The Pacing Triad

There are more paces than just "fast".  Let's start there. When authors talk about pacing, they often mean, "How can I make this book go as fast as possible?" The first question, however, should be, "What pace will help me give my readers a better experience?"

After all, readers who like a Henry-James-like contemplative approach don't actually WANT your book paced like The DaVinci Code.

So what pace is right for your book? More on that in another post, but right now I want to talk a bit about a technique that can help create a different pace. That's what I call the "BAR" method.

Build up.
Action (or event).
Reaction (or emotion/aftermath).

This is a typical sequence for a pacing/event unit. (Pacing is all about how many events you have and in what period of time/pages.)  We will, of course, have a bunch of these in a book, maybe 15 in a fast-paced book, or 5 in a leisurely-paced book.

First you do the buildup, whatever decisionmaking, investigation, exposition, and/or consideration has to happen before the action or event.  Like if Sadie is (in the coming action) going to find a clue, the buildup might be where she figures out what she needs to know, and decides to risk arrest to get it. This is about anticipation, preparation, consideration.

Second, there's the action or event-- what happens. This is the most essential part of pacing as it's how we calibrate pacing. A thriller is "fast-paced" because it has a lot of actions and events coming quickly. A more contemplative or leisurely paced novel will have fewer actions in the same amount of time. The action or event is something that a character does (or happens to the character) that changes the course of the story. So this would be where Sadie breaks into the office and steals the old typewriter and finds the letter on the old typewriter ribbon. (Typewriter ribbons were really cool clue-locations.)

Third, there's the reaction or aftermath. That's where the character (and/or the world of the story) reacts to the event, shows the emotional or actual change because of this event. So Sadie gets back to her apartment and reads the typewriter ribbon and realizes it implicates her own mentor, and she is plunged into doubt and despair and can't decide whether to turn this over to the police, or protect her mentor.

Now those three elements can be each in a separate scene of more or less equal length, or separate scenes of different lengths, or just passages within a scene. But I think -- just speculating here- that if we want to make the pace of a book something or other, we can do this by manipulating the relative length of these elements.

Let's say we want a more methodical pace that's suitable for a police procedural. We might amplify the Build up section to show the careful consideration Sadie goes through figuring out what she needs to, why she needs this clue, whether she ought to commit a crime to get it. Or conversely, for a suspense thriller, we might want to expand this passage to build up the suspense, the danger involved, the threat to her life and career, the looming darkness that is the villain-- before she does what she has to do. Fear, suspense, threat have to be created in the reader by the build up to an event. But of course, that creates a slower pace.

Or maybe we want a fast pace for an adventure book. In this case, the build up might be pretty short, just enough to set the stage for the action. Then the action scene might be long, exciting, and richly detailed, very physical to give the reader a visceral experience. So in this case, there wouldn't be a lot of Sadie debating the morality of breaking in-- She decides to do it and just does it, but we get a full account of all the obstacles she encounters and the last-minute interruptions and the near-miss security guard patrol, and the slippery feel of the folder in her fingers.... Expanding the action passage to a greater length than the other two elements will lead to a more adventurous pace.

But then, what if we want the reader to feel emotion, to identify with the angst and triumph and despair of the character? Then we might spend the most time on the reaction or aftermath, where the character deals with the impact of what she's done or learned or experienced. Romances particularly I think often need long aftermaths to create the depth of feeling and the potential for interaction that deepens the love story. So in this case, Sadie might be rocked by her sense of betrayal by the mentor, remember all the times Mentor helped her do her math homework, and plunge into a despair because he is the only person she trusts, and now she might have to betray him. (And she has to call that hunky but arrogant police detective.... Romance!)

Anyway, no rules here, but if our story doesn't have the appropriate pace, it might not be a problem with the plot or characters, but rather just a matter of manipulating this BAR sequence so that the most important element to our pacing choice is emphasized by being longer than the other two. I don't mean making the action scene 15 pages long in a fast-paced book (long scenes will slow down the pace), but rather making it the longest of the three, so maybe we have a paragraph or two of build up, five pages of action, and two paragraphs of reaction.

What do you think? Look at your own stories. What sort of pace are you hoping for, and what kinds of passages or scenes go on longer?
Alicia

I have a guest blog post

http://www.pinkfuzzyslipperwriters.blogspot.com/2012/01/alicia-raisley-editorautor-is-in-house.html

and another!



http://www.nanreinhardt.com/?p=846

See, I'm so addicted to blogging, I do it in my spare time. :)

Also-- I don't know how to get followers except by begging. Can some of you just follow us so I can prove to my friend Lynn there is a reason for Twitter?
Alicia Rasley and Lynn Kerstan are tweeting as #RegencyTwisters. Two novellas about two sisters, see? Tweeting sisters- Twisters.

And if you have advice on how to achieve world domination or at least a bit of notice through Twitter, plz share. (See! I've learned twitter-spelling!)

Alicia

Little adverb movements make everything precise

In the previous post, I was reading it over and realized I'd (horrors!) misplaced a modifier.
 
Too late she remembered the reason for that generous gift, and how embarrassed he had been, confessing to his secret fear of windmills last year.

This is a common mistake with "time" adverbs and adjectives like "back then" and "in the past" and "on Monday."  Here, the problem is that with the modifier placed at the end of the sentence, it's not clear whether he became afraid of windmills "last year,"  or if the embarrassed confession was last year. Why make the reader wonder, when all it takes is a bit of movement?

The modifier should be placed right next to whatever element actually happened at that time. In this sentence, the gift and embarrassment and the confession happened "last  year," so the modifier can go close to either of those, whatever sounds best. So:
Too late she remembered the reason for that generous gift, and how embarrassed he had been last year, confessing to his secret fear of windmills.

We need to be sensitive to what our sentences actually say, and open to the minor fixes that make it say what we actually mean. 

Alicia

Just to Clarify

Many questions regarding my post yesterday. One of them is important enough to post about. Several of you asked whether this clause came from one of those agents helping an author self-publish.

No.

These particular agents have no hand in any self-published material. They don't read and provide feedback on manuscripts, format or typeset them, or provide cover art. They don't write jacket copy or arrange blurbs. They don't upload anything, and they don't download anything, and they don't provide networking assistance.

They do nothing. It could easily come to pass that you would self-publish a work without them even seeing it or being aware of it. And yet you would owe them a commission on it. It could even come to pass that you would have This Book with them, and while they shop it, you upload That Novella as a self-published work. They fail to make the sale on This Book, and yet they are still entitled to a commission on That Novella. (One of you argued that this would never happen in the real world. Maybe not -- certainly it should not -- but the language I saw would allow this exact possibility.)

I could draw lots of analogies here to help you understand how damaging this is. Imagine you bank at Big Horrible Bank With Protesters Out Front. And every time you make a transaction at this bank, they charge you a quarter. You don't mind paying the fees because you figure they've earned them. It's fairsies. But then you open another savings account at another bank, and the Big Horrible Bank With Protesters Out Front is now claiming that you owe them a quarter on every transaction made at the new savings account, whether they ever touched the money or not. So when you find a ten dollar bill in the grass and decide to deposit it in the new bank, BHBWPOF wants a commission on that. And when your grannie writes you a birthday check from a bank other than BHBWPOF and you deposit it into your new account, you owe BHBWPOF a commission on that. And so on. "It's only fair," they say, "because by using our banking services, you learned some things about using banking services." Yes, and they were paid for it, a quarter every time you made a transaction at BHBWPOF.

Just remember what you own and what you pay for. You own your brand. You own your skills and knowledge. You might pay someone to help you improve those things, the same as a soft drink company pays ad agencies to craft memorable, brand-building commercials. But that doesn't mean your ownership is suddenly converted to co-ownership. It means you paid for a service.

One of my friends said, roughly paraphrased, "It used to be my trad pub that made my house bills and insurance payments each month. Now they can only make the house bills, but my self-published books are covering my insurance. Just barely, but they're covering it. If I have to give that up or split it, I would have to get a day job again. I can't take any more cuts to my income."

To that, many industry professionals would respond with a shrug. If this one drops out of writing, ten others are waiting in the wings to take her place.

That attitude and reality has scared authors into accepting bad terms in the past. But the difference then was that there was only one path to publication, and that path ran through the people offering the bad terms. Now there are other options. Is self-publishing the savior of everything? No. It changes some rules of the game, but we're all still playing the same basic game. Nevertheless, it's an important change because of the way it empowers writers. Don't give away that power. Don't even give away 15% of it.

Theresa

Sign of the Times?

I heard a disturbing rumor -- and I have to repeat, this is a rumor, not something I saw personally -- about an agency contract that takes a standard commission on an author's self-published books. Self-published. So the author would be contractually obligated to pay 15% of their self-published royalties to the agent even if the agent has never laid eyes on the book.

The theory behind this is that the agent is "building" the author's career through traditional sales, and the author benefits from that in direct published sales, so the agent is entitled to a cut.

This is utter garbage, of course. Not every tenuous connection creates an entitlement. What's next -- if you write on your day job, they can take 15% of your day job salary, too? Agents act as brokers, selling books to publishers and earning a commission on those sales. Why should they ever be entitled to earn anything without performing the work?

You know what's really going on here? They're gambling that you're more desperate than they are. They're pretty desperate, some of these agents, because sales and advances are falling across the board, so agents are taking hits just as much as anyone in this business. Or, to put it another way, 15% of nothing is nothing. Actually, that's 15% of 8% or whatever your trad pub contract calls for. But your direct pub royalty rate is probably anywhere from 30% to 70%, depending on how you distribute and price the book, so 15% of that is a bit more of a cut to the agent. As an added bonus, it's free money because they didn't have to lift a finger to earn it.

But there will be some writer out there who's been struggling to break in and who sees this as the one chance to do that. And they'll sign away their kidneys and lungs if they think that will get them a good book deal. So what's 15% in perpetuity on work the agency never sold? As long as the agent signs you, it's all good, right? No. Not right at all. For one thing, you don't know that this agent will ever sell a single thing for you. Plenty of authors are signed but never sold. You don't know whether this agent will treat you well or screw things up for you -- and if you don't understand that agents can screw up a writer's career, you haven't spent much time talking to writers about agents.

Don't get me wrong. A good agent is worth every (legitimately earned) cent you pay them. If you get a good agent, thank your lucky stars and buy them chocolate. But how do you know what kind of relationship you'll have with your agent when you're at the signing stage? Oh, you can go by reputation. Maybe Agent Alice has a great reputation because she represents a bestseller or two. But sometimes these powerhouse agents focus all their attention on the stars. They take you on in the hope they can get a star deal for you, too, but if they can't, they're stuck with you just as you're stuck with them. That's how their stables get filled with authors who wonder why they can't get a call back.

And reputation only tells a partial story. In this business, in public, we're all quick to praise and slow to criticize. (Notice, for example, that even though I'm not hiding my annoyance at this contract provision, I have not named the agency or the agent. I might be mouthy, but I'm not that stupid.) If you don't share a confidential relationship with at least one of the agent's clients, you might not be hearing the whole story.

Be smart, kids. It's a cruel and treacherous world we're living in.

Theresa

ETA: Since this post went live this morning, I've received confirmation of two agencies doing this. One was the original agency that prompted this post, and the other is a mid-sized agency with questionable ethics. Anybody know what the AAR has to say about this?

As You Know, Alphonse...

Theresa's post about exposition reminds me of something our friend Lynn Kerstan used to laugh about, the "As You Know, Alphonse" dialogue, where one character tells another something they both know, just to get the information (exposition) out. Like:

Paula said, "As you know, Alphonse, Murray is our own sainted father, and you and I lost him twenty years ago in a tragic windmill accident, right in front of your very eyes. And ever since, you have been deathly afraid of windmills, so much so that when you won a trip to Holland, you gave the ticket to me, your sister."

What's the problem? Well, of course Alphonse already knows his father's name and that Paula is his sister, and surely knows he himself is afraid of windmills. It sounds artificial, and it is, because of course Paula would never really say it that way. She'd never recite a bunch of info that her conversation partner already knows. It's a clumsy way to avoid putting exposition in the narrative (where it belongs-- that's one of the purposes of the non-dialogue parts).

Of course, we can do exposition (information conveyance) clumsily in narrative too. But while it might be clumsy, it won't be too inauthentic if it's not in the mouth of someone who would never say it.

How then can we convey to the reader the reason for Alphonse's terror of windmills? Or whatever the important info is there? The ticket to Holland? The name of their father?  One question is, of course, what does the reader NEED to know to understand this scene and to build suspense or interest for what's to come?  One problem I see a lot in exposition passages (in or out of dialogue) is that the information is thrust out indiscriminately, without consideration for what is the important piece of information, and without consideration of if this is the best time to tell it, or if maybe it should be presented only partially (to build suspense). Another aspect which is important especially in dialogue but also for character point of view is the character's motivation for telling/thinking this bit of info.

Let's start at the top. What's the important info here we want the reader to know? Maybe it's that ticket to Holland. (Don't ask me what the plot is where that's most important. This is just an example!) In that case, maybe all that other stuff isn't necessary right here. Maybe it is, but notice-- all that is ALPHONSE'S motivation, not Paula's.  Paula didn't see the windmill accident and suffer lifelong trauma. What's Paula's motivation here? What does she want? Why is she bringing up this no-doubt painful subject? Once we know that, we can decide what about that paragraph of info is really necessary, and we can decide how best to convey it.

I generally use a mix of dialogue and narrative, in the point of view of one character. That is, the speaker says something, and the POV character (the speaker or listener) reacts mentally, maybe filling in some important bit of information, maybe translating the information (rightly or wrongly). And the dialogue doesn't have to say much-- just enough that the listener and speaker both have enough to know what this is about, and the reader gets some idea too. (It's important to cut the speech off -after- the speaker has said enough that the reader has at least some notion of what this is about.)

For example, let's say the whole point of this, Paula's motivation, is that she wants Alphonse to accept a gift of money that he needs but is too proud to accept. So she wants to remind him that she owes him because he gave her that trip to Holland.  See how immediately this will transform that exposition? Now there's a reason for it to be there-- her desire to give back.  Let's see:

Paula said, "Come on, Alphonse. You know I owe you. Remember that trip to Holland you gave me? You didn't--" Too late she remembered the reason for that generous gift, and how embarrassed Alphonse had been last year, confessing to his secret fear of windmills. She tried to cover up her lapse. "I mean, really. I owe you more than a thousand dollars for that."

Let's say you want to convey a bit more, maybe that Alphonse is her brother, which isn't apparent there (and presumably wasn't established before-- if it was, don't worry about it now). Well, in narrative, a bit of explication isn't all that noticeable, so you could amend a bit:

Paula said, "Come on, Alphonse. You know I owe you. Remember that trip to Holland you gave me? You didn't--" Too late she remembered the reason for that generous gift, and how embarrassed her brother had been last year, confessing to his secret fear of windmills. She tried to cover up her lapse. "I mean, really. I owe you more than a thousand dollars for that."

It's one of those narrative conventions that a name can be replaced in dialogue with either the pronoun (he) or a simple descriptor that the character might actually use. We do think of our siblings as "my brother" or "my sister," so that wouldn't strike the reader as odd.

Notice that the exposition there is confined to just his fear, but notice that the addition of "secret" helps make this seem more important. No, I didn't talk about the tragic windmill accident... but now the reader is alerted to something about windmills. Suspense is all about making the reader anticipate something bad-- in this case, some secret event involving windmills that terrified Alphonse. Later maybe one or the other could mention or think about dear old Dad's tragic end.

Now what if I want to be in her POV, but convey that Alphonse is still reactive to this subject?  Add her perception of his body language, like:

Paula said, "Come on, Alphonse. You know I owe you. Remember that trip to Holland you gave me? You didn't--" She saw her brother tense up, and too late she remembered the reason for that generous gift, and how embarrassed he had been last year, confessing to his secret fear of windmills. She tried to cover up her lapse. "I mean, really. I owe you more than a thousand dollars for that."

One thing to keep in mind is that the POV character is the one that tells us what's going on (for example, she sees the body language of her brother). The POV character doesn't have to interpret this correctly (Alphonse could be tensing up because he heard a car door slam outside and thinks it's the police), but how she interprets it can be a way to slide in more information gracefully (that he'd confessed a fear of windmills).

Now watch how different it can be in Alphonse's POV. Why? Because then we know his motivation at this moment, and also we can see him interpret (or misinterpret) Paula's purpose here. (You know siblings. Always assuming the worst.)

Paula said, "Come on, Alphonse. You know I owe you. Remember that trip to Holland you gave me? You didn't-- I mean, really. I owe you more than a thousand dollars for that."

Alphonse studied his sister coldly. Of course she'd take advantage of his financial problems to remind him of his humiliating fear of windmills. Hell, maybe she was even trying to tell him how much she blamed him because, long ago, as a child, he wasn't able to keep their father from climbing that windmill. It would be just like her, pretending to be all generous and giving, then sticking in the icepick of memory and twisting it in his guts.

Little edits after the first draft can help a lot in subtly pointing things out to the reader. For example, I first had "his father" then changed it to "their father" so that the reader wouldn't wonder, if only for a moment, if they had different fathers.

There are no rules here, but good writers can adroitly manipulate narrative and dialogue to convey what they want to convey. But the speaker and POV character's motivations in imparting this info are key to doing this effectively. The reader doesn't have to know every bit of backstory, but she needs to know what information is important right now to the story and characters. However, in the deeper forms of narrative POV, it's essential to impart info subtly enough that it seems to be coming out authentically from the characters' speech, thought, action, and reaction, rather than from an imposing author.

It helps me to read the scenes of authors who do this well and see how they do it.  Any suggestions for subtle authors and scenes?

Alicia

Question About New Scene Transitions

In the comments, Michelle asks,

Great post! I have a question, though. It doesn't really relate to your topic, but the topic reminded me of this.

What do you do when you have long passages of time you're skipping over? Do you summarize it? Make a note that so much time has passed? Or do you just jump right into the action and slip clues into the text that tell the reader time has passed?

Actually, Michelle, this is on topic if we define our current topic as, "Theresa rambles about exposition, etc." The start of scenes is a common place to rely on exposition to transition a reader to a new time and space. This can be done with a subheader at the top of the scene, such as--

January, Okanagan Lake

This tends to work best when it's already been established that the protagonist will be located at this spot for some reason. Maybe he's searching for Ogopogo, the famous sea monster of Okanagan Lake, so the reader has been prepared for him to reach the shores. This kind of quick, non-narrative transition allows the text to zoom forward without a lot of set-up at the start of the scene.

There are other times this type of transition will work. Maybe you have a multi-thread plot and keep shifting the reader between the pieces. Then the subheaders can help the reader track which plot thread is which. The current scene is Larry searching for Ogopogo on Okanagan Lake, and the next scene is Jessica searching for Nessie at Loch Ness, and the next scene is Bonita in a secret science lab trying to hatch a lake monster egg. The three of them are racing to produce a live lake monster, and the plot shifts freely between the three  threads, and the subheaders help the reader track it all.

In any case, some authors avoid these kinds of headings because they don't want to clutter the page, and there might be some good arguments against using these kinds of subheaders. Much like chapter headings and title/author headings, these pieces contain words that help identify something in the story but are not really part of the story. So they might serve as a distraction to the reader. If you think this isn't an issue, consider the reason we put last name/page number headings on the upper RIGHT corner of a manuscript. This keeps us from turning the sheet and processing the heading as the first line of text on a new page, which can break the flow of the narrative. Scene headers are not quite as disruptive, given that they're inserted in breaks in the story action, but they are still external intrusions of a sort.

So that takes us to narrative transitions at the start of new scenes. How much is too much? Can you ever skip it all together? I have a rule of thumb for this, but it's one of those things that can be hard to apply. But here's the basic idea. At several points over the course of most manuscripts, we will have to effectively press a reset button for the reader. The protagonist or another character will have changed enough, or the plot or setting will have changed enough, that we will need to create something like a touchstone for the arc within the text. Those touchstones can serve like transitions in to the next big piece of the plot. The bigger the changes, the greater the need to press the reset button. The greater the need, the more text you might need to re-orient the reader. But that's by no means hard and fast. Sometimes it's possible to re-orient the reader with a very quick transition. That's why I say this general rule of thumb is hard to apply. It can be difficult to gauge just how large a touchstone you need to create.

But as with all exposition, you will usually be better off minimizing the length as much as possible. Let's say, for example, that our monster-hunting friend Larry has been searching for Nessie for years and only just learned about the existence of Ogopogo. His goal has always been to find Nessie, so traveling to Canada would be a big change that might not support his original goal. Why would he do it, then?

Maybe there are scenes in Scotland with his band of Nessie hunters in which they debate the matter. Maybe Larry is opposed to going, but the group votes that one of them must go. Maybe he wants to go, but the group scorns him and tries to prevent his departure. In any case, the moment when Larry arrives on the shores of Okanagan Lake will be the moment when his quest has changed. Depending on what came before and what follows, you might need a small touchstone or a large touchstone. But, unless the change has been adequately prepped in preceding scenes, you will probably need a touchstone. (This is also partly dependent on how much has happened since the last touchstone. As I said, this analysis is very book-specific.)

But let's say you're not worried about pressing the reset button and reorienting the reader. Let's say everybody already knows why Larry abandoned Nessie for Ogopogo. In that case, a simple clause indicating time and space might be all you need.

Larry shielded his eyes against the bright spring sunshine glinting off the surface of Okanagan Lake.

Boom. One sentence, all action, no exposition, and yet we know the time and place after reading it. Or maybe you're a traditionalist and prefer an adverb clause.

When Larry reached the daffodil-covered shores of Okanagan Lake, ...

This is an expositional transition, and it's brief enough that it won't drag on the pacing. In ten words, we get the new time and space. It might be enough information.

What you probably want to avoid, unless it's strictly necessary for reader comprehension, is a long run of exposition like this.

Okanagan Lake was a deep lake with two islands. Because of the temperate but rainy climate, Larry knew he would need a different equipment and clothing. He shopped for two days to gather waterproof fleece pullovers and windbreakers, new rubber boots, waterproof matches, and a supply of his favorite Scottish tea, which he was pretty sure would be rare in rural British Columbia. The hardest part was deciding which camera equipment to pack. He only wanted to have one suitcase and one carry-on, but the equipment took a lot of space. But he would only be there a few days. He did pack some extra socks in case it rained on the boat and tossed in his favorite copy of a Douglas Adams book to read on the plane. Maybe this trip would be a complete waste of time, but at least he arrived in Vernon with everything he needed.

These kinds of blocks at the beginnings of scenes are almost always worth cutting or trimming. Notice how much of the text summarizes things that happen in the moments between the last scene's ending and this scene's beginning. Shopping and packing are usually dull events, so we wouldn't want to convert this passage into actual scenes if nothing dramatic happens. But if they're dull, guess what's also going to be dull? This info dump of a transition. If for some reason we need to plant the notion that Larry packed specially for this trip and bought new gear, we can reference it in an adverb clause transition.

After two days of shopping and packing, Larry arrived at Okanagan Lake with more than he probably needed.

And then, if the extra pair of socks is necessary to the action of a future scene, you can probably just have him change his socks then and there without a lot of explanation. If it's relevant to character or theme, maybe you would have Larry think about the cautious packing when he changes his socks.

He stripped off his sodden footwear with silent gratitude that he had remembered to pack extra socks.

But this depends on whether the detail is the kind of detail that needs to be set up in advance. Packing extra socks for outdoor adventures in a wet climate is probably not remarkable enough to require set-up. But again, this is one of those things that is highly book-specific.

So, to answer your question: Depends on the book, depends on the scene, and depends on the author's goals. But it's usually best to keep start-of-scene transitions brief.

Theresa

Exposition, Not Dialogue

Yesterday, among other things, we looked at a sample passage of description and discussed why it was description and not exposition. Today, I want to show you a paragraph in which dialogue is replaced with exposition in the form of narrative summary. This is from a story called "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter that has to do in part with a substitute teacher talking to students.

She talked for forty minutes straight. There seemed to be less connection between her ideas, but the ideas themselves were, as the dictionary would say, fabulous. She said she had heard of a huge jewel, in what she called the Antipodes, that was so brilliant that when the light shone into it at a certain angle, it would blind whoever was looking at its center. She said that the biggest diamond in the world was cursed and had killed everyone who owned it, and that by a trick of fate it was called the Hope diamond. Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved. George Washington had died because of a mistake he made about a diamond. Washington was not the first true President, but she did say who was. In some places in the world, she said, men and women still live in the trees and eat monkeys for breakfast. Their doctors are magicians. At the bottom of the sea are creatures thin as pancakes which have never been studied by scientists because when you take them up to the air, the fish explode.

You might think this is dialogue, but it's not. It's a condensed, representative version of a 40-minute ramble from a substitute teacher. It might or might not contain exact quotes from her speech -- we can't be sure which sentences might have fallen as-is from her lips and which are the schoolboy's representation of the teacher's words. Because really, even if some of these words are verbatim, they're all part of the schoolboy's rendering of the speech.

This works as a technique for the purposes of this story because nobody wants to read a verbatim record of the entire 40-minute speech. So instead, Baxter chose to use narrative summary, which takes events on the story's true timeline and compresses them in to a smaller space. This way, we don't have tons of page space being consumed by a rambling monologue, but we still get the full flavor in this "highlight reel" type of compressed version. This is a rather long patch of narrative summary, so Baxter leads us into it carefully with some explanatory notes at the beginning (also exposition). And he peppers the passage with "she said" and other reminders that this is not the actual speech, but the boy's recollection of it.

If it had been written as actual dialogue, not only would it be substantially longer, but it would be in quotation marks to indicate that these are the true words spoken aloud by the character. It might look, in part, like this:

"I've heard of a huge jewel in the Antipodes," the teacher said, "that is so brilliant that when the light shines into it at a certain angle, it will blind whoever is looking at its center. The biggest diamond in the world is cursed and has killed everyone who owned it. By a trick of fate it is called the Hope diamond. Diamonds are magic, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved."

This still feels like a bit of a ramble, but we lose the sense of time unfolding slowly as these stories about diamonds are told to the children. But doing it as Baxter did serves two goals: it enhances the sense of time passing, and it avoids weighting down the pace with a long but accurate representation of the actual dialogue.

So, here's the thing. The same basic story elements are being conveyed in the original and in my partial modification. A teacher is talking about diamonds, sharing legends and fables about diamonds in either case. The difference is not in the story content but in the narrative element being used to present the story. This is the cool thing about narrative. It's very flexible in how it can convey story.

The trick is learning how to manipulate those elements in a way that has the best impact on the reader. Ordinarily, we would urge you to avoid long runs of exposition. But here, in this case, compressing the dialogue into exposition was a good choice. So I wanted to share this for two reasons, first to give you practice in seeing the difference between exposition and dialogue, and second, to show you one place where the general guideline was rightly ignored.

Theresa

Question from the Comments

This is a really good question from Chemist Ken. It was posed on one of Alicia's posts, but I'm going to take it because this is a pet topic of mine.

I have a question about the sample text you wrote:

The grotto was ancient and long-forgotten, the mossy ground soft and rotting underfoot. The tiny pond was filmed with algae, and the air stank with the smell of the stagnant water. Even the rustle of the wind over the water was hushed and abashed.

Would that sentence or series of sentences be considered telling? I'm still confused by the concept.

 You're not alone in this confusion, Ken. The rule sometimes referred to as "Show, Don't Tell" is a shorthand way of advising against the use of exposition. Exposition is a narrative element, a way to categorize the words on the page, which basically refers to text that compresses, summarizes, explains, or otherwise reduces story material into condensed passages. We all learn expository writing in school, so for even the best fiction writers, we sometimes lapse into exposition almost as a default style in places.

Some exposition is necessary in every text. Micro-exposition (things like dialogue tags, thought tags, transitions, and other tiny bits of exposition) are key ingredients in good writing. The trick is not whether you have exposition, but how you use it. Here are some general rules of thumb for exposition.

• Avoid long runs of exposition.
• Avoid using exposition in place of action, dialogue, or description.
• Make sure the interior monologue is actually interior monologue and not exposition.
• Make sure the opening of your novel is as exposition-free as possible. (By "opening," I mean the chunk of text from page one until the start of the rising action, usually a few scenes, a few chapters, maybe 10-25% ish of the text, depending on story)
• When you have to use exposition, keep it as brief as possible.
• Exposition in the form of narrative summary (compressed events within the story's real time line) is useful for shorthanding trivial or repetitive action. But it should be kept as brief as possible.
• Use action beats in place of expository dialogue tags.
• If you're writing in a subjective point of view, eliminate expository thought tags.

I could go on. In fact, I could probably write a post on each of these points, and maybe I will. The point is that the use and misuse of exposition is a broad and complex subject, and "Show, Don't Tell" has become a shorthand rule of thumb for handling exposition.

But Alicia's sample is not exposition. It's description. Description is not "telling" in the same way exposition is, but description does contain its own set of pitfalls. For one, it can be static. If you look at Alicia's example, all three of her sentences contain a verb of being, "was," in some form or other. This is a static word -- not to be confused with passive voice, no matter how many times good-intentioned people insist that verbs of being are passive voice. The confusion on that point stems from this: Static verbs are the opposite of active verbs, and passive voice is the opposite of active voice. "Active" is used to name both things, so people sometimes think "passive voice" refers both to the type of verb and to the type of sentence structure. It does not.

In any case, although we generally say that active verbs are better than static verbs, this is anything but a hard and fast rule. Sometimes we want the emphasis in a sentence to be on something other than the verb, so a quiet little verb of being or appearance can help you accomplish that. Sometimes an active verb is so overused that it becomes worthless -- reach, pull, push, move, look, gaze, stare, and many more besides these, although active, have become associated with weak writing merely because they are repeated so frequently.

So, in Alicia's example, where she was trying to convey a still, dead, stagnant wilderness area, the description relied on static verbs. This makes sense. But if she'd been trying to describe a school playground at recess, more active verbs might have worked better.

I know I'm throwing a lot of concepts into a single post, and I hope it's not confusing. But I thought it would be better to do a comprehensive, if short, answer.

Theresa