By Terescia Harvey

Telling

Example » Nick was angry.

This is easy. I, the author, am telling you, the reader, that Nick is angry.

That wasn’t hard to spot, was it?

What makes this a bad thing? For one, if it’s used too often in a story, it keeps the reader at a distance from what the character feels. If the reader cannot experience the emotions of the characters by reading your words, the reader will move on to someone else’s story, someone who knows that to keep the reader interested she (or he) must bring drama and life into the character’s world with powerful words and phrases.

Showing

Example » Nick’s hand curled into a tight fist. He stared hard at the man standing in front of him, and his eyes narrowed to thin slits. A muscle in his jaw ticked. “You dare to question my honor?”

The preceding passage contains nothing that an observer couldn’t have seen or inferred from outside the characters. That’s showing in its most elemental form. The writer acts as if she (or he) is sitting outside the characters and taking notes about what she (or he) sees and hears, tastes and smells, touches and feels. Everything happens outside the characters.

In this instance, I would hope that my word choice gave you a hint (okay, more than a hint) that Nick is angry. But…sometimes, the situation begs for more information. That’s where the next bit comes in.

Mixing and Matching

Example » Nick’s hand curled into a tight fist, his anger swelling up from his chest, threatening to choke him with bitterness. He stared hard at the man standing in front of him, and his eyes narrowed to thin slits. A muscle in his jaw ticked. His brother had not changed, not one damn bit in the past two years that he’d been abroad. “You dare to question my honor?” Nick bit out, wanting desperately to smash his fist into the side of Robert’s head. He held back. His mother would not like to see her favored son knocked to the ground.

See? I think it adds depth to mix and match the showing and telling. Too much telling distances the reader. Too much showing can have the same effect, leaving the reader with the feeling that she (or he) never really got to know that character, never found out what made him tick.

And in romance, character is everything.

© Terescia Harvey

By Terescia Harvey

Writers have many different ways to organize all the paper that comes with writing a book. My way isn’t better than anyone else’s, I’m sure, but it works for me, so I thought I’d share it.

It’s simple and inexpensive and an excellent way to keep everything that belongs with a certain project together in one place where you can find it when you need it.

The first thing I do is buy myself one of those big, fat 3″ binders at Wal-Mart (or anywhere else that sells ‘em cheap). Then I get a packet of tabbed dividers. I like the color coded kind that are kind of thick, because I reuse them when I finish a project. (In reality, I have several of these binders going at one time.)
I have several standard categories that I use the tabs for:

* Characters
* Scenes
* Research
* Notes
* Synopsis
* Manuscript

These categories are just starting points, so if you have needs for different categories, by all means create your own. I have a friend who did just that. Her binder has twice as many categories as mine. That’s good, because she’s making it work for her. She’s not a slave to any method.

What do you put in these categories? Really, whatever you want. But here’s what’s in mine:

Characters

I have cut-outs from magazines showing how I see my characters. It gives me a visual cue about how my characters look. I usually use these more at the beginning than I do later on, because once I really get into the story, I know by heart how my characters look.

This is also where I keep my character charts.

Scenes

In this section, I keep snippets of scenes that I’ve written down, sometimes scene outlines, and even phrases that I consider to be the beginnings of scenes that I’ve not yet explored.

Research

Ah, the title says it all. Anything that I look up for my work-in-progress, I make sure and keep a copy of it in my project binder. I learned my lesson the hard way. I repeat: Keep a copy! You don’t want to have to redo time-consuming research.

Notes

For anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere. Yep, that’s about it.

Synopsis

For my working synopsis.

Manuscript

No computer is fail-safe, let me tell you. So this section is for that paper copy you know you should have. Besides, I like to get away from the computer to do my editing sometimes. It’s nice to be able to make changes that aren’t permanent. I’ve found that I edit better when I do it twice. On paper I can go crazy cutting things, slashing through words, lines, even paragraphs, and then when I get to the computer I get a chance to rethink those changes.

Trust me on this, the delete key is way too easy to use. I mean, yes, you want to get rid of dead language, useless prose, and all that, but I have a tendency to rip through my stuff, leaving nothing behind but dialogue. For some reason, when I’m editing, I think everything else is worthless. Who knows? Maybe it is.

Finally, my project binder may be too big to lug around with me, but that isn’t really why I have one. I use it as a tool to organize my work-in-progress. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, maybe not, but I’d urge you to try it. I wouldn’t do without mine.

© Terescia Harvey