Put Your Readers in the Scene: What it Means to Show and Not Tell – a two-part workshop.
What is meant by “showing” versus “telling” and how can you tell the difference? Is it ever okay to “tell?” Is there such a thing as showing too much? Explore these important questions by looking at dialogue, description, pacing and transitions, and learn how to invite your readers into the scenes you write.
Part 1
What is showing and not telling? When is it okay to tell? When should you show? Using imagery to paint a word picture. Active vs. passive voice.
When: Wednesday, March 6, 2024 from 6:30 – 8 p.m.
Where: Richmond Hill Public Library, 1 Atkinson Street, Richmond Hill, Ontario, L4C 0H5
Full confession: I watch a lot of television. Like, maybe too much television. I enjoy it most of the time, but I really enjoy revisiting my favourites by reading the books the series were based on. Most of the time, the books don’t disappoint.
Here are my favourite books from which series have been made, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both (if not the book more).
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood is, perhaps, one of my favourite authors. I actually read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school, quite a while before I became a fan of the series (and several more times over the years). Season one, especially, captures the flavour of the novel. Subsequent seasons have continued in the same style and world as the book, helping to build a richer world and flesh out the characters. Parallels to the world in the 2020s are made even more obvious in the series, drawing home the fact that, in addition to being a brilliant author, Atwood is also part visionary.
I should also note that I wasn’t crazy about the book’s sequel, The Testaments. I recommend that you watch the series, but most of all, read The Handmaid’s Tale.
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler’s Kindredwas a fast, fascinating read, but the series was mesmerizing. Due to the format of a series with ten episodes and the possibility of several seasons, the narrative is slowed and we get to know the characters better. Kevin and Dana’s backstories are significantly different and Kevin is given more to do in the series, but it is worth both the watch and the read.
All Creatures Great and Small
James Herriot’s memoir has been fictionalized as a dramedy entitled All Creatures Great and Small. Though one is a memoir and the other a fiction, the flavour of Herriot’s writing is perfectly interpreted in the series. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this memoir, but discovered that three seasons weren’t enough. Luckily, season four is scheduled to debut in fall of 2023/sometime in 2024, and I can hardly wait.
The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times
Another fictionalized memoir is The Midwife, made into the ten-season (so far) long Call the Midwife television series. Though I haven’t checked, I wouldn’t be surprised if the voiceover in the series (purporting to be Worth but played by Vanessa Redgrave) was taken directly from the novel.
The first book in the series made me feel as if I were re-watching the television series. I also read the second book,Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse, the stories of which were also dramatized in the early seasons of the series, but didn’t like it enough to venture into book three of the trilogy. The thing I like most about the television series, the characters and the theme of the way women’s rights–and specifically women’s reproductive rights–have evolved just wasn’t strong enough for me.
At any rate, I recommend watching the entire television series and reading at least book one of Jennifer Worth’s trilogy.
Outlander
Wow! Just…wow.
I am only a quarter of the way through the first Outlander book, and I know I’m going to love it as much as I do the series. The series has matched the characters so closely to the writing that I can see and hear Claire and Jamie as I read, as well as the other characters. I’m not usually one for re-watching a series as I find the process tedious when you know what’s going to happen next or where it’s going to end up, but for some reason, I absolutely love that feeling while reading. I will be reading more than one book in this series, for sure. The book is easy to read, whimsical in its narrative, and not as huge a bodice-ripper as the first few seasons of the television series was (which is a huge plus, in my opinion, as I much prefer character development and page-turning plots to graphic depictions of sex).
Watch Outlander on television. Read the books. You won’t be sorry.
You: A Novel
I almost didn’t watch the tv series You, as I was turned off by the point of view and found it unsettling. I’m glad I went back to watch more. I really enjoyed all three seasons of the Netflix series, but I gave up on the series of books after the second one, Hidden Bodies, as I found the narrative tedious.
Reading book one in the series is like revisiting the television series season one. Kudos to the screenwriters who were able to transfer the creepy-factor from the books to the small screen. The stories are no less compelling, no matter the medium you choose.
My recommendation is to watch the series, and read at least book one.
Pines
Season one of the television series Wayward Pines was phenomenal. It kept me on the edge of my seat, questioning everything as I tried to figure out what, exactly, was going on. Once that secret of the town was exposed, the series jumped the shark. I read the entire trilogy of Wayward Pines books, which didn’t suffer the same glitch. By all means, watch the series, but be sure to read the entire trilogy. In this case, the books are so much better than the series.
The Magicians
I absolutely love the entire television series of The Magicians and was sorry to see it end. There were some amazing story arcs, and I didn’t mind the fantasy aspect of the plot. Book one of the book series The Magicians was great. The series was very much like the book, and I enjoyed comparing how similar the two were. Unfortunately, book two began in Fillory, and based on Amazon’s the free sample, seemed too much fantasy for my liking, and I didn’t read any further.
My recommendation is to watch all five seasons of the tv series, and read as many of the books as you can when you’re feeling nostalgic.
Bonus Books
Other times I’ve written about books made into television series:
When I was a child, I bought a kit to crochet a Bert doll. With only the instructions in the kit (there was no Internet back then), I set out to teach myself crochet. Needless to say, it ended horribly, and I hung up my crochet hook, where it would remain for over 40 years.
I was at a wedding shower when the bride-to-be was gifted an amazing patchwork blanket. I thought it was knitted, and I set out to find a pattern to create one of my own (I have been knitting every since my mother taught me how over 30 years ago). The more I looked for a pattern, the more I wondered if the blanket hadn’t been crocheted. Two years ago, I made it my summer project to teach myself how to crochet.
I published my first children’s picture book in 2020. The main character was a hedgehog. My second picture book also featured a hedgehog, my third and fourth a unicorn, and my fifth a hippo. I wondered if it wouldn’t it be a great idea if I had a stuffed version of my character to sell along with my books. I found patterns online that looked like my characters and created them.
At a recent gift show, someone was selling crocheted keychains. My daughter liked them and asked me if I could make one. That was last Christmas, and I haven’t stopped making them since.
I’ve branded these as “backpack buddies.” I am attending the Sweet Week Market at the Bathurst Jewish Community Centre on 10 September 2023, where I will be debuting most of these designs. Here are a few of them:
I’ve been experimenting with AI text, but I’ve heard a lot about AI image generators of late, so I thought I might try one. I used Gencraft to generate images of characters from Revamped that joined the world of Braelynn’s Birthright in Book 2: Fallen Angel, and the results were gorgeous!
Here’s what the AI image generator came up with:
Piers Westenra
Piers makes his first appearance in Revamped when Pru wanders into Stoker’s Bar after suffering a bout of amnesia. She is immediately drawn to him and with good reason: they are bonded. Piers turned her more than 100 years ago. He is instrumental in helping her regain her memory.
Braelynn is similarly mesmerized by him when she finds her way to Stoker’s after a rough evening cleansing a house of malevolent spirits. She goes to the bar to unwind, inadvertently placing the Revamped characters in danger.
Prudence (Pru) Hightower
Pru is the vampire side of Addison Haney, a young woman who wakes up in the hospital with amnesia. She later learns that she was once a vampire but has undergone a change to make her human. The problem is that her vampire essence is still out there somewhere, killing people. Can she be reunited with her vampire half? More importantly, does she want to be?
In Fallen Angel, we see what has happened to Pru after the events of Revamped. She is getting along quite nicely, and though her attitude leaves something to be desired, her bark is worse than her bite.
Percival Stoker
Percival is the brains (and a little of the brawn) behind the archives at Stoker’s Bar. The bar property has been passed down for generations, but what goes on in the storefront isn’t as important as what happens deep beneath it. There, Percival maintains a library and archive of the supernatural and the paranormal. In Revamped, Percival uses his amazing collection to figure out how to reunite Addison and Pru.
In Fallen Angel, Percival takes Braelynn under his wing and introduces him to his archives. There, they forge a partnership that might extend beyond the academic and into the romantic. Together, along with the help or Piers, Pru, and Braelynn’s friends, they try to figure out how to vanquish the fallen angel threatening the existence of humankind.
Stoker’s Bar
Just for fun, I tried to generate an image of Stoker’s Bar. These are the best images the software came up with, although it seems to have had trouble with the lettering above the door. I think the one on the left really captures the Goth-like nature I describe in the book. In Fallen Angel, the bar is a happening place at night, but it loses some of its polish in the daylight.
Playing with AI to create portraits of my characters was so much fun!
Stay tuned to catch other glimpses into my fictional world.
Here is the BookTok for my newest release, There’s a Pond in My Backyard that tells the real life story that inspired the book.
Wait!
Don’t scroll past this video just yet.
So many people think that backyards are just plain plots of grass, but they can be so much more.
We’ve always had a koi pond in our backyard, and that attracted all sorts of wildlife like birds, squirrels, and—believe it or not—wild bunnies, but it also attracted some—shall we say—less desirable animals, like raccoons and herons—for some reason—that threatened the koi in the pond.
My new book, There’s a Pond in My Backyard, tells the story of—what else?—our backyard koi pond. It’s an illustrated children’s story book for kids aged two to six, about the real-life koi pond, the wildlife, and the dangers that lurk in nature.
It’s important to note that no illustrated animals are harmed in this book!
I had so much fun illustrating this book, and I hope you’ll read it.
This book was a cool experiment with AI. I used the AI interface to generate thousands of writing prompts over the course of three weeks, carefully curating them so there would be a variety of genres and writing techniques, including dialogue, narrative, showing and not telling, and writing descriptive passages. Prompts were selected, re-written, edited, and revised until they were ready for publication. The result is a unique writing journal, sure to provide all writers with inspiration for a long time.
Here is the BookTok for my new release, 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts.
This book is perfect for writers of all levels who need a little inspiration. With 365 unique prompts, you’ll never run out of ideas. From romance to horror, from poetry to memoir, this book has it all. Plus, the prompts are designed to help you practice different writing techniques, so you’ll improve your skills along the way.
And the best part? You can go at your own pace. Complete one prompt a day, one a week, or whenever you have the time. The choice is yours. But one thing is for sure: with this book, you’ll never have writer’s block again.
So, are you up for the challenge? Let’s write our hearts out for the next 365 days. Don’t forget to like and follow me for more great book recommendations and writing tips. Let’s do this!
You can purchase 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts on Amazon. If you’d like a free copy for review, please leave a comment or send me an email. If you’ve already read it, please let me know by posting a review, and don’t forget to like this video and follow me for more BookToks and new releases.
Here is the BookTok for my new release, Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 2: Fallen Angel. I am currently brainstorming the third book in the series, tentatively called Origins.
Fallen Angel is the thrilling sequel to Wendigo. In the second book in the Braelynn’s Birthright series, Braelynn and her friends are back, and this time, they face an even bigger challenge.
It’s been a few years since Braelynn inherited her grandmother’s ring and the curse that came with it. After graduating from high school, Braelynn and her friends opened a sort of detective agency, figuring out how to help people who have problems with supernatural entities. But when more and more of the creatures start giving her the same chilling message that something powerful is coming, she realizes that an evil being is at play.
Will Braelynn be able to take down a fallen angel hell bent on stealing her soul?
Get ready for an action-packed adventure with Braelynn and her friends in Braelynn’s Birthright—Book 2: Fallen Angel.
This book unites characters from Wendigo with those in my other books, Revamped and The Revenant to create a common world.
If you’d like a free copy for review, please leave a comment or send me an email. If you’ve already read it, please let me know by posting a review, and don’t forget to like this video and follow me for more BookToks and new releases.
The above definition was “written” by the ChatGPT interface, an artificial intelligence.
I had the idea to use AI after reading a book on how to generate passive income. I played with it a bit and decided to see if I could do what the book suggested, let AI generate a year’s worth of blog posts in a week to free up some of my time. I soon learned that this was easier said than done.
There is a pattern to the way AI—and ChatGPT in particular—formulates its blog posts. For example, the structure of most posts it generates is the same, beginning with an introduction, providing a list of three to five items complete with subtitles, and ending with a conclusion that says virtually the same thing as the introduction. If you don’t like what the AI produces for you, it can be regenerated, but there is no guarantee the new content will be significantly different.
It took me close to two weeks to generate enough content for 52 blog posts for my sister site, largely because I had to rewrite, revise, and pad most of the blog posts. Rumour has it that Google won’t index blogs it thinks use AI, so I had to do some heavy editing to make the text sound more like me than directly copied and pasted from the AI interface. I did, however, do a few plagiarism checks using Grammarly, but there was no indication that the AI had written anything that might be considered plagiarized.
From generating blog posts, I switched focus to having the AI generate an entire book for me. I decided to create a writing journal-type book with 365 writing prompts. I call it 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts. This took me three weeks to generate enough unique and doable prompts. I learned that AI likes fantasy. Both ChatGPT and Boo.ai sites seemed to default to prompts about people time travelling, losing their memories, inheriting haunted places, travelling to alternate realities, or writing from the point of inanimate objects, which was frustrating. I witnessed the machine learning aspect of AI firsthand when, after more than a week and getting prompts close to what I was looking for, I cleared the list of questions I had asked ChatGPT, and it stopped giving me answers I liked. It took a few days to re-train it to give me get good results again.
As for the question of whether AI lives up to the hype? The jury is hung on this one. It is a great tool for writing blog posts and outlines or getting ideas when you have writer’s block (it can outline whole novels for you if you ask it to and work with it long enough). It’s also good for writing advertising copy after a good revision and edit.
Could students use AI to outline their essays for them? Probably. Will they be good enough to pass teacher scrutiny? Not likely. AI writing tends to be superficial at best. For example, when I asked it to write advertising copy for this website, it took keywords I used in my last few posts and extrapolated that to write the blurb. According to it, I have written all sorts of books in genres I have never attempted (like romance). It also lists book titles I have never written and states that one of my books is a series when it is a standalone book.
In my opinion, the kind of text written by AI is limited. It cannot generate unique ideas, but it can repackage old ones. If you use AI to assist you in outlining your book, it might help you to get started on your writing journey, but if you plan to use it to flesh out your book in its entirety? I will let ChatGPT answer that question for you:
AI-generated writing is typically based on patterns and algorithms that the machine has learned from a large amount of input data. This means that the output is often formulaic and lacks the creativity and originality of human writing. Additionally, AI may not be able to capture the nuances and complexities of human emotions and experiences that are often the hallmark of great fiction.
Moreover, using AI to write an entire fiction novel raises ethical questions around intellectual property and authorship. It is unclear who would own the rights to an AI-generated novel, and whether it would be considered original work or plagiarism.
One of the things I see in my editing is that many authors are unsure as to how to show the possessive of a proper noun ending in S. Here are some things to remember to clear up this confusion.
Tip 1: When you have a name that ends in an S, add an apostrophe to show belonging, but only if the apostrophe S is not pronounced.
The ball belongs to Sanders.
It’s Sanders’ ball.
NOT: It’s Sander’s ball. [the S is a part of the name and cannot be separated to add the comma]
Tip 2: If you would pronounce the S to show the possessive, you must add an apostrophe S at the end of the name.
The ball belongs to Cyrus.
It’s Cyrus’s ball.
Tip 3: If a family name ends in S and you want to show the possessive for the whole family, add es’ to the end of the name.
The ball belongs to the Sanderses. [the whole of the Sanders family]
It’s the Sanderses’ ball.
Tip 4: Limit the apostrophes to one per name (or word).
It’s Cyrus’s ball.
NOT: It’s Cyrus’s’ ball.
Keeping these tips in mind as you write is sure to help you avoid these mistakes in the future. It has been said that, on average, it takes about a month to build a habit, so the more you practice applying these tips, the quicker these rules will become second nature.
If you are still unsure of whether you are using apostrophes to show the possessive form of proper nouns, be sure to use a grammar-checker like the ones built into Microsoft Word or Google Docs or an AI grammar-checker like Grammarly to help you with this.
Mahjong is a centuries-old Chinese game with tiles, usually with four players (and a fifth so players can rotate out and have a break), with the goal of making up hands containing sets and runs. I grew up with my mother playing Mahj every Wednesday. Once every four or five weeks, her weekly game was held at our house, and we were confined to the upstairs from seven o’clock until bedtime. That didn’t stop us from hearing the click of the tiles and their voices calling out the values of the discarded tiles (“One bam.” “Five crack.” “Soap.” “Flower.”). The best part of Mahj night was around 8:30 or so when the ladies took a snack break in which we were allowed to participate. We always tried to persuade my mother to order pizza for break time at our house. That’s also where I learned my appreciation for anchovies and tomatoes on pizzas, something I still enjoy today.
As an adult, my mother always suggested that she teach me, my sister-in-law and my daughters how to play so we could have a regular game of our own. We thought there would always be time for that, and one day she would teach us, but then she took sick and lived out the last four or five years of her life in and out of hospitals and the last three years of her life in the hospital. She passed away nine months ago, and her dream of teaching us never came to fruition.
After she died, I inherited her Mahjong set, and it seemed a shame to let it sit around and continue to collect dust as it had the previous twenty years or so. My sister-in-law and I mentioned this to our cousins and their Majh group, who graciously agreed to teach us how to play. Later, we taught my daughters and began playing semi-regular games, sometimes with my mother’s set.
There’s something about playing the game, especially when we use my mother’s set, that feels as if I am honouring her with every click of a tile and every call of a discarded tile. Playing evokes a warm nostalgia hearkening back to one Wednesday a month in my childhood when my mother and her friends (all of which have now passed) used to play, tinged though it might be with regret that she wasn’t the one to teach us.
Elise Abram 