Excellent insights. I’ve learned the secret to (at least my own) writing is to learn all the rules so that I know how and when to break them. I love adverbs, starting sentences with ands (not to mention gerunds), and telling not showing. Stories are living breathing things and have their own rhythms, the trick is tuning into what that is and how to facilitate it.
You’re so right! Some of the best stories out there break a lot of the “rules” but the authors almost always understand those rules first
Like with telling, for example. Once you know it adds distance and creates a layer of numbing insulation, you can balance that out in a whole bunch of different ways. It’s less “never tell” and more “if you tell, find ways to deal with the consequences”
And as you say, learning the rules is a great way to understand the consequences and start finding different ways around them
Very useful! I think I'll try that highlight exercise. I do struggle with telling. Need to get better, as I have a tendency to want to rush to the next set-piece. I want to get my readers to the "good part." But there's no reason it can't all be good parts. And if a scene's boring, why not cut it down to essentials? Or remove altogether?
I recently read a book where the extent of a narrator's emotional reaction in a scene was: "I was so overwhelmed" (...their best friend just died 🤦♂️).
One layer I've started to notice in my reading is: how does the writer slow/speed up time and do they choose correctly in the right moment?
Slowing down an action scene with an info-dump may generally be bad, but slowing that same scene with hyper-specific sensory details or spikes of interiority may add to the scene. Conversely slowing down a scene that has generic activity (e.g. washing dishes) with excessive interiority is probably hard to pull off (unless you're a master).
So rather than show-vs-tell, it's helped me to think about slow-vs-fast. How much do I zoom in or out?
This is a great way of looking at it! It's always a mixture of showing and telling, plus using the brakes and accelerator pedal through a mixture of success and failure
The goal is to create those perfect waves of rising and falling tension that make a book impossible to put down
I love the idea of highlighting different types of telling to see how they occur in the manuscript. I've used that technique with nonfiction writers, directing them to highlight every sentence in a paragraph that relates to the topic sentence, for example, or contains emotion (usually to illustrate how many sentences DON'T...)
Great way to help writers graphically see the balance of what they're writing -- a classic example of showing, not telling. So cool to see you mention it in this helpful post!
Thank you. Are you going to put these together into an ebook when you have enough? I'd buy, for convenience! I have a question. I've noticed that sometimes when I read more 'literary' (but simultaneously bestselling, highly acclaimed) SFF, the authors can use a good deal of what you have called 'telling in summary' to move quickly between scenes and cover vast distances. And they actually use it rather a lot. Examples coming to mind now would be (1) Every single one of the Gentleman Bastard books by Scott Lynch and (2) Babel by R.F. Kuang, which I'm reading right now. Like, Lynch will have big telling sections summarising Locke's childhood or how Locke's and Sabetha's early relationship developed; and Kuang will summarise whole terms at Oxford for her students. These books to my eye have very large and frequent sections of telling, so that in fact sometimes it seems as if telling is more often than not the modus operandi, but they (a) season the telling with smatterings of sensory detail and scraps of dialogue and (b) are using it to surf smoothly to the next visceral, vividly-painted scene. Can people get away with more telling if they are writing 'literary' SFF? Or is it that when you reach a certain level of skill you are not anchored so much to 'show don't tell' as everyone always goes on about ad nauseam but you learn how to tell as well as you show, and move smoothly through the landscape of telling between shown scenes? Or have I misread these books?
I've not read Scott Lynch, but I've read a good amount of R.F. Kuang and you're absolutely right. She uses almost every kind of telling in the book, and she uses them a LOT
I feel like there's three things going on there:
1) Her books are more literary, and literary fiction does tell more
2) A lot of the time, she's balancing things incredibly carefully, to offset the distancing and lagging effect of telling. She has big, explosive ideas that carry the story a lot, and often writes very intense situations that also infuse a lot of movement into the text
3) Even then, she pays the price. I've met plenty of readers who find her work "flat", dull, or too slow. I found this with both Babel and Katabasis: I could appreciate they were very well written, but they didn't really move me and I often felt frustrated. I've spoken to many other folks who feel the same
So I definitely agree with what you're saying. Literary speculative fiction has more leeway, and also there are no absolute rules in writing, besides "don't bore your readers." Some very clever writers can manage that using storytelling techniques that would sink the rest of us dead in the water lol
It's all about knowing what you're trying to do, and figuring out the best way to do it
Thanks for the interesting question! Also I hadn't thought about compiling my posts into an ebook, but it's a fun idea. I'll definitely give it some thought
1. You gotta read some Lynch. At least The Lies of Locke Lamora. Or if you want a sample, try a short story The Smoke of Gold is Glory, or A Year And A Day In Old Theradane. So so so good. And telling often abounds here--but somehow it's still so good? How does he do it??
2. Really glad you understand what I mean about Kuang. But the thing is...she's one of the world's currently most successful SFF authors. What's the deal with that, hey?
3. I feel like I have tried so hard to work at 'show don't tell' and then I read people like this, and I wonder if what I should have been working at was 'how to tell well in between showing'. When my first-in-series goes permafree I'll let you know so I can point you to an example in it.
4. If you do eventually stick all these posts in an ebook when you have enough, you will have at least one willing and happy customer (here).
What looks like rule breaking is often rules mastery. And I don't think any wildly successful writer "breaks the rules" without really learning and understanding them first
That's definitely the impression I get from Kuang. She knows the rules, she just thinks (and rightfully so) that she's better than them 😂
This is at the front of my brain on my 1st reread of my stories & I still miss spots. It gets so embodied into your soul, what is on paper isn't always what the writer reads...we need more eyes.
Ah, this so funny. I actually break a lot of these rules during my rough and first draft. Can't be bothered too much with details over progressing with the story. It's quite easy to spot too during the editing rounds too. Between the hands shuffling inside the pocket and heads slightly tilted, hiding the bit on the lip, these blatant descriptors blares louder than air raid horns.
Also funny story, I have a planned YA novel that doesn't allow some of these permissible rules. It might end up being a bad novel or whatever, but that's just the truth.
So glad you enjoyed it! And you're right: anything and everything is permitted in a first draft. It is a wild and lawless place where the ordinary rules do not apply 😁
Thank you so much. This is incredibly helpful. In my book I'm just about at a scene where I have a planned bit of... sort of backstory to fill in and I need to do it right. It's kind of pivotal to the entire series... though you won't know this right away if I do it right. Basically there are two characters who have been sort of missing since then end of book one. The dad and the goat. Don't laugh. I'm serious. No one knows what happened to them. They just disappeared one day. WELL, just before the climax of book two they come back, but not alone. There are soldiers, a knight commander and another very well-dressed noble person who turns out to be the prince. How we get from a farmer and his goat to that needs to be explained, and well.
Very helpful. A rule I learned about flashbacks is that they occur only when the plot demands the information. Flashbacks work best with a portal, a prompt from present action info flashback, then returning to present action. The story has a smooth transition out and back.
I'd agree with this! "Is it really needed?" / "Could it be shown in the present instead?" / "If not keep it short and sweet" has always been my approach!
Hmm, I hadn’t noticed that about readers, but I’m going to give that some thought
It probably does vary by genre, but in my experience, the best spec fic stories still show heavily. There’s a grey area around more literary authors like R.F. Kuang, who generally tell a lot more, but most of the standard genre fiction I read still strongly tips towards showing
I will be thinking about this though, as you might be right. Tastes and expectations change all the time
Excellent insights. I’ve learned the secret to (at least my own) writing is to learn all the rules so that I know how and when to break them. I love adverbs, starting sentences with ands (not to mention gerunds), and telling not showing. Stories are living breathing things and have their own rhythms, the trick is tuning into what that is and how to facilitate it.
You’re so right! Some of the best stories out there break a lot of the “rules” but the authors almost always understand those rules first
Like with telling, for example. Once you know it adds distance and creates a layer of numbing insulation, you can balance that out in a whole bunch of different ways. It’s less “never tell” and more “if you tell, find ways to deal with the consequences”
And as you say, learning the rules is a great way to understand the consequences and start finding different ways around them
Thank you for this, a good read for right now. ☺️
I'm really glad you found it helpful! Thanks for reading 😁
Very useful! I think I'll try that highlight exercise. I do struggle with telling. Need to get better, as I have a tendency to want to rush to the next set-piece. I want to get my readers to the "good part." But there's no reason it can't all be good parts. And if a scene's boring, why not cut it down to essentials? Or remove altogether?
Sometimes a scene does need to be cut, but that never makes it any easier lol
Writing is so hard. But the good thing is that the more we practice showing (or any other skill) the more it becomes second nature
You've got this 💪
I recently read a book where the extent of a narrator's emotional reaction in a scene was: "I was so overwhelmed" (...their best friend just died 🤦♂️).
One layer I've started to notice in my reading is: how does the writer slow/speed up time and do they choose correctly in the right moment?
Slowing down an action scene with an info-dump may generally be bad, but slowing that same scene with hyper-specific sensory details or spikes of interiority may add to the scene. Conversely slowing down a scene that has generic activity (e.g. washing dishes) with excessive interiority is probably hard to pull off (unless you're a master).
So rather than show-vs-tell, it's helped me to think about slow-vs-fast. How much do I zoom in or out?
This is a great way of looking at it! It's always a mixture of showing and telling, plus using the brakes and accelerator pedal through a mixture of success and failure
The goal is to create those perfect waves of rising and falling tension that make a book impossible to put down
I love the idea of highlighting different types of telling to see how they occur in the manuscript. I've used that technique with nonfiction writers, directing them to highlight every sentence in a paragraph that relates to the topic sentence, for example, or contains emotion (usually to illustrate how many sentences DON'T...)
Great way to help writers graphically see the balance of what they're writing -- a classic example of showing, not telling. So cool to see you mention it in this helpful post!
Yes! It can be so helpful to see it for yourself. And it helps slowly internalise the ability to recognise it, too!
Thank you. Are you going to put these together into an ebook when you have enough? I'd buy, for convenience! I have a question. I've noticed that sometimes when I read more 'literary' (but simultaneously bestselling, highly acclaimed) SFF, the authors can use a good deal of what you have called 'telling in summary' to move quickly between scenes and cover vast distances. And they actually use it rather a lot. Examples coming to mind now would be (1) Every single one of the Gentleman Bastard books by Scott Lynch and (2) Babel by R.F. Kuang, which I'm reading right now. Like, Lynch will have big telling sections summarising Locke's childhood or how Locke's and Sabetha's early relationship developed; and Kuang will summarise whole terms at Oxford for her students. These books to my eye have very large and frequent sections of telling, so that in fact sometimes it seems as if telling is more often than not the modus operandi, but they (a) season the telling with smatterings of sensory detail and scraps of dialogue and (b) are using it to surf smoothly to the next visceral, vividly-painted scene. Can people get away with more telling if they are writing 'literary' SFF? Or is it that when you reach a certain level of skill you are not anchored so much to 'show don't tell' as everyone always goes on about ad nauseam but you learn how to tell as well as you show, and move smoothly through the landscape of telling between shown scenes? Or have I misread these books?
I've not read Scott Lynch, but I've read a good amount of R.F. Kuang and you're absolutely right. She uses almost every kind of telling in the book, and she uses them a LOT
I feel like there's three things going on there:
1) Her books are more literary, and literary fiction does tell more
2) A lot of the time, she's balancing things incredibly carefully, to offset the distancing and lagging effect of telling. She has big, explosive ideas that carry the story a lot, and often writes very intense situations that also infuse a lot of movement into the text
3) Even then, she pays the price. I've met plenty of readers who find her work "flat", dull, or too slow. I found this with both Babel and Katabasis: I could appreciate they were very well written, but they didn't really move me and I often felt frustrated. I've spoken to many other folks who feel the same
So I definitely agree with what you're saying. Literary speculative fiction has more leeway, and also there are no absolute rules in writing, besides "don't bore your readers." Some very clever writers can manage that using storytelling techniques that would sink the rest of us dead in the water lol
It's all about knowing what you're trying to do, and figuring out the best way to do it
Thanks for the interesting question! Also I hadn't thought about compiling my posts into an ebook, but it's a fun idea. I'll definitely give it some thought
Ok:
1. You gotta read some Lynch. At least The Lies of Locke Lamora. Or if you want a sample, try a short story The Smoke of Gold is Glory, or A Year And A Day In Old Theradane. So so so good. And telling often abounds here--but somehow it's still so good? How does he do it??
2. Really glad you understand what I mean about Kuang. But the thing is...she's one of the world's currently most successful SFF authors. What's the deal with that, hey?
3. I feel like I have tried so hard to work at 'show don't tell' and then I read people like this, and I wonder if what I should have been working at was 'how to tell well in between showing'. When my first-in-series goes permafree I'll let you know so I can point you to an example in it.
4. If you do eventually stick all these posts in an ebook when you have enough, you will have at least one willing and happy customer (here).
I actually have Lies of Locke Lamora on my bookshelf! Hopefully I'll get to it soon
Sadly, writing is often like that. For every "rule" there's a billion exceptions, and a dozen jammy gits who find some way to make it work
I stand by what I said about it in this post though: https://pagewake.substack.com/p/but-shakespeare-didnt-do-that
What looks like rule breaking is often rules mastery. And I don't think any wildly successful writer "breaks the rules" without really learning and understanding them first
That's definitely the impression I get from Kuang. She knows the rules, she just thinks (and rightfully so) that she's better than them 😂
This is at the front of my brain on my 1st reread of my stories & I still miss spots. It gets so embodied into your soul, what is on paper isn't always what the writer reads...we need more eyes.
If a story feels off to me, it is usually THIS!
Thanks for the reminder 🧡
It's so easy to slip into without noticing! Which is fine in a first draft. Like you say, that's what edits and beta readers are for
And saving up for an awesome editor. We need editors!
Ah, this so funny. I actually break a lot of these rules during my rough and first draft. Can't be bothered too much with details over progressing with the story. It's quite easy to spot too during the editing rounds too. Between the hands shuffling inside the pocket and heads slightly tilted, hiding the bit on the lip, these blatant descriptors blares louder than air raid horns.
Also funny story, I have a planned YA novel that doesn't allow some of these permissible rules. It might end up being a bad novel or whatever, but that's just the truth.
Anyways, great article. I absolutely love it!
So glad you enjoyed it! And you're right: anything and everything is permitted in a first draft. It is a wild and lawless place where the ordinary rules do not apply 😁
Thank you so much. This is incredibly helpful. In my book I'm just about at a scene where I have a planned bit of... sort of backstory to fill in and I need to do it right. It's kind of pivotal to the entire series... though you won't know this right away if I do it right. Basically there are two characters who have been sort of missing since then end of book one. The dad and the goat. Don't laugh. I'm serious. No one knows what happened to them. They just disappeared one day. WELL, just before the climax of book two they come back, but not alone. There are soldiers, a knight commander and another very well-dressed noble person who turns out to be the prince. How we get from a farmer and his goat to that needs to be explained, and well.
Anyway, thank you for the help! You're amazing!
Thanks so much for your kind words. I'm really glad the post was helpful. And happy writing!
So helpful, as always!
Thanks so much!
Very helpful. A rule I learned about flashbacks is that they occur only when the plot demands the information. Flashbacks work best with a portal, a prompt from present action info flashback, then returning to present action. The story has a smooth transition out and back.
I'd agree with this! "Is it really needed?" / "Could it be shown in the present instead?" / "If not keep it short and sweet" has always been my approach!
A fantastic piece. I would love, with your permission, to copy paste some of this into my document of things I need to check when I finish a section.
I'd be absolutely honoured. Thank you so much!
Thank you. I am always on the look out for little checklists I can analyse my work by, so this was very useful!
Hmm, I hadn’t noticed that about readers, but I’m going to give that some thought
It probably does vary by genre, but in my experience, the best spec fic stories still show heavily. There’s a grey area around more literary authors like R.F. Kuang, who generally tell a lot more, but most of the standard genre fiction I read still strongly tips towards showing
I will be thinking about this though, as you might be right. Tastes and expectations change all the time