It's often quoted as "Show, don't tell" because, on the whole, beginner writers do too much telling when they should be showing. But of course it's not nearly as simple as that. Both have their value; the key is to understand their respective strengths, and use each to your story's best advantage. Mind you, like everything in writing, it isn't even binary, but a spectrum, from the telliest tell, to the showiest show.

SHOWING is for making the reader feel they're in there: feel as in smell, touch, see, hear, believe the actual experience of the characters. As John Gardner says, it's by being convincing in the reality and detail of how we evoke our imagined world, that we persuade the reader to read the story we're telling as if it really happened, even though we all know it didn't. That means working with the immediate physical and emotional experience of the characters and their actions.

TELLING is for covering the ground, when you need to, as a narrator (whether the narrator is a character, or an implied, external narrator in a third person narrative). It's the storyteller saying "Once upon a time", or "The mountains were covered in fine, volcanic ash". So it's a little more removed from the immediate experience of the moment.

Telling: They stood close and wrapped their arms round each other in a passionate embrace, so that she became aware that he had been riding, and then that he was as nervous as she was.

Showing: They gripped each other and the tweed of his jacket was rough under her cheek. His hand came up to stroke her hair; she smelled leather and horses on the skin of his wrist. He was trembling. [Note that though showing is often a bit longer than telling the same thing, it isn't here, and it needn't be.]

Telling: He was tall and attractive to women, being so charming to them that they fell for him immediately and never guessed how little he cared for them.

Showing: Show us how he stands at the bar, how Anna looks up into his face and sees love in his smile, and then show us what he says, in the gents, about making sure this girl - what's her name? - Anna, doesn't discover his address.

It can help a lot to think in terms of psychic distance, which I've also blogged about here. For now...

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Being between houses is proving to be an enlightening experience. Did you watch Mary Portas on estate agents the other night?
Prospective Purchaser: 'Which direction does the house face?'
Indifferent Estate Agent with Provocatively Spiked Hair: 'West. Of course, West is the new South.'
Like 50 is the the new 30. Grey is the new Black. Going out is the new Staying In. Rejection is the new Acceptance...?
It's no coincidence, I think, that estate agents are the keyholders to prospective houses, just as literary agents are the gatekeepers for publishing houses.


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I'm in what's for me a rare state: I'm not writing a novel. But the other day I needed something to take to my writer's circle, the Clink Street Writers, for the likes of Sarah Salway, Pam Johnson, Ros Asquith and Michelle Lovric to sink their teeth into. So I did something else which is rare for me: dug out a short story which I wrote about five years ago, and which I never really got right but still think could be got right.

It's a story that started as an exercise in a third thing which is rare for me: a third person narrative, with a moving point of view and therefore a neutral but implied omniscient narrator. I'd had an interesting time doing this with my two viewpoint characters my story Russian Tea so I decided to try working with three. Point of view becomes a much more interesting affair if each viewpoint character has reasons to feel strongly about the others, so I set up a newly-married couple, and sent the man's best friend to visit them. And since it was set around 1830, I wanted a narrative voice which had a feel of the period.

But in reading it after so long a gap, I found it curiously distanced. I can't remember if that's what I felt didn't work before, but it certainly is now.

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On WriteWords, Caroline Green has been tackling the dreaded Second Novel, to follow her debut YA Dark Ride, (isn't that a great cover?) and she posted this:

"I've written the big dramatic finale of my WIP and am now facing the bit I always hate. How DO people tidy things up and end a story? I always seem to go for an epilogue set a few months or so down the line but feels a bit lazy. I genuinely don't know how other people do this [and suddenly am unable to remember what happens in a single book that I've ever read]. Would love to know what others think..."

And I found myself saying: "I think less is almost always more. Maybe you just need to stop where you are." I very rarely see a manuscript which ends too soon, and I see a great many which have a lumpy little chapter dangling off the end, covering the next three years and explaining how they did get married and move to America where they were re-united with the long-lost stepson who got a few mentions earlier in the novel. If I ask if the writer wrote that in response to someone saying, "I wanted to know if she..." sometimes they say Yes, and sometimes they say, "I thought readers would want to know if she...", which is the writer's own Inner Reader saying the same.

The need to follow the characters through till everything's resolved is a tribute to how involving they and their predicament have been for the reader.

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This musical version of Erich Segal's 'boy-meets-girl-girl-dies' novel was too slick to be moving. We know the outcome because the story of poor Jenny Cavallieri and rich Oliver Barret IV begins at Jenny's funeral, to the song What do you say about a girl? and is told in flashback.It progresses on much the same level, one event following another, without much variety of tone.

Most people in the audience would have known the 1970 film of the same name, starring Ali Macgraw and Ryan O'Neal. Not having seen the film, I thought the music, delivered from a grand piano and some string players at the back of the stage, was the best part of this show. The lyrics were often tame, sometimes clumsy or cringe-makingly mawkish, apart from a song about varieties of pasta sung in the newlywed's kitchen, where Donizetti was made to rhyme with spaghetti.


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One of the faux-orthodoxies about creative writing most guaranteed to raise my blood pressure is the one parrotted by newbie writers with terrible writing teachers: "omnisicient narrators are Old Fashioned". Both John Gardener in The Art of Fiction and James Wood in How Fiction Works explore all the possibilities and conclude by preferring an omniscient, third-person narrator, able to enter any character's consciousness and to narrate independently of any character. Such a narrator is even able to tell us what a character doesn't understand about his/her own consicousness: it's arguably the most powerful, flexible, fluent and, you might say (as Gardener and Wood say), grown-up, way of telling a story.

But the novel I'm about to start is that kind and, frankly, I'm just a tad worried. It's a first for me, although I've written short fiction thus. I've decided to do it partly because it suits the story, but also because I need a technical difficulty to wrestle with before I can face the long slog of writing the damn thing. But I'm also having what you might call existential angst about it.

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