Seeing Your Way to Better Stories.

STANLEY SCHMIDT.

The first time I met Kelly Freas, the renowned science fiction artist, he had just published

a series of posters to promote interest in and support for the space program. The entire

series was displayed on walls throughout the house, and Kelly was asking all the guests at

a party which posters they thought most effective. He found a fascinating pattern in the

results. "Verbally oriented" people always picked the one showing a moon rocket, three

ghostly sailing ships, and the phrase, "Suppose Isabella had said no..." "Visually

oriented" people always picked the one with no words, just a picture of a rocket

"hatching" from an Earthlike egg.

 Writers, by the nature of their work, tend to be "verbally oriented." But they would do

well to realize that many of their readers are less so. Most readers do not pick up a novel

or short story to admire the author's cleverness in turning a phrase, but to experience

vicariously something they cannot experience directly. Your job as a writer is to make

your reader forget that he or she is reading and give him or her the illusion of being in the

story, seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling what's happening to your characters.

Hence the oft-repeated dictum: "Show, don't tell."

 What, exactly, does that mean? I've found that the most important key to making a

reader see a scene vividly is that the author must see it clearly to be able to convey the

illusion to someone else. And one of the best pieces of advice I can give a writer

suffering from a tendency to tell rather than show is this: try telling it as a play.

All the World's a Stage.

 Telling rather than showing breaks down into several specific types of faults:

describing character rather than showing it through dialogue and action; directly

disclosing thoughts of non-viewpoint characters; summarizing dialogue as indirect

discourse instead of quoting it directly; speaking in generalities rather than specifics. All

of these things tend to distance the reader from the scene and reduce the illusion of being

a part of it.

 In a play you can't do those things. Except for a few special cases of unusual structure,

like the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town or Sakini in John Patrick's The

Teahouse of the August Moon, there is nobody on a stage to tell you what kinds of people

the characters are. The only way you can find out is by watching what they do and

listening to what they say to one another. And they say and do specific things, which the

playwright must spell out. So if you've written a scene for a story in which you have told

too much that you could have shown, a good way to force yourself to find specific ways

to solve the problem is to recast the scene as a play--and then translate the result back

into story form.

 Let's see how it works in a hypothetical snippet of a badly written story:

Ralph stepped nervously into Commissioner Reed's office. It was clearly the

office of a career bureaucrat, and Ralph could see at a glance that Reed was the kind of

bureaucrat who did everything by the book and disliked anything that threatened to

deviate from it. But the fate of California depended on Ralph's convincing him in the next

few minutes that he had to deviate from the book.

 Reed already had Ralph's dossier in front of him and seemed to be reading the crucial

article. He looked up and greeted Ralph with a few words of perfunctory small talk. Then

he said, "So what you're saying in your paper is that you're sure the Big One is coming in

six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive?"

 "That's right," Ralph replied nervously, trying to collect his thoughts and brace his

confidence for the confrontation to come.

 "But your cure," Reed grated, "is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Right?"

 "I'm afraid so," Ralph admitted as apologetically as if it were his fault. He drew

himself up and said firmly, "But if we let the earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot

more."

"How much money7" the bureaucrat demanded.

 How does this go wrong? Let me count the ways. We are told that Ralph is nervous,

but we are left on our own to picture how this affects his behavior. It would be better to

do it the other way around: show us how he acts and let us conclude for ourselves that he

is nervous. We are told that Reed is marked by his office and his personal appearance as a

career bureaucrat who can't stand things that don't fit standard procedure, but we're not

shown a single piece of evidence to justify Ralph's sizing him up that way. Their

conversation begins with "a few words of perfunctory small talk," but again we're left to

guess what they are--whereas if they were quoted, they themselves could provide some of

the character clues that we haven't been given in any other way. Once Ralph and Reed get

down to business, every speech is described by an adverb or worse, and the author seems

determined to find a new synonym for "said" every time anybody opens his mouth.

Now try it as a scene of a play:

(We see an office lined with glass-fronted bookcases, locked and filled with leather-

bound volumes. A single desk sits in the middle of the room, its top empty except for a

telephone and a folder containing several papers.

REED, a slightly built, tight-dipped man of fifty or so, with a few strands of greasy black

hair combed haphazardly across his pate, is frowning through thick, rimless glasses at the

top paper in the folder.

RALPH enters through the door and walks to the desk, checking his belt buckle and

smoothing his hair down with quick little motions as he goes. When he reaches the desk

he stops, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Reed looks up at

him, not lifting his head but simply peering over the tops of his lenses. Ralph avoids

meeting his eyes directly.)

REED: Hmph. So you're Tambori. RALPH: Yes, sir.

REED: And what you're saying here (he taps the paper) is that you're sure the Big One is

coming in six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive? RALPH: That's

right.

REED: But your cure is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

Right?

RALPH: I'm afraid so. (He straightens up and looks Reed in the eye.) But if we let the

earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot more.

REED: How much money?

 A few things still have to be described, of course. Furniture and other fixed features of

the physical setting can't speak for themselves; human beings can and should. The theater

audience will see what the scene looks like by looking at it, but the stage manager has to

be told how to set it up for them. The actors need some suggestions--such as Ralph's

avoiding Reed's eyes and Reed's peering over the top of his glasses while keeping the rest

of himself aimed at his desk--of how to convey their personalities and states of mind. But

the way people talk is conveyed simply by what they say and bow they say it. The

adverbs and "said-bookisms" are gone. There is no place for them on the stage--and

there's seldom a need to put them back in when you translate it back to a story:

 There was nothing in the room except some cases of musty books and a single

wooden desk, and the desk was bare except for a telephone and a folder containing a few

papers. Reed, a slightly built, tight-lipped man of fifty or so with a few strands of greasy

black hair combed haphazardly across his pate, seemed to be studying the top paper

intently through thick, rimless glasses. He was frowning, and Ralph shifted his weight

back and forth from one foot to the other as he waited for the commissioner to speak.

 When he finally looked up, he didn't lift his head but simply peered at Ralph over the

tops of his lenses. "Hmph. So you're Tambori."

"Yes, sir."

 "And what you're saying here"--he tapped the paper--"is that you're sure the Big One

is coming in six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive?"

 "That's right."

 "But your cure is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Right?"

 'Tm afraid so." Ralph drew himself up and looked Reed in the eye. "But if we let the

earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot more."

Reed scowled. "How much money?"

 Notice that not only are the adverbs and strained synonyms for "said" gone, but even

the word said itself is seldom necessary. As on the stage, once the audience or readers

have been given a picture of the characters and setting, they can fill in for themselves

such details as who's speaking and in what tone of voice. On the printed page, where they

can't physically see and hear who's speaking, they may need an occasional reminder--but

with only two characters "onstage," this can be provided easily and unobtrusively by an

occasional reference to something else one of the speakers is doing, like, "Reed scowled."

There is still room on the printed page for an occasional direct reference to the viewpoint

character's thoughts, but even those can often be avoided. The original reference to how

important this meeting is seemed unnecessary in the revision because that would have

already been hinted at in earlier scenes, and the reason for its importance quickly

becomes apparent in the dialogue of this one. The very existence of a viewpoint character

is perhaps the most essential difference between a story and a play, but it's not as big a

difference as it first seems. In a play, everybody is revealed only through his words and

deeds. In a story, one character is known more directly--but even he, and through him the

reader, remains an audience for everyone else.

 As the writer, you, too, see much of the action from an audience's viewpoint. But this

can work to your advantage: if you visualize your characters and their doings clearly

enough, all you have to do is watch what they do and write it down.

Setting the Stage.

 There are, of course, a number of important differences between a play and a story.

One is that the reader does not actually see the stage, so you as storyteller have to create

it in his mind-and you want him to feel as if he's in the scene, not looking at it from

section 6, row 5, seat 2. I've been talking about "seeing" and "watching" and

"visualizing," but those are really a metaphorical shorthand for "perceiving and

experiencing." Seeing is perhaps our most vivid and detailed sense, but much of the

fullness of the world comes from the fact that it is only one of several. Poul Anderson,

probably best known as a science fiction writer but highly regarded in several other

genres as well, has said that in setting a scene, he consciously tries to appeal to at least

three of the reader's senses. Consider the following, for example, the fourth paragraph of

a scene in Anderson's novel The People of the Wind:

By then they were strolling in the garden. Rosebushes and cherry trees might almost have

been growing on Terra; Esperance was a prize among colony planets. The sun Pax was

still above the horizon, now at midsummer, but leveled mellow beams across an old brick

wall. The air was warm, blithe with birdsong, sweet with green odors that drifted in from

the countryside. A car or two caught the light, high above; but Fleurville was not big

enough for its traffic noise to be heard this far from the centrum.

 This brief paragraph plants not only visual images, but sounds, smells, the feeling of

warmth, and even tactile sensations in the mind of the reader, with just a few words each.

The phrase "old brick wall" alone tickles at least three senses for any reader who has ever

seen and smelled and felt one. When your story is set in a place similar to ones the reader

has experienced, a word or two like rosebushes can trigger a great deal of imagery. If the

setting is not likely to be familiar to the reader, as often happens in science fiction,

fantasy, and historical novels, the writer can take less for granted and may have to work

harder, and even use more words, to give the scene enough depth to draw the reader in.

Even then, though, careful choice of the words is often preferable to using vast numbers

of them. Anderson has a special knack for bringing alien worlds to life by giving things

found there the sorts of instantly evocative names that human colonists might coin for

them:

 Further down a slope lay sheds, barns, and mews. The whole could not be seen at once

from the ground, because Ythrian trees grew among the buildings: braidbark,

copperwood, gaunt lightningrod, iewelleaf which sheened beneath the moon and by day

would shimmer iridescent.

 No reader of The People of the Wind has ever seen a braidbark, copper wood, or jewel

leaf--but every reader gets an instant picture from each one-word name, complete with

overtones like suggestions of texture. No reader gets exactly the same picture that the

author had, but that's not important. What is important is that each gets a picture, suitable

as a setting for the action and substantial enough for verisimilitude.

The Viewpoint Character.

 These days, most successful fiction is told as if seen through the eyes (and other

senses) of a single character, called the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character may

not be the same through an entire story, particularly a long and complex one; but each

scene, at least, is experienced by the reader as it is experienced by one of the participants.

This means, for example, that a passage like this one won't work:

 Astonished, Elmer looked at Esmerelda standing in the doorway. He'd never expected

to see her again, and he didn't know whether he should invite her in or throw her out.

There was no doubt in her mind, though. She'd come back for revenge, and she could

hardly wait.

 It's true that people used to write that way, but most readers and writers have become

so used to the greater vividness and immediacy of narration from a single clearly defined

viewpoint that "omniscient" storytelling now seems remote, artificial, and confusing. The

word astonished, and the description of Elmer's thoughts and feelings, solidly establish

him as the viewpoint character. Telling what is in Esmerelda's thoughts seems to do the

same for her. The reader is left disoriented, unable to feel a part of the scene because his

or her perceptions seem to keep jumping randomly around the room. If Elmer is the

viewpoint character, with whom the reader is to identify for the duration, he has no way

of knowing what's in Esmerelda's mind-except as it's suggested by her external

appearance and actions. The last two sentences, for example, might be replaced by:

She smiled, but there was an odd quirk to her lips, and she looked more directly into his

eyes than she had ever done before. "Aren't you going to invite me in?" she asked.

 "Uh . . . sure." Only as she stepped across the threshold did he notice the slight bulge

under her jacket that could only be a shoulder holster. tell it that way and the reader never

leaves Elmer's head-and may feel a shiver along with him, without being told to.

 Beyond the simple technical requirement of consistency within your chosen viewpoint,

you need to understand how your viewpoint character thinks and feels. If your heroine

has been a private detective for ten years, she's not going to react to things in the same

way as if she's been a nun for ten years. A nun who became one out of deep religious

conviction may be very different from one who entered an order to hide from the secular

world. This is why you're often advised to construct biographies for your important

characters: because what happened to them before the story will profoundly influence

how they see and react to events during the story. One important thing to remember,

though, is that hardly anybody is either a villain or an idiot in his or her own eyes.

Everybody's actions make sense--from his or her own point of view. As a writer, you

must understand that point of view and convey it sympathetically, no matter how much

you may personally disagree with it. In fact, a good exercise for broadening your range of

characters is to set out deliberately to write sympathetically about a character you

personally find distasteful.

The Rest of the Cast

 At first glance, it may seem self-contradictory to talk about seeing the story through

the eyes of characters other than the viewpoint character. The reader normally doesn't-but

the author should.

The reason is simple: if you don't, your other characters will tend to act in the way most

convenient for you, rather than in the way that makes the most sense for them. Since the

driving force of a story is conflict, often among characters, the critical points in a plot are

likely to involve two or more characters flung together in a situation in which each of

them has to make a decision. (Should Elmer try to throw Esmerelda out, or should he

scream, or should he try to reason with her? Does she really want to do something as

drastic as killing him, or will that mess her life up even more than it already is?) In the

real world, if the decision is about something that matters to both parties, they're both

likely to invest a good deal of mental and/ or emotional energy in deciding what to do-and

upon reflection, it often happens that the best course a person can choose is not the

first one that might spring to mind. In fiction, all too often a writer is determined to have

the hero or heroine's life go a certain way, and so has the other characters do things that

will steer it in that direction. The result often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to

cardboard puppets--with the strings showing.

 Negative examples are easy to find; we've all read or watched too many war stories

and westerns in which the bad guys were just plain bad, with never a thought for whether

they would actually have any reason to do the specific things they did. For a positive

example, you might look at Forest of the Night, a first novel by Marti Steussy, about

human colonists on a harsh planet whose native inhabitants include creatures called

"tigers" for their superficial resemblance to their terrestrial namesakes. In the early part of

the book, the resemblance seems to go even deeper, as several incidents occur in which

tigers are seen to attack humans, sometimes killing or injuring them, sometimes leaving

them unharmed. In the hands of a less careful writer, this could easily have been another

of those tedious tales of humans under siege by alien predators who are nothing more

than mindless killing machines. But Steussy's tigers are actually highly intelligent, and

there's a very specific reason for every one of the mysterious features of the "attacks."

You don't find out what those reasons are until much later in the book--but the reason the

book makes sense is that she thought those incidents through from the tigers' point of

view before writing them, even though she first described them only as seen by the

humans.

 Occasionally a writer will explicitly show an incident from more than one viewpoint in

the finished story. This happens repeatedly in T. Coraghessan Boyle's recent novel

World's End, chronicling the interwoven histories of two families living in the Hudson

Valley between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and retelling many key incidents

from the viewpoint of everybody involved. Unless you have a very special reason for

doing this, though, it's usually better to think each part of the story through from each

important character's viewpoint, but then tell it only once, from that viewpoint which is

most effective for that scene. To minimize the risk of reader confusion, it's also best not

to change viewpoint even when you change scene unless there is a particularly good

reason to do so--and virtually never within a scene.

Epilogue.

 Several of the most useful skills you can have as a fiction writer are nothing more than

looking at the substance of the story in the right ways: through the eyes of an imagined

audience; through more than one sense; from inside the viewpoint character; and through

the eyes of characters other than the viewpoint character. All but the first of these may be

thought of as secondary skills for the act of translating the play back to story form. But

the basis of the whole process is that initial step of visualizing the action in dramatic

form.

 When I first mentioned this idea to an actor and playwright friend, he said, "Good idea-

but I'd take it a little further. Tell them to write it not only as a play, but as a play without

parenthetical instructions to the actors on how to say their lines." That may sound

extreme to a fiction writer used to relying heavily on adjectives and adverbs--but if you

think about it, that's how Shakespeare did it.

And look where it got him.