I was considering entering the BBC short story competition
this year. Concentrating on my current story, I collected feedback. I’d deliberately
ignored a key piece of advice from the guidelines, which all my critters quickly
reminded me of; ‘Go low on the dialogue.’
My stories are all liberally salted with talking; extract the chatter and there is very little left. Partly this is because I’m an auditory person; my written visuals are usually crude or alluded to. (I always admired JK Rowling’s initial description of the Dursleys for its succinct effectiveness: ‘He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache. Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck’. Genius visualisation!)
But mainly it’s to do with my terror of telling. ‘Show don’t tell’ has been drummed into me since my first creative writing evening class nine years ago. And for me the easiest way to show a character is to say what comes out of their mouth.
But we don’t show stories, we tell them. I’m a natural born anecdoter; I’m doing it right now. I’ll tell you what’s in my mind at this moment – telly tellingness. I’m potentially censoring the showing of my situation, which might well be more interesting; on a train, dog asleep at my feet, wearing an impractical new skirt that I can’t run in but I bought anyway because it has squirrels on. Blogging feels different; I wouldn’t dare do this in a tale.
As I’m immersed in my present work I didn’t want the distraction of dreaming up something new for the competition, so I went to my back catalogue to look for less dialogueness. And there is none. All my stories are noisy; if you could hear my memory stick your ears would bleed. So my next challenge will be to write a story with no dialogue. Maybe it will be ready for next year’s competition.
My stories are all liberally salted with talking; extract the chatter and there is very little left. Partly this is because I’m an auditory person; my written visuals are usually crude or alluded to. (I always admired JK Rowling’s initial description of the Dursleys for its succinct effectiveness: ‘He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache. Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck’. Genius visualisation!)
But mainly it’s to do with my terror of telling. ‘Show don’t tell’ has been drummed into me since my first creative writing evening class nine years ago. And for me the easiest way to show a character is to say what comes out of their mouth.
But we don’t show stories, we tell them. I’m a natural born anecdoter; I’m doing it right now. I’ll tell you what’s in my mind at this moment – telly tellingness. I’m potentially censoring the showing of my situation, which might well be more interesting; on a train, dog asleep at my feet, wearing an impractical new skirt that I can’t run in but I bought anyway because it has squirrels on. Blogging feels different; I wouldn’t dare do this in a tale.
As I’m immersed in my present work I didn’t want the distraction of dreaming up something new for the competition, so I went to my back catalogue to look for less dialogueness. And there is none. All my stories are noisy; if you could hear my memory stick your ears would bleed. So my next challenge will be to write a story with no dialogue. Maybe it will be ready for next year’s competition.
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