A Tight Write Bite by A. LaFaye
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Sunday, March 29, 2020
Thursday, March 12, 2020
A Closer Look at "Show, Don't Tell & The Use of Time in Fiction
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“Show,telling through dramatic telling to dramatization. Knowing when to use each of these approaches to the portrayal of time in a story is one of the hardest, but most important skills for any writer to acquire. Let’s look at how this can play out in your writing.
Telling is very useful because if we showed every element of a story it would be enormously long. Even in Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” she doesn’t show us every minute of that hour, she condenses time through telling, then expands it through dramatic telling and dramatization where necessary. We learn of her heart condition by telling, then we see her transformation from grief to liberation through effective dramatization. I’ve linked title of the story to a copy of the story itself, so after you’ve read this look at the use of time, you can read and explore how Chopin uses time in her story.
So, when should we use telling?
Telling is your go-to approach when you need to condense time and share essential information that is not dramatically important to the story such as “He went to the grocery store” or “Bailey never missed an episode of Reverence.”
If the information you’re conveying brings us to a new place and time, then you want to make sure that this “time skip” doesn’t go over any essential events in the life and development of the characters or the forward progression of the plot. Don’t pull out a “Cthulhu Axe” in your writing. The author H.P. Lovecraft had several stories in which characters had to battle alien cthulhu monsters and in one story, the character goes up into an attic, discovers a monster, the fights it with the axe he picked up on the way up the stairs.
HOLD UP.
If he picked up the axe on the way up the stairs, then the writer should’ve told us that as he went up the stairs, otherwise that axe pops up out of literary thin air. Make sure you tell readers about pivotal elements like this as they happen, not after the fact. On the other hand, you can host an anniversary dinner Sixth Sense style. In that movie, we see Bruce Willis’s character in a tense/non-communicative anniversary dinner only to find out later that the reason his wife isn’t answering is because the Willis character is actually dead, but doesn’t realize it. You can withhold key information if the “secret” is essential to the plot reveal later.
Telling is like the plate in a fictional meal—it’s functional, helpful, plain, and essential to holding everything together.
Dramatic Telling is the tasty side dish of any fictional meal. It’s the use of condensed time to show important details of a story. Through the use of concrete specific details, active voice, and action verbs, dramatic telling can “show” you a lot within a story without bringing you into a specific moment or scene. For example, you might say that “Fadro and Eric were frienemies.” (telling) or you could say, “Since the colossal spitball war of first grade, Fadro and Eric had been battling their way through Holston Elementary one science experiment explosion at a time. As Principal Garrett puts it, make friendly rivalry potentially deadly. Here, we see more of why they are frienemies, have a sense of their identities, and a more specific timeline for their relationship, but we never entered a full scene with both boys present. Dramatic telling is best done with double-duty details. Details that develop more than one element at a time. Because these boys make “friendly rivalry potentially deadly,” we have a sense of their risk-taking, competitive, and scientific personalities (character development), but we also have a sense of the plot with a pinch of foreshadowing.
With that side dish served, let’s look at the main course of dramatization.
Dramatization is when you use full scenes to bring us into the moment of a character’s life which is a key component of drawing your readers into your story and offering them a vicarious experience. You could say that “talking to a stranger at the edge of a lake saved Ginny life” or you could see this full scene from the short story “Surface” to see how one weird conversation on the edge of a lake allowed the terminally ill Ginny to gain new lease on life. Be prepared, it’s a long scene that includes multiple flashbacks which employ dramatic telling. I’ll put those in bold. Notice the use of character-specific dialogue, directed thought (in italics), dialogue tags, and that most scenes combine telling, dramatic telling, and dramatization to bring us into the moment.
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| Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay |
And this damn lake was no Oak Street Park, so Ginny flung her cell phone into the water.
“Pity. Party of 1. Your table is ready.”
A voice drew her attention to the shore. A tall kid stood by a tree, his hair as pale as his skin which she could practically see-through.
“You’re…you’re…”
“Look who’s talking.” He leaned against the tree, the pattern of the bark visible through his clothes. “Not like you’re living it up over there, Miss Doom and Gloom. Heck, those thunder clouds have more life in one cubic centimeter than you do.”
“I…”
“Have speech problem?” He stood up and took a step towards her. “Don’t sweat it. There aren’t any entrance exams where you’re going.”
“Where’s that?” Ginny asked, feeling chilled.
“Into the lake, I hope.” He walked up and threw in a seed pod that didn’t make a splash. “I mean why rent a lake house if you’re not going to swim?”
He stared at her, his eyebrows raised.
“Am I…”
“Gawking at me like I should be wearing a long black robe and carrying a farming tool fit for chopping some wheat?” He took a swipe at the imaginary crop. “Yes, indeed you are.” He laughed.
Ginny could feel her jaw tighten. Jerk.
“You’re just looking at the surface again. The signs floating on top.” He cast his hand out as if he skimmed over an unseen object.
If she wasn’t so tired, she’d stand up and give that guy an earful, but she settled with saying, “Oh, and you’re here to help me go deep and see the purpose of life before I …”
“Die? Croak? Kick the bucket? Shuffle off this mortal coil.”
“Whatever!” She shifted to face the other way.
He appeared again on that side of the dock, leaning onto his toes, saying, “Nope. I’m not here to talk about ‘whatever.’” He did air quotes. “ I’m here to talk about neocides and pHlevels. You?”
“I’m freaked out.”
“I can understand that. I mean, when I learned what was going to happen to me, I was …” He laughed. “Let’s just say, it’s a good thing my mother always bought a fresh stock of tightie-whities every three months.”
Ginny snarled in disgust.
“Hey, don’t judge. They say Einstein didn’t bother getting up to go the bathroom when he was on a hot streak. Know what I mean?”
Ginny closed her eyes and held her stomach.
“Changing the subject.” He walked back to the tree. “Do you remember your neighbors on Peale Street?”
“The Bickersons and the Arugables?” Ginny shredded a leaf. They were really the Dickersons and the Aarables, but their neighborhood feud was legendary on account of the Dickerson’s beehives and the Aarables loathing for the flying little honeymakers.”
As a newly single mom, it took Ginny’s mother worked for almost a decade to afford a house. Too bad the neighbor report didn’t include bickering neighbors.
Ginny lived in headphones from the moment they moved-in to drown out the yard-to-yard shouting matches.
“Yep. Those are the very jerks I’m referring to. FYI. Neocides kill bees. And they are killer on the red blood cells. Turn the suckers into cups.”
Ginny blinked.
Did this guy speak English?
She blinked again.
His words sifted into her thoughts and she slowly sorted them out.
Spinning to face him, she asked, “Are you saying my blood’s jacked up because my neighbors killed my other neighbor’s bees?!”
“And sprayed all three yards for weeks while you were at school. That’s right.” He tucked his hands in his pockets.
“Shit.”
“Yep. Stuff decimated the US populations. We’re going to be dealing that screw-up for years.”
“How do you know this?”
“Same way, I know you’ve got three nickels in your pocket right now.”
She gripped the coins. She carried them every day. They were the change she’d gotten when she bought a hotdog in the aisle at the ball game with her dad. She’d wondered why the vendor hadn’t give her a dime and hesitated there on the step, her dad had turned, yelling, “You’re missing it, Ginny! Come on.” And a fly ball had hit him right in the temple and he’d crumpled over the seat.
“You spoke to my dad?” She practically, fell off the dock when she scrambled to her feet.
“Not possible.” He sighed. “I can do a lot of things. But I can’t do that. Just like there’s no way for you to know if he would’ve lived if he hadn’t turned to yell at you.” He wagged a finger at her. “Besides. You need to stop looking at the surface. Unless you want to talk about the surface of your blood cells. See now, there’s where I can help. Tell them to look at lower Ph level therapies to permeate the lining of your blood cells. It’ll reverse things.”
“What?”
“Go see Dr. Elliot Littlefield.”
“Who?”
“Elliot Littlefield. Say it, so you’ll remember him.” He walked towards the tree. “I mean after all, it’s that teenage son of his who’ll grow up and get you to spend those nickels.”
He turned to face her, smiling. “Oh, and he’ll bore you with some dumb theory about quantum physics and time. You might want to listen though. Could come in hand someday.” He whispered something like “today,” then he stepped behind the tree.
She leaned to see where he went.
He leaned back, “See you around, Ginny Carpenter. And remember, look a little deeper.”
And he was gone.
To see the full version of this genre-bending story, click on the title.
Hopefully, this overview of the continuum of telling, dramatic telling, and dramatization gives you deeper insight into the use of time in your story and then adage old advice “show, don’t tell.”
Let me know if you have any questions!
Write on!
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