stdennard:

We are so thrilled to have Susan Dennard on the blog today. Not only is Susan a fabulous author, but she’s also an amazing person with unmatched generosity. Recently, she judged our Pitch+250 Contest and went above and beyond in her finalist critique. She’s also mentoring our July 1st Five Pages Workshop, where again, she is going above and beyond in her notes for the writers’ workshop participants. She’s written a wonderful craft of writing post on Showing vs. Telling and included a helpful writing exercise.

Show Your Character’s Backstory, Don’t Tell It

"Show, don’t tell." I know everyone has heard that phrase a thousand times. At least a thousand times, right? And yet, though we all know we should show our story instead of tell it, ye olde maxim is WAY easier said than done.

Trust me: I still make this mistake, and I know I’m not the only author who finds myself falling into the Telling Trap. I seem to be especially guilty when I’m trying to provide backstory—and I’m even moreguilty when I’m writing a first draft.

But that’s the beauty of revisions, no? We can rip out all our telling and weave it back into the story as beautiful, seamless showing.

In this post, I want to show you how to spot telling in your WIP—and then I want to show you how to work the information back in as showing. I’m going to use a writing example, but bear with me. I tend on the side of verbosity.

So let’s say we have a story, and in it our MC is named Emily. In this scene I’m going to use for our example, Emily is in a car at nighttime. She’s with her ex-best friend, Carrie, who has somehow—despite the bad blood between them—convinced Emily to abandon the end of her school’s play rehearsal. Carrie needs to take Emily somewhere to show her something super important…

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Brilliance.