Showing vs telling. I've talked about this before. Probably a LOT! Mainly because I'm still working on getting it right. As I'm editing my finished product, I'm feverishly pouring over passages to see if I got it. Probably the most frustrating thing about writing and editing, at least for me. Through my blog, I follow a few other blogs out there. Writer's Digest, Janice Hardy, Romance University, a few agent blogs and now The Bookshelf Muse. Why now The Bookshelf Muse you ask? Upon looking through the blog entries from these other sites, I stumbled across a guest blog from Angela Ackerman of The Bookshelf Muse regarding this very topic. Read it here (hope the link works as I'm still new to this;-0).
I thought she did a fabulous job of describing the differences of the two as well as a couple of other pitfalls including making good use of showing but then adding a tell sentence to hit it home and overdoing showing bordering on purple prose and melodrama.
I'd been wondering about these last two points. I definitely, when I get the showing right that is, have a tendency to add in the tell sentence to be sure the reader gets what I'm saying. I don't have to do this and Angela made good points as to why. Trust my writing. That's hard.
This very reason is why I'm beginning to love blogging. Reading other people's wonderful blog entries out there giving great advice and passing along words of wisdom is what I think it's all about. We need to help each other. I realize you can do this on Twitter and Facebook too but blogs enable people to elaborate and go further. Just my opinion!
Check out Angela and her blog partner Becca's sage advice. You'll also be fabulously startled to see they've come out with The Emotion Thesaurus. I'm so excited! The rest of you have problem known this already but I love it when I make such discoveries! Thanks, Angela and Becca!
Now, back to pouring through those passages and hoping I'm close to getting it right.
No comments:
Post a Comment