My prologue and I thank you!

I’ll tell you what is wrong with “Show-not-Tell”

People (including 95% of teachers) don’t really understand it. The chosen words are simply WRONG.

It is NOT about showing or telling, but about entertaining. For show think “seduce” and for tell think “instruct”.

ALL fiction, every second, every word, sentence, paragraph should SEDUCE the reader. The reader should be involved and required to add his/her intelligence to the process to gain the maximum from the text.

When the reader is INSTRUCTED, when every nuance of thought or action is explained, then the reader is listening to a lecture and becomes bored.

What some writers or teachers call “tell” is NOT truly tell.

Example: She had the kind of face and body that would make a Bishop kick in a stained-glass window.

We are being told something (she is gorgeous and sexy) but it ENTERTAINS and involves the reader and the reader has to process the bishop idea, get the point and WORK OUT she is gorgeous, sexy, so much so that she might tun a man of the cloth.

I have two articles at The Internet Writers Journal called Seduction Not Instruction (Parts I & II) which deal with this subject in more detail.

Alex Keegan

alex.keegan@btinternet.com

I’m struggling with keeping a prologue right now. Everything in me says to leave it. But I keep reading how some agents/publishers hate prologues. My prologue is just over one page long, is an intense scene involving the main character, happened two years prior to the start of the novel, and is expanded upon slowly throughout the novel. I think the prologue creates suspense from page one, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. I’ll revisit the issue once I’ve finished polishing the manuscript.

I think prologues are overdone when it comes to fantasy–it seems like they’re used for a sense of mystique and to stick some action in a beginning that didn’t have much. The problem is, it’s two hundred pages before you find out what it has to do with anything. The same thing happens in other fiction, too, I’m sure, but it seems to me like prologues are almost necessary in certain cases–to set up a contrast, perhaps, between then and now. Or maybe that’s just my opinion because that’s how the current draft of my novel reads!

I tend toward this myself, so this is very timely advice in helping me pare down the overwritten passages in my WIP. Amazing what a few months focusing on another writing project will reveal, when I go back to edit a completed manuscript. Most of the overwritten spots jumped out at me already, but your advice (and wonderful word picture) about focusing the reader’s face helps immensely. In fact, I woke up at 3:30 this morning thinking about it, and instead of lying there editing only in my head, got up to put in a couple hours of extra work time. For which I suppose I should thank you.

Hear, hear!

Wendy