Imagine being able to instantly increase your writing ability tenfold!
All you need is ten toy soldiers on your desk. Okay, that’s a silly metaphor, but imagine if you had ten toy soldiers, each labelled with one of the following writing tips. Now go through your manuscript ten separate times, each with a different soldier, scouting for the one weakness in which that particular soldier specializes.
What?! Go through your manuscript ten separate times when it’s already written, perfect, and ready to submit to a publisher?!
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying! Because it may be written, but it’s not perfect and ready to submit. Further, once you get into the habit of marching all ten fresh sets of eyes along their route, you’ll become—hear the bugle blow?—a much, much better writer.
Here goes…
- SHOW DON’T TELL. This is a standard phrase that, once you understand it, will boost your writing quality considerably. (Think that you already understand and apply it? Dare you to read on anyway, then march through your manuscript looking for places to convert phrases.)
For instance, “she was happy” is telling, and “she smiled” is showing.
“She was surprised” is telling, and “her mouth dropped open” is showing.
“She looked sharply at her mother” is telling, and “She frowned [and/or directed knife eyes] at her mother” is showing.
Words that end in -ly are red flags for where telling, rather than showing, lurks. For instance, “she walked slowly” is telling, while “she dragged her feet” is showing. Using telling phrases is not forbidden, and some can be left as is. But most manuscripts have way too much telling in general, and most writers will find much satisfaction and a great improvement by going through and converting many instances of telling to showing instead.
One of the best tools I’ve found for showing-not-telling is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi. You can look up a word like “jealousy” and find a whole page or two of descriptions for how a person manifests jealousy in their body language. Such a brilliant resource!
2. ELIMINATE REDUNDANCIES AND THINGS “UNDERSTOOD.” For instance, the phrase “ducking out of the way” is redundant. If one ducks, one is ducking out of the way. The phrase “exclaimed loudly” is redundant, because exclaiming means communicating loudly. (Note that -ly again, which signals telling-not-showing.) Also, depending on context, “shook her head in confusion” is redundant, because shaking one’s head implies confusion. This writing tip is a bit tougher to internalize than the show-don’t-tell, but just as important to learn to recognize. It’s a matter of trusting the reader to “get it,” and not risking insulting them by repeating it in another way.
3. ENSURE APPROPRIATE VOCABULARY LEVEL. If you’re writing for kids, I recommend getting a copy of Children’s Writer’s Word Book, a dictionary that tells you what age groups understand what words, and suggests substitute words for different age levels. For instance, the word “trudge” is understood by fifth-graders and up. For fourth grade, the dictionary suggests using “tramp.” For first graders, it suggests using “march” and for kindergartners, it suggests using “walk.” A must-have resource for those who write for children of any age.
4. LIMIT VARIETY OF DIALOGUE TAGS (he said/she said). One of the first things a writing teacher taught me in university was that writers get more tired of the word “said” than readers do. As writers, we like to vary dialogue tags with “he exclaimed” or “she added” or “he enthused” or “she implored.” Basically, dialogue tags annoy readers if they’re not mostly bland, such as “she said.” Further, a character cannot “laugh” words. So the sentence, “You are a twit,” she laughed, needs to be changed to: “You are a twit,” she said, laughing. Or: “You are a twit.” She laughed.
5. USE MORE ACTIVE AND LESS PASSIVE TENSE: The phrase “there was a light” is passive tense. The phrase “it was gone” is passive tense. Changing these to “a light flicked on” and “It disappeared” convert them to active tense. Active tense lifts writing, and passive tense deadens it. Going through a manuscript and converting passive to active tense is a super easy and successful way of improving the writing. Often, people use passive tense because they’re missing the sentence subject. In other words, “The car was wrecked” is passive tense. “Tony wrecked the car” is active tense, revealing the subject. “Chairs were placed around the table” can be converted to “Lucy placed the chairs around the table,” or even, “The table boasted three chairs meticulously placed.”
6. INDULGE IN ALL FIVE SENSES: Seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing. The more you use these, the more the reader is drawn in. For instance, instead of “the carriage stopped,” how about “the wheels screeched and the gravel crunched as the carriage halted in the driveway.” (That’s basically also showing rather than telling.) Writers often over-rely on just a few of the five senses, under-using smelling, tasting and touching. Maybe a smell of electricity fills the room as a ghost materializes? Or a character tastes the bitterness of jealousy as she eyes a potential boyfriend talking to someone else.
7. BEWARE OF TENSE CHANGES: It’s sooo easy to mix up tenses, and accidentally switch from past to present to present-perfect, etc., sometimes in the same paragraph, without meaning to. Switching tenses can be effective if you know what you’re doing and are intentional about it. But if it’s a problem, work with an editor or read a source such as this: https://www.iup.edu/writingcenter/writing-resources/grammar/tense-shifting/
8. FIND AND KILL MISPLACED MODIFIERS. Lots of people don’t understand these. But they are a grammatical error, and writers need to learn to recognize and change them. Example: “Tapping the bottle, the contents came out.” Get the error? Contents did not tap the bottle. Contents is not the subject being modified. There are two ways to correct this: “Tapping the bottle, she saw the contents come out.” (SHE is the subject that the phrase is modifying.) Or, “As she tapped the bottle, the contents came out.” If you still don’t understand, check out https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/moduleDangling.htm
9. VARY YOUR RHYTHM. What’s wrong with the rhythm of the following paragraph? Moving awkwardly, he drew near to the house. Opening the door, he screamed. Grabbing the robber, he shouted threats. Tossing the robber into the street, he slammed the door and locked it.
YES, they all start with the same type of modifying phrase. It begins to wear on the reader; it feels like amateur writing. But it’s so easy to fix by being alert for too many of these (or other phrase types) in a row, and introducing more variation in rhythm.
10. POINT OF VIEW (POV): Some writers offer multiple characters’ points of view, as in the reader gets to hear the interior thoughts and perceptions of more than one (main) character. Some writers even fly from one head to another within the same paragraph or chapter. But this takes a lot of experience and skill to pull off.
Most writing instructors strongly advise that beginning writers to stick with one point of view on their first novel(s). Even when you feel bold enough to graduate to two characters’ POVs, keep it easy by presenting Person One POV in one chapter, and Person Two in the next. In other words, every other chapter goes into the head of one character, and every other chapter goes into the head of another.
That applies whether you’ve chosen first person (I) or third person (he/she), or the much less commonly used, and very awkward to pull off, second person (we).
If you’re writing for young adults, first person has become almost de rigueur.
Further, if you’re writing a children’s novel, the POV pretty much has to be a child. Beware of the story slipping into the POV of the main character’s mother or teacher, or other adults in his/her life.
Also, strive for a depth of POV, which means where the main character’s mind and behaviour is filtering what’s going on in the room, we need her five-senses reactions: the way happenings are making her sweat, shiver, wince, cry, loosen her jaw in distress, cover her ears, whatever.
Unfortunately, having just one POV means that scenes can occur only through that person’s eyes, which means that person must be present in whatever scene is happening. He/she needs to overhear things or be part of the scene, unless you reveal the scene through dialogue with someone else later. The latter is weaker (if overused) because, in a larger sense, you are telling rather than showing. You are not showing the scene “in the moment,” which grips the reader harder.
Besides character POV, there is something called narrator’s, or omniscient, POV. These are a bit old-fashioned and not used much anymore. This is when the scene is described by what feels like God hanging out on the ceiling, leaping from one person’s thoughts to another’s. This has been used effectively, but it’s complicated stuff to pull off, and can’t really be used simultaneously with character POV. See: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/third-person-point-of-view-1277092
More instruction on POV: https://www.authorlearningcenter.com/writing/fiction/w/points-of-view/2055/point-of-view-primer—article
Okay, toy soldiers: on your mark, set, go!
Pam Withers is the award-winning author of 19 bestselling young-adult novels and three nonfiction books. www.pamwithers.com
