Editing Your Novel Part 3: How to Show, Instead of Tell

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing course or read books on how to edit, you’ve been told at some point to “show, don’t tell.” In other words, try to make your “scenes” come to life.

Look at this example:

Tracey was furious, too nervous to continue cooking dinner. She paced up and down the small living room. How do you dare! And with that fool, Maria, who had turned the middle of the street. Well, she would show him that she was not one to be taken lightly. She waits for him to come home.

He looked around frantically. On the sideboard was an ugly bronze statuette that her grandmother had given her. She imagined it buried deep in Charlie’s skull.

When he walked through the door, he was as bright and cheery as ever. She kissed him hard 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 him, what the infidels would say. In the end she just went out with her. He told her directly that he knew what he had been doing with Maria. But he just laughed. She said that Maria had approached him, that there was nothing to it.

Enraged, she grabbed the statuette and slammed it into the back of her head. She saw the shock on her face and her mouth open to protest, but her rage got the better of her. All she could see was the infamous red mist, and she unloaded her ornament on her head over and over again until she froze.

Now the above gives you all the information you need. It is not badly written and the information contained in the piece is clear. He gives us the details we need and he does it succinctly. In fact, if you read 19th-century novelists like George Eliot, Jane Austen, or Henry James, you’ll find large tracts of written text like this (no doubt the writing will be of better quality, surely it will be longer). breathless) and so fiction was then written. To be honest, I prefer to enjoy it. Done right, it engages the intellect and draws the reader into the author’s thoughts very effectively.

Look at this passage from Middlemarch.

His thought was not tinged with any solemnity or pathos about the old man lying in bed: such feelings are easier to affect than to feel about an aged creature whose life is visibly nothing more than a remnant of vices. He had always seen the ugly side of Mr. Featherstone: he was not proud of her and she was only useful to him. Being anxious about a soul that is always biting you should be left to the saints of the earth, and Mary was not one of them.

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

Take a look at the first excerpt rewritten to show, rather than tell, what happened between Tracey and Charlie.

Tracey smoked. Her breathing became ragged and she could hear the beating of her heart.

‘That cheating pig,’ she said to herself. And with that fool, Maria. How could she? What does she have that I don’t?

He tried to steady his breathing, which came in short, sharp gasps. She debated with herself how she was going to bring it up, put it in her face. She with one eye she looked at the bronze statuette on the sideboard.

‘Right,’ she said. Let’s see what you have to say for yourself. Let’s see how you feel about that buried in your skull.

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

‘Hello darling,’ he said. ‘Hello?’

‘Oh, not bad, not bad.’

‘The dinner is ready?’

‘Not yet. It won’t be long.

She looked. ‘Something wrong? Your face looks a bit blotchy. Are you sick of something?

He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. Hold still for a minute, will you? Stop circling up and down. What’s wrong?

She stared back at him, her eyes like hot coals. ‘Only a word. Mary.’

He looked up, and his grip on her shoulder tightened.

‘What the hell are you…?’ she started her but then started laughing. She let go of her shoulders and flung herself down into the flesh.

‘So you heard. So what nosy old lady let you in on that?

‘Does not matter. What matters is, why?

‘Why do you think?’

‘How could you?’

‘Oh, give up. She was all over me like a rash. She wanted it. I just forced. It didn’t mean anything.

He looked at her and offered her his hand. Come on Trace. It’s not like you haven’t been around the block.

She reached for him as if forgiving him, but with her other hand she grabbed the statuette and threw it hard. Her blood gushed from her forehead from the wound she had given him.

“For God’s sake, Trace,” she managed to say. ‘Be careful.’

As she swung the ornament back and forth, she mumbled, ‘And don’t call me Trace.’

This time, the writer has explored the action and dramatized the incident to look like a scene in a play, showing the events as they are really happening, thus carrying the reader along. The first two excerpts are simply recorded events (the first) or recorded thoughts (the second).

Of course, there are times when ‘telling’ is actually the best vehicle to convey something. The reader would be exhausted if every page contained drama and conflict. But there are other mechanisms, which when done in moderation, can also ensure that we are shown rather than told. In fact here is another passage from Middlemarch that uses another technique, that of interior monologue.

Lydgate, in fact, was already aware that he was fascinated by a woman strikingly different from Miss Brooke; he did not suppose in the least that he had lost his balance, but he had said of that woman, ‘she is grace itself; she is perfectly beautiful and accomplished.’ The simple women considered like him the other severe facts of life, to be confronted 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 hostages and the state of mind of one of the perpetrators without taking the reader through the incident.

She enjoyed pleading more, she decided. That was when you really felt the terror of her, when you came closer. She begged and cried so much that he got bored. meeventually he had to stop her babbling, stop her with a good smack across her fat white face. That had put some color on her cheek. She had hated the whiteness of it, she thought it looked like raw cake.

It had been easy, he chuckled, getting her into his car and then pulling it out of the parking lot. He had checked where the CCTV cameras were the day before and had seen that they did not cover the entire site. And it was such a cloudy and rainy afternoon, already dark at four in the afternoon, that no one was going to pay much attention. He just wanted to get into their cars to get out of the weather. The security guy wasn’t doing much either. Staying dry, Graham supposed. So it had been a matter of minutes before two nice young men had offered to help her put her heavy purchases into the trunk of her car and then into the back.

The reason I chose this method was because at the time I also needed to think hard about the pacing of the story. And rhythm is something I’ll discuss in the next article.