Episode Eighteen: Scenes: Your Show, Don’t Tell Secret Weapon
This week, I’m continuing my discussion of “show, don’t tell,” by introducing your show, don’t tell secret weapon: writing in scenes.
There are three ways that writing in scenes can help writers show instead of tell:
Scenes lock us into a specific moment in time which primes us to narrate specific actions as they happen instead of summarizing them.
When the scene is narrated through a specific character’s perspective, all information (worldbuilding, backstory, etc.) is filtered through their perspective, giving you a simple metric for deciding what gets added on the page and what gets left out because it’s not necessary for readers to know in that particular scene.
Scenes happen in a specific time and place which means adding specific details and that immerse readers in the world of your story and keep us focused on what is happening in that specific time and place instead of just feeding us information detached from space & time.
Here are the resources and tools mentioned in this episode:
Download my scene writing checklist here - perfect for making sure your scenes have all the ingredients they need, whether you plan them in advance or shape them up in revision. Grab the checklist here! https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/scene-checklist
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Transcript
Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Welcome to episode 18 of the Better Writer podcast. I am so excited that you are here listening to me talk about writing because it is one of my favorite things in the world. In case we have not met, my name is Olivia. I'm a developmental editor and book coach and I help genre fiction writers create reader-ready novels no matter how messy their original drafts are.
And today I want to talk about Show Don't Tell. Again, the last two episodes I've been talking about why people think of Show Don't Tell the wrong way and I have been talking about what makes showing so difficult for writers. And now I want to wrap up this little mini series by talking about my favorite Show Don't Tell solution that happens at the developmental level. Obviously, there are a lot of things that we can do to show instead of tell at the line level where we want to be super specific in our narration. We can be very descriptive. We can show emotion through facial expressions, through body language, through visceral reactions. We have a wide array of tools at our disposal for show and tell at the line level. However, I believe that showing really starts at the developmental level. Showing starts with the way that you have designed your plot and your story as a whole.
And I think that the real secret to show, don't tell is writing your novel in scenes.
Because when you write your novel in scenes, if you're truly creating scenes, you are automatically going to be pushed to show things that are happening on the page instead of just telling readers about them. And today I just want to talk about how scenes help us and how you can use scenes to your advantage to make sure that you are showing instead of telling.
Before we go any further, I want to make sure that we are all on the same page of what I mean when I'm talking about scenes. In my mind, and there are various definitions out there, but for me, a scene is a unit of narrative. And in a scene, we are following one character, one group of characters as they react to a specific event or situation, and we stick with them in real time until that event or situation is either resolved or interrupted by a new situation or a new event.
And just to make that more concrete, let's pull book off of the shelf on my desk and we'll see what the first scene of that book is.
Alright, random selection. We've got Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. And if we open up to the very, very first pages of Mistborn, this is actually a prologue. And prologues, especially in first drafts, can be huge telling culprits because sometimes people will put in a prologue that just summarizes the history of their world or it just summarizes a conflict that has been ongoing or it summarizes backstory, things like that. But this prologue is actually a scene. We open up with a character looking out over their fields as their servants work. They are meeting with another character. They're being questioned about, their servants running away? Things like that. And in the context of the world, that all makes sense. We are learning about the world as we go, but it is in the context of a scene. There is a specific conversation happening that is our situation.
Then Lord Tresting the main character in that scene makes eye contact with a servant who is not as humble as they should be in his mind. He sees that moment of defiance in that character's eyes and reacts to it. By the time he is fully processed, that person is gone, has disappeared And that's it. That is basically the end of the scene. And that is initiating the rest of the story. And it's a very simple set of actions. We have one character basically standing there talking to another, looking out over the fields as other people are working. But that is a situation that is happening in real time. Something is happening in real time. The dialogue is happening in real time. We have the characters' actions narrated. When we get character thoughts or character reactions, they are always relevant and specific to what is happening in that precise moment. Nothing else is coming in. We are learning about the world. We learn a lot about the world. There's ash falling from the sky. We have peasants who are called skaa.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. It doesn't matter. But we are learning information, but it is not just being told to us. We don't have an opening prologue that says, once upon a time, there was this great empire where most of the people were oppressed working in these fields of ash. We don't get that explained to us. We are shown what this world is like through a character who is not our main character, but we adopt their perspective for a short period of time so we can learn about the world through them, through their eyes and through this very specific moment in time.
Alright, now that we've gone through an example that literally got pulled off the bookshelf in real time was not pre-planned as it should have been, but well. ⁓ Let's talk about why scenes are so important to show don't tell. And one quick note that I probably should have said at the beginning, but when I'm talking about scenes, you might think in terms of chapters and they can function the same way if you are using them the same way. So if your chapters, follow a character through a specific situation and you're just thinking of them as chapters, that is totally fine. Call them chapters, call them sections, call them whatever you want to. As long as you are still using that core principle of things are happening in real time, you are following that situation through and we're focusing on one character at a time or one group of characters at a time. ideally we should only have one POV character at time and I will talk about that a little bit later. Get off of the treadmill.
Sorry if that was an awkward edit. Minerva is really hyper right now and she wants me to play with her, which I will do as soon as I stop recording. Alright, so let's talk about how a scene is going to help you show instead of tell. There are three main ways in my mind. And the first way is in that definition of a scene. We are following characters in real time. And when we are moving with characters in real time, we are showing. If we're doing it right, of course.
If you can think of telling, telling is summarizing what happened. Telling is giving us a sketch of events versus if we are actually narrating the play by play, the specifics of what happened exactly. We are narrating all of the characters actions, all of the characters reactions. We are putting the actual dialogue on the page. We are following that conversation as it happens instead of just summarizing the gist of it afterwards.
If we are doing all of those things, we are showing what happened. We are showing the conversation. We are showing the characters' reactions. Obviously, there are other things that need to happen because, remember from a couple episodes ago, show don't tell is not one thing. Obviously, there are things that we need to do at the line and sentence level to bring that real time action to life. But at a baseline level, you need to have put your characters into a situation where things are happening.
If you are a plotter, you need to do that in your outline. You need to plan to show actual moments of your story instead of just summarizing events overall. If you are a pantser your discovery draft might be a bunch of summary. That's okay because that summary is going to tell you what scenes you need to go back and write when you revise. So it doesn't matter how you get there as long as it happens.
Alright, strategy number two, and this one is going to vary depending on your genre, but if you write a commercial genre, if you are writing any sort of fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery, etc. I recommend focusing on one character's perspective at a time. That means you are not writing an omniscient story. Obviously there are exceptions. There are cases in which having an omniscient narrator can work. However, I find that to be more and more rare in genre fiction specifically. And right now we are seeing a lot of deep point of view, which means we are very much intimately in the point of view character's head.
We are hearing all of their thoughts, their feelings. We are with them in every visceral reaction, every subjective reaction to what is happening in the story. And that is true whether the author is writing in first person or third person. We can have deep point of view with both. It's just going to vary slightly in how it's written. But for genre fiction especially, I pretty much always recommend writing in some form of deep point of view. Obviously, you can decide how close and how intimate you're getting to the character's thoughts. But I find that a lot of modern readers want that closeness. They want to see what is going on in the character's head. And there are reasons for that. I've definitely taken classes and heard different theories on why that is. It doesn't really matter why it is, but I find most of the books that I'm reading are taking us into a specific character's head and we are staying there for the entire scene. So you don't have to stick to just one character's head for the entire book, but one character per scene, one specific perspective. And the reason why that helps us with Show Don't Tell is that when you are focused on one character's perspective, when you are in their head looking right over their shoulder telling us exactly what they are experiencing, and I mean telling in the showing sense of telling, not just summarizing. The language is tricky. ⁓ If you are bringing us into their experiences and really just focusing on what they would be thinking or feeling or reacting to in that specific moment, that is going to be our filter for backstory information, for world building information, for emotions, et cetera. And instead of just telling readers everything that might possibly be relevant in that moment, we are going to focus on what is relevant to that character. And when we start filtering all of our information through that specific lens, when we start thinking of what does this character care about in this moment, when we start focusing on their subjective experience of what is happening in that scene, it becomes much, much easier to show instead of tell. And another benefit of working with a single point of view character at a time is that when it comes to secondary character emotions, we no longer have the ability to just name what that character is feeling because we have to rely on external cues that the point of view character can see. And what better way to show instead of tell than just simply narrate what our point of view character is seeing or experiencing from that other character instead of just as the narrator stepping in and saying they are feeling X. We have to instead show that they are doing XYZ or their face is doing something or maybe their body language and what they're saying doesn't match up and that is all going to allow readers to infer what is going on with that character.
And we can also use our main character's subjective thoughts about what is going on with that character as well to our advantage. But the key is when we focus on a single character's perspective, it is going to put limits on us. It is going to limit what we tell readers, what we share with readers, and that is a good thing because a lot of showing instead of telling is knowing exactly which details are right in that moment. Which details are going to bring the scene to life? Which details are going to grind it to a halt. So oftentimes the difference between showing and telling isn't even really about the amount of information that readers are getting, it's about how that information is presented, it's about how relevant that information feels, and it's about whether that is information that immerses us in a specific moment or if it's information that pulls us out of the story by simply giving us the encyclopedia version of what it would be like to live in this fantasy world or in historical fiction, if it's giving us the textbook version of what it was like to live in that period versus the immersive experience of living in that period. And that's what we get when we are in one character's head, living the scene alongside them instead of just being told about that period in history.
All right, and then finally, one of the key elements of a scene is that it has to take place in a specific setting. And it might sound really obvious that your story needs to take place somewhere, but oftentimes when people are telling, we become completely detached from place. We are just getting streams of information. We're getting backstory, we're getting history, we are getting information about the world, but we are not rooted in a specific time and place. And when you are writing a scene correctly, we are anchored in a certain spot. The characters are somewhere. There are tangible details, things that they are interacting with. And that is something that A, makes that scene immersive because readers can visualize your characters in a place doing the thing, whatever it is that they're doing in that scene. And putting us in a specific setting also helps you share the world in an active way, whether it's a real world fantastical one that you have made up.
The key point is if there is a specific place and you are giving us details of that place, it is going to make your setting feel real. Again, that is another way to filter world building information. We're not just giving everything. We are in a very specific area, having your characters interact with the world, showing readers what that world is like through the way that your characters interact with it. And that is going to help you show instead of tell as well.
All right, that was three ways that writing and scenes can help you show instead of tell. And just to recap, we are putting our characters in one specific moment in time. We are showing that moment in real time as it unfolds instead of simply telling readers what happened. We are also filtering all of our information through one character's specific perspective so that we are filtering information out that is not relevant, that is going to pull readers out of that specific moment and we are only sharing the details that are going to bring that moment to life. And then finally, we are putting our scenes in a specific place at a specific time, and that is going to act as another filter that has us only sharing the information that is relevant to that place, to readers in that moment. And more importantly, it is also going to put our characters, scene in a specific place. That is going to help us immerse readers, it's gonna make your scene feel real as if it is happening somewhere that readers can visualize and that is essential for creating that immersive experience that we want readers to have. All right, right now there is a very playful chihuahua begging for my attention. So that is the end of our episode. I hope you learned something about using scenes to show instead of tell and I will be back next week with more advice for you.
If you need more help with writing scenes in the meantime, I have a super simple checklist of eight things that every scene in your novel needs in order to be complete. So you can grab that checklist wherever you're listening to this podcast episode or wherever you're watching. And I hope that it helps you create better scenes that help you show instead of tell in your novel.
Thank you so, so much for listening to this episode of the Better Writer podcast. I hope you have a wonderful week. Keep writing, keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.
