Show, don't tell - you've heard it all before but what does it mean?

If you've ever been on a creative writing course, or read books on how to edit, you'll have been exhorted at some point to 'show, don't tell'.  In other words, try and make your 'scenes' come to life.

            Look at this example:

Cherie was fuming, too wound up to get on with making dinner. She paced up and down the little sitting room. How dare he! And with that slut, Marcia, who'd been round half the street. Well, she'd show him she wasn't one to be taken lightly. Wait till he got home.

            She looked wildly round her. On the sideboard was an ugly bronze statuette that her grandma had given her. She pictured it buried deep in Kenny’s skull.

            When he came through the door he was as bright and cheerful as usual. Gave her a smacking kiss and asked what they were going to eat. She told him to sit down, that it wouldn't be long. She wondered how she was going to approach it, what the bastard would say. In the end she just came out with it. Told him straight she knew what he'd been up to with Marcia. But he just laughed. Said Marcia had come on to him, that there was nothing in it.

            Enraged, she grabbed the statuette and smashed it down on the back of his head. She saw the amazement on his face, and his mouth open to protest, but her rage took over. All she could see was the infamous red mist, and she brought the ornament down on his head again and again until he lay still.

Now the above gives you all the information you need. It's not badly written and the information contained in the piece is clear. It gives us the details we need and it does it succinctly. In fact, if you read 19thC novelists such as George Eliot, Jane Austen or Henry James then you'll find huge swathes of text written just like this, (the writing will no doubt be of a better quality – it will certainly be more long-winded) and this is how fiction was written then. To be honest, I rather enjoy it. If it's done well it engages the intellect and draws the reader into the author's thoughts very effectively.

Look at this passage from George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Her thought was not veined by any solemnity or pathos about the old man on the bed: such sentiments are easier to affect than to feel about an aged creature whose life is not visibly anything but a remnant of vices. She had always seen the most disagreeable side of Mr. Featherstone: he was not proud of her and she was only useful to him. To be anxious about a soul that is always snapping at you must be left to the saints of the earth, and Mary was not one of them.'

But today's readers expect a greater immediacy than that. They would expect Mary's feelings to be shown, rather just be told about them. In fact on the whole, today's readers want to be much more emotionally engaged. This is true of all fiction, novels and short stories included, but it is particularly true if you want to write genre fiction, such as crime, romantic fiction, spy thrillers or historical romances.

Have a look at the first extract rewritten to show, rather than tell, what happened between Cherie and Kenny. (I'm not going to try and rewrite George Eliot!)

Cherie fumed. Her breath came in short gasps and she could hear her heart beating.

            'That cheating bastard!' she said to herself. 'And with that slut, Marcia. How could he? What the hell has she got that I haven't?'

            She tried to steady her breathing, which was coming in short, sharp pants. She debated with herself how she was going to bring it up, shove it in his face. With one eye she took in the bronze statuette on the sideboard.

            'Right,' she said. 'Let's see what you've got to say for yourself. Let's see how you feel with that buried in your skull.'

            She heard his footsteps in the hall before he opened the door.

            'Hiya darlin',' he said. 'Good day?'

            'Oh, not bad, not bad.'

            'Dinner ready?'

            'Not yet. Won't be long.'

            He looked at her. 'Something wrong? Your face looks a bit blotchy. You sickening for something?'

            He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. 'Keep still for a minute, will you. Stop pacing up and down. What the hell's got into you?'

            She looked back at him, her eyes like coals. 'Just one word. Marcia.'

            He stared, and his grip on her shoulder tightened.

            'What the hell are you…?' he began, but then started to laugh. He let go her shoulders and threw himself down into the chair.

            'So you heard. So what interfering old biddy let you in on that?'

            'Doesn't matter. What matters is, why?'

            'Why d'you think?'

            'How could you?'

            'Oh, give over. She was all over me like a rash. She wanted it. I just obliged. Didn't mean anything.'

            He looked up at her, offered his hand. 'Come on, Cher. It's not like you haven't been round the block yourself.'

            She reached out her hand to him as if in forgiveness, but with her other hand she grabbed the statuette and swung it down hard. Blood sprang to his forehead from the gash she'd made.

'For God's sake, Cher,' he managed. 'Be careful.'

            As she swung the ornament again and again she said between gritted teeth: 'And don't call me Cher.'

This time the writer has explored the action and dramatised the incident so that it appears like a scene in a play, showing events as they are actually happening, thus carrying the reader along. The first two extracts are simply recorded events (the first one) or recorded thoughts (the second).

Of course there are times when 'telling' is actually the best vehicle for getting something across. The reader would be exhausted if every page contained drama and conflict, and the writer needs to work at varying the pace as well as trying to put events across dramatically.  But there are other mechanisms, which when done sparingly, can also ensure we are shown rather than told. In fact here is another passage from Middlemarch that uses another technique, that of the internal monologue.

Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman strikingly different from Miss Brooke; he did not in the least suppose that he had lost his balance, but he had said of that woman, 'she is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished.' Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

In my own novel, Hangman's Wood, I use this technique to reveal both the fate of one of the abductees and the state of mind of one of the perpetrators without taking the reader through the incident.

He enjoyed the pleading most, he decided.  That's when you really felt their terror, when you got up close. She'd begged and cried so much he'd actually got bored. Eventually he'd had to stop her babbling, stop her with a good hard slap to her fat, white face. That had put some colour in her cheek. He had hated her whiteness, thought she looked like undercooked pastry.

It had been easy, he chuckled to himself, getting her into her car and then driving it out of the car-park. He'd checked out where the CCTV cameras were the day before and seen they didn't cover the whole of the site. And it was such a murky, drizzly afternoon, dark already by four o'clock, that no-one was going to pay much attention. Just wanted to get in their cars out of the weather. The security guy wasn't doing much, either. Keeping himself dry, Graham supposed. So it had been a matter of minutes for two nice young men to offer to help her put her heavy shopping in the boot of her car, then bundle her into the back.

The reason I chose this method was because at that point I needed to do a couple of things. I’d already described one abduction in dramatic detail, and another through various conversations after the event, so I needed to find another technique to describe this event. I also needed to think hard about the pace of the story, and in fact at this stage I wanted to slow things down a little.

So despite the instruction to ‘show, don’t tell’, it’s also important to vary the method of showing. And sometimes a bit of ‘telling’ enables the writer to vary the pace and give the reader a bit of breathing space. And pace is something I'll look at in another article.

This article was written by Pauline Rendall (Paula K. Randall), and is a version of an article previously published in Ezine magazine.

Achieving authenticity

All writers need to do research. We're often told to 'only write what you know', but clearly there will be times when this is impossible. For instance, did Hilary Mantel ever actually meet Thomas Cromwell? Did Thomas Harris ever commit cannibalism? Did Tolkein live in Middle Earth and commune with elves, wizards and hobbits? I think not!

And therefore the committed and conscientious writer must undertake a great deal of research, a lot of which will never reach the pages of the novel, but will ensure that we don't make ridiculously inaccurate statements. Because, funnily enough, it's not being right that matters. It's not being wrong!

So I asked crime writer, probation officer and all round knowledgeable guy, Michael Craven, to give us the low-down on some aspects of research that may well help you not to seem an idiot. It's already given me some food for thought for my work-in-progress Washed in the Blood, which deals with this very thing.

Bodies Found In Water

by Mike Craven

This short article is designed to give crime writers a few facts about bodies found in water. Of course, some of these may not fit in with your plot or theme and that’s fine. Some writers want every fact to be correct but most of us simply want to get it right when there is nothing to be gained by getting wrong.

So here are a few facts that are useful to know about a corpse being found in water when it comes to plotting your novel or short story. In no particular order they are:

•                Bodies found floating in water will ALWAYS be lying face down with the head hanging. There are often post-mortem injuries to the head because of this as the body is buffeted against things in the water. Normally, pathologists can easily distinguish between ante and post-mortem injuries due to the presence or lack of blood. However, as the head hangs down in the water, blood congests there and post-mortem injuries will also bleed.

•                Typical signs found when a body has been immersed in water include anserina cutis (goose bumps), where skin has swelled and wrinkled, and adipocere which is the transformation of the fatty layer in the skin to a soap-like substance. Depending on the water temperature this last process can take months.

•                A body in water will normally sink as the specific gravity (SG) of the body is similar to water. Having sunk to the bottom, putrefaction commences and this will eventually lower the SG, causing the body to rise. Attached weight (heavy clothing, weights etc) may delay the body rising but will not normally be enough to stop it altogether. In cold water, putrefaction is delayed so the body will not rise as quickly as it would in warmer water. In water that remains very cold all year round the body may never rise.

•                Medically, a pathologist will not be able to prove the cause of death was drowning. There are some pathological changes that are characteristic of drowning but they also occur in other deaths (heart failure, drug overdoses, and for crime writers, head injuries). A diagnosis of drowning is largely done by excluding other deaths.

•                There are suggestive indicators which can help with diagnosing whether the body was alive or dead when it entered the water.

1.   Large quantities of water in the stomach indicate the body was alive when it entered the water. If water is not present or present but in small quantities it suggests that death occurred before the body entered the water.

2.   Hands gripping foreign materials. Struggling victims may clutch at anything they can. Evidence may be found during examination (fingernails etc). Occasionally something happens called cadaveric spasm, essentially the body goes into rigor mortis instantly. Anything the hand was holding at the time could well still be held there. This would suggest that the victim was alive when they entered the water.

•                For writers wanting some technical details that may emerge from a post-mortem when the cause of death was drowning, the following would be typical:

3.   A fine white foam may be seen coming out of the airways (mouth and nostrils). If it is wiped off, pressure from the lungs will force it to reappear. This indicates that the body was alive when it entered the water. Unfortunately, this foam also occurs in cardiac victims, drug overdoses and head trauma.

4.   Damage to the middle ear, typically a blue/purple discolouration of the bone of the mastoid air cells. However, this also occurs in electrocution, head injuries and some forms of suffocation.

5.   Shoulder girdle bruises. People struggling against drowning often rupture muscles in the shoulder girdle, chest and neck. This may only occur in 10% of drownings and is not conclusive.

•                For crime writers, it is very rare for a murderer to kill his victim by drowning. This would normally require the murderer to be substantially stronger than the victim or for the victim to be incapacitated somehow (i.e. drunk or unconscious). Far more common is a body being disposed of in water and a drowning to be staged.

To summarise, pathologists and the police have certain reliable pointers that suggest whether the victim was alive or dead when they entered the water. It is difficult to stage the pathological changes that occur during drowning and it is unlikely anyone could successfully kill someone and then fake their drowning. However, the difficulty for fiction writers is that drowning cannot be definitively proved during post-mortem. There are indicators but they also occur in other deaths, making it very difficult to differentiate whether someone drowned or died from other causes, a heart attack for example. 

The author of this guest post is Michael Craven. Michael was short-listed for 2013 Debut Dagger. You can follow his very useful blog at www.criminaljusticewriters.com.

Going round in circles

Are you a writer? Is there any particular way in which you like to kick-start your novels (or short stories)? I'm not sure if I always start the same way. Sometimes it's with an incident that then grows into a longer story. Sometimes it's with the victim, and sometimes I start by thinking of the perpetrator first. Certainly that's what I'm doing in my second novel, Washed in the Blood.

But I asked established crime writer, Margot Kinberg, to talk to us about her methods. Here's what she said.

Will it Go Round in Circles?*

Thanks so much for inviting me to guest-post – I’m honoured. One of the challenges writers face is taking all of those creative ideas that always seem to pop up at either 2 am, or in the middle of a traffic jam, and putting them into some kind of coherent story.  Every writer handles this differently, so I can only share the way I go about it. But here’s how the process works for me.

I write crime fiction, so in my stories, there’s invariably at least one murder, and at least one murder victim. And that’s where I always start. Who’s the victim? What is that person like?  I’ve gotten inspiration from many places for the kind of person who would make a good victim. There really is no set pattern there, at least for me. But once I decide on who the victim is, then I get to work on setting up the story.

One way to look at the way I do things is a set of circles. First, of course, there’s the smallest circle around the victim. What is her or his personality? What is that person’s background?  What about that person might drive someone to murder?  Once I know the victim a little, it’s time for the next circle: the victim’s close friends, family and so on.

In that second circle is where you often find the suspects in a murder mystery, so that’s where I start adding in people who may have something to gain by killing the victim. In one of my stories, for instance, my victim has something valuable that one suspect wants. Another suspect feels threatened by something the victim knows. Another is obsessed with the victim. Well, you get the idea. This is also the place where one can add in another circle for the people the victim comes into occasional contact with – sort of an ‘outer circle’ of people. Those are people who can give an interesting perspective on the victim and certainly could be suspects.

Then I add another circle, separate from the victim’s – the sleuth’s circle. After all, it’s hard to do a crime novel if nobody tries to solve the crime. My sleuth is Joel Williams, a former cop, now a university professor of criminal justice. He has his own circle, including his wife, his contacts at the police department, his university colleagues, his students, and so on. Those circles are important (at least to me) because my sleuth is not a cop or PI. So he doesn’t have any official reason to be investigating anything. And nobody is required to tell him anything. That means that one of his circles has to overlap with one of the victim’s circles.

Let me give an example. In one of my stories, my sleuth is working on a research project with two colleagues. In the process of that research they uncover a ‘cold case’ that leads to a not-so-cold murder. In this case, that research circle overlaps with one of the first victim’s circles. That step, as I say, is perhaps less of a critical issue for police procedurals or PI novels, where the sleuth is supposed to investigate. That’s what cops and PIs are paid to do.

Once I have my circles set up, I outline the action in the story. I add in things such as where things happen, how exactly Joel Williams gets involved, and who has critical information for the case. With that rough structure in place, it’s time for the details.

One thing I like about this approach is that it allows for flexibility. It lets the writer put in as many or as few characters as needed. The story can take place at any time, in any place, and feature just about any kind of victim. So there’s a lot of ‘wiggle room.’

I also like the way the circles encourage me to add character development and sub-plots. As I look at each circle I see opportunities to sketch in things such as people’s home lives, minor characters and the other details that make a story (hopefully!) more interesting.

Circles don’t work for everyone of course. More than anything else I believe that each writer has to find her or his own way to frame ideas and get those ideas written. But as for me? Yeah, I go around in circles. ;-)

Many thanks again for hosting me!! Please feel free to get in contact with me (margotkinberg(at)gmail(dot)com) if you want to connect.

*NOTE: The title of this post is the title of a Billy Preston song, co-written with Bruce Fisher.

Margot Kinberg is the author of the Joel Williams mystery series. She blogs at http://margotkinberg.wordpress.com

Thinking of self publishing?

So you've decided to go it alone. The next question is, print book or e-book? Well, Philippa has talked about her experiences of using print-on-demand services. And this may well be the way you want to go (there's no reason why you can't do both). But I chose to take the route of self-publishing on line.

The first thing you will need is a cover. It's important that this cover is one that will still look good reduced to a thumbprint, one that will stand out and mark your novel as professional. And I'm afraid that, for that, you will have to pay. The company I used was called 2h Design Consultancy www.nedof2h.net and the guy I dealt with was Ned Hoste. It was pricey, but the service was excellent. It didn't take more than a few days before six options were winging their way to me. The one I chose wasn't exactly one of the ones he sent, but had elements from several incorporated into the final result. I recommend them.

           
Now I'm no technophobe, and I guess I thought I would find the next part easy. I'd spent quite a bit of time on-line, investigating sites which gave you information on how to do it yourself, sites which offered to do it for you (for a fee) and sites which promoted themselves as e-publishers, and had gathered a considerable amount of information. Well it wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. For a start I was a bit bewildered by the information on the type of formatting that was required. It seemed that different e-book sellers required different formats, and so just reading the instructions put out by Amazon for Kindle would only go so far. And I didn't want to limit my market to just one seller. So in the end I chose the company that seemed to have the strongest reputation, which was Bookbaby.

Were they helpful? Well, yes and no. They claim that you can just send them a Word document and they will do the rest. So I sent them a Word document, along with the fee (which isn't extortionate). Not so fast. Apparently, I discovered, although this was indeed a Word doc., it had the wrong formatting. Well, I had thought (and to be honest, I still do think) that putting in the correct formatting was what I was paying them to do. Now I was lost. It wasn't that I couldn't understand what was needed. It was that I couldn't work out how to take out all the formatting I'd put in.

So, and I totally advise this to anyone who is struggling with technology, I went to a geek forum, and I asked the question. As it happened I'd been chatting on this forum for a while, ever since I developed my own website, and so I wasn't just a newbie asking for favours. That can get right up people's noses. And there I found a Good Samaritan who DID IT FOR ME! She even reformatted the book correctly and said it only took her about twenty minutes.(Of course I now needed to learn to do it myself, and when I've mastered it I'll post the details).

Once it was in the correct format, the new, smart cover attached, I re-sent it to Bookbaby and soon it was on all the e-book retailers' lists.

Wow! Now everybody's flocking to buy it, yes? Well, er, no, actually. Because here's the rub. Whether you choose to self-publish through print on demand, or through e-sellers, the marketing and publicity is all down to you. It can feel really heady initially, when friends and acquaintances are reading it, they're recommending it to their friends, you're getting some fab reviews on Amazon. Philippa even got her book taken up by a reading group. But once that's over, you need to be thinking of how to get your book out there, and noticed (and bought and read, obviously). So how?

Well, the standard response is: Social Media. Of which there are many forms. I'll have a look at them, and what's worked for me, in the next post, but let me tell you this much: it's a long, slow haul.

Historical Headaches or The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction 1 by Clare Hawkins

      I am still wrestling with techniques for creating an authentic period flavour in my novels without producing phony or unintentionally humorous effects. The development of a confident voice is fundamental. In this instance I am referring to the narrative voice, although the notion is applied equally to the individual voices of characters conveyed through their speech and dialogue. I find it useful to refer to successful writers as I continue to try to work on my style. Julian Rathbone, in his notes to The Last English King refers to his anachronistic use of modern prose in the narrative and in the dialogue, though I think in fact this is what most successful writers of historical fiction do. This would appear to be the safest approach to avoid the following effect.    Dick Turpin espied the fair serving wench who had oftentimes evaded him and swore upon his rapier that he would bed her that very eventide.     Avoiding an inappropriately modern idiom is another danger as in:        Rubens just didn’t feel up to it that morning, all that standing at his easel. Plus his model was hardly going to make it on the cat walk, not with doughnuts that size.     Period atmosphere can be very effectively achieved by using appropriate contextual references and some elements of vocabulary suggestive of a period in the past. Here are some examples.

Lady Mary gathered her rosary beads in her short workmanlike fingers, tucked them into the pocket of her gown and strode towards the door of the great hall where her armies of gentlemen and soldiers were breaking their fast. She entered the head of the hall and mounted the dais. ‘Today we move out,’ she announced, loud and clear enough for the least man at the back of the hall to hear her. ‘We go to Framlingham, a day’s ride, no more than that. I shall raise my standard there. If we can get there before Lord Robert we can hold him off in a siege.

The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory.
    Apart from the obvious references to the physical and social context (rosary beads, gown, gentlemen and soldiers, hall, Lady Mary etc, some of the verbs (gathered, strode, entered) are more formal and suggestive of Lady Mary’s manner and status perhaps. There are two notably archaic expressions: breaking their fast and  the least man, this latter reflecting the ranks in society.
    Ronan Bennett in Havoc in its Third Year uses a number of subtle grammatical variations to indicate the period of the early 17th century as well as the contextual references and some rich Shakespearean metaphor, nourish the prating mouths as well as archaic vocabulary.
The alehouse-keeper brought small beer to drink and halfpenny loaves of buckwheat and barley. The man would have loitered so that his fat lips might carry gossip to nourish the prating mouths outside, where it seemed the whole township had gathered, but Brigge bade him be gone with angry hard words and so he went, very quick his step and dismayed his look. The bread was stale and coarse and the butter near rancid. Brigge ordered the door of the parlour left open for air, but all that entered was the fuddled gaze of the drinkers, their pots in their fists, their clay pipes in their stained lips.
   Hilary Mantel’s creation of the period in Wolf Hall is achieved by a complex and skilfully integrated mix of vigorous modern language, embedded indirect speech, the occasional archaic phrase as well as rich and detailed contextual references.
The stake was on top of a pile of stones, and some gentlemen came, and priests, bishops perhaps, he did not know. They called out to the Loller to put off her heresies. He was close enough to see her lips moving but he could not hear what she said. What if she changes her mind now, will they let her go? Not they, the woman chuckled. Look, she is calling on Satan to help her. The gentlemen withdrew. The officers banked up wood and bales of straw around the Loller. The woman tapped him on the shoulder; let’s hope it’s damp eh? This is a good view, last time I was at the back. The rain had stopped, the sun broken through. When the executioner came with a torch it was pale in the sunshine, barely more than a slick movement, like the movement of eels in a bag. The monks were chanting and holding up a cross to the Loller, and it was only when they skipped backwards, at the first billow of smoke, that the crowd knew the fire was set.
   Integration of a range of elements would seem to be the key: restrained and limited use of archaic expressions, references to context and figurative language, which are integral to the character’s (or characters’) actions and experiences. Easier said than done!
    Where the first person is used in narrative, the issues of voice become more complex, because of the need to slip into indirect speech and more deeply inside the head of the narrator. (Quite a challenge when trying to imagine the thoughts and experiences of a 17th century soldier or a medieval Maltese peasant.) Other technical difficulties occur in trying to move smoothly from the inside of a character’s consciousness to a more distant view. And then there is the question of direct speech and dialogue, another tricky area for the writer of historical fiction. These topics are best left for another time!
    In the meantime, if anyone has a glossary of 16th and 17th swear words, I would be very grateful to hear about it!