B.D. Tucker

See, when we engage with fiction, we suspend our disbelief about certain things. The author tells us that magic exists, so we’re willing to suspend our disbelief about the existence of magic. The more the author works to build an immersive world, the easier it is for us to suspend our disbelief and accept what’s going on. What’s ‘real’ or ‘isn’t real’ in our world isn’t important, but what’s ‘real’ in this fictional world does.

Good writing doesn’t need to be realistic but it does need to be immersive. We need to be able to stay in that suspension of disbelief, because once that’s broken, everything else can come crashing down with it.

So when people talk about one character or another’s choice being unrealistic what they often mean is that it broke their immersion. We are willing to accept the new rules of any given reality, so long as they are established for us. When new concepts come out of nowhere that weren’t introduced to us previously, that can make the world feel unreal. This can come in the form of rapid changes in the setting, tone, characterization, etc. It breaks our ability to suspend our disbelief, and brings back all of our critical thinking we purposefully set aside to enjoy the story. 

Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes that’s what the author was trying to do, to get us to question everything that we thought we knew. But when it’s unintentional, poorly set up, repetitive, etc, then it just becomes a frustrating experience for the reader and makes the story unenjoyable.

I think the best way to understand this difference is to think of the classic ACME Toonville worlds. Cartoons have different rules to them, characters may survive things like anvils dropped on them with no more than annoyance, they can be run over by trains or change form completely in a matter of seconds. Those are all clearly established rules of the universe, and we can suspend our disbelief to accept them.

But now imagine if in one episode, without warning, an anvil was dropped on the wile coyote, and he died. Blood splattered everywhere, a mangled body left behind. And that was it. He was gone. 

All the sudden, your immersion would be totally broken. Every past instance of anvil dropping and every future instance now becomes horrifying and hard to watch.

To any kids out there: I know that quarantine is stressful and we’re all depressed and lonely bu please please please don’t give out your information to strangers on the internet, and if you do there are dozens of safer options than just giving everything to everyone and just hoping for the best

1. Use an alias (don’t have to but doesn’t hurt, especially when you have a unique name)

2. NEVER give your last name! (E.g. if you’re Jessica, aint no way they gonna be able to find you without your last name. Don’t risk it)

3. NEVER give your address (things like country is still vague enough. But if you tell anyone your street or something super identifiable)

4. You don’t have to post photos of yourself! (You can if you want to but remember to be careful! Street names and addresses should not be visible in these photos!)

5. Block creeps. Anyone that ya getting bad vibes from, just block em. Don’t be scared about being “mean”. Protect yourself.

- Do they consider themselves selfish?

- Do they think crying is a sign of weakness or a sign of strength?

- What's a skill they wish they possessed?

- A trait they dislike about themselves?

- How do they view general society?

- How comfortable are they around strangers?

People throw around the phrase “Show, don’t tell” all the time. But what does it mean? Really?

When I’m editing a client’s work, I always explain what I mean when I say “Show, don’t tell,” so I know we’re on the same page (pun intended). 

FYI: This advice is really 2nd or 3rd draft advice. Don’t tie yourself in knots trying to get this perfect on the first go. First drafts are for telling yourself the story. Revisions are for craft. 

Ruthlessly hunt down filter words (saw, heard, wondered, felt, seemed, etc.). Most filter words push the reader out of narrative immersion, especially if you’re writing in 1st person or a close 3rd person. “She [or I] heard the wind in the trees” is less compelling than “The wind rustled through the trees” or “The wind set the bare branches to clacking.” Obviously, the point of view character is the one doing the hearing; telling the reader who’s doing the hearing is redundant and creates an unnecessary distance between the character’s experience and the reader’s experience of that experience. Was/were is another thing to watch out for; sometimes, nothing but was will do, but in many instances—“There was a wind in the trees” “There were dogs barking”—“was” tells, whereas other phrasing might evoke—“The wind whispered/howled/screamed through the trees” “Dogs snarled/yipped/barked in the courtyard/outside my door/at my heels.” 

Assume your readers are smart. What does this mean? Don’t tell the reader what your characters are thinking or feeling: “Bob was sad.” How do we know? What does Bob’s sadness look like, sound like? What actions, expressions, words indicate Bob’s sadness? Does Bob’s sadness look different than Jane’s would?

It also means that you need not repeat information unless you have something new to add to it—even if it’s been several chapters since you first mentioned it. I think a lot of readers fall into this trap because writing often takes a long time. But what takes a writer days or weeks or months to write might take a reader fifteen minutes to read. So, if the writer keeps telling the reader about so-and-so’s flaming red hair or such-and-such’s distrust or Bob’s blue eyes or Jane’s job as a neurosurgeon, the reader gets annoyed. 

The last thing you want is your reader rolling their eyes and muttering, “OMG, I KNOW” at the story you’ve worked so hard to write. It certainly means you don’t need to have characters tell each other (and through them, the reader) what the story is about or what a plot point means.

Along these same lines, let the reader use their imagination. “Bob stood, turned around, walked across the room, reached up, and took the book from the shelf.” Holy stage directions, Batman! A far less wordy “Bob fetched the book from the shelf” implies all those irrelevant other details. However, if Bob has, say, been bedbound for ten years but stands up, turns around, and walks across the room to fetch the book, that’s a big deal. Those details are suddenly really important.

Write the action. Write the scene with the important information in it. Let the reader be present for the excitement, the drama, the passion, the grief. If you’re finding yourself writing a lot of after-the-fact recap or “he thought about the time he had seen Z” or “and then they had done X and so-and-so had said Y,” you’re not in the action. You’re not in the importance. Exceptions abound, of course; that’s true of all writing advice. But overuse of recapping is dull. Instead of the reader being present and experiencing the story, it’s like they’re stuck listening to someone’s imperfect retelling. Imagine getting only “Last week on…” and “Next week on…” but never getting to watch an episode. I’m editing a book right now with some egregious use of this. The author has a bad habit of setting up a scene in the narrative present—“The queen met the warrior in the garden.”—but then backtracking into a kind of flashback almost immediately. “Last night, when her lady-in-waiting had first suggested meeting the warrior, she had said, ‘Blah blah blah.’ The queen hadn’t considered meeting the warrior before, but as she dressed for bed, she decided they would meet in the garden the next day. Now, standing in the garden, she couldn’t remember why it had seemed like a good idea.”

That’s a really simplified and exaggerated example, but do you see what I’m getting at? If the queen’s conversation with the lady-in-waiting and the resulting indecision are important enough to be in the narrative, if they influence the narrative, let the reader be present for them instead of breaking the forward momentum of the story to “tell” what happened when the reader wasn’t there. Unless it’s narratively important for something to happen off-page (usually because of an unreliable narrator or to build suspense or to avoid giving away a mystery), show your readers the action. Let them experience it along with the characters. Invite them into the story instead of keeping them at a distance.

Finally, please, please don’t rely on suddenly or and then to do the heavy lifting of surprise or moving the story forward; English has so many excellent verbs. Generally speaking, writers could stand to use a larger variety of them. 

Make your descriptions pull double and triple duty. Describing people, places, and objects is fine. Necessary, even. But one of the quickest ways to ramble on telling instead of showing is when you include descriptions that don’t reveal more information than just what people/places/objects look like. It’s particularly easy to fall into this trap with character and setting descriptions.

This week I edited a sample chapter of a manuscript set in the 1970s Middle East that had the potential to be both captivating and rich in setting. Unfortunately, the author didn’t think to tie any of the descriptions of the apartment in the first scene or the characters that inhabited it together in a way that revealed any truly engaging information. Two militia soldiers sent as messengers for a certain faction invade the family-of-five’s home, and the narrator gives a lot of detail about the living room in which the characters sit down, including the colors of the couches and chairs, the positioning of them in relation to the coffee and side tables—and a tray of cigarettes and cigars sitting on the latter. Several paragraphs later, one of the soldiers is suddenly rolling a cigarette between his fingers before he and his companion stand and leave.

Not only did the author not provide adequate details as to where this cigarette came from, they missed out on the opportunity to show who these characters are by having them interact with the environment. The unwilling host could have motioned toward the tray, a “help yourself” gesture—or maybe he intentionally didn’t but one or both of the soldiers take from it anyway. Or maybe the soldiers intentionally refuse the offering and instead one of them reaches for one of his own cigarettes. Maybe they each grab a handful, far more than manners would dictate polite. Maybe they tip the tray over and grind the cigarettes and cigars into the carpet before leaving, a petty form of revenge against being denied their request. Or maybe they don’t and instead leave the bigger threat hanging over the host’s head.

Not one of these descriptions says the same thing as the others, which is why it’s important to critically examine every detail given in a particular story. An intentional and skilled author can turn any told description into information that SHOWS something important that will deepen the reader’s understanding of what’s happening in a given scene. Descriptions should never be throwaway mentions. Not considering the deeper implications of what you’re writing is the fastest way to telling the reader things they aren’t going to find interesting, which brings me to…

Generic descriptions. By now, you probably know what types of throwaway character “tag” actions you default to. You know the types, the ones that often are inserted to break up or react to dialogue: smiling, grinning, nodding, sighing, shrugging, laughing, blinking, looking (at), folding arms, and rolling eyes, just to name a few. They’re easy descriptions to insert, and when used sparingly, they CAN mean something more than is outright stated, but overuse will without question kill their effectiveness. I’ve edited so many manuscripts where characters do things that just… are things? But these things either don’t seem to have any greater meaning or they’re blatant telling, e.g., “I don’t know why you’re still talking about this.” John rolled his eyes, annoyed.

Can you say telling?

A certain manuscript I edited had almost four hundred uses of smile/smiled/smiling and almost three hundred uses of nod/nodded/nodding. I was ready to start slapping characters somewhere around the one-quarter mark of the manuscript because these descriptions meant nothing. As placeholders, they’re fine, but authors need to go deeper if they want to avoid readers rolling their eyes in annoyance like poor John.

I love this post because it is something that can be applied to a character relationship that is more subtle but a totally real problem. They both love each other, but their love languages differ. They have to find a meeting point where they can both feel that love from each other.

THE SECOND DRAFT:

THE THIRD + DRAFT:

THE FINAL DRAFT:

Never be discouraged by your first draft!

If you work it long enough, it will bend and mold into your hands until it transforms into whatever you wish— don’t give up!

Also: Never compare your first draft to someone else’s final draft!

You had to write what you did, when you did, so you could write what you’re writing now.

We only get better with experience.

“Cathexis: the investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea”

When I ask people why they stop reading a book, the number one answer is “I just didn’t care”. 

Ouch. 

So how do we get readers to care about our stories? It may seem like an abstract and immeasurable answer dependent on luck and individual preference but luckily, it’s not. Yes, there will always be cases of of people who just are not interested in your story due to personal opinions, regardless of how nuanced, skilled, or polished your piece is. This is just something we have to accept as creators and press forward. 

There are two main ingredients that make readers care: investment in the characters, and stakes. 

So first, how do we create investment in our characters? We give them a want. Something that they reach out in desperation to have or accomplish. This is the foundation of your external goal and introduced at the end of the first act. It doesn’t have to be “to save the world from an alien invasion” but it does need to be a solid (as opposed to abstract), attainable goal. 

For example, “to find love” isn’t a solid goal (it’s abstract) but is one I often see. The antidote to this is to break it down to smaller and smaller specifics. Your character wants to go to the certain kingdom to defeat the dragon to find the person she loves. Providing physical, concrete objectives for your character to pursue creates the initial investment for the reader to engage with. 

Secondly, stakes. Stakes are what make us hope for the best and fear for the worst, they are what make us wildly keep turning pages wondering what will happen next. They go hand in hand with The Want. The best way to identify stakes is to ask yourself what happens if your character doesn’t accomplish their goal. If the answer is “nothing much” then you don’t have high stakes.