Showing and Telling Storytelling, Andrew Wille at FoW15

The first thing to say is that I've had some complaints about the difficulty of reading my blog, due to the coloured background. I really like the background, so I've decided to experiment by putting my text in Bold. I'm just wondering whether this will also affect my writing style, just as I'm told that when I speak German, I sound more aggressive.

Andrew Wille's workshop on Showing and Telling was extremely helpful and I would highly recommend his own blog: www.wille.org, particularly as regards tips on self-editing. My own tip on this, for what it's worth, is to read your book aloud. That's particularly useful, when it comes to dialogue, but also helps with the music and rhythm of the piece as a whole.

One of the most important points Andrew made is that we're all told the mantra of  show don't tell over and over, but there does need to be some telling or there's no space to be lyrical.

The other difficulty which arises with insufficient telling in the main body of the narrative is that too much information tends to be shunted into dialogue. One creative writing teacher referred to  this as a Star Trek Moment, but it is generally referred to as an `info dump' (something you get all the time in Soaps). As far as dialogue is concerned, less is more.

We looked at Ernest Hemingway's short story `Hills Like White Elephants', which is a superb example of a pithy, revealing to and fro between lovers:
`Oh, cut it out.'
`You started it,' the girl said. `I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'
`Well, let's try and have a fine time.'
`All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'
`That was bright.'
`I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it- look at things and try new drinks.'

Basically, you don't want the reader to either have to work too hard at figuring out what is happening or to get bored, the idea is to create a dream world that the reader is completely immersed in.

Andrew recommended `Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner and the Mutinous Crew', by Ursula Le Guin, which is full of exercises to help with the craft of writing and from which he took the necessity for `density and speed' in your writing. One of the ways to achieve this is to use good verbs (as opposed to too many adverbs) and I've noticed that the writing I most admire in both published and unpublished writers alike is a good verb!

We also looked at `Brokeback Mountain', which was a short story by Annie Proulx long before it was made into a film. Apparently, it went through 60 drafts, which shows she has a lot more patience than me. It's wonderfully economic and evocative: ``The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.' There's not a single superfluous word, it makes me melancholy just reading those lines, like listening to Billie Holiday.

As Terry Pratchett apparently said, `A first draft is just the writer telling himself the story.' Below shows how I feel round about draft 8: