Tips on Starting a Book - Part 5

Showing versus Telling:

One of the first things they teach you in any writing course is to “Show, don’t tell”. What that means is that instead of just saying something like “Jerry felt sad”, you write a scene that will put the reader into Jerry’s head and make the reader feel the same emotions that Jerry is feeling. The following is a snippet from my novel The Back Nine.

Jerry ran the chamois over the camper-van one last time before backing it out of the garage. Shirley’s funeral had been held just over a week ago and it was time to take her ashes back home to Saskatchewan. Jerry had decided to drive rather than fly. This was the trip they had always talked about taking when Jerry retired, something that he’d continually delayed, trying to work a few extra years to top up his pension. He now realized the time they’d lost was worth much more than the extra money. By the time he finally retired, her health had already started to go downhill.

Showing, rather than telling, is a much more powerful way to write. However, sometimes you can overdo it. If you “show” every scene in your book, it will quickly become too long and probably too boring. The key is deciding which scenes should be “show” scenes and which should be “tell” scenes.

I’m currently working on the third book in the Goliath series and yesterday I wrote several pages describing my main character travelling from Washington to New York. There were several “showing” scenes. But when I read it again this morning, I realized nothing important really happened on that journey, so I changed those several pages of “showing” into a couple of paragraphs of “telling”.

Tip: “Show” the important scenes in your book and “tell” the transitional scenes.

This now brings us to the subject of revising and editing. I suggest you try to write the first draft entirely before you get bogged down in editing. I know several writers who say they’ve been working on their book for years but have barely made any progress. That’s because they spend most of their time trying to make the first few chapters perfect rather than writing the rest of the book.

When I write, I will typically read and edit the stuff I wrote the day before and then move on to write the next new scene. This gets my head back into the story rather than starting cold every day. But I try not to go back and edit stuff I wrote before that.

Tip: Try to write the entire story before getting bogged down in editing.

Once I’ve written the complete first draft, I try to take a break for a couple of weeks before I start working on the second draft. This gives enough time for me to clear my head.

I also use beta readers. Beta readers are people who you know and trust enough to give you honest feedback and won’t just give you general feedback like “it was pretty good”. I will normally only give the first draft to one beta reader and I will ask them to concentrate on the story, not on things like typos, grammar or punctuation. I will normally ask them questions like:

Did you like the story?
What parts (or characters) did you like the best?
Which parts did you like the least?
What parts did you find confusing or (worst of all) boring?
And, since I mostly write mysteries, when did you figure out the plot twists?

I hate reading books or watching movies where I know what’s going to happen half-way into it. The ideal situation is that your reader doesn’t see the plot twist coming until it happens, but then realizes it makes perfect sense and they wonder why they didn’t see it sooner. Since I’m the author and know what’s coming, the plot twist always seems obvious to me.

When I sent out the first draft of my novel Goliath, the first beta reader didn’t see the plot twist coming until the end of the book, which I thought was a good thing. However, it didn’t really make sense to them until I explained it to them in more detail. Obviously, I don’t want the readers to be confused by the ending, so I added in more clues and foreshadowing in the second draft.

Then I sent it out to a different beta reader. There was no point sending it to the same beta reader because he already knew the plot twist.

Tip: Send each draft of your novel out to different beta readers.

I also suggest sending it to different types of readers. Male/female, older/younger, etc. For example, some of the beta readers of my novel The Back Nine were golfers, and some weren’t. I wanted the book to be interesting and readable to both groups.

For some reason, six drafts seems to be my magic number. When reviewing the first draft, whole chapters and characters can be added or dropped in the second draft. Revisions to the early drafts are mostly about the story. Revisions in the later drafts concentrate more on changing specific words or phrases.

My wife is the last editor of my books. She doesn’t get to see or know anything about the early drafts. She only gets to see it when I’ve got a printed physical proof copy in my possession. Despite that, she always seems to find errors in the book that no one else caught.

I don’t show my wife early drafts of my books because I think she may try to influence the story. For other beta readers, I can decide whether to accept or reject their suggestions, but it’s tougher when it’s your spouse.

The only book she significantly affected was my romantic comedy called Women 101: A Father's Humorous Guide To His Son. She didn’t want me to write that book in the first place. She told me several parts of my book would be offensive to women. I thought those parts were funny. In the end, I decided to “tone things down” a bit and I’m still not sure if I made the right decision or not. I found writing humour quite difficult because what one person finds funny, another will find offensive.

In the end, it is up to you to tell the story you want to tell. If you’re writing your memoir and afraid that some of your family members might not like what you’ve written, then you’ve got a difficult decision to make. Maybe that’s why the creative non-fiction genre was created in the first place. Only you’ll know what parts are real, and what parts are fiction.

Tip: Tell your own story.

When I first told my family that I was writing a book, my wife was quite nervous about it. She is a very private person and was afraid that I’d reveal too much in my book. I solved that problem by making the main character a widow, which also gave me the opportunity to give him a really hot lover in the book. Win-win.

I hope you find some of the tips I’ve given in this series useful. If you do, then use them. If you don’t, ignore them.

I’d suggest taking a creative writing course if one is offered in your area. I took such a course through the University of Western Ontario in London and it helped me greatly. Join a local group of writers. It will help your writing as well.

And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. When I lived in London, we were fortunate enough to have Gary Barwin as the Writer-in-Residence at the university and the London Public Library. He is an accomplished writer and poet and a winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his book Yiddish for Pirates. I got to pick his brain for free at three separate sessions as he helped me with my book The Second Shooter.

There are three resources I’d recommend for those interested in writing. The first is Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules by Steven James. It is probably the book that has had the most influence on me. The second is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King and the third is Captivate Your Readers: An Editor's Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction by Jodie Renner.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little series on “Tips on Starting a Book”.

Thanks for reading.