By Terry Brennan
Certain manuscript issues are
constants in conversations with editors and publishers:
·
Avoid Point-Of-View problems;
·
Resist the urge to explain;
·
Show, don’t tell.
In conversations with other
authors, show-don’t-tell still leaves many writers frustrated. You want to move
the story forward. What’s wrong with having one character say to another, “You
know, Joe’s house burned down.” Do we need to be at Joe’s house?
Yes, particularly if Joe is
important in the novel.
So, how do we do that? How can we
avoid telling the reader something? How can we show them, instead?
An editor told me once, “I love
the way you make little stories to show action.” Really? I never realized it.
But then I went back through my last book, The Aleppo Code, and found a number of places where the editor was right.
At one point in the book,
conflicts erupt simultaneously in locations around the Middle East. An early
draft had military officers telling the President about these developments in
the White House Situation Room.
As soon as somebody is telling
someone else about action, you have a problem.
So I created the action. I
introduced, in less than three-quarters of a page:
·
Yhanni Goldsmith, an Israeli Defense Force
reservist working as a waiter in Tel Aviv as a wave of rockets walked
destruction down the street outside his
seaside restaurant ;
·
Petra, who was driving to her mother’s home near
the Lebanese border. It was her mother’s birthday, which is why she braved the
crater-lined road, until she came to a crater where her mother’s house should
be;
·
Colonel Isadore Stanfill, commander of 100
Israeli tanks near Ghajar, Israel, waiting for his “Go” to race into Lebanon
with orders to destroy the Hezbollah rocket batteries.
I also created a pivotal naval
battle in the Persian Gulf which ran through several chapters. Not only did the
battle take the life of Rear Admiral Chauncey “Chipper” Woods, whose frigate,
the USS Ingraham, was shredded by an
Iranian missile attack, but the battle also introduced Lieutenant Andrew Stone.
Fresh out of Annapolis, newly assigned, Stone was part of an amphibious attack
team dispatched from the USS Ponce to
lay waste to the Iranian naval base on Larak Island. Stone didn’t survive the
attack, either. Tragic, since Stone was the son of the American President.
My favorite “show-don’t-tell”
character came at the end of the book – Benji Propolski, overnight security
guard for the Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept in
Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. Benji was upset because his wife, Melda, forgot to fix
his lunch. So he was distracted when, making his rounds, something astounding
happened to the most powerful weapon in the history world.
Other than the naval battle, these
scenes were not long. Each moved the story forward. Each introduced an
interesting character, found nowhere else in the book. And each occurred in the
midst of the action, giving the novel more depth.
In a word, they “showed”.
A Pulitzer Prize is one of the many awards Terry Brennan accumulated
during his 22-year newspaper career. The Pottstown (PA) Mercury won a
Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a two-year series of editorials published
while Brennan was the newspaper’s Editor. Starting out as a sportswriter in Philadelphia, Brennan became
an Editor and Publisher for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New York
and in 1988 moved to the corporate staff of Ingersoll Publications (400 newspapers
in the U.S., Ireland and England) as Executive Editor of all U.S. newspaper
titles. In 1996
Brennan transitioned into the nonprofit sector, spending 12 years as VP Operations
for The Bowery Mission and six years as Chief Administrative Officer for Care
for the Homeless, NYC nonprofits that serve homeless people. Terry and his wife, Andrea,
live in the New York City area. Terry’s first novel series, THE JERUSALEM
PROPHECIES, was released by Kregel Publications: The Sacred Cipher in July of 2009, The Brotherhood Conspiracy in June of 2013 and The Aleppo Code in October, 2015. The Aleppo Code won the Carol Award as the best Suspense/Thriller
of 2015. Website
– www.terrybrennanauthor.com Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/terry.brennan.5201
Facebook Author Page – https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTerryBrennan
Twitter – https://twitter.com/terrbrennan1
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