Finally, much real dialog goes unfinished. When someone is interrupted or cut off abruptly, end the dialog with an em-dash (which you type in manuscript as two hyphens); when he or she trails off without completing the thought, end the dialog with ellipsis points (three periods). Real dialog also tends to be peppered with asides: “We went to Toronto—boy, I hate that city—and found…”
Get your characters talking at least halfway like real people, and you’ll find that the readers are talking, too: they’ll be saying favorable things about your work.
Show, Don’t Tell
Every writing student has heard the rule that you should show, not tell, but this principle seems to be among the hardest for beginners to master.
First, what’s the difference between the two? Well, “telling” is the reliance on simple exposition: Mary was an old woman. “Showing,” on the other hand, is the use of evocative description: Mary moved slowly across the room, her hunched form supported by a polished wooden cane gripped in a gnarled, swollen-jointed hand that was covered by translucent, liver-spotted skin.
Both showing and telling convey the same information—Mary is old—but the former simply states it flat-out, and the latter—well, read the example over again and you’ll see it never actually states that fact at all, and yet nonetheless leaves no doubt about it in the reader’s mind.
Why is showing better? Two reasons. First, it creates mental pictures for the reader. When reviewers use terms like “vivid,” “evocative,” or “cinematic” to describe a piece of prose, they really mean the writer has succeeded at showing, rather than merely telling.
Second, showing is interactive and participatory: it forces the reader to become involved in the story, deducing facts (such as Mary’s age) for himself or herself, rather than just taking information in passively.
Let’s try a more complex example:
Singh had a reputation for being able to cut through layers of bureaucracy and get things done.
Doubtless a useful chap to have around, this Singh, but he’s rather a dull fellow to read about. Try this instead:
Chang shook his head and looked at Pryce. “All this red tape! We’ll never get permission in time.”
Suddenly the office door slid open, and in strode Singh, a slight lifting at the corners of his mouth conveying his satisfaction. He handed a ROM chip to Chang. “Here you are, sir—complete government clearance. You can launch anytime you wish.”
Chang’s eyebrows shot up his forehead like twin rockets, but Singh was already out the door. He turned to Pryce, who was leaning back in his chair, grinning. “That’s our Singh for you,” said Pryce. “We don’t call him the miracle worker for nothing.”
In the first version, Singh is spoken about in the abstract, while in the second, we see him in the concrete. That’s the key to showing: using specific action-oriented examples to make your point. When writing a romantic scene, don’t tell us that John is attracted to Sally; show us that his heart skips a beat when she enters the room. It’s rarely necessary to tell us about your characters’ emotions. Let their actions convey how they feel instead.
(Notice that at the end of the second Singh version above, Pryce tells us about Singh. That’s a special case: it’s fine for one of your characters to say what he or she thinks of another; in fact, that’s a good way to reveal characterization for both the person being spoken about and the person doing the speaking.)
Speaking of speaking (so to speak), a great way to show rather than tell is through dialog:
Telling: Alex was an uneducated man.
Showing: “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said Alex.
Likewise, using modified speech to show a character’s regional or ethnic origin can be quite effective, if done sparingly:
Telling: “It’s a giant spaceship with the biggest engines I’ve ever seen,” said Koslov in a thick Russian accent.
Showing: “It is giant spaceship with biggest engines I have ever seen,” said Koslov.
The failure to use contractions shows us Koslov is uncomfortable with the language; the dropping of the articles “the” and “a” shows us that he’s likely a Russian-speaker, a fact confirmed by his name. The reader hears the accent without you telling him that the character has one.
Don’t overdo this, though. One of my favorite non-SF writers is Ed McBain, but frequently when he wants to demonstrate that a character is black, he descends into pages of offensively stereotypical Amos ’n’ Andy dialog. Here’s a character in McBain’s Rumpelstiltskin musing on the local constabulary: “P’lice always say somebody done nothing a’tall, den next t’ing you know, they ’resting somebody.”
Are there any times when telling is better than showing? Yes. First, some parts of a story are trivial—you may want your reader to know a fact, without dwelling on it. If the weather is only incidental to the story, then it’s perfectly all right to simply tell the reader “it was snowing.” Indeed, if you were to show every little thing, the reader would say your story is padded.
Second, there’s nothing wrong with relying on telling in your first drafts; I do this myself. When you’re working out the sequence of events and the relationships between characters, it may cause you to lose sight of the big picture if you stop at that point to carefully craft your descriptions:
First draft: It was a typical blue-collar apartment.
Final draft: She led the way into the living room. It had only two bookcases, one holding bowling trophies and the other mostly CDs. There was a paperback book splayed open face down on the coffee table—a Harlequin Romance. Copies of The National Enquirer and TV Guide sat atop a television set that looked about fifteen years old.
Note that showing usually requires more words than telling; the examples of the latter in this column take up 51 words, whereas those of the former total 210. Many beginning writers are daunted by the prospect of producing a long work, but once they master showing rather than telling, they find that the pages pile up quickly.
The third place where you’ll still want to do a lot of telling is in the outlines for novels. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a senior editor at Tor Books, says that some of the best outlines he’s ever received contain lines such as, “Then a really exciting battle occurs.” If the editor buys your book, he or she is trusting that you know how to convert such general statements into specific, action-oriented, colourful prose.
Finally, of course, showing is also better than telling in the process of becoming a writer. Don’t tell your friends and family that you want to be a writer; rather, show them that you are one by planting yourself in front of your keyboard and going to work…
Description
There was a cartoon in The New Yorker many years ago in which the female host of a posh party accosts one of her guests: “I’ve just learned that you wrote a novel based on somebody else’s screenplay. Please leave my house at once.”
It’s true that novelizations are the antithesis of literature, but when I was a teenager, desperate to learn how to write, I read dozens of them. Why? Because in a piece of fiction, every nuance can be described in words. It was fascinating to see the ways in which writers described scenes that I’d already watched on the big screen.
(In point of fact, of course, most novelizations are written before the movie is completed. The writers of the book versions have probably never seen a single frame of the film, so the way they describe the action is often quite different from the way it was actually shot.)
For writers beginning today, there’s an even better tool available than novelizations: the new interpreted-for-the-blind movies on video. These use the secondary audio channel to provide a running commentary, often of a very high caliber, describing in vivid words the scene that’s simultaneously unfolding in pictures. Watching these can be a terrific way to learn how to bring a scene to life verbally; the best one I’ve seen is the for-the-blind version of Casablanca.
Although I’m part of the minority that thinks Star Trek: The Motion Pic
ture is one of the best SF films ever made, just about everyone likes the last bit of dialog in the film.
Unfortunately, the novelization of ST:TMP is by none other than Gene Roddenberry (and it’s so clunky, unlike the Star Wars novelization, which is putatively by George Lucas but was actually written by Alan Dean Foster, that I’m inclined to believe Roddenberry really did perpetrate it). How does Roddenberry portray this climactic moment in the book version? Just by reprinting the dialog, without any real description:
Kirk turned to the helm. “Take us out of orbit, Mr. Sulu.”
“Heading, sir?” DiFalco asked.
Kirk indicated generally ahead. “Out there. Thataway.”
Now, let’s see how that might have been handled better. Remember, a scene in any book has to carry all the emotional freight on its own; it’s not supposed to be a mere transcript of something people have already seen:
Jim returned to the center seat. It wasn’t his old chair, but he would have to get used to it. He heard the whirring of the little motors in the chair’s ergonomic back as it nestled into his spine.
He knew everyone on the bridge was waiting for what he would do next; it was his ship, at last and again, and he was back where he belonged. Ahead of him, he could see the backs of Sulu and DiFalco’s heads, and between them—
—between them, the stars, steady, untwinkling, beckoning.
Jim’s heart was pounding. He allowed himself a moment to gain composure, then gave the familiar order. “Mr. Sulu, ahead warp one.”
Sulu’s voice was filled with excitement, with anticipation. “Warp one, sir,” he acknowledged, while sliding the master velocity control on his helm console forward. The deckplates immediately began to vibrate, and a growing hum filled the air.
Chief DiFalco half-turned in her seat to look back at Kirk. “Heading, sir?”
Jim was still caught up in the beauty of the cosmos. He leaned forward, and his voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Out there,” he said.
He glanced to his right; Scotty was standing beside him, eyebrows raised.
Jim couldn’t quite suppress the grin that was growing across his face. He was back, and the adventure was just beginning. He flipped his hand nonchalantly ahead.
“Thataway…”
The trick is to appeal both to the emotions and to the senses: tell us what people are feeling, what they’re thinking, and, when appropriate, what they’re seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.
You have much more control over the reader’s experience than a movie director does. A director can’t be sure what part of the frame any given viewer might be looking at, but when you write “there was permanent dirt under his fingernails, the legacy of decades of archeological fieldwork,” you know exactly what the reader is contemplating.
Of course, you shouldn’t weigh down every bit of business with lots of detail; it may be sufficient to say “she rode the bus to work.” But when something major is happening, increase the amount of description; think of your words as swelling background music, denoting the importance of the scene.
Description does more than just make vivid the reader’s image of the story; it also lets you control the timing of experiences. Don’t just blurt out, “The butler did it!” Rather, play out the moment, stretch things, build the suspense, make the reader wait:
“Of course you all know by now who the killer is,” said the detective. He paused, looking from face to face, taking in the sea of expressions—fear and agitation and anger, one man biting his lower lip, another nervously smoothing out his hair, a woman with eyes darting left and right. The clock on the mantelpiece clicked loudly to a new minute. Rain continued to beat a staccato rhythm against the window. The detective, milking the moment for all its drama, extended his index finger and swung it slowly from chest to chest until at last it came to rest pointing at that hideous chartreuse cummerbund. “The butler did it!”
Pauses don’t have to be large to convey volumes. Here’s an entire scene from Terence M. Green’s 1992 novel Children of the Rainbow:
It was almost midnight when McTaggart made the decision. “I think,” he said, “that we should go closer.”
The others stared at him.
“Maybe fifteen miles away.”
Nobody said a word.
“Force their hand.”
Even though the other characters do nothing, their inaction communicates their nervousness, their failing resolve, their fear that their leader has gone over the edge. Try it without the description: “I think that we should go closer. Maybe fifteen miles away. Force their hand.”
Nothing. No tension. No suspense. Description isn’t padding—it’s the heart and soul of good writing.
Secret Weapons of Science
Okay—I admit it. I’ve got an arts degree. There, the cat’s out of the bag: despite the cosmology and relativity and paleontology and genetics in my novels, I haven’t taken a science course since high school.
But, hey, I’m not alone in that among practitioners of hard SF. Look at Fred Pohl, who writes about artificial intelligence and black holes and quantum theory. He never even graduated from high school. And, yeah, sure, Kim Stanley Robinson, who is detailing the terraforming of our neighboring world in his Red Mars trilogy, is indeed Doctor Robinson—but his Ph.D. is in (gasp!) English literature.
So how do we non-scientist SF writers keep up with science? Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I rely on six secret weapons.
First, and most important, there’s Science News: The Weekly Newsmagazine of Science. You can’t get it on any newsstand (although many libraries carry it). I’ve been a subscriber for thirteen years now, and I credit it with fully half of the science in my novels and short stories.
Science News is published weekly, and each issue is just sixteen pages long—you can read the whole thing over one leisurely lunch. Aimed at the intelligent lay person, it contains summaries of research papers appearing in Nature, Science, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, The New England Journal of Medicine, and hundreds more, as well as reports from all the major scientific conferences in Canada and the United States, plus original feature articles on topics ranging from quarks to the greenhouse effect to Neanderthal fossils to junk DNA. There is simply no better source for keeping up to date.
(Of course, the key is to actually make use of the material. Both Michael Crichton and I read the same little piece in Science News years ago about the possibility of cloning dinosaurs from blood preserved in the bellies of mosquitoes trapped in amber. Me, I said “Neat!” and turned the page; Crichton went off and made a few million from the idea.)
Science News is published by Science Service, Inc., 1719 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 785-2255; www.sciencenews.com.
My second secret weapon: Time magazine. Yup, that’s right: Time. Each year a few issues will have science cover stories. Buy them—they’re pure gold. You won’t find better introductions to scientific topics anywhere. Recent examples: The Chemistry of Love (February 15, 1993); The Truth About Dinosaurs (April 26, 1993); How Life Began (October 11, 1993); Genetics: The Future is Now (January 17, 1994); How Humanity Began (March 14, 1994); When Did the Universe Begin? (March 6, 1995); and In Search of the Mind (July 31, 1995). Not only will each one suggest many story ideas (the novel I just finished, Frameshift, owes a lot to the two 1994 issues I mention above), but they will also give you all the background and vocabulary you need to write knowledgeably about the sciences in question.
In fact, I find that magazine articles tend to be better than books for giving me what I need quickly and efficiently. And that brings me to secret weapon number three: Magazine Database Plus on the CompuServe Information Service, the world’s largest commercial computer network.
MDP contains the full text of over two hundred general-interest and specialty publications, many going all the way back to 1986. Among the titles of obvious use to SF writers are Astronomy, Bulletin of the At
omic Scientists, Discover, Omni, Popular Science, Psychology Today, Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, and, yes, good old Science News and Time.
A year ago, when I was writing my novel Starplex, I needed to learn about “dark matter”—that mysterious, invisible substance that we know, because of its gravitational effects, constitutes ninety percent of our universe. Well, in less than a minute, MDP provided me with sixty-nine citations of articles on that topic, ranging from lay discussion in the newsmagazines The Economist and US News and World Report to twenty-one articles in—of course—
Science News. There’s no charge beyond normal CompuServe connect-time for generating such a bibliography. You can then either head off to your local library and dig up the articles there for free, or you can download the full text of any that interest you for US$1.00 a pop. To access Magazine Database Plus, type GO MDP at any CompuServe prompt.
[Note: sadly, Magazine Database Plus went out of service in August 1999; I miss it a lot, but a good substitute is Gale Research’s Reference Center Gold; lots of public libraries offer access to it via their websites.]
My fourth secret weapon is being a couch potato. When you get tired of staring at your computer monitor, go look at your TV screen. The Learning Channel has several truly excellent science series that they repeat ad infinitum (Paleo World and The Practical Guide to the Universe are tremendous; Amazing Space isn’t quite as good).
My fifth secret weapon is Richard Morris. Never heard of him? Well, he writes science-popularization books. He’s not as famous as Carl Sagan or David Suzuki or Stephen Jay Gould, but he’s better than all three of them combined. His slim, completely accessible books Cosmic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark Matter, and the End of Time (Wiley, New York, 1993) and The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics (Prentice Hall, New York, 1990) will suggest enough story ideas to keep any hard-SF writer going for a decade or two.