Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell

Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell

Author:James Scott Bell [Bell, James Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-03-30T07:00:00+00:00


Compare those openings to the opening of one of your own manuscripts. What's the difference?

Go to the library or bookstore and pick several novels at random. Read the opening pages. If there's a prologue, does it work for you? Why or why not? Are you hooked by the openings? Do you want to read on? Analyze your reactions.

Next time you watch a movie, think about the middle section (Act II). If things drag, ask yourself why. How would you do it better? Simply by asking this question and thinking it through, you're working your writing muscles.

Have you ever been dissatisfied with the ending to a novel or movie? I think you have. Choose one and analyze the ending. What did it fail to do?

[ SHOW VS. TELL ]

If there is any bit of ironclad advice for fiction writers, it's "Show, don't tell." Yet confusion about this aspect of the craft is one of the most common failings in beginning writers. If you want your fiction to take off in the reader's mind, you must grasp the difference between showing and telling.

The distinction is simply this: Showing is like watching a scene in a movie. All you have is what's on the screen before you. What the characters do or say reveals who they are and what they're feeling.

Telling, on the other hand, is just like you're recounting the movie to a friend.

Which renders the more memorable experience?

Remember the scene in Jurassic Park the movie, where the newcomers catch their first glimpse of a dinosaur? With mouths open and eyes wide, they stand and look at this impossible creature before them before we, the audience, see it.

All we need to know about their emotions is written on their faces. We're not given a voice in their heads. We know just by watching what they're feeling.

In a story, you would describe it in just that fashion: "Mark's eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He tried to take a breath, but breath did not come. ..." The reader feels the emotions right along with the character.

That is so much better than telling it, like this, "Mark was stunned and frightened."

In the nineteenth century, telling was common. Authors like George Eliot would write passages like this one from Middlemarch:

When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite's clear young eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence

about the future from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he must give a rather strong admonition. Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from



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