Everyone always says “show don’t tell” when writing. However, the truth is that to tell a good story you have to both show AND tell.
But what are the real differences between “showing” and “telling?”
To find out, let’s write the same scene three different ways: only telling, only showing, then using both.
Reading is just as important in becoming a better writer as writing. A chef who never eats good food will never cook good food, an architect who never examines good buildings will never design good buildings, and a writer who never reads good books will never write good books.
There are so many benefits from reading. You not only increase your vocabulary and phraseology, your tools in your arsenal when doing your own writing, but you also get to see how good stories are written. How do they begin? How do they get you invested? How do they describe things in an interesting way?
And one book does all that particularly well: Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher.
What if, whenever we played a video game, instead of controlling pixels on a screen, we were actually controlling that character in a faroff world?
And, what if, the controller of one of those characters was a speedrunner?
That sounds like it could make for a good story!
When writing a story, sometimes you need to zoom in on important things. You need to paint a specific image of an object in the reader’s mind. But other times you need to zoom out, not wasting time describing something specifically when there’s other, important stuff going on.
Part of writing a good story is knowing when to zoom in and out, and also how to zoom in and out. Thankfully there’s an easy way to remember with the five levels of description.
If you’ve never seen the website The Fanfic Maker, then you should probably change that immediately by checking it out. It’s amazing. All you have to do is put in some parameters and then bam! You have fresh fanfiction written about whatever you want.
One of my favorite exercises is generating a fanfic, and then going through and editing it to try and make it into something actually readable. It can be quite a challenge, and even though it’s a bit silly, you can learn a lot from it.
Case in point: the story of Serenity and the Stolen Eyeball.
In real life, people should strive to solve their problems through compromise, level-headed talks, and mature actions.
But in fiction, the complete opposite is true! No one wants to read about a happy family solving their minor issues happily. We want to read about terrible things happening to downtrodden people. We want CONFLICT.
Aren’t humans weird?
Sometimes you see a writing prompt, and a great idea comes to mind right away. A light goes off in your head and your fingers start flying across the keyboard, barely fast enough to keep up with how quickly the thoughts are firing off inside your head.
And other times, you write about a kid not eating their vegetables.
For the last stream’s exercise, we did something we haven’t done since Rubbish to Published: talk about how to outline a story.
Creating an outline can be a very helpful guide, like having a map for a roadtrip. And they don’t have to be intimidating to create either.
All we did to create our story’s outline was answer five simple questions. Chat voted for how we answered them along the way, and I think we ended up outlining a cool story.
Here’s what we came up with: (along with examples in italics)
I can’t believe believe it was six months ago, back in December 2017, when I first started the ScottWritesStuff creative writing livestream.
I had no idea what to expect back then, but I couldn’t be prouder of what the stream has grown into. I’ve learned so much in these six months, and I’ve had a ton of fun with everyone in chat. Here’s to hoping for an even more awesome six more months to come!
To celebrate our stream-iversary, I decided to try out some things I’ve always wanted to do. For the exercise section, I wanted to see how well I knew my viewers’ writing. I invited anyone in chat to write an (anonymous) seven sentence story in a Google Doc, and then when everyone was done, I went in and tried to guess who wrote each one.
How did I do? Here’s my score:
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried something new: interviewing a character to get to know them better.
When writing a story, it’s all to easy to fall into the trap of writing two-dimensional characters. If you have a fun idea for a plot, then you may get so caught up in progressing it forward that the characters are just cardboard cutouts.
In order to make them feel more human, it’s important to get to know them better. Then you can use that information to influence how you write them to make them feel more realistic. And the best way to get to know someone: interviewing them.
So for the exercise, we had chat vote for a character to interview. They ended up choosing the Twitter bird.
Here’s what we came up with:
