What Had Happened

“Show, don’t tell.” Can anyone explain this maxim better? A lot have tried, and a lot have tried to claim one secret to understanding “show, don’t tell.” Unfortunately, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Now, if you’re a passable plot-creator, and just want to make money, then it’s simple: stuff action into every possible crevice of your writing. But if you enjoy wordplay and will write whether you get published and make money or not, and are aware of subtle action (think PBS instead of NHL), then I’ve found one instance of telling that’s easy to spot.

 So, I’m still working on inserting the character Sarah earlier into my novel; yeah, she came in that late. And I came across a scene so atrocious I’m surprised I didn’t smell somewhere in the ether just by its existence. A rotten egg at the bottom of a trash can in an otherwise spic-and-span kitchen still smells like a rotten egg, you know.

But the scene moved quickly: within four or five paragraphs the characters had healed, packed up, and made their way two days northward through a storm and into some strange farmer’s house. You couldn’t deny there was movement: but somehow I’d slipped into past perfect tense and stayed there, and it was dry! Dry, dry, dry, hack up a lung and die, dry. Here’s one example:

“By nightfall, they found one of the inns Geoffrey had promised Pladt when they had been on their way to Quaran – but the inn was long abandoned. Scorched stone marred the outside, sections of tiled roof were missing, and the walls inside had been defaced by claw and spear. Geoffrey suggested they could still camp there, but eyeing the gouges in the walls, Pladt said he would not mind the ground as long as it was nowhere near this inn.”

The “had been” gave it away – that and the instance of dialogue without quotation marks. I am literally telling you what they said, instead of having them speak.

So I broke down the first part of that chapter into what component information the reader needed: Geoffrey had healed; they packed up and headed north (now with Sarah); they found an unusable inn and had to camp elsewhere; they encountered a storm that forced them to stay with a strange farmer; and Pladt is being strangely withdrawn. The whole new piece is long, so here’s the above example rewritten:

***

After-Noon passed, and it seemed to Haydren that the sun dragged through its long path toward the flat horizon. When finally it neared the end of its journey, a squat stone building arose to the north, just off the road on which they traveled.

“See, Pladt?” Geoffrey said, pointing. “I told you they would have Inns a day’s ride apart in this country.”

Pladt smiled, but Sarah glanced quickly at them. “Umm…”

“What?” Geoffrey asked.

She smiled grimly. “You’ll see.”

And so they did; as they neared, they could see the ragged remains of the collapsed roof. Riding closer revealed scorch-marks streaking the stone walls, and what was left of the door hung awkwardly on its hinges. They stopped and dismounted; Pladt approached first and ran his fingers along a set of deep grooves, barely worn by time, clearly made by thick claws.

“I’m afraid there’s not many inns left that withstood the beasts’ uprising,” Sarah said as they stood in glum horror.

Geoffrey glanced around. “We could still stay here,” he said. “The floor is intact, and the walls will keep off the wind.”

Pladt let his hand drop from the claw-marks. “That’s okay,” he said, in the closest he had been to his usual humor in several weeks. “I don’t care how wet or windy, as long as it’s far from here.”

***

Showing, not telling.

If you know me, you’ll know that I will never say never; sometimes a past perfect verb tense will be exactly what a story or character needs. And sometimes, even, you’ll tell what someone said instead of showing it. But it’ll work because it’ll fit the character or the moment: since I was in omniscient third, it didn’t work here.

That’s one way to follow that tired maxim.