More Telling: Blunt and Sakey

In the last post, we say Marcus Sakey start with an action paragraph with a couple of sentences not being in the moment. I checked a couple of openings by Giles Blunt in Forty Words for Sorrow and By the Time You Read This, and they both began with purely descriptive paragraphs, one paragraph for Forty Words and four By the Time. Here's the paragraph from the former:

It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o'clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we're talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.

This opening is more traditional, but Sakey's is more attention grabbing with the protagonist having a gun pointed at him. Sakey's telling is sandwiched by ongoing action, while Blunt's is a continuing narrative.

In the following excerpt Blunt uses telling to enhance a subject already raised in the action as Sakey did in his opening paragraph with a beer:

“How long is this expedition of yours?” Cardinal said, but his wife didn’t hear him. They’d been married nearly thirty years, but she still kept him guessing. Sometimes when she was going out to photograph, she would be chatty and excited, telling him every detail of her project until he was cross-eyed with the fine points of focal lengths and f-stops. Other times he wouldn’t know what she was planning until she emerged from her darkroom days or weeks later, clutching her prints like trophies from a personal safari. Tonight she was subdued. [Underlining added by me.]

Done this way, the transition is seamless, as is the exit from the digression by use of the next piece of dialogue: “What time do you think you’ll get back?” In other circumstances the transitions don't have natural entries and exits, and to avoid choppiness and confusion it is necessary to indicate these points. 

In Chapter 21 of Forty Words, Blunt guides the reader in and out of transitions in the following way.

• The chapter begins with Cardinal, the protagonist, enduring the cold in his poorly insulated house. He closes the curtain on the picture window cutting of his view of the Lake.
• Then he says: "Somewhere out there [the lake], across the frozen lake, somewhere in the middle of town perhaps, the killer was going about his normal day."
• While thinking of the killer, Cardinal wonders if he'd taken any photos of his victims, which lead to a transition within the telling digression to a new topic in this manner: "Thinking of cameras made him think of Catherine [his photographer-wife]" 
•  Blunt signals a return to the regular scene in traditional manner: "But now the telephone waited for him [to make a call]."
• The word now is the trigger. Readers know what it means.
• Blunt then uses the telephone to transition to another digression; i.e., why the telephone was waiting.
• He returns to the ongoing action by picking up the telephone and dialing his daughter. 

Sakey in At the City's Edge, page 28, moves in and out of the main scene like this:

• Character glances out the window
• "Clark and Division. A weird-ass place": a description of the place follows
• When the telling is done we are moved back to main action with this:
• "The smell of coffee pulled him from his reverie."
• Any sensory shift will likely work. Consider the following in place of the coffee smell: her touch, her voice, her perfume, the movement of, and the like.

One more from the same book, page 39:

• Character driving with a young boy staring blankly out the car window.
• He asks the boy if he is feeling any better, and the boy's response is tighten his finger on the armrest.
• As reader we wonder what wrong with the boy.
• Next words in the text following armrest: "Twenty minutes ago when Jason had yanked open his apartment door ..." The telling follows.
• "He turned onto Damen, driving through..." And we are back in the car again.

Telling vs. Showing

Like all apprentices, I've been drilled to show and not tell--in fairness, there's always been a comment or two along the way about knowing when to show and when to tell, but the emphasis has always been on the showing part. And the more attention I paid to the showing, the more I saw its power: dramatic, draws you in, you feel the emotion, you empathize, the fictive dream begins and on it goes.

The trouble is I focused on it so much I lost track of the telling aspect. This week I got refocused on it when Nancy McQueen, one of the members in a mystery/thriller writing group I belong to, referred me to a book by Laurie Alberts called Showing &Telling. Here are some things she said that got my attention, at page two.

Creating only scenes can rob a work of context and meaning. A work comprised of scenes alone ... can be a welter of dramatic renderings, many of which provide information that doesn't deserve to take up that much space If everything is written as a scene, how does the reader know where the emphasis lies? And how does the writer move between scenes without enormous gaps? ... Summaries ... may contain background exposition, description that doesn't occur in a specific scene, interior thoughts, events that happen repeatedly or that are being recounted in a compressed fashion, and narrative commentary and reflection.

I consider interior thought that is in-the-moment part of a showing vs. telling, so I was already convinced of the importance of that aspect of telling, but all the rest, I have not paid attention to. And it shows in my writing.Today, I decided to see what some of my favorite mystery/thriller were doing, and I began with Marcus Sakey's The City's Edge. Here's how the book starts:

When the man pointed a gun at him, Jason Palmer was cooling down after his daily five and picturing the first beer of the day, a sweating Corona-and-lime that he figured he'd drink in the shower. Happy hour had been coming early lately, but he'd decided not to worry about it. To pretend this was summer vacation. Spend it running along the lake, scoping the bikini-girls that hit North Avenue Beach every afternoon like rent was a concept they weren't familiar with. He pushed sweat-damp bangs out of his eyes, laced his fingers overhead, and turned into the pedestrian tunnel beneath Lake Shore Drive. The change from blast-furnace sun to cement-cool shadows left him blinking, but when his eyes adjusted there the guy was, standing like he'd been waiting. [underline added by me]

 Wow, right there in sentence two the narrator tells us happy hour has been coming earlier--background, events repeating, not occurring in the scene, compressed fashion just like Alberts said. And I--the apprentice-- had missed it. Thinking about a beer after a run is something I do, and it's something I might have my character do. But Sakey adds to it with this character, and tells us he's been drinking earlier and earlier--hmm!

Two pages later the gunman is moving the protagonist along:

[The gunman] gestured to the stairs. Jason climbed, mind working furiously. What could possibly connect his brother and this man with the killer's eyes? He tried and discarded a dozen explanations with every step, but couldn't make the pieces fit. It had to be a mistake. They reached the second floor and started down the row of cars. The whole thing was funny in a dark sort of way. Used to be that every time the squad hit the street, someone might have been watching, sweaty finger on a radio detonator, waiting for Jason to step a little too close to death. It was a feeling he'd grown used to, that proximity to nothingness, the way he might just disappear in a roar of flame. [underline added by me]

 Arguably the first highlight is in-the-moment, but the second reached back to an earlier time. Note here that both highlighted portions are very directly connected to what is happening to our protagonist.

The telling segments help develop the character of Jason, a veteran who is drinking more than normal. Good stuff.

Adjectives Revisited

In my second blog ever, 2008, I wrote about adjectives and Mark Twain's admonition to kill them all on sight, and about some exceptions to the rule.

Here are a couple more exceptions I found in James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss. In the first one, at page 35, he is describing a guy snoring:

He was sleeping like a grizzly gone under for the winter ... spitting out snores that seemed to curse his sleep, great phlegm-strangled, whiskey-soaked, cigar-smoked, window-rattling roars.

 In the second example, at page 47, he is a little more restrained when describing a lawyer.

And he had dressed for the occasion. A dark-blue, expensively tailored, vested, pin-striped suit and a silk tie.|

James Crumley Wordsmithing

Ever been reading along and come upon a piece of writing that makes you say to yourself, Wish I'd written that? That happened to me yesterday when I was reading The Right Madness by James Crumley. I found this at page 50 of the paperback:

But the bad dreams were always waiting in the shadows, flirting around the fringes of sleep. They didn't mean anything, I knew, but that was sometimes hard to tell myself when they blundered like drunken bears into my unconscious.

I particularly like the blundering drunken bears simile.

I have a character who has bad dreams, too. So I make take a simile lesson from Crumley. My guy's dreams are different,  more like wolves than bears, and they don't blunder in, they lurk and prowl in the shadows waiting for a chance to charge in.

Dashing

There are three types of dashes: hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Here’s how they are used and how to produce them using Microsoft Word.

The Hyphen

The hyphen links words together:

• Twenty-odd people
• Soft-centred candy
• Seventy-six trombones.

There are generally no spaces on either side of a hyphen. An exception is when it is used in an address: 123 - 45 Street, Tucson.

Word

It is easy to type a hyphen using Word. Simply hit the key next to the numeral 0.

The Em Dash

It’s called an em dash because it has the same width as a capital M. The em dash—unlike the hyphen—serves to separate words, not link them:

• At the wedding the speeches—and the food—were superb.
• I do the work—he gets the credit.
• My deal is simple—I get all the money.

There are generally no spaces on either side of an em dash; however, the practice is not consistent; for example, the Toronto Star uses a space on either side.

Word

Type text, and then insert two hyphens (--)and type more text. Don’t insert a space on either side of the hyphen or between them. Word will automatically convert the two hyphens into an em dash—magic.

The En Dash

The en dash, as wide as an N, is also used to separate, but only numbers.

• See pages 100 – 110
• During the week of May 14 – 20

Many style guides say there are no spaces on either side of an en dash, but Word just doesn’t see it that way.

Word

Type text followed by a space, then type one or two hyphens followed by one or no space, and Word will automatically inserts an en dash.