Short Story The secret to length

Discussion in 'Genre Discussions' started by Justin Rocket 2, Aug 27, 2015.

  1. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Any reason other than the door being too heavy would probably warrant more explanation. For example, John is drugged, or someone is pushing the door on the other side. A simple heavy door is really not significant enough to warrant two words to indicate that it is heavy. Either it is heavy, or John is struggling to open it. I maintain using both in this context makes it a less than perfect sentence.


    My problem with "show don't tell" is that it perpetuates bad writing. I like that you say, essentially, if someone reads my writing and says "show don't tell," they're telling me I am not providing a strong enough narrative experience. Fine.

    However, "show don't tell" is also responsible for endless tedious prose in the workshop. Stories that are so boring because every action needs to be explicitly stated. It's really not a good rule. Period.
     
  2. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    I see.

    It really depends on the story, don't you think?

    "The cold wind blew against her" tells one story.

    "Shivers ran up her arms as she braced herself against the wind. Why hadn’t she remembered a jacket?" tells another.
     
  3. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I certainly hope I didn't give the impression I think stories should be composed only of showing rather than telling, with melodrama dripping from every sentence. Urkkkk. I agree with @123456789 that it would be very hard to slog through a story like that (although I've never been a fan of Hemingway either! :)) I was just trying to illustrate the difference between show and tell, based on the example the OP gave us, which I thought was a striking one.

    Your example of ducking under doorways is also good, even though it has nothing to do with 'feelings.' However, it does have to do with an experience, rather than just a 'fact'. Either John is the POV character here, and he's letting the reader know how he has to deal with doorways, and the fact that his situation is unique ...OR it's another POV character watching John come through a doorway and giving us a share of what he's seeing and concluding about it.

    I do think you've hit the nail on the head though with:
    It rarely is, is it? Immersion, as you also pointed out, IS the key. John is tall, is not an immersive statement. John had to duck under doorways that no one else did, is more immersive because you can see that happen. His three colleagues breezed though the meeting room doorway without minding their heads, but John had to duck, as usual. That's very immersive.

    People might say that's a hell of a convoluted way to tell a simple fact, that John is tall—hey, just spit it out, like Hemingway does!—but it depends on the context. This last one conveys not only the impression that John is tall, but that somehow he doesn't quite 'fit' with the other guys he works with. It's subtle, but you can use immersive 'showing' to build a story.
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2015
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  4. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Well. You have Hemingway for simple and direct. You have Nabokov for brilliant and complicated. But you also have Kafka for unnecessarily long yet trite sentences that basically repeat the same meaning at least twice. EG, both bold parts 1 and 2 each individually tell us John is probably tall.

    I am having this problem in my own WIP. Usually, I want to eliminate redundancies, but on occasion I feel it strengthens the prose and would prefer to have it. Like with the quoted sentence. Unfortunately I still have to cut a few dozen thousand words. I'm not really sure I have a choice.
     
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  5. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Just out of curiosity—I don't want to derail this thread any more than I already have—but do you consider yourself an instinctive 'overwriter' or an 'underwriter?' I got the impression the OP, @Justin Rocket , considers himself to be an 'underwriter.' In other words, do you find your writing needs bulked up a bit, when you get to editing? Or do you need to chop away huge swathes of undergrowth, to expose the elegant bones of your story?

    I know I'm an overwriter, whose final edit was more than a third shorter than the original was, even though I actually added scenes. Showing is not a problem for me. :) I had to learn that sometimes it's best to just tell. And that we don't actually need to be with a character every moment of his day. Only the important ones. Some may think my lesson is only partially learned, even now!

    BTW, I do think you missed my point. That longer sentence which included the colleagues AND John wasn't making the same point twice. It was demonstrating that he's tall, but that he's also different from his colleagues. Not 'everyone,' but more specifically, the guys he works with—and they are probably not basketball players. They 'breeze' through the doorway, while he has to awkwardly duck through, which puts him at a status-related disadvantage already. That sentence gives a picture of the setting, the characters in the setting AND some idea of the relationships involved. That sentence does triple duty, so it's not wasted wordage. Presumably what happens at the meeting will reinforce and fine-tune this aspect of the story. It all relates to context and to creating an overall impression.
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2015
  6. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I interpret "show versus tell" as "demonstrate versus explain."

    When you demonstrate something, you give the user the evidence and let them come to a conclusion. That gives that conclusion more depth and richness, and the reader gets more involvement and enjoyment through their participation.

    When you explain something, you give the reader a predigested conclusion. Putting that conclusion into words tends to simplify it and make it less interesting.

    Demonstrate/Show: Jane's mother scanned Jane from shoes to hat. After a long pause, "Is that what you're wearing?"

    Explain/Tell: Jane's mother was passive-aggressively judgemental about Jane's appearance.
     
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  7. daemon

    daemon Contributor Contributor

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    Actually, when I read that he struggled to open the door, my first thought was that it was a creaky old door, on slightly crooked hinges, kept shut by the friction of the door frame. That experience is more familiar to me than encountering a door so heavy that it is a struggle to open it. (At least one door in my house was like that for a long time.) I guess the principle here is that your intuition is never as universal as you think it is, because it is the sum of your experiences, which are different from your readers' experiences. No matter how you describe what you imagine, other people will imagine something different.

    Anyway, this is becoming about show vs tell, which is off topic.

    On topic: if your book is a novella, then by all that is holy, let it be a novella. No need to pad it with filler. Respect your reader's time.
     
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2015
  8. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    I know but is a heavy door really important? That's the question.
     
  9. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    I agree part one and two of the sentence serve different purposes. However, you COULD potentially infer that by bothering to tell us that those three can get through the door, the MC probably can't. We therefore also infer that the MC is tall and different from his work colleagues. It really depends how hard you need to drive a certain point home. That's part of the art I would imagine.

    It's funny you mentioned having to chop a third, because that's about how much I initially needed to chop. I am a bit of an over writer. I also developed a special system. In the third draft, I go back and do motivation reaction units( MRU). Yeah, I know, I did them. That means if event A happens, I absolutely have to show the MC somehow reacting to it, either directly or indirectly. And I did this for every event- there could be have a dozen different small events on any given page. That buffs up the word count tremendously. The MRUs wind up largely being a scaffold. That means unnecessary responses to events are deleted in the fifth draft, which helps bring the word count back down in addition to not making the writing ridiculous -_-. It's been a lot of work.
     
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  10. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Last tangent. I think part of the magic of writing is that your reader does imagine something different. It's like trying to describe what you think is a beautiful person, instead of letting the reader do it itself. It's an art trying to find the balance between what your reader needs to know exactly and how he experiences certain events. If whether a door is heavy or stuck has no bearing on the story at all (and it may or may not) I really don't think it matters.
     
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  11. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    MRU? That's an interesting approach. I may try it myself.

    Funny. I would have pegged you as an 'underwriter!' Just goes to show, eh?

    ..........
    Not that simple. What's to prevent him shambling in after them without ducking? :)
     
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2015
  12. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    It's important, especially here on the forum, to realise that everything we present here is out of context—as you have pointed out regarding the stuck/heavy door. What might work well in the middle of a story might seem awkward, over-written, or lack importance or emotional resonance when presented as a little snippet for discussion. Context is all, really. Our discussions on the forum are wonderful to have, but judgements of anybody's snippet has to be made out of context, unless it's a whole story or poem.
     
  13. Aaron DC

    Aaron DC Contributor Contributor

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    When telling a joke, you would tend to deliberately lead your audience down the wrong path. The punchline a lot of the time is the reveal that shows them how far down that wrong path you managed to take them.

    So there is a very basic level of communication that does fairly reliably communicate the same setting as the one you wish to communicate, and the vast majority of an audience will tend to take the path you set for them.

    In the context of this thread, jokes are like flash fiction where the setting and the character have to be communicated as quickly and succinctly as possible. For that reason they tend to be as simple as possible.

    In writing, any sort of richness in terms of detail or depth of character immediately introduces words and constructs that are far more open to interpretation based on the filters present within the reader. The magic comes in the reading, and for me at any rate, leaving room for the reader's imagination by finding the balance you mention between accurate description and sufficient detail for the reader to know what's going on and why.

    I fully agree that if the heaviness of the door is immaterial, it doesn't matter and I personally do not want to know. Get this crap out of my way and get on with the story is not something I enjoy thinking while reading a book.
     
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  14. plothog

    plothog Contributor Contributor

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    Thinking about doors I've struggled to open in my life, if heaviness wasn't mentioned I'd probably assume that he was failing to figure out the latch or was a badly fitting door that was jamming. A door that I struggled to open purely because of weight would have to be a pretty substantial door.
    It depends on why we're even talking about opening a door in the first place. It's the sort of action which could be skipped in a lot of cases.
    If I'm reading about a character trying to escape a burning building, I want to experience the sensation of struggling to open the door with the character. If it's not indicated why he's struggling, I'm just being told he's struggling rather than getting to experience it.

    Maybe it's being mentioned as a big heavy door to set up a big imposing room conveying that feeling of bigness with a physical sensation of moving a heavy door rather than just visuals.

    To me the word 'heavy' gives an indication of physical sensation making the scene come more alive. Most times that I wouldn't care about the door being heavy, I wouldn't care about him struggling to open the door either. I guess it's an interesting example of how different people read things differently.
     
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  15. DueNorth

    DueNorth Senior Member

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    Well, 1 thru 9, I can not field a good argument against your cynicism, and actually tend to agree. Too bad that what appeals to the masses and what might be considered good art in any medium are not often the same. I do like your point about how overdoing showing at the cost of simplicity can be quite tedious.
     
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  16. thirdwind

    thirdwind Member Contest Administrator Reviewer Contributor

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    Hence the "sometimes."
     
  17. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    For those still arguing about the door. Yes, context absolutely matters. I mentioned the door and my resistance to these sort of sentences for a reason. I see it in the writing workshop a lot and often these explicitly, drawn out descriptions of events wind up being tedious and contribute nothing to the story. It's great we're all coming up with reasons as to why showing a heavy door might be important and that's the sort of thought I hope we're all putting into our stories when we actually write these bits.
     
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  18. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    I think publishers are becoming less hung up on length as self-published novellas become more common. I've been looking at publishers in my genre and one of them stated outright that they are happy to accept books of any length, whereas others are still specifying 55,000 - 90,000 words (still a wide range, of course).

    Mine is going to naturally fall into the 90,000 - 100,000 range by the look of it, though I expect to lose a good chunk in editing. If I needed to get it back up to a certain level I would probably look to draw out or add scenes in the beginning, where I'm setting a lot of things up. I don't think I want to slow the pace down later on in the book.
     
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  19. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    Sorry for the late response. I blame the time difference :)
    Yes, I think that is what they mean. But then, as Gingercoffee pointed out, showing is not always better than telling. Not everything HAS to be shown. If we did, I guess we all would write 900-page-novels. Lol. Plus, it would probably be a little boring for the reader if we show EVERYTHING.
     
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  20. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    I'm having a hard time understanding your objection. "Heavy" in my example was what, cluttering the sentence?

    So your objection to show, don't tell is that it's not understood?
    The bolded part is not what show, don't tell means. You are trying very hard to apply it to my example which took this long tedious sentence:
    "John approached the door and grabbed the handle firmly. He twisted his hand and pulled the heavy door open."​
    Explained why it wasn't what the concept meant, and offered a short sweet example:
    "John struggled to get the heavy door open."
    Many people who learn about show, don't tell but haven't yet understood the nuance of the recommendation will write sentences like the first one, thinking the phrase means to describe what is happening in more detail.

    That is not what show, don't tell means. And I can see why people in the workshop, when told to do more showing, end up with the explicitly drawn out descriptions you are objecting to.

    What I can't see is why you are applying your objection to my shorter concise sentence, trying to make the single adjective, heavy, apply to that objection. It doesn't and my sentence was not in any way an explicitly, drawn out description.

    I understand your complaint that telling someone to show, don't tell results in explicitly, drawn out descriptions. But rather than that being a valid objection, I see it as the writer moving toward understanding the concept, but not yet developing the skills to do it.

    In other words, those explicitly, drawn out descriptions are a step on the way but not the last step. Explicitly, drawn out descriptions is not the definition of show, don't tell.
     
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  21. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I mostly agree (Oh, my God!) with you here.

    I see "show don't tell" as being relevant only when there's something to be communicated beyond plain bare facts.

    For example, if the next event happens at John's home and the previous event had him at work, you don't need to "show" him tidying his desk, going to his car, getting in, tuning the radio, starting the engine, blah blah blah... That would only be useful if you wanted to communicate something about John's mood or his nature and the going-home actions were a good vehicle for that. If not, just send him home already.

    For that matter, you don't really even need to "tell", "John went home."

    If all that matters is that the next event is in John's home, you can just go straight to, "Later, prowling around his living room, John..."
     
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  22. Aaron Smith

    Aaron Smith Banned Contributor

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    Damn it, I was really hoping for some help with my micropenis.
     
  23. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    You're right. Maybe if we keep saying this, people will progress past that awkward stage.
     
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  24. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    Because show, don't tell is off topic, I've started a new thread here so we can get back to length in this thread.
     
  25. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    I get all kinds of spam trying to tell me the secret of length. It all goes straight to the bit bucket.
     
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