Forum: Author Hangout

but glossing over what most consider the best days of their lives seems like a shortcut.

Not for the plot. The purpose of his going to college was to get a degree in Journalism and learn Italian. That's it. His first year was interesting and shown, but I'd be repeating myself if I showed the next two years.

More important than the plot here is whether the character grows or the conflicts change during those two years. If not, yay timeskip.

Out of curiosity, why would people consider it the best days of their lives? I could maybe see it if momma and daddy were paying for college and all expenses, kinda of a last hurrah before finally taking responsibility for their lives. For everyone else, it was a bunch of hard work.

Back in the day (late 70s), someone with decent grades and someone vouching for them could get by mostly on scholarships. Sometimes you'd get work study, which mostly consisted of busy work cleaning up or staffing the bookstore, but I found the constant hours too distracting and just ponyed up the extra cash (by selling antique decoys my father had given me as 'investments', which I consider that to be).

In the end, I graduated without dept and ready to work, without anyone underwriting my education (other than Uncle Sam). While it's not true nowadays, for most of the BabyBoom generation, getting a car meant independence, and college meant an opportunity to experience freedom and unlimited sexual opportunity (mostly unrealized) with a suitable 'safety net' of being in a mostly closed community. So year, most of us went a bit wild, and loved every minute of it.

Ruthless edits could improve pacing after the story is complete, but that would require the authors to even acknowledge that there are the pacing problems.

Rather than culling a story after you've already invested months exploring it, it's better to consider the story's pacing before you start, as your writing, and then once more, refining the pacing as the story evolves.

Pacing it not something you merely 'add on' to the story once it's all done, it's an ongoing part of writing. It's the writers who don't get that that struggle with pacing issues.

Not sure how many it takes until they reach the end, though. Talking with other pantsers, most of us generally know where things are headed (if not how they're getting there) well before then. Speaking for myself, I usually know what kind of story I'm telling fairly early on and what sort of conclusion to aim for between halfway and three-quarters through. Both of those, especially the first, give me a measure of control over pacing — and in any case, I'm doing enough non-linear writing with backfills anyway that it's easy to tweak the pace as I go.

The question arises, if the intervening years aren't relevant to the plot at all, then why waste time mentioning them at all? Why not just start the next chapter at the next stage of his life.

That can be done, but I'd have to explain in the beginning of that chapter about the missing years. You can't just jump a couple of years with no explanation. I need a transition. So instead of starting a chapter a few years later, I start the chapter by telling what happened in those few years. Mostly he graduated, but there are other tidbits in there as well.

The point is, there are times to Tell, not Show.

And his college years are definitely not the most important part of this man's life. It's not about his life at college. In fact, most of his time in college is taking classes and studying. Very little social life.

Character is built from formative situations and expressed through stand-out actions.

And there were many. And even the first two semesters of college were "shown." But to go into detail for the rest of his college would be boring or at the least redundant. What I wanted to get out of his college experience I got.

You show your story. You tell, if you can't ignore, the rest.
I have a rule for romances, "Meet cute or don't meet." If the way the couple met doesn't contribute to the story, then start thestory after they met.

You show your story.

I'm not convinced showing isn't ultimately just a subset of telling. The net result is an author telling a story to the reader. But I wholeheartedly agree with pruning the bits readers skip over!

AJ

I'm not convinced showing isn't ultimately just a subset of telling. The net result is an author telling a story to the reader. But I wholeheartedly agree with pruning the bits readers skip over!

Like any tool, if you overuse it, it'll get dull. Thus, if you constantly show, it'll lose its effectiveness. It's best to carefully consider when you employ each technique, so you get the maximum effect from it, rather than wasting it on unimportant scenes that don't matter as much.

However, while it does involve a lot more words (showing over telling), it's generally so difficult 'showing' a scene, that the dangers of overuse is actually difficult to carry out, as you'd be having to modify both the way we typically write, but also how we typically think. Showing is much more difficult than 'telling' is. "You're kidding!" he exclaimed angrily. is so much clearer and easy to convey, while conveying the same scene based only on everyone's reactions to the characters' interactions are.

So, rather than focusing on precisely how much to tell, merely focus on the few scenes that really need to be shown. Those should only be your most important, pivotal scenes. That takes the pressure off, but it also makes those scenes that much stronger!

In that sense "Two years later..." is not telling.

I agree that's not telling. But I told those two years with:

The spring semester ended and then the summer semester. Two calendar years were completed. And his final year went by even faster. Before Boyd knew it, it was May, 1947 and he was graduating.

I could have said "Two years later…" but I summarized those two years. That summarization is telling.

Showing AND Telling are both necessary narrative tools and neither should be neglected.

That was the point I was making.