Narrative Slips, or when to "tell" and not "show" by Randy Ingermanson

New today, from Randy Ingermanson's ezine:

Creating: Narrative Slips

Every writer has been told a thousand times, "Show,
Don't Tell."

It's good advice, usually. But like most good advice,
there are times when it's dead wrong.

One of those places is in a scene that would take quite
a long time if shown in real-time.

Suppose you have two characters having dinner at a
restaurant. They eat. They talk. Not much else happens.
The eating is repetitive, so after you've shown the
first bite, you pretty much have to focus on the
talking.

How much can you say in a one-hour conversation?
Figuring 100 words per minute, that's 6000 words of
dialogue, which works out to 24 pages of manuscript.

For one lousy scene in a restaurant.

If you show the whole thing in its entirety, your
readers aren't going to stay with you. Not unless it's
a crucial scene with stakes so high that your reader
can't afford to look away. But scenes with ultra high
stakes are rare.

Most scenes have much less at stake, and so they
deserve a lower page count. So what do you do?

You solve the problem by mixing up your "showing" and
your "telling."

You "show" the important parts of the scene in
dialogue. Those would be the high-tension parts or the
parts that reveal character or the parts that reveal
absolutely essential information.

You "tell" the unimportant parts using narrative
summary. You do this by using a sentence or a paragraph
that allows a big chunk of time to slip by.

I call these parts "narrative slips" because you use
narrative summary to "slip" the time forward. It's the
moral equivalent of the fast-forward button on life.

To see how a narrative slip works in practice, let's
look at a couple of examples:


In John Grisham's novel THE FIRM, protagonist Mitch
McDeere is a young lawyer newly hired to a high-powered
law firm. Mitch hasn't yet taken his bar exam, and his
coworkers are lining up to help him prepare.

The first helper is Wally Hudson, who has a long
conversation with Mitch that goes on for more than two
pages. Wally explains in detail how he's going to help
Mitch. Most of the scene is shown as dialogue.

When Wally leaves, Randall Dunbar walks in. Dunbar has
even more to say to Mitch, but this time, the dialogue
is summarized in less than half a page, with no direct
dialogue.

Mitch's third helper is Kendall Mahan, and now Grisham
takes barely a third of a page to summarize his
dialogue.

The scene then races ahead through the rest of the
afternoon with a paragraph that summarizes everyone
else like this:

The procession continued throughout the afternoon,
until half of the firm had stopped by with notebooks,
assignments of homework, and requests for weekly
meetings. No fewer than six reminded him that no member
of the firm had ever failed the bar exam.

The scene ends with a return to dialogue -- Mitch calls
his wife and tells her he's going to be home late. Very
late.

It's Mitch's first day on the job, and we've seen only
a few pieces of it, yet we feel like we've been through
hours and hours of exhausting work.


In Mario Puzo's novel THE GODFATHER, Don Corleone is
riding in his Cadillac with all three of his sons and
his consigliori. The scene begins with a snippet of
dialogue in which Corleone asks his youngest son
Michael about his girlfriend. The rest of the ride is
summarized in a paragraph:

Because of the gas rationing still in effect, there was
little traffic on the Belt Parkway to Manhattan. In
less than an hour, the Cadillac rolled into the street
of French Hospital. During the ride Don Corleone asked
his youngest son if he was doing well in school.
Michael nodded. Then Sonny in the back seat asked his
father, "Johnny says you're getting him squared away
with that Hollywood business. Do you want me to go out
there and help?"

The dialogue then resumes with several paragraphs in
which the Godfather assures Sonny that his consigliori
can handle the problem in Hollywood on his own.

The scene is a short one, which serves to give the
reader a bit of information about the family dynamics.
It's not important enough to rate many pages of
dialogue. Instead, Puzo whisks us through it in a
single page.


How do you decide when to show a scene in full, and
when to fast-forward through it using a narrative slip?

That's easy. Show the important stuff; tell the fluff.

Telling has value. It allows you to efficiently get
through the lower impact parts of the story without
seeming to break up the action.

If you sandwich a "narrative slip" between two slices
of "showing," even the slow parts of your story will
fly.




Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the
Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing
E-zine, with more than 25,000 readers, every month. If
you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction,
AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND
have FUN doing it, visit
http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

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