All these books repeat the same thing regarding showing versus telling. Someone posted their writing for critique for a writers’ group on Facebook and wanted to know which sentence worked best.
First Sentence: It was fucking cold.
Second Sentence: My bones chattered from the howling winds through my frosty open bedroom window.
Third Sentence: The howling winds brushed against my chattering bones as the midnight air bit through my peeling skin in a thunderous collision of war.
I rarely post anything on there, but I was really tempted, so I wrote: The first sentence for sure. This show versus tell madness is getting out of hand.
Sometimes, all you have to write is: It was too fucking cold.
I never heard truer advice as when someone said, “Write like you talk.” His name is Jack Grapes. I implore you to watch his three-hour interview on YouTube. It’s better to avoid sentences that begin with a participial phrase, such as:
Standing at the window, I watched the car roll by.
That’s not how someone talks. Maybe in the nineteenth century they did when eloquence was key. But nowadays, modern speech isn’t the same.
If I was telling someone, I would effortlessly say, “It was fucking cold.” Or “I stood at the window and watched the car roll by.”
People just automatically speak in subject-verb-object sentences. So when I read a story where sentences begin with participial phrases, it reminds that I’m reading something rather than experiencing it. Oh, wait. Someone wrote this. The less attention you bring to yourself as a writer, the better. It’s like if you were watching a movie, and out of nowhere, the film crew entered the frame. The director yells “Cut! ” and the scene ends.
We’ve been taught at an early age to write like a writer. It’s hard to unlearn. Unlearning it takes years of practice.
I also read a heated debate about insensitive language. This is something I’m afraid I can’t help. A frustrated writer expressed his thoughts about someone calling him out for using the word “handicap” in his story. He cried censorship. People in the group posted accusatory comments and called him an “old man yelling at the wind.” So it’s a matter of older people not understanding the rules of younger people. And what’s wrong with older men? Isn’t that offensive? I can agree that I can’t keep up with what words are insensitive these days. It seems there’s a new word that is deemed derogatory every hour. I wanted to make a comment as well, but I held back. If I’m playing golf, what should I say instead of “handicap”?
The angry old man said he refused to be politically correct. Someone actually wrote, OMG, the term politically correct is so 1990s. I didn’t even know. So what’s the word they use these days instead?
Most of them told him he could write what he wanted, that no one was censoring him, but also that the readers had a right to hate his work, and that traditional publishers wouldn’t go near him. It was an all-out assault, but I understood his point. The appropriate words should align with the character. Euphemisms remove the poetry out of a poem. The purpose of one is to remove feeling from the meaning. If “handicap” is too offensive to use in literature, depending on the context of course, we’ll have to use “person with a disability.”
They said Stephen King had even apologized for his insensitive language in his past works. I wonder if someone forced him to apologize and if he really meant it, or if he internally rolled his eyes.
