Live Edit: Show me, don't tell me

Join Drake and Marie in a live critique where they tear apart a willing victim's work.

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Transcript

Drake: And then for those that haven't watched my show, don't tell stuff and all of that, how we turn a show into a tell is very simple. Once we've identified it, we ask a question.

Drake: Now that question does differ depending on what sense the the tell is. In this case, it's a visual sense because we're seeing the puddle grow. So the question would be, what does it look like when a red puddle of blood grows bigger? Whatever the answer is, and there's a million ways to answer that question, whatever the answer is.

Drake: Like you wrote, the red puddle crept out from behind his back. Now you're showing me the red puddle growing as opposed to telling me the red puddle is growing. So think about that. When you look at your sentences, if you replace that verb with an equal sign and the sentence still make sense, you're telling.

Drake: Releasing your inner dragon.

Marie: So, Drake, today we have another

Marie: doccument

Drake: Lamb.

Marie: And another sacrificial lamb who has volunteered their work to be critiqued for us to tear apart and give a lesson on. So while I'm setting up my screen sharing and so on, why don't you tell us why? It is unbelievably important to always get critiqued.

Drake: Yeah, man, you are huge believers of this. You need to be in a critique group, not just a writer's group, but a critique group you need. There's only two ways to really grow as a writer. Yes. Podcasts like this are great. Reading books are great. You got to write on a weekly basis. That's great, but you must get your stuff read by somebody who doesn't give a crap about you and get honest feedback on it, and you must critique others.

Drake: I people, I think people don't understand the value of critiquing others. You must critique other people. It's the only way to grow If you're not critiquing other people and you're just getting critiqued, it still will not do you justice. Yeah. So if you would like to get critiques, we do these occasionally. Actually, we're doing these more and more.

Drake: So we're doing probably one a month now on these critique things. They seem to be really popular. Send us a, you know, a thousand words. We normally don't get through more than a couple 100 words, but send us a thousand words to releasing your inner dragon at gmail.com. We also do episodes when we have enough of something called first page reads, where we read your first page and we tell you when we think an agent would stop reading, and then we tell you why we think that agent would stop reading if you were submitting this to industry.

Drake: So if you are going to submit to us, make sure since we do two different things, make sure you let us know in the email. This I would like to have for critiquing or this I would like to have for my first page read. The only requirement for the first page is that needs to be the first page of your manuscript.

Drake: With critiquing it be anything you would be in the middle of a chapter. It could be the beginning. It could be, you know, a lot of people send us the beginning because you want to you want to get a look at that, that first step out. But it could literally be the center of a chapter in the center of a you know, of a of the book.

Drake: Like it doesn't matter to you or.

Marie: You could send us an action scene to see how how you write action and what we think of your action writing.

Drake: Exactly. So the link will be down below, but it's pretty easy releasing your inner dragon at gmail.com. And then we'd love to. We'd love to take a look at your work.

Marie: All righty. So this is apparently chapter one. We have a date stamp 178 AGC, the burn event thousand bridge.

Drake: you know, last name is. Where you going? Yeah, but those are you just listen on podcast, we're going to try to make this as obvious as what we are, but this is one of those episodes where you may want to think about heading over to YouTube since we do this stuff on YouTube. So you can actually look at the shared document and read along with us and if you are going to go through the trouble of going all the way over there to YouTube, please go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button.

Drake: It doesn't cost you anything. It helps us out tremendously. So go ahead and take care of that for us.

Marie: Okay. So the setting sun gives away a red hue, accentuating the bloodstains on the typically pristine asphalt

Marie: thousands. Bridge is a mess of rubble, smoke and debris. Most of the railings are either broken or broken or completely torn off. Explosions, voices and gunshots ring out in the distance. Kiera kneeling on the ground in the center of the bridge between two torn off railings, forces herself not to notice them, as well as all the blood staining her clothes.

Marie: Instead, she keeps gently cradling heroes, head to her, soothing his blue hair. Okay, I'm just going to briefly pause.

Drake: So I actually read the breathing next paragraph and then we'll look because I know where you're going. Yeah, Yeah.

Marie: Come on. Come on. Should face clear care. Kira raises her voice, shaking slightly from the physical strain put on her body as she tries to maintain the projection. Keeping them read. Hang in there.

Drake: All right. Okay.

Marie: All right. So we have spoken previously about presenting, so I don't. I don't want us to go there like we know that. We don't. We don't. Neither of us likes present tense writing. If you like, present tense writing. That is 100% fine. Be aware. There are people like us who, like I struggle with present tense writing. I never even made it through.

Marie: Through Hunger Games. Yeah.

Drake: Well. And there is a difference between present tense in first person and present tense in third person. Yeah. And first person. Depending on the genre, there can be anywhere from 10 to 30% of the people who won't read it just because of the of the tense. Third person It's different. Most people will not read third person present tense.

Drake: It is. It is something that is usually writing about a 50% drop rate. So if you want to spend a year writing a manuscript that every other person who looks at your first page doesn't read because of the tense you chose. That's on you. Yeah. But it is a very difficult, very hard pov to read for most people.

Drake: I'll give you a lot more credit on first person Present tense. But third person I think is just a terrible business decision knowing people refuse to read it.

Marie: Third person POV is really hard to read in present tense, but regardless my

Marie: leaving aside the tence, I've got a couple of other problems with the opening paragraph.

Marie: I like knowing whose head we're in quite early. Now the first line is good enough that I would be okay not knowing whose head I'm in immediately. Right. Because the setting sun gives a good start. The gives away isn't great, but the setting sun, the red hue, the accentuating bloodstain on the typically pristine asphalt. That is good since it's an interesting set up.

Marie: Yeah, but then we go into Kauzen's bridge description and most of the railings is completely torn off and explosions and voices and gunshots ring out in the distance. So we're hearing things and we're seeing things, but we don't yet know whose head we're. And that makes it feel like we have this kind of omniscient, disconnected POV. So it's very easily fixable.

Marie: Just move the mention of Kirara up before you describe what's going on around her.

Drake: Yep. Yeah. And also, it's disconnected. You know, we talked about it in the last podcast. We talked about pacing where you want to try and where there's two problems. One, you want to try to do your scene setting organically, and the way I like to teach it is either have the character, the pub character interact with the setting, the setting, interact with POV character or the setting interact with the setting.

Drake: And by that I mean it can, you know, the shadows can play off of walls, or I consider secondary and tertiary characters a part of the setting. And so, you know, another character could pull up a chair and sit down at the, at the red tiled table and that'll, that'll set that scene for me as well. So that consider that setting because now I get this secondary character, plus I get the color of the table.

Drake: So. And then the other problem that we talked about in the last podcast is, you know, we kind of joked about how so many people will try to start in media res and they'll do one line. So like one of the things I wouldn't do with this is, you know, come on, shit face, Herrera says, her voice shaking slightly from the physical frame, blah, blah.

Drake: And then the next paragraph, the setting sun gives way to a red hue, accentuated by like you're starting in media res and then you're moving out. But you're really kind of doing the same thing here. It's not as egregious because at least we're not starting with a moment and then taking a step back. But you're starting with a step back and then trying to come in to media res.

Drake: And since you're already going to try to start this story, I mean, other than that first paragraph, we're starting in media res, so why not, you know, in the action? So why not just start in the action and just not have this info dump heavy first opening paragraph,

Drake: So it is also telly. Telly is a hard thing to wrap your mind around versus, you know, show versus tell. If you go to writer's room, dot us, you can actually watch my show. Don't Tell class for free on the homepage of the Writers Room website. So writers room, dot us. It's right there. You can literally watch the entire class for free.

Drake: I highly recommend everybody does that. It's one of my most popular classes on how to be a showy writer versus a telly writer. But one of the things that I talk about a lot of times on the showing is because there's so many aspects of it. But like, here's a great example of her voice shaking slightly, so l y adverbs.

Drake: First of all, I'm not a person who's like, You can't use l y adverbs. I use l y adverbs all the time. One to page one every other page, sometimes two a page. I mean, I have a couple instances where I might actually use two in a paragraph, but there are a couple of ways that I try to teach people to not use them at all, and this is one of them.

Drake: So one of the ways you should avoid using l y adverbs is because you chose the wrong verb. You chose the wrong verb, and so you're using an l y adverb to make up for it. Because if we just wrote her voice shaking from the physical strain, that doesn't paint the right picture because it's not shaking. It's only slightly shaking.

Drake: So we're adding this crappy l y telly adverb to the verb shaking because we chose the wrong verb. But, you know, we could use trembling, shuddering, quivering, vibrating, fluttering. I mean, there's a million other verbs that we could use that actually paint the picture that we're trying to paint without using a crappy telly l y adverb because we've chosen the wrong verb.

Drake: So that's one of the big ways that I try to convince people to stop using, you know, that now there's another adverb in the in the paragraph above it, bloodstains on the typically pristine asphalt. Now, I could get rid of that, but it would take rewriting the sentence. This isn't an adverb that that pristine is the wrong verb, you know, really, it's an adjective, but it isn't.

Drake: It is it the wrong one?

Marie: So I actually think that typically is fine.

Drake: They're right.

Marie: It immediately communicates to the reader that this is different than what you want it to do.

Drake: Exactly. So that's where I was pointing out this is an adverb that I may actually use. Now, I also may rewrite that sentence in a way that does the same thing, but that would take a complete rewrite. So we're not talking about like this. The first example that I used, which is just you use an l y adverb to overcompensate for a verb.

Drake: That's the wrong verb. So the typically up there is like, you know, that's something I might do. I might write blood stains on the typically pristine asphalt because you're not overcompensating because you chose poorly. You're actually painting a dichotomy between how it should look and how it looks now. So that's I just wanted to point out the difference.

Drake: They're both right there of of why I see these y adverbs as different.

Marie: Yeah. All right. Her words must have reached him. She looks down to find her brother's gray eyes open, staring at her Here are hates the resignation in that gaze. The almost bleak acceptance like he's become used to this to everything going wrong. Chiara supposes in many ways that here I has. Then here I try to speak, but he coughs.

Marie: Instead. The movement shakes his body and causes the gash on the right side of his face and chest to bleed even more. So this paragraph is loaded with filtering and there's a couple of tells, but the filtering is what really like I really noticed here.

Drake: Well, there's one other thing, but go ahead.

Marie: So she looks down Is is filtering.

Drake: Yep. What we mean by filtering is you're using sentence structure. Filtering has to do with sentence structure. So if we look at this sentence and we diagram it. Yes, I know that's a horrible word, but you're a professional writer, and you must be able to diagram every sentence that you write. So if we diagram this sentence, she looks down to find her brother's gray eyes open, staring at her.

Drake: The subject is she. The action is looks. So the reader is going to paint the number one thing in their imagination. Is she looking? But is that the part of this sentence that the reader actually should be focusing on? Absolutely not. So why are you forcing the reader to look at her as she's looking at something? So that's what filtering means.

Drake: So we would rearrange this. So like her words must have reached him. Her brother's eyes, her brother's gray eyes were open, staring at her like we don't need. She looks because we already know that if we've set the reader, if we're writing in a limited P.O.V., which is what this is attempting to do, then everything that is seen, heard, smell, felt, experienced is all done from Kira's point of view.

Drake: So we don't need to say she looked at this and she smelled this and she saw this and she watched this because everything that describes she looked and saw and all of that. So we don't read that.

Marie: Yeah. And Chiara supposes in many ways that he really has. Again, this is filtering. It's filtering because Chiara is supposing. But there is only one person who can suppose. There is only one person who can think. There is only one person whose internal thoughts we get. And it is Kira's. You don't.

Drake: Need. And listen how much stronger the sentence is with a like he's becoming used to it to everything going wrong. And then and in many ways he had or has. I can't I can't write in present tense.

Marie: In many ways. He ry has.

Drake: Yeah it's it's a definitive it's a this is the way it is and strength.

Marie: It strengthens the sentence to remove the filtering.

Drake: Yeah. There's another problem here and it's the same problem you had in the opening paragraph. I always hate it when people bury common information that the reader or that the poem knows the P.O.V. knows that she is, that the body she's holding,

Drake: the them she knows it's her brother. Here, are here. Here. I hear.

Marie: I hear. Ah, yeah.

Drake: Why are we burying that? Why do we have them first? And then her brother next. And then his name. She knows what his name is. She knows where he's at. You're not improving the story by hiding that information from the reader.

Marie: do you mean. You mean the author should have put the brother's relationship up?

Drake: There It is, isn't it? Okay. Sorry. Didn't say it.

Marie: She keeps gently cradling Hera's head to her, soothing.

Drake: You're right. My, my bad. I messed it up.

Marie: No problem.

Drake: So what I would recommend then, instead of the them.

Marie: I When you where do you see the them?

Drake: You don't have line numbers, but it's the little paragraphs right before the keeping them ride, whatever that means.

Marie: I think this is them. As in the two of them, right.

Drake: No, it is 100%. But that's what I'm saying. So you can't separate your connections between different descriptors. So we have Harry, and we have that it's her brother and we want to make those as close as possible. So instead of them, because you're right, I missed the her I up there, you know the projection keeping her ry and herself ride or whatever that means.

Drake: So I would put, Ah, I'm sorry, not Harry, her brother keeping her brother and herself ride. Or you could even move it into the same sentence with getting rid of his blue hair, gently creating her rise headed to her, soothing her brother's blue hair. However you want to do it, it's just about connecting them closer so that the reader can make that connection of, Meri is also her brother.

Drake: So either of those two spots are close enough. I mean, obviously his blue hair is in the same sentence. You're not going to get closer than that. But you do need to make these connections for the reader and you need to do them a couple of times so that they really know that. When you say her brother, you're talking about Harry.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: But putting it down, I missed the first one because we were talking about all things really. I think the reason why I missed it up there is because I'm just my mind is still melting over trying to read third person present tense. So I'm going to miss a lot of details because of that, because my brain is just screaming.

Marie: So I'll be honest, I also don't like this first sentence here. Her words must have reached him.

Drake: As very wishy washy. We talked about the time to.

Drake: We talked about wishy washy words all the time.

Marie: So it just, it doesn't feel like a sentence that adds very much. It gives it, it basically is giving a reason for why her brother's gray eyes were open. But I mean, she just said the words, you don't need to say that. Her words must have reached them. We can see that. Her words must have reached them by the fact that his gray eyes opened.

Drake: Right. We can also be a little bit more active. And yeah, her brother's eyes fluttered open.

Marie: Yeah, fluttered open.

Drake: We can actually see them open as opposed to them just being open.

Marie: Because then, like, it's very clear that her words reach them and you can completely eliminate this very weak sentence right here.

Drake: But words like must have almost began sort of almost every single time. 99% of the times when you cut those words, you actually strengthen in the sentence. So look at the the third line down in that paragraph, the almost bleak acceptance. Yeah. So we've got Kira current Kira hates the resignation in that gaze. The bleak acceptance like he's become used to this.

Drake: Like it's so much stronger to just get rid of almost, almost all of your wishy washy words. When you cut them and reread them, you'll go.

Marie: Almost all of your wishy washy with.

Drake: Almost. Because there's a couple of occasions where I can. That's why I never like to say always. But you're right that I threw on purpose. But I mean now read it. It's so much stronger with the the bleak acceptance like.

Marie: The thing about the thing about almost and I know why people are doing they're like, well it's it's not fully that so I just want to leave a little get what No sit on the pot or get it.

Drake: Yeah. Look, we write drama, we write drama, we write drama.

Marie: What do we want? Drama? When do we want that? All the.

Drake: Time. So yeah, and like I said, when you start cutting these and rereading them yourself, you will notice your I mean, it just it's, and I write wishy wash words all the time in my first draft. I have to cut them as well because that's the way we talk, that's what we think. And it's exactly like what you were saying.

Drake: It's that it's that they're not really bleak except it doesn't matter. Still stronger, Still better, still paints a better picture, more drama, more everything. So yeah, yeah. All that. So the first part of that, the her words must've reached him. Almost all of this wishy washy stuff. When you start cutting it, you start realizing how much stronger your your visuals become.

Marie: So now, Tris is also something that people often say, like, cut. But in this case, I would say leave the tris because the tris is relevant to their coughs. Instead, you could rewrite the sentence to eliminate that, to put an interrupt kind of there, but it actually works. The tris there is fine.

Drake: Yeah, it could be. You know, Hera opened his mouth to speak, but in the across chemo or whatever. So there's, there's obviously other ways to do it.

Marie: There are other ways to do it. But the Tris works here. It doesn't weaken the right?

Drake: Right. Hundred percent. Yeah, but the thing that I do hate about that sentence is the word, then yes.

Marie: Stage direction you never need. Then I will die on this.

Drake: He'll mean again. I won't say never, but most 99% of the time stage direction is silly. Then this happened and then that happened. It's like. Of course it happened. Next, I'm reading it in order. It's literally the next sentence. It can't happen in my mind before the thing before it because I didn't read it yet. I don't even know it's there.

Marie: So the the reason why so many people put in thing is because they like it indicates a delay between this action and that action. But I put it to you that you can make the delay much more if you wanted to. If you want the pause between the two actions, you can make the delay much more impactful by either putting in a period or putting in a sentence or putting in an internal thought or putting in something more relevant.

Drake: Then then literally everything you just said is already here. So we look down at his eyes. Yep. And then we go into this exit esoteric thought of how much he hates the look in his eyes and how he's just accepting this this stuff like he's used to it. Everything's going wrong, you know? You know, blah, blah, blah. Like, there's your pause.

Marie: Yeah. You don't need the then you don't need it at all in this, in this paragraph. Just got it.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: So just to read. To read it. How, how just we would bear in mind we've done very minimal editing here. We've literally just removed the filtering basically. Yeah. So how we would read it would be Come on should face, Kira says, her voice shaking, her voice trembling from the physical strain put on her body as she tries to maintain the projection, keeping them re hang in there.

Marie: Her brother's gray eyes fluttered open, staring at her.

Marie: Kira hates the resignation in that gaze, the bleak acceptance like he's become used to this to everything going wrong in many ways he Roy has he right? Tries to speak, but he coughs instead. The movement shakes his body. Okay. And I'm just going to pause it so it reads much stronger.

Marie: And we've made minimal edits. This is not extensive edits.

Drake: Yeah, we're mostly cutting. We're not even really. I mean, yeah, we we changed.

Marie: We changed that the first sentence in the paragraph and so on. But I mean, we haven't changed substantial things.

Drake: Yeah. No. And this doesn't get rid of all of the telling this or anything like that, but just this little bit, just doing these few things. Strengthen the paragraph, just noticeably.

Marie: Yeah. Now the last sentence I am not crazy about causes. The gash causes is like was it's a weak verb, right?

Drake: Well, this one I also don't like the whole the movement shakes it like. Like it's so much stronger. It like. But coughs instead. His body shook the gas in his right and the right side of his face, you know, bleeding even more like again, it's about that direct that direct motion, the direct pause, in effect, the direct action, as opposed to this wishy washy, you know, the movement shook his body and that caused this other thing to him, because that's the same thing as the one that then this happened and next that happened.

Drake: And, you know, then the next thing that happened is this as opposed to just, man, give it to me, his body, you know, so I even get it. If we really like again, there's a lot of rewriting that I could do. So like

Drake: her brother tried to speak,

Drake: but his body was wracked by a cough instead.

Marie: Yeah, there's a lot you could do to make it stronger. But even just like with minimal effort. Okay, with with minimal editing.

Drake: Right.

Marie: Things like the movement shakes his body. The movement is then the thing that's acting. But is it? No. His body is the thing that shake. Yeah. Yeah. So again, it's a form of faltering in a way because you're faltering. The shaking of his body through the movement as opposed to just having his body shake and the causes is just, it's just like a weak, a weak verb just used the stronger verb of it's bleeding, that's the strong verb.

Drake: And every, and everybody goes into verb, but also remember the subject. So like, let's just take it and there's nothing wrong with the sentence that you wrote. And I probably would write it that way too. But, but since we're going down this path to really kind of focus in this. So the line Marie wrote wrote in replace of it was his body shook, comma, the gash on the side of his face and chest bleeding even more.

Drake: But if we actually wanted to talk about writing this in a different way right now, the subject of the the second part of that would be the gash we could actually have blood if we wanted to. So his body shook, blood gushing from the side of his face and chest like if we wanted to. There's just so many.

Drake: It's and again, it's just different ways of thinking about the same thing. Where do you want the reader focused on? What do you want impacting the reader the most as a writer? How you control the pacing of the story with the focus of the story, the impact of, you know what? What in a sentence is going to impact the reader more than the rest of it is always based off of the word choice that you choose to do.

Drake: Yeah, that's where it comes from. So if if I want the ganache to be the thing that I want the readers to focus on more than the blood coming out of the gash, I can write it the way it was written originally. But if I want to be a little bit more gory and and put a little bit more emphasis on the fact that he's dying, I can bring the blood up front because blood gushing from the gash is is more violent.

Drake: It's more and again, it's the it's the tone. It's the image that I want to paint. It's the all of this stuff matters. Every sentence matters. Every word matters. It is it it is that important, in my opinion.

Marie: And I really want to like emphasize this. If you take one thing away from both academics and this podcast, do not use to be verbs, don't use these ancillary weak verbs to be caused. Like these things are weak. Yes and yes. There are times when absolutely they're the right thing and you might use it, but especially when you're starting your journey, try to kill every single one of them, even if it's just as an exercise crying right completely without them, so that you can get used to writing stronger verbs.

Drake: Yes. And then the only thing, like I said, everyone focuses on verbs and I focus on verbs as well. But I think a lot of people don't press the importance of the subject. Yes, the subject of your sentence is the focal point of the sentence. It's what is going to be the first thing painted inside of your readers mind.

Drake: And so make sure that the subject you're choosing in your sentences is the focal point of this moment. Because that's what every sentence is. Every sentence is a moment of this movie that we're painting on the reader's imagination. So strong verbs, you know, like we talked about shaking slightly versus quiver or shutter or whatever. Make sure those verbs are open in exactly saying what you want them to say, but also the subject needs to be for on correctly.

Marie: Okay, Kira forces her lips to curve upwards, hiding her tension as she chuckles. Now's not the right time to try and come up with a smart ass reply kid. The red puddle grows bigger. Kyra's hands stick to the fabric of her brother's soft, soft shirt, clinging to his hair, A few hair pulled loose is going to be the least of his problems, Chiara thinks, hysterical laughter building inside her chest At the thought, she tears a piece of her pants with ease and presses it to his neck in order to prevent too much bleeding.

Marie: Okay, couple of things. Let me start with the most egregious. You absolutely do not need the Kira things. Yeah. Not only is it already in italics and clearly internal monologue, but you also follow that up with hysterical laughter building inside her chest at the thought, which also indicates that it's internal thought you do not need the Chiara thinks it's just wasted words.

Drake: Yeah, let me let me expand upon that. So this is a thought tag. But but in my opinion, it works the same for a speech tag. So it could be, you know, let's say she says it's in dialog. A few hairs pulled loose is going to be the least of your problems in quote. Okay. So she said it out loud and then it says Chiara says hysterical laughter building over her statement or whatever.

Drake: One of the things that I try to press on my members of my writers room is when you're dealing with a speech tag, this is a thought tag, but still it's a speech tag. A speech tags only job is to let the reader know who said the piece of dialog, in this case an inner monologue. But still that's a piece of inner dialog.

Drake: They are always tells because they're telling the reader who said it. If the speech tag includes any other piece of information, then that piece of information is going to let the reader know who said it. So in other words, if we cut out correct. Thanks, and we just wrote, you know, the inner monologue and then the hysterical laughter built to do it in past tense, because I can't do this built inside Cara's chest at the thought using paragraph structure.

Drake: Now it's called an action tag. I do not like that word. I'm really changing it to paragraph structure. So if I, if I use paragraph structure, meaning everything in this paragraph is one character's moment of dialog and actions, then the reader is going to know that character. Ferraro was the one who thought it because right after that, in the same paragraph, we get hysterical laughter building inside of Kirara’s chest.

Drake: So we know that Karar thought this because we then get an action of Carrara.

Marie: Yeah. However.

Drake: Yeah, there's another problem with it. You really want to not double dip on your pronouns in the same paragraph if they're not needed, if there's no chance of somebody being confused of who's doing what in a paragraph, the first word of this paragraph is Carrara. That means that I'm going to assume everything in this paragraph is Carrara. I don't need halfway through the paragraph to have Carrara his name again.

Drake: It just doesn't need to be there because we've already set up. One of the members of the writers room this week brought in a piece and it was one girl by herself for a couple of pages just piddling around a camp and eating breakfast and all this other stuff. Almost every single paragraph had the girl's name as the first word of the paragraph, and I'm like, My guy.

Drake: There's only one character here. We know there's only one character here. We don't need to keep hearing this girl's name every three sentences. I know grammatically and academically, it's like, No, it's a paragraph. Got to put your name it. But they're alone. We're good. You can you she and her. And she. And her. And she. And her. And she.

Drake: And then everyone. So what? It feels right to throw in her name again. You know, maybe halfway down the page or whatever.

Marie: And when you have a guy and a girl, you've got a he and she pronoun, you can absolutely have he and she for quite a while without their names. You don't need to keep repeating names like.

Drake: So, you know, the no.

Marie: One's going to get confused.

Drake: Right. Grammatical rule is a pronoun always points back to the last noun yet. But again we are creative writers. Creative being the first word of what we do. We are not grammatical writers and so if Jack and Jill are having a discussion and they're the only two people in the scene, if I do. He then looked at her and gave her a side eye and she giggled and then, you know, she said, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Drake: No one's going to confuse it because there's only Jack and Jill in the scene. So you don't have to be as rigid. Now, if it's Jane and Jill, then you can't do she and she and she and she because you're going to lose them.

Marie: Because then you're going to confuse the reader. They're not going to know who the she is pointing and that's what you want to avoid.

Drake: So we when we're dealing with our pronouns, we're always just going, you know, because sometimes I do have the same character's name in one paragraph I've done that. I mean, happens because there's something that happened between when I said their name first in that paragraph, something was brought up that makes me go, There's a chance that someone might get confused, that that they don't know that this next line is actually that the actual character maybe I mentioned another name or, or had a character's action, but I didn't want to break it.

Drake: I just don't paragraph. It's actually a part of this paragraph, whatever. So sometimes I will have the same character's name twice in one paragraph. But it it's a decision. It's a game time decision because I think maybe someone might get confused. Yeah, no one's getting confused in this. No, Now we're cutting it completely because it's the thought tag that doesn't need to be there.

Drake: But if it wasn't, we still don't need to have it. Yeah, because of the fact that, you know, actually, I'm sorry, there's. There's one up there. There's actually three times in here because there you don't.

Marie: Need this either. This earlier.

Drake: Yeah. I didn't even notice that when I was looking at that 100%. That could just be her hands and it doesn't lose a single iota of understanding. There's another thing.

Drake: So Show don't Tell is one of the hardest things to master. And the biggest problem with with Show Don't tell is just finding tells because some of them are just kind of sneaky.

Drake: So the red puddle grows bigger. One of the things that I tried to teach people a way to identify tells is can you turn? Can you change the verb into an equal sign? And it works as a math equation. If so, you're telling. So the red puddle equals bigger. That works. Therefore, we're just telling. We're just telling them that the red puddle is growing.

Drake: We're not showing them that it's growing. We're telling them that it's growing. So that's just one little trick you can use to help you identify towns.

Drake: And then for those that haven't watched my show, don't tell stuff and all of that, how we turn a show into a tell is very simple. Once we've identified it, we ask a question.

Drake: Now that question does differ depending on what sense the the tell is. In this case, it's a visual sense because we're seeing the puddle grow. So the question would be, what does it look like when a red puddle of blood grows bigger? Whatever the answer is, and there's a million ways to answer that question, whatever the answer is.

Drake: Like you wrote, the red puddle crept out from behind his back. Now you're showing me the red puddle growing as opposed to telling me the red puddle is growing. So think about that. When you look at your sentences, if you replace that verb with an equal sign and the sentence still make sense, you're telling.

Drake: So like, look at this one.

Drake: The red puddle equals out from his back. That doesn't make no sense that. So it's in India and it's not a flawless system. Obviously, math and English don't necessarily go together. It's not a flawless system. It is just one of the shows or tells are so hard to identify sometimes that a lot of times the little equal sign trick that I came up with years and years and years ago just kind of works.

Marie: I had a maths professor think it was third year, third year mathematics, which gets very weird at university level. It gets very theoretical. I had a math professor that used to say mathematics is just philosophy with a rigorous proof.

Drake: So that's the other thing. I'm like I said, I already mentioned that this is pretty tally. Yeah, and that's what we're talking about.

Marie: So instead of just like this. Okay, so, so let me do a couple of things. So obviously, like the puddle grew bigger is, better than, you know, he played out like it. It is we are reaching a point where the prose is of higher quality and it's getting closer to showing, okay, this isn't a beginner writer.

Drake: no, not at all.

Marie: Okay. So I just want to make that distinction. But if you really want to show, like you actually want to show, you have to show what is happening, not tell the effect. And when you can replace the equals sign, you're telling the effect and not showing the action.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: In fact, Chiara forces her lips to curve upwards while it's fine and I have written sentences like this, it could also be rewritten to be a show because this is a tell it. And sometimes you do just want to tell that. Sometimes you do just want to say like I forced myself to do blah because you want to get to that.

Marie: Communicate that to the reader. So but you can also say Kiraras lips shook as she made them smile or something equivalent to that.

Drake: Wow. So this. Yeah, this would actually go the other direction. I actually think it has too much showing in it because it takes away from. So one of the things that I try to teach my students when they're when they're looking at sentences and they're looking at editing sentences is don't try and edit what is written. Ask yourself what is the sentence delivering?

Drake: And then then ask the question, are there other ways this if we look at the sentence, Chiara forces her lips to curve upwards, hiding the tension here. What are we delivering to the audience that the Chiara or Carrara is actually fake? Smiling. She doesn't internally feel what she's projecting externally. Now, if I ask the question, how many ways can you write a sentence that shows that Chiara is, you know, smiling on the outside but not feeling on the inside at that point, You know, instead of looking at the line and going, I need to rewrite this in, how am I going to do that?

Drake: What word of my change? You now go, well, I can come up with 20 different ways to that. But but that's not the point that I was going at. The point that I'm going at is knowing what I'm trying to convey, knowing that I'm trying to convey that I'm I'm doing a facade of strength, but internally, I'm not Her lips curving upwards to me is going to take too much focus away from that.

Drake: So like with this, I'd actually go the other direction and go. Kira forces a smile.

Marie: So I might actually even switch it around and go like Chiara hid her tension with a false smile. Right.

Drake: Right. I won't hit her attention to me. I mean, that's gets into that telling this again for, you know, something like tamping down the terror, creeping up her throat, Chiara forced a smile. You know, if you give me a little bit more showiness of the emotion and then I connect to a better and you're right, both of us are going to move that to the front because.

Drake: Perfect. Well, yeah.

Marie: That's the couple, right? Her forcing the sort she's.

Drake: Feeling is the external side. The internal emotion is what the reader is going to connect to. So we're always going to shift that, you know, the tension and the terror and the and the or maybe it's grief. Like she knows her brothers are going to die. There's nothing she can do. Whatever. I'm going to move that. You're going to move that to the front of the sentence, make that the subject and then allow the forcing of smile to convey to the reader that she's putting up a brave face.

Drake: But that's ancillary. It's not that important that she's putting on a brave face. The important part is internally, she's she's just being ripped apart. If if I don't see that's the other thing is when you don't write it that way, like right now, at this point in the story, I have no idea if Chiara thinks her brother is going to live or die.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: And so again, we write drama. We write drama. So even if your brother's going to live, even if I. The writer. No, the writer going to live doesn't mean Chiara knows that. So I might write something like, you know, terror or forced up, you know, clawed its way up her throat, knowing that this would be the last words she ever said to her brother.

Drake: You know, she forced a smile, whatever. I'm going to bring that that drama up because that's it. I mean, I'm going to let the reader go, crap, brother's dead. And that way when the brother doesn't die, it's going to be like, okay, cool. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe the brother does. And then you still have that drama.

Drake: So yeah, but as of right now, I couldn't care what you're actually thinks is going to happen.

Marie: Then you don't need. Okay, so the sentences she tears a piece of her pants with ease and pressures. It braces it to High-Rise neck in order to prevent too much bleeding.

Drake: At there is overriding.

Marie: No other reason why she would be pretty.

Drake: Yeah, that's just your traditional overwriting.

Marie: Yeah, that's just overwriting. Like you really don't need this.

Drake: She she tears a piece of her pants with ease and presses it to her eyes back to see if she can wipe the tattoo off or to distract him while she's steals his wallet. Yeah. Yeah. There's no other reason why she's doing that.

Marie: Absolutely. You do not need that. It's just overacting.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: All right. His skin reacts to the contact. Light blue energy emanates from him resembling out of control electricity. But it appears to be receding. Chiara wants to activate her defenses and swap the energy away from her own. But she can't. Her hands tremble and she almost drops the piece of cloth at the sight.

Drake: O almost appears.

Marie: Dry is not here. Not not really clear. I can see it in his gaze. no. All right, cool. Let's. Let's pause there and deal with this chapter. No, this. This part of his skin reacts to the contact is the same as her words must have reached them. The whole sentence is a filter all by itself. It's just the filter.

Drake: Yeah, it's also a tell.

Marie: So yeah, filters are quite often tells. Just. Yes. If you're looking for another way to identify the light blue energy emanates, you could what you could do here is you could have his skin repelled or his skin puckered or his skin did a jig on, you know, and walked off his body, which I mean, that would be interesting.

Marie: I'm going to like. But anyway, his skin did something right and then light blue energy emanates from him.

Drake: But resembling out of control, electricity.

Marie: Again, that's weak. Weak.

Drake: So vague. Like you're trying to give me a detail, but it's a but. I don't know how to paint that. Yeah, What does that even mean? What does out of control energy look like? And again, that's you just supply the my show don't tell. Turning to a question, what does it look like? Whatever you do to describe it, that's going to be the show.

Drake: But so many people do these analogies that this is the thing where we have the head book versus the paper book in your head, you know exactly what out of control inner electricity looks like, but no one else does, and no one else is going to imagine what you imagine. They're not going to paint the same picture. So that is such a vague statement to tell me, you know, as opposed to, you know, resembling tiny, severed baby hands like you can.

Drake: I know exactly what that means. Like, I can visualize it. I can see it. That's horrible. You know, whatever. As opposed to something vague like this, out of control electricity. I don't know. I don't know what that means.

Marie: I'll I'll be honest as well. I really don't like the word resembling. They're gonna tell you.

Drake: Yeah. Resembling a pairs.

Marie: Yeah. But it's weak but it's also it's completely unnecessary. Okay. So light blue energy. What is the electricity? It's like blue energy. Like it doesn't resemble it. It is it.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: Like you don't even have you don't even have the people go. But it's not a real tornado that blew through her house. So it caught be that a tornado blew through her house, It must be it looked like a tornado blew through her house. Yes, I do have people who comment on that. Yes, I ignore them. Yeah, but but.

Drake: But one of the.

Marie: Literally is.

Drake: One of the fights that I got into early, early in my learning stage. I was reading at a writers group and I had written something like Fire Danced Up the Edge of the Blade, and one of the people were like, Fire doesn't actually dance. It doesn't know how to dance. And I was just like, I will. Anything comes out of your mouth now.

Drake: You are now Charlie Brown, teacher. You're just womp, womp, womp, womp. That was like urinating. I'm not listening to you anyway.

Marie: So my point is, light blue energy is light blue. You don't need any resemble. Yeah. So what does that look like? Light blue energy emanates from him. Arching flashes all over his body.

Drake: Yes. You know.

Marie: Something? Tell me what it actually looks like. Show me what it's doing. Then it appears to be receding. A receding where? And B, Y only appears. Why isn't it just receding?

Drake: Well, also, it just it just now happened. Like it's literally coming out. How can it It wasn't there before. So how can it appear to be receding if this is the like the wave is coming into the shore?

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: You haven't done the transit and that's haven't.

Marie: Crashed on the beach yet. You need to crash on the beach before you can receive.

Drake: Right.

Marie: Now.

Drake: And then it we have one sentence that has energy emanating. But it while it's emanating, it appears like it's receding. Like how can something emanate light but also at the same time appear like it's going. So yeah, it's the wave crashing analogy I think works really well for this.

Marie: Yeah, this is this is a confused sentence and you need to like look at the image that you're painting there. Besides looking at the strength of the boat, then Carraro wants to activate her defenses.

Marie: Why? Can you show her actually activating her defenses and then being prevented.

Drake: Or just prevented? You know, her fingers itch to turn on her shield, but she fought the.

Marie: Fought the desire. Yeah.

Drake: Whatever.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: Again, want lot of telling could be a lot more active, a lot more showing as we went through here.

Marie: Yeah. Want want this. It difficult for me to identify why it's wrong I know why I feel it's wrong right there and I think it's because the want in this case is telling but it's also it feels like it's a it's a filter or a or a or the.

Drake: Statue and see if this is what you're feeling. It's not connected to any motivation. I don't understand the reason for it. Why? Okay, she wants to do it, but what does that mean? There's no stakes attached to it. There's no there's no results. There's no if it doesn't happen, I don't know what magic is going to happen. I don't know why she would want I don't know the outcome of her not doing it, since none of that has been placed down.

Drake: The fact that she has a desire to do something I don't like. If you said Caro wanted to save her brother's life. Okay, we get it. Like that's built in. We know we want to save our siblings. We don't want our our relatives to die. That's a built in. We understand the motivation behind the desire.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: But when we have her brother has lightning coming off of him. But it doesn't seem dangerous to her. And she wants to activate, like, okay, there's no motive. I don't get the stakes. I don't. There's nothing to tie me to it.

Marie: Why can't she? Is it something preventing her? Like, why does she want to and why can't she like it? Just. It doesn't feel like a connected sentence. You're right. It just. It feels like a thing that's being told to me. But I have no idea why.

Drake: Right?

Marie: Any of it, man.

Drake: I think this has to do. This is another great example of what I call head book versus paper book in the writer's head. She knows why or he knows why. I mean, I don't know if it's a male or female writer, but the writer knows why Carrara wants to activate this and knows the ramifications of not activating this.

Drake: But that's in your head. Books? Me, the Reader I don't. I don't have that. And so I don't. I'm disconnected to the to your want, your desire.

Marie: And again with the almost drops the piece of cloth I mean if you if you wanted to keep hold of the piece of cloth and say the the piece of cloth trembled at the end of her fingers or something like that.

Drake: Or it slipped and she scrambled to keep it in a place or whatever, like again, almost drops. That's the same thing with that. I adverb you're using the wrong verb. And since it doesn't describe what you want, you have to add this adverb to it. Yeah. So we just have to rewrite. You have to then go. Okay, well, there's not one word because there are.

Drake: There are there are verbs that will never there are situations where there is no single verb to describe what you want it to say. That is 1% of the case. That happens to me every couple of pages. You're going to run into a sentence where there is literally not a verb in the English language that paints the picture that you want.

Drake: And so sometimes you have to do, you know, slightly shook. I mean, obviously we have quivered, but I'm just using that as an example. Sometimes you have to do a weird adverb or whatever, but a lot of times and that's only again, if you're editing with the mindset of how do I replace this one word? If you take a step back and you go, her hands trembled and she almost drops, Well, okay, what does it look like to or feel like or experience like to almost drop something.

Drake: Yeah. The class slipped and she gasped, struggling to keep it into place against shaking skin, you know, or whatever is vibrating skin, whatever. Like that's the show of what this is. And so then now we get rid of drops because it's the wrong verb. But, but there is no right verb for almost drops. There's no way to say there is no single verb that says almost drops.

Drake: Yeah, there is. So you either have to use almost drop or you have to rewrite it in a way that is going to show it better than using this. Because even though the English language is literally amazing with English.

Marie: Language is honestly very versatile and I speak a number of languages, so I speak from experience. Yeah, I.

Drake: Mean, we have a lot of our language is created by stealing from every other language on the planet. Like we're just like this scavenger hound and, you know, we just suck it up. But, but.

Marie: It also helps that for all the grammar rules and everything else, they're not really rules. You don't have like an academy resolve. This is how you speak English.

Drake: Like, Yeah, right. We have it sounds right to us. Yeah. But even with all of our versatility in English, there are still 100% things that you want to paint that you can't paint with one word in English, you just can't. And so this is one of those cases. There is no such thing as a word that that means almost drops.

Drake: Least I can't think of anything. Got my head. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong down in the comments like, no, you could have used this word or that word, but I don't necessarily know of any. I realize I'm not even looking at me. Okay, good. I wasn't looking at the peanut gallery chat until just then. No one's made any comment, so it's fine.

Drake: By the way, we haven't mentioned that in this podcast. For those of you who want to watch the podcast live as we're doing it, we are now recording it in front of people. However, you must be a member of the writers room to get access to that. We may end up opening up to YouTube at some point in the future, but the cool thing is it's a part of the free writers Room membership.

Drake: So if you go to a writers room, not us, just sign up for free, you don't get access to them up the petite pod with me and you don't get free access to Marie's critique pod. You don't get the classes, you don't get all the bells and whistles that come with it. But there's a couple of things you get.

Drake: You get my monthly Q&A. So imagine that. And one of the things you get for free is you can join us for these recordings of the podcast links down below. And then you can actually ask questions while we're in the middle of doing these comments, or when I can't figure out what to say. And I'm like that word that means this thing.

Drake: And you can say, Last podcast, Somebody saved me with Jason Jason's day. Jason Statham I couldn't remember his name. And so they were like, This is the this is the actor you're trying to think of. So yeah,

Drake: already there are just some words that you just you would have to rewrite the sentence. But again, that's where my trick of stop looking at the sentence you wrote because there isn't a word to replace the word and go, okay, what am I trying to say here?

Drake: Well, I'm trying to say that she's shaking and she you know, she's having trouble keeping the piece of cloth to the wound. Okay, great. Can you come up with ten different ways to write that? Yes. You with 20 different ways, right? That. Yes. So you're not locked into any one thing.

Marie: All right. Anything else in this paragraph now?

Drake: And we're probably at time,

Marie: Are we?

Drake: I think we've been. Is it show how long it's been recording for? And I feel like we started at my 1130 or so, So it's been 45 minutes.

Marie: Okay.

Drake: I think.

Marie: Well, I think that our key takeaway from this piece is your your filtering and the strength of your verbs and your your subject is so important in writing. You can see that we haven't made huge, sweeping changes here. There is like sometimes we edit these pieces and we're like, there's no emotion on the page. There is emotion on the page.

Marie: The emotion is there. There's some interesting worldbuilding on here. There's no info dumping here. Okay? So that for at least in for dumping there isn't egregious, right? But there is a craft improvement that can happen here. Yeah.

Drake: And it would drastically improve the reader's connection to the story.

Marie: Yeah. And the funny thing about Cruel is it is actually the easiest part of writing to learn.

Drake: I think, because.

Marie: Because craft is just learning how to tell the story in a better, stronger way. You can see the edits we made here. They're not huge edits. They're not sweeping things of like, we don't understand how these paragraphs connect. We don't understand the motivation of the character. We're like, Everybody wants to save a sibling that you know, like, right?

Marie: There's emotion, There's there's motivation. There's all of that's there.

Drake: There's plenty of interested. There was nothing in the story that made me go, I can't. I mean, other than the fact that is written in present tense, yeah, I would definitely be out.

Marie: Like, yeah, I'd be out too. But, but there is this. It is enough to keep me interested. If this was in past tense. right, I would absolutely be reading to the end of the page. No problem. But if you want to just strengthen your writing and really make it hit hard, then look at these craft examples that we've given you and go fix that the telling us and fix the filtering.

Marie: And I promise you this will be this will read much stronger.

Drake: And then I'd be remiss if I didn't say and also change it to past tense.

Marie: Yeah and I think that is a good note on which to end this episode by.

Drake: Good day to our esteemed listeners. I'm Marie Melanie and it has been a pleasure guiding you through the nuances of writing and worldbuilding.

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