, which is annoying because it breaks the flow of your reading. Anything that loses clarity like this is likely to break the flow of the reading, and that’s bad.

I have seen this many times, and I always wonder why the author didn’t write it clearer. It is trivial to do it. Here’s one way to make it clear:

“Would you like to go to the Yule Ball with me?” Ron asked.

Hermione glared at him furiously. “What I can’t figure out is why I like you.”

Randy sez: In this example, it’s obvious that Hermione is the speaker. The first sentence in the second paragraph serves as an action tag for the second sentence of that paragraph. Now here’s a second way to write it that changes the meaning:

“Would you like to go to the Yule Ball with me?” Ron asked.

Hermione glared at him furiously.

“What I can’t figure out is why I like you,” Ron said.

Randy sez: This time, there’s a simple dialogue tag in the third sentence making it obvious that Ron said it.

Now to work on Camille’s example. In my view, the paragraphing should go as follows:

What he was saying didn’t really sink in. The fact that he called and was not upset by her letter eclipsed all other thought. She leaned back against the doorframe and let out the breath she’d been holding.

“I’ll tell you more about it when you arrive—you’re still coming, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Three more weeks . . .

“Emily . . .” The sudden depth of his voice sent a warm shockwave through her. “Do you remember when we stopped that night? On the side of the road?”

A shrill scream blasted from the teakettle.

Emily jumped, heart pounding. “Hang on!” She dashed to the stove, moved the kettle off the burner, took a deep breath, then put the phone to her ear. But the drumming in her chest made her words come out sounding breathless. “Yeah . . . I remember.” Are you kidding me? How could I forget?

Randy sez: By combining paragraphs like this, I have squeezed Camille into the six-paragraph limit that I imposed. And I think I’ve made the whole thing a lot easier to read. Emily is the POV character here, and so now we have paragraphs in a simple pattern: Reaction, Motivation, Reaction, Motivation, Motivation, Reaction. Notice that paragraph 4 is a Motivation (Ian speaking) and paragraph 5 is a second Motivation (the tea kettle). This is commonly done and works just fine. The paragraph break clearly distinguishes between the two Motivators–Ian and the kettle.

The one issue is in paragraph 4. Let’s look at that in detail:

“Emily . . .” The sudden depth of his voice sent a warm shockwave through her. “Do you remember when we stopped that night? On the side of the road?”

In Camille’s original, she made this three paragraphs. I combined the three sentences into a single paragraph because the subject of sentence 2 is Ian’s voice. This is a Motivation. It is true that Camille sneaks a bit of a Reaction into the second half of the sentence, but the fact is that the sentence serves as an action tag to remind us who is speaking. Furthermore, it interrupts Ian’s sentence. So I vote for jamming them all into a single paragraph, as shown above.

As a final note, the phrase “The sudden depth of his voice…” is technically called paralanguage. This is just a fancy term that means that it’s describing the way something is said. Paralanguage about a non-POV character simply has to be part of the Motivation, not the Reaction. You can find out a whole lot more about paralanguage and its uses from Margie Lawson and her excellent courses on writing.

Is it OK for Camille to sneak in a bit of Reaction here? Yeah, sure, why not? It works pretty well this way. I can’t see an easy way to improve it. When you have to break the rules to make the scene work better then do so. The rules are to help you write better, not write worse. Use them accordingly.

In my last blog, I invited my loyal blog readers to submit a few paragraphs for critique on their Motivations and Reactions (which I’ve just finished discussing at great length). Today, we’ll look at the first submission by Sina’i:

Starfa was still in shock. “Are you telling me that that woman has kidnapped my brother?” Well, at least that would explain Veylan’s absence from this meeting.

“Think, Starfa!” the king snapped. “That woman has been imprisoned for over a thousand years with no difficulties! How, all of a sudden, do you suppose she escaped from under the eyes of her guards? And then kidnap your brother, Veylan, of all people?”

Starfa hated being scolded like a child, even if he was not thinking too clearly. If anyone besides the king had spoken to him in such a manner, he would have had the man’s head on a spear immediately. Because it was King Terdan, however, he swallowed his pride. “So you’re saying…she escaped like she did the first time. She had help.”

The king nodded.

“And…Veylan…helped her?” Starfa was having far more trouble with that idea. He knew that Veylan was soft-hearted, particularly where women were concerned. That was one of the problems the nobles had with him. But could he really be so stupid as to help her escape? Starfa would have to have a serious talk with his brother once he became king. That is, if Veylan was still alive. He had a knack for getting into trouble on his own. He could only imagine what dangers Veylan would blunder into under the influence of that…that witch.

King Terdan interrupted his thoughts by dismissing the attendant. “Starfa, you don’t seem to understand what this means. Your kingship is in danger.”

Randy sez: Well done! This appears to be part of a fantasy novel. We have two characters, King Verdan and Starfa. The Point-Of-View character is Starfa, and Sina’i is doing an excellent job of putting us inside Starfa’s skin. We see what he sees; we hear what he hears; we think what he thinks; we feel what he feels.

Notice that we have six paragraphs, and three of them are Motivations (external to Starfa and objectively shown) while three are Reactions (internal to Starfa and subjectively shown). These are perfectly structured. As a result, it’s easy to follow the scene and understand the conflict.

I really can’t find anything to complain about here. There is one ambiguous sentence: Starfa would have to have a serious talk with his brother once he became king.

Given the context that follows, the “he” who is going to become king is probably Starfa. But it’s not obvious from the sentence alone. It’s possible that it could be Veylan. But we’re jumping into the middle of a novel without context. If we’d read the preceding chapters, we’d presumably already know this and there would be no ambiguity.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Camille’s submission.

Today I’ll wrap up my discussion of Motivations and Reactions.

Yesterday I showed the first few paragraphs of the first Harry Potter book and asked my loyal blog readers how to “Show” this passage, rather than “Tell” it (as JK Rowling did). Today, I’ll give you my own answer to that.

First, let’s be clear that the passage really is “Telling”. None of this is happening in real-time. There is no Point-Of-View character with whom we can identify. The acid test is this: Can you color-code it into Motivations and Reactions? (See the color-coded examples I’ve done for a number of passages in the last few days).

Here is the Potter passage one more time:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son named Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it.

The answer is no. There’s nothing to color-code. This is “Telling”.

But it’s brilliant. I have a rule for this: If you’re going to “Tell,” then be brilliant about it. Since it’s brilliant, there’s just no good reason to “Show” it–unless you can “Show” it better.

Remember that “Telling” is very efficient. You can tell a lot of information very quickly by “Telling” but you need to make it interesting. And this passage is very interesting.

JKR’s goal here was to take us from our own very ordinary world (in which magic doesn’t exist) into a very similar-looking world (in which magic exists, but the Muggles don’t know about it). How is she going to do this?

Her method is elegant and simple: She presents us in a few swift, comic strokes with three very unlikable characters, the Dursleys, who deny that magic exists. We have all met people like the Dursleys and we find them despicable. Since the Dursleys don’t believe in magic, and since we hate the Dursleys, we are willing to entertain the possibility that magic is real. This is how JKR pulls us into the fictive dream–by convincing us not to be like the dreadful Dursleys.

In the rest of the chapter, we learn that the Dursleys have a nephew named Harry. The Dursleys hate Harry’s parents and therefore have never met Harry, but they hate him on principle. Because we dislike the Dursleys, we automatically like Harry.

When we learn that Harry has somehow survived the death curse of the greatest dark wizard of all time, we’re intrigued. Nobody else has ever survived this curse. What makes Harry different? We read on to find out–but JKR doesn’t tell us for quite a long time. There is a reason, a very good reason, and it is one of the major themes of the entire series. Of course I won’t tell you what this reason is because it’s such an essential part of the story.

So in the passage above, JKR’s choice to “Tell” about the Dursleys is a good one. She doesn’t want to make us identify with the Dursleys, she wants us to believe in magic and to get curious about Harry. The way she wrote it works.

Let’s now summarize with my final slide from my lecture:

Slide 35: Summary

• The decision to “show” or “tell” is a strategic decision for each segment
• If you are going to “show,” the easiest way to do so is to use the MRU structure
• Structure is not enough!
• Sometimes you need to violate the MRU structure in order to get the best effect
• Resolve all dilemmas by asking how to get the most Powerful Emotional Experience

At the end of the day, rules can only take you so far. They can suggest ways to improve, but you can’t write fiction in a paint-by-numbers way by following rules. Those pesky rules are to help you figure out what’s wrong with a passage of fiction when it isn’t working.

But if a scene is working very well already, don’t mess with it.

OK, now it’s your turn. If you’re having trouble with those pesky Motivations and Reactions, then post a segment from your current work-in-progress in a comment here and I’ll analyze them in the order they’re posted. No more than 6 paragraphs please! I will ignore all posts that have more than 6 paragraphs!

I’d like to soon wrap up the series of blogs I began a couple of weeks ago to work through a recent lecture I gave on “Motivations and Reactions” at the ACFW conference. We should finish either today or tomorrow, depending on how wordy I am today.

First, I want to congratulate one of my loyal blog readers, Mary DeMuth, who has recently launched a mentoring service for writers at www.TheWritingSpa.com. Mary has published several novels and has also published several nonfiction books, all with good publishers.

As my loyal blog readers know, many published authors (including me) use freelance editors (like Mary) to help us buff up our novels before sending them to our agents and/or editors. For one thing, it’s a competitive world. For another, you can never view your own work objectively.

In my own case, I don’t need a lot of mentoring; I mainly need a hard-headed person to tell me when the story isn’t working and why. Once I know that, I can figure out how to fix it. A mentor will not only tell you what’s wrong, she’ll give you some guidance on how to fix it.

OK, on to those pesky Motivations and Reactions. If you’re just joining us, you may want to read through the previous 6 lessons that I’ve posted over the past couple of weeks.

In our last lesson, we worked through a snippet of a scene from PATRIOT GAMES by Tom Clancy. The scene had some very minor structural issues, but it worked very well. Today, we’ll look at a perfectly structured snippet from THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown.

Slide 32: Dan Brown: The DaVinci Code, p. 184

Vernet gave a helpless sigh. “I’m afraid every key is electronically paired with a ten-digit account number that functions as a password. Without that number, your key is worthless.”

Ten digits. Sophie reluctantly calculated the cryptographic odds. Over ten billion possible choices. Even if she could bring in DCPJ’s most powerful parallel processing computers, she still would need weeks to break the code. “Certainly, monsieur, considering the circumstances, you can help us.”

Randy sez: The viewpoint character is Sophie, a cryptologist who works for the French government. She is trying to recover the contents of a safe-deposit box in a bank from Mr. Vernet, the annoying bank official who is playing by the rules. Sophie has the key but not the password. If she can’t guess the password, the key is useless.

The Motivation is therefore the first paragraph, which shows Vernet speaking. The Reaction is the second paragraph, showing Sophie’s internal thoughts.

As I’ve done with our other examples, I’ll color-code this snippet in the next slide so you can see how nicely structured it is. The Motivation is black; the Reaction is red.

Slide 33: Dan Brown: The DaVinci Code, p. 184

Vernet gave a helpless sigh. “I’m afraid every key is electronically paired with a ten-digit account number that functions as a password. Without that number, your key is worthless.”

Ten digits. Sophie reluctantly calculated the cryptographic odds. Over ten billion possible choices. Even if she could bring in DCPJ’s most powerful parallel processing computers, she still would need weeks to break the code. “Certainly, monsieur, considering the circumstances, you can help us.”

Randy sez: Dan Brown has got the structure perfect here. The Motivation is in one paragraph and is very nicely objective and external to the POV character. The Reaction is in its own paragraph and is subjective and internal to the POV character.

But there is still a problem here. Can you see what it is? Read the snippet above again, remembering that Sophie is a mathematician. Do you see anything slightly off here? And do you see anything that is grotesquely off?

Mull on that for a minute and then look at my comments below.

OK, enough mulling. Here are the problems I see. You’ll see that most of them are minor and one is major.

* “Sophie reluctantly calculated…” Randy sez: This is a little odd. Why would she be reluctant? The calculation is trivial. I could see that she might be disappointed in the result, but it’s strange to think that she might be reluctant, since it takes no work to do the calculation. It’s a minor point, but it just feels funny.

* “the cryptographic odds”. Randy sez: I earned a double major in math and physicss and then went to Berkeley for my Ph.D. in physics, where I took a few more graduate math courses. I’m not a cryptologist, so I can’t say with certainty, but the phrase “cryptographic odds” sounds foreign to my ears. Most mathematicians I know would simply say “the odds” or “the combinatorial factor”. The phrase “cryptographic odds” feels more like a novelist trying to use big words and less like a real mathematician. Again, it’s a minor point, but again, it just feels funny.

* “Over ten billion possible choices.” Randy sez: This is flat out wrong. There are exactly ten billion possible choices. The calculation is trivial. It seems odd for Brown to overstate the facts here, since 10 billion is a big enough number already. Why try to inflate it? But overstatement of facts seems to be a common theme in the book. This is a fairly bad mistake, because someone like Sophie could not possibly get this wrong.

* “Even if she could bring in DCPJ’s most powerful parallel processing computers, she still would need weeks to break the code.” Randy sez: This would be a completely idiotic thought for a mathematician to think. It is true that computers can be used to crack codes. It is true that parallel processing computers are faster than single-processor machines (all other things being equal). But this is not a code to be broken, and a computer would be of absolutely no help here. There is a password which you have to guess and type in to a terminal. There are 10 billion different options. The only way to guess the password is to GUESS it. You can’t compute it! If you have no reason to guess any particular password, then you have to resort to the brute-force method of typing in each one by hand, and you can’t have a computer do that. But in this particular case, that won’t work either, because the system only allows one attempt and then shuts down. So the entire sentence is a blunder. Sophie could not possibly have thought this sentence.

One paragraph in the point of view of a mathematician. Two minor glitches. One biggish glitch. One monumental blunder. What’s the moral here?

The moral is that if you’re going to put thoughts into the mind of a character with specialized knowledge, then you need to ask somebody with that specialized knowledge to read your work. Don’t just make stuff up. There are a lot of readers out there, and some of them will know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.

Getting your Motivations and Reactions right is not enough! Your goal is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. If you instead give your reader a Powerful Scornful Experience, then you goofed.

Now let’s move on to our final example. Keep in mind that we have been talking about how to “Show, Don’t Tell” effectively. This example is one of the most famous passages in recent literary history, the opening paragraphs of the Harry Potter epic series.

Slide 34: J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter #1, p. 1

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son named Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it.

Randy sez: This snippet is all “Telling”. Now the simple question is this: How would you “Show” this passage?

Before I address this question, I’ll give my loyal blog readers a shot at it. Go ahead and post a comment here. I’ll give you my thoughts on it tomorrow.

My loyal blog readers will be happy to hear that I have just sent out the October issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the series on my recent lecture on Motivations and Reactions and move on to some real-world examples contributed by you, my exceptionally loyal blog readers. So be ready!

I’m working hard today on my next issue of the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, so I have no real time to blog. Not to mention that those pesky presidential candidates are doing their debate thing this evening.

But I might as well point my loyal blog readers to my recent humor column in which Sam the Plumber speaks out on the topic of marketing. Want to know what got Sam the Plumber riled up? Check out my column, which has the perfectly outrageous title: “The Lean, Mean Jesus Machine.”

Today, I’d like to continue working through my recent lecture at the ACFW conference on “Motivation Reaction Units”. This is #6 in the series, so if you’re just joining us, feel free to review the earlier blog posts to come up to speed.

In my last post, I showed some writing examples from Jane Austen and Ken Follett. Today, I’ll analyze a piece of a scene by Orson Scott Card. This is a fight scene done in zero-gravity. The setting is “Battle School,” a training ground for the next generation of soldiers. The protagonist is a boy named Ender, who is training some of his friends in combat skills when they’re attacked by some older boys. Ender first gets his friends off to safety, then takes on the attackers.

Slide 28: Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game, p. 115

Someone caught Ender by the foot. The tight grip gave Ender some leverage; he was able to stamp firmly on the other boy’s ear and shoulder, making him cry out and let go. If the other boy had let go just as Ender kicked downward, it would have hurt him much less and allowed Ender to use the maneuver as a launch. Instead, the boy had hung on too well; his ear was torn and scattering blood in the air and Ender was drifting even more slowly.

I’m doing it again, thought Ender. I’m hurting people again, just to save myself. Why don’t they leave me alone, so I don’t have to hurt them?

Randy sez: Read the above passage and identify the Motivations and the Reactions. You’ll recall that Motivations are external to Ender and they are shown objectively. Reactions are internal to Ender and are shown subjectively.

Now the question is whether this scene could be “improved.” I’ve put the word “improved” in quotes, because it all depends on what you consider “good” and “bad” writing. Remembering that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, there isn’t any hard and objective way to define “improved.” So I’ll simply define “improving” this scene to mean “making the Motivations and Reactions clearer.”

In the next slide, I’ll color-code the Motivations and Reactions and insert a few comments directly into the text.

Slide 29: Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game, p. 115

Someone caught Ender by the foot. The tight grip gave Ender some leverage; he was able to stamp firmly on the other boy’s ear and shoulder, making him cry out and let go. [What comes next is Telling.] If the other boy had let go just as Ender kicked downward, it would have hurt him much less and allowed Ender to use the maneuver as a launch. Instead, the boy had hung on too well; his ear was torn and scattering blood in the air and Ender was drifting even more slowly.[End of Telling section.]

I’m doing it again, thought Ender. I’m hurting people again, just to save myself. Why don’t they leave me alone, so I don’t have to hurt them?

Randy sez: The segment I marked above as Telling is sort of what Ender is thinking, but not quite. Note the use of the words “had” and “would have” and “was”. These are typical marks of Telling.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to turn this Telling into Showing. Remember that Showing is less efficient than Telling. Would it be worth the extra words to Show this rather than Tell it?

In the next example, I’ll show part of a very intense action scene from PATRIOT GAMES, by Tom Clancy. In this scene, Jack Ryan has come upon a pair of terrorists in London who have disabled a Rolls Royce and are trying to get at the car’s occupants. Ryan doesn’t know it, but the royal family is in the car. All he knows is that somebody is going to end up very dead unless he does something. So he throws a vicious body tackle at one of the terrorists from behind, grabs the man’s pistol, shoots him in the hip, and then gets into the following gunbattle with the other gentleman (who has an AK-47). Here’s the snippet. I have deleted a short segment, marked by an ellipsis:

Slide 30: Tom Clancy: Patriot Games, p. 6

The other gunman turned his head first, then swiveled off-balance to bring his gun around. Both men fired at the same instant. Ryan felt a fiery thump in his left shoulder and saw his own round take the man in the chest. The 9mm slug knocked the man backward as though from a hard punch….

Ryan kept his pistol centered on the man’s chest until he saw what had happened to his head.

“Oh God!” The surge of adrenaline left him as quickly as it had come. Time slowed back down to normal, and Ryan found himself suddenly both dizzy and breathless. His mouth was open and gasping for air.

Randy sez: You may want to analyze this for Motivations and Reactions yourself first. You’ll find they’re clearly spelled out for the most part, but there are a couple of anomalies. Do you see an ambiguity?

In the next slide, I’ll color-code the Motivations and Reactions:

Slide 31: Tom Clancy: Patriot Games, p. 6

The other gunman turned his head first, then swiveled off-balance to bring his gun around. Both men fired at the same instant. Ryan felt a fiery thump in his left shoulder and saw his own round take the man in the chest. The 9mm slug knocked the man backward as though from a hard punch….

Ryan kept his pistol centered on the man’s chest until he saw what had happened to his head.

“Oh God!” The surge of adrenaline left him as quickly as it had come. Time slowed back down to normal, and Ryan found himself suddenly both dizzy and breathless. His mouth was open and gasping for air.

Randy sez: OK, let’s walk through this in super slow motion, analyzing each Motivation and Reaction. The first Motivation shows the gunman turning his head and swiveling his gun around.

Now look at the next sentence: “Both men fired at the same instant.” That is obviously a Reaction–since Ryan fires his gun. But it’s just as obviously a Motivation–since the gunman fires his gun too. So we have a sentence that is BOTH a Motivation AND a Reaction. Has Tom Clancy committed a no-no? No, of course not. In most cases, Motivations and Reactions don’t happen simultaneously. In this rare case, they do. So you have to show them at the same time. Clancy chose the best option here.

There is another sentence showing Ryan’s Reaction to the shot fired by the other guy: “Ryan felt a fiery thump in his left shoulder.” This is a feeling, and it’s all there is to this Reaction. It’s all you need. Things are happening fast, so Clancy has pared things down to the bare minimum.

The next Reaction is a continuation of the sentence: “and saw his own round take the man in the chest. The 9mm slug knocked the man backward as though from a hard punch…” I would recommend eliminating the words “and saw” (they add nothing, since we know we’re in Ryan’s head.) I would also recommend putting this Motivation in its own paragraph. It just makes it a little clearer.

I have eliminated some words (marked by the ellipsis) which show Ryan taking a second shot at the terrorist’s head.

The next Reaction and Motivation get their own paragraph, but they are glommed into a single sentence. The Reaction is: “Ryan kept his pistol centered on the man’s chest”. The Motivation is: “until he saw what had happened to his head.” The question here is whether it would have been better to break this sentence into two, putting each into its own paragraph. My own belief is that it’s better the way Clancy wrote it here. There is such a strong connection between Ryan’s Reaction (keeping the gun centered) and the Motivation that follows (until he saw) that it just makes sense to keep them together.

Notice how well Clancy does the final Reaction. There is a reflexive exclamation (”Oh God!”) followed by a very natural set of physiological responses to coming out of a combat situation safely. There’s the rapid loss of adrenaline. Then time slows back to normal. Then Ryan is dizzy and breathless. Then he’s gasping for breath. I’ve never shot anyone’s head off, but this feels authentic. I’ll bet Clancy talked to combat veterans to get this right. If you’re going to write gore, make it accurate.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a perfectly structure set of Motivations and Reactions that nevertheless has a serious flaw in it. See ya then!

Today I’d like to continue working through my ACFW workshop that I did on motivations and reactions. Our purpose here is to learn how to follow the common editorial advice to “Show, Don’t Tell.” I believe that the best way to learn to do that is to pay attention to the so-called “Motivation-Reaction Units” made popular by Dwight Swain.

If you’d like to know the theory of MRUs, you can find it in my article on Writing the Perfect Scene. Today, we’ll continue with some practical examples. We are about 2/3 of the way through my lecture, and I hope to wrap this up soon.

We’ll begin by looking at a short passage from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:

Slide 25: Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, p. 89

The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart; and by a maneuver of Mrs. Bennet had to wait for their carriages a quarter of an hour after everybody else was gone, which gave them time to see how heartily they were wished away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her sister scarcely opened their mouths except to complain of fatigue, and were evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They repulsed every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and by so doing, threw a languor over the whole party, which was very little relieved by the long speeches of Mr. Collins…

Randy sez: This snippet happens at the end of the ball in which Lizzy Bennet first dances with Mr. Darcy. This is Telling, not Showing. There is no POV character here, no dialogue, no action. It’s all narrative summary. Notice how efficiently Jane whizzes through 15 minutes of time. For her own reasons, she wishes to Tell it. If she had wanted to slow down and Show this, there would be no way to rescue the above passage with a bit of editing. You can’t edit Telling into Showing. You have to rewrite it completely.

19th century novels had a lot more Telling than modern novels do. A common mistake of paroled English majors who want to write fiction is to try to write like YesterGuy or YesterGirl. Let’s be honest here: if you do that, you’re slitting your literary throat. The audience for 19th century fiction died out a hundred years ago.

If you want to lament that “they wrote better fiction then,” feel free. Certainly, some great novels got written in the 19th century. They were generally great because of great themes or great dialogue. If you want to write great fiction like the 19th century writers, then choose a great theme (like they did) and write it using the best methods available to you (like they did) — using great dialogue (like they did) and great action (like they didn’t).

In the next slide, we’ll look at a passage from a modern novel that is Shown, not Told. This comes from a scene in which a man’s last camel has collapsed in the middle of the Sahara desert. He is far from the next oasis, and this camel is his best hope to live another day:

Slide 26: Ken Follett: The Key To Rebecca, p. 3

[The camel’s] forelegs folded, then its rear went down, and it couched on top of the hill like a monument, staring across the desert with the indifference of the dying.

The man hauled on its nose rope. Its head came forward and its neck stretched out, but it would not get up. The man went behind and kicked its hindquarters as hard as he could, three or four times. Finally he took out a razor-sharp curved Bedouin knife with a narrow point and stabbed the camel’s rump. Blood flowed from the wound but the camel did not even look around.

Randy sez: This passage is Shown well. Notice that with roughly the same number of words as Jane Austen used to cover a quarter of an hour, Follett covers maybe half a minute of time. And yet the pace of the scene feels much more lively than the languid pace of the Austen scene.

This is important: using the same number of words to cover LESS time can often feel FASTER. Why? It’s the principle of super-slow-motion. If you’ve ever watched a football instant reply, you know that running high-action scenes very slowly lets you capture every bit of the action. (You’d be crazy to do this in a low-action scene, but it works in a high-action scene.) In the old Kung Fu TV series, the crucial bits of each fight scene were shown in slow-motion. It worked.

The scene above with the camel is not a particularly high-action scene, so it’s Shown in “real-time” — it takes roughly as much time to read it as it would take for the scene to play out in real life.

In the next slide, I’ll do my color-coding trick to split out the Motivations and the Reactions and you’ll see that Follett could have improved the passage slightly at one point. Can you see where before I point it out? Look closely for a minute before you read further.

Ready? OK, here’s the next slide. Motivations are colored in black. Reactions of the man are colored red:

Slide 27: Ken Follett: The Key To Rebecca, p. 3

[The camel’s] forelegs folded, then its rear went down, and it couched on top of the hill like a monument, staring across the desert with the indifference of the dying.

The man hauled on its nose rope. Its head came forward and its neck stretched out, but it would not get up. The man went behind and kicked its hindquarters as hard as he could, three or four times. [Randy sez: We need a Motivation here!] Finally he took out a razor-sharp curved Bedouin knife with a narrow point and stabbed the camel’s rump. Blood flowed from the wound but the camel did not even look around.

Randy sez: The reason I argue that we need a Motivation in the square brackets is because there is a time lag after the man kicks the camel and before he stabs it with the knife. We know there’s a time lag, because Follett uses the word “Finally” to initiate the sentence with the knife.

What was happening in the time lag? We aren’t Shown. We can guess that the camel doesn’t react, but we aren’t Shown. The scene would be a little sharper if we saw that failure to react. That would be a reasonable motivation for the man to pull out the knife. As the scene is written, the knife-work seems just a wee bit unmotivated, almost cruel.

Tomorrow, I’ll analyze a fight scene by another modern master.

See ya then!

I’ll continue my series on Motivations and Reactions in my regularly schedule blog later today. But I thought it would be appropriate to take note of an important launch that is happening TODAY.

I went to a talk about a year ago by my buddy John Olson. John showed a list of the Top Ten best-selling novels of all time. I was a bit surprised to see that PILGRIM’S PROGRESS topped the list. I never much liked that book, to be honest. The big surprise to me was that of the other nine books on the list, the overwhelming majority (6 or 7) were in a category that I don’t read much — fantasy. But I’d read all of those on John’s list and loved them all.

John’s point was that there is something in the fantasy genre that is massively appealing to readers. But there’s something very strange about fantasy. Three of the most popular fantasy series of all time are LORD OF THE RINGS, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, and the Narnia series, by C.S. Lewis. All three authors were British authors with a strong background in classics, and all three wrote from a Christian worldview, using well-known Christian themes.

The very strange thing is that Christian publishing in the US has been unable to make fantasy “work” as a genre. Yes, there’ve been isolated successes, but the fact is that Christian fiction is dominated by romance, suspense, and women’s fiction, while fantasy novels are blindingly absent. The quickest way to get a rejection from a Christian publisher is to start out saying, “I’m writing a fantasy…”

You might say, “Who cares? Fantasy is doing pretty darn well in the general market. If Christian readers want to buy fantasy, they can go there.”

This is true, but the whole thing just seems strange. A lot of the young writers I meet these days are writing fantasy. In fact, the MAJORITY of the under-25 Christian writers I meet are writing fantasy. And they all have the same question: Where are they going to get their work published? Something is seriously wrong in the Christian publishing industry.

My friend Jeff Gerke is a huge fan of fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, and as he say, “anything weird.” Jeff is also a very accomplished editor who has worked at three Christian publishing houses and has acquired a number of excellent authors. One of his goals is to bring fantasy fiction home–to create a publishing house that does those “weirdo books” from a Christian worldview (which can be a very broad label, if you remember that it includes Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, and a whole lot more).

Today, Jeff is launching the first three books from his publishing house (Marcher Lord Press). He’s giving out some special incentives for people who buy TODAY. So if you like “weird fiction,” check out his first three books: HERO, SECOND CLASS by Mitchell Bonds, SUMMA ELVETICA, by Theodore Beale, and THE PERSONIFID INVASION, by R.E. Bartlett.

You can take a look at them all here: www.MarcherLordPress.com/store

I dropped by Jeff’s online store today to check them out. All three books look seriously weird.

So I bought them all.