17. Q&A Session from the Fall Two Day Writing Retreat Part 2

In this episode of Show Don’t Tell Writing, Suzy answers questions from participants at the two-day writing retreat held at the end of September. She provides valuable insights on various writing topics including, dealing with stalled projects, incorporating backstory, introducing a large cast of characters, and keeping multiple projects on track.

Show, don't Tell in Memoir is also discussed, and how it is similar to a traditional novel. 

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Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight

Transcript

0:49

Welcome to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction, nonfiction, that are going to wow your readers broken down step by step. We're going to explore writing techniques. I'm going to show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And I'm also going to coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show is going to help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed. But you definitely do. I'm so excited. So looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams. And you're going to also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Everybody ready? Okay, Johnny, if you haven't worked on a book in a while and you're not feeling super excited about it and you're looking for motivation there, I want you to consider the following. Because sometimes people come to me and they say, Oh my gosh, I don't know if I should stop writing this book. Like, what is going on? And the answer is, try it on, right? If, if that book that you were writing before, you're no longer excited about, there can be lots of reasons for that. Remember when I talked about the fact that writing is always personal, even if we're not aware of it, we're writing it for a reason. We're writing it because something in our soul needs to resolve, right? Like, we're writing it because we have something to say. And we change. You are not the same person that you were when you started writing this book. So that thing that you're writing about may or may not be as exciting to you or as interesting to you as it once was. Now, that doesn't mean that your book is a complete waste if you find that you're no longer excited about it. But maybe tweak it and think what are some things that I could bring to the table now and and just change it ever so slightly so that it's still exciting for you. Because if you're not excited about it, your readers won't be either. Right? It's got to be something that you really love. And if you can put that book away for three years and, you know, you don't really think about it and you just feel guilty and you, but you're not feeling called to write it, then maybe it's time to let it go. But if you've put it away and you think about it every single day and you know that it's time to finish, then keep it. I just wanted to add that. Okay, so Keely. Whoa, incorporating backstory. Okay, I think Keely, we had a discussion in the Facebook group. About her chapter one and having chapter one and, and, and stating, okay, I just got to get past this sort of intro before I can get to the meat of the story. And my comment was. If you're finding, like, your chapter one is just creating a character's backstory and getting into it, then it might be time to cut it. Somebody also asked about prologues. So backstory, traditionally, in a, in a book, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we'd have a prologue, which set everything up. And told us all the backstory and got us ready to, like, go on this adventure with your, with your characters. Prologues are kind of controversial. I would say about 50 percent of agents or publishers do not like prologues and might just reject it because of that. If you can call it chapter one, I would call it chapter one, just to avoid that quick, like, knee jerk, oh, I'm not going to read it, it has a Prologue, but I am seeing it coming back. In fact, one of my clients who writes for a big five publisher She was recently asked to create a prologue and that was for a historical romance So potentially, you know, like it depends on the publisher But but just know that everything I teach is about sort of playing the odds And know that there are pet peeves out there and things that people I don't like, and that might earn you an instant rejection. So if you can avoid them, do it. But in terms of Keely's backstory, if, if we're just writing chapter one to set up the rest, she probably needed to actually write that as the writer. Notice that. But it doesn't mean that it belongs in the book. And in fact, that backstory, if you take it somewhere else and you pepper that through as readers need it. That would be a lot more powerful than dumping it in the first chapter, because it's not really moving the story forward. If you're saying that the story gets going in Chapter 2, start with Chapter 2. And then sort of weave that backstory in, in little snippets, more digestible for the reader, so they don't have to learn everything at once. And they might not have to learn everything at all. You need it as the writer, but you don't need to necessarily share it all. And here's what I'll say about backstory, because backstory is not inherently bad. You will hear people say, oh, don't do backstory. You know, it's kind of like this catchphrase. I wouldn't say that. In fact, backstory can be a lot of fun. I've worked on a lot of books with, with writers who have sort of a dual perspective, where it's like in the past, in the future, in the past, in the future. We only care, here's what I'll say about it. We only care about the past, the reader, the reader only cares about the past if it tells us, informs us what's going to happen in the present, okay? So if you have something that has more than one timeline and the past is important, and you're writing in the present, the reader only cares about story present, and here's why. Because story present is new, we don't know what's going to happen in their suspense. The past has this like, spoiler alert. Because if you've got a 50 year old character and then they're thinking back to their past when they were 10 or 20 or 30, we know that they don't die. We know where they end up. So there's very few things or tension that you can build in the past. There's not enough tension in that past story, so it's not as riveting. But what's cool about it is when you go to the past, if it helps the reader understand what's happening in the present, if it helps us predict what they might do in the present, if it helps us understand why they're doing something in the present, then it's needed. Okay? So just remember that if you're going to dump in backstory, something that happened in the past that isn't really part of the story. Make sure that it's relevant to what's happening in story present. Don't make the mistake of trying to make your backstory as important as story present. It isn't. It just isn't. If you have something in chronological order, like a prologue or a chapter one that starts somewhere, you can do that and then move forward. But then if you keep going back to that past, make sure that it's actually moving the story in story present forward or you're gonna lose your reader. Okay. Somebody said like Batman, we only know that his parents died, but not their entire lives, but it drives and changes his entire life. Yeah. I mean, it's important because of how he reacts today. Right. Or how he reacts in the movies. Yeah, absolutely. But make sure that when you're evaluating whether or not you need it. Whether or not it's important. Okay, Liz, so she said that her goal was to work on a scene that she'd been avoiding because it's introducing a whole bunch of new characters and she knows what to do, but she just doesn't want to do it. And I said, I completely understand why you'd avoid a scene with a whole bunch of new characters, because it's really hard to do well, right? This happens in first chapters of books or when they change setting or when something new like an act two comes into play or a different place. Liz. And you have to introduce a whole bunch of characters because you run the risk of having what we call character soup, which is like, and Susie was there and Liz was there and Paul was there and all the people were there, right? Like, and it's boring. So you have to treat it really carefully. And so I thought I would share a few little tricks, right? Number one, do you need them all? There's a lot of times when, when writers have so many characters that We think that they're all going to be really important, and then we can go back, and this is something that happens at the developmental editing stage, which I'm going to talk about in tomorrow's presentation, but, that we're, we didn't need them all, or we thought they were going to be really important, and then as writers, we didn't, like, sort of follow through. So we can axe a character, we can combine a character, we can do different things, right? So if you don't need them all, don't bore your reader, because it just feels like a laundry list, right? And then number two, if you do need them all, do they all need to be there? to be in that same scene, or can you sort of dole it out as you go along? Cause that'd be a lot more digestible for your reader as well. But if you decide Liz, that you need them all, and they do know that, I happen to know that. Liz is writing sort of science fiction space operatic where there's a huge cast of characters and that is normal in that genre in other genres, especially in literary, you're not going to have that huge cast of characters or women's fiction, or there's, there's a number of genres where you wouldn't have that sort of huge cast of characters, but hers, you, you do have them. So if you have to deal with this, I would rank them in priority and then introduce them in order of how important they are. And also pay attention to when you're introducing them. So we talked about dumping backstory or dumping something, information dumps, or like large pieces of information that you sort of stick in there. There are places where you can put more information. One of them is when you're introducing a character for the very first time. So we don't want to be on like page 10 and we've already been with your character for 10 pages and then she looks at herself in the mirror, which by the way is a very overdone thing. But, yeah, they're all of a sudden describing what their hair colour is and everything on page 10. No, the very first time, find a way to show us a detail or two about each character. So, main character, or an important character, in Liz's case, might have two to three details that you share. How tall they are, if that's important, or what type of clothing they're wearing, or not in, not in tons of detail. But specifics, and that's part of Show, Don't Tell. You can do it there. And then, less important characters might be grouped together, or you might give less detail. Now, one of the tenets of Show Don't Tell that I teach is actually about making groups or making crowds stand out, right? If you say that there was a group of people all standing around, the human brain can't picture that. I don't know who they are. They could be a group of children, or school children, they could be a group of aliens, they could be a group of, I don't know anything about this group, and so what happens? It's kind of like that overwhelm where you're standing at the fork in the road, I don't actually know, and so I don't picture it as a reader. And then you haven't shown me. So instead in a crowd, what you can do is you can zoom in. There was a crowd of people, a woman in front, you know, like was swishing her skirts to get the rats away from her ankles. Right? Swallow out a few people, one or two in a crowd. That's an amazing way to describe crowd. Brandi said, I called him out on how you described your main charact. Okay, so let me talk about this for just a minute because there are a number of things so I haven't read your books but I can tell you that there are probably a number of things that you have in there that are pet peeves of agents and Publishers because they are the easiest way right? They are just the easiest way to write and so when you take the easiest way when you haven't learned those skills and you haven't come to many of these events or things like That and nobody's told you there's no way for you to know that Brandy Don't like don't be You know, like, oh my gosh, I made a mistake. It's not really a mistake. It's just something that we know that newer writers are going to do until somebody tells them, oh my gosh, everybody does that. So if you have a scene, the easiest way to start a scene is with your character waking up. It's the reason that many, many, many agents will actually reject it if your character wakes up at the beginning of a scene. Opens their eyes, right? Somebody's gonna tell me that that's in their scene. I haven't read your book. I'm gonna tell you. There are people here that have that in their scene. It's a very simple fix. All you have to do is have them already awake and stretching. It's that extra bit. Or falling asleep, or passing out, or everything fades to black at the end of a scene, right? These are the easiest ways, and so when we first come to writing, this is what naturally happens. We want to open every scene with somebody waking up and then tell us everything about their single day, and end it with them falling asleep, right? This is the easiest way to write, and it is the way that we all start. But knowing that and being able to recognize that are coming to forums like this and asking the questions and getting a professional eye on your work will avoid that feeling that you send it out. You have no idea that agents are like, uh, next, right? Like, I've seen that. I've seen that. And yeah, so one of the things is actually that I mentioned Randy is, is looking in a mirror to describe your character. It is the easiest way to do it, right? So it's not wrong. It's not lazy. It's not any of those things. It's just so overdone that they don't see you taking that next step, right? And so readers naturally will be like, Oh, you've seen this a thousand times before. And people in the professional side of the industry will just see that, you know, you haven't taken that next step. So there's other ways to do it. I know you got to get creative, right? These are the things that we can get creative about. So there is a number of, of sort of cliches like that. That's usually the first thing that I point out with writers when working with them. Okay, so hopefully you guys got that sort of crowd thing. Liz, good luck. We'll just know how that goes with the character soup and how you deal with that. I'm sure you're gonna rock it. Okay, Caitlyn or Caitlyn Ann. Okay, so many stories I want to tell. Too many projects I have going on at the same time. I would love to learn how to focus on one story. without writer's block attacking me so I can work on something else. Great. A lot of you have this. So let's go back to the definition of overwhelm, where we're standing at a fork in the road and we haven't decided if we're going to go right or we're going to go left. And if you haven't decided, your brain shuts down. Right? The same thing can happen when we have a lot of projects on the go at the same time. And there's a lot of, it's interesting, the conversation is changing around, you know, social media and things like that. Even talking with people about how I use Facebook, and you guys are like, I don't really want to use Facebook for this. And there's a conversation around dopamine, right? And then that is that sort of chemical rush or hormone that comes from succeeding or starting something new or that little rush, right? So it might be why we have an online shopping addiction. It might be why we start a lot of new stories, right? And so, you know, writing is awesome because it can make us feel great and starting a new story can be a ton of fun and, you know, all that slog in between and that you need to do isn't as fun and you don't get that rush. But at the same time, I really encourage you to look at that dream writing goal. If you went through this presentation today, look, look at your dream writing goal, because the only way that you're going to get there is if you finish one project. So take the project that you're the most excited about. Forget like which one's saleable or whatever. If you're excited about it, readers are going to be excited about it. And, and, and pick that project. And then what you can do to feel that same sort of rush is what we talked about. Have those smaller goals and be able to check them off your list because checking them off your list will give you that little dopamine hit that you're looking for every time you start a new story. Again, brain science. This is what we can do to like sort of gamify our writing process and accelerate it and stick with one story. Bye. Bye. But really let yourself dream. Which one of those stories that you're writing is going to be the one? Which one of those stories are you most excited? Which one of those stories do you want to accept a big prize for? Which one of those stories do you want to go on podcasts, come on my podcast and talk about? Which one? Which one is it? Because Because whichever one that is, or you could also choose whichever one's the furthest along because then you'll get there faster. So those are a couple of different ways, but I would really highly recommend that you choose. If you do get stuck, if you've got a lot of projects on the go and you do end up getting stuck, you can go and write a different project for a little bit of time. And I do know people that successfully write more than one project at a time. But if you're continually starting and you know, You want to stop that. I would write out a plan. I would make a list of all the stuff that needs to get done to get your book from where it is today to that finish line and start checking them off because I think you're going to find that you enjoy that and you can get that little rush that you're looking for every time you start a new book. Okay. Ooh, Karen. I'm working on a memoir. Memoir and novels are actually very similar. And all of the advice that I can give you for a memoir, although mindset in a memoir, you've got to work a little bit harder on because it's about yourself and there's some things that you need to address and overcome. And I could talk about that too, but think of a memoir as, which is a biography, it's sort of a more modern term for biography, and I'm assuming that you're talking about a narrative memoir, which reads like a novel, right? So it reads like a novel, and in a novel, you've got your protagonist that goes through Story Mountain, and I can't actually talk about Story Mountain without drawing it with my hand, but you've got your protagonist that goes like, through a change, from the beginning to the ending, and has the rising action and the climax and all the things that happen, right? So, yeah. Yeah. In a memoir, it's exactly the same, but the person is you. You're the protagonist. It's about you. If you're writing a non fiction self help book, that protagonist is actually your reader, and they go through that journey. And that's a whole other topic. But if you're writing a memoir, that protagonist is you. And so when you're learning to structure your memoir, because that's the biggest thing that's important in a non fiction book, is like sort of being able to separate yourself from the fact that it's your own life, and we're not sharing cradle to grave. We don't want to hear the day you were born it was raining, and the day you died was whatever, whatever. We want to know what journey are you taking us on? So, looking at your memoir, what are the bookends? What is the actual change? You're the protagonist. What is the actual change that you want to demonstrate? So, if you were writing a novel, you might say, Okay, they went from wallflower to power, or they went from power to wallflower, right? With an unhappy ending. They went from rags to riches. They went from whatever that change is. What is the change that you're showing? What actual moment in your life do you want to highlight? It's not cradle to grave. Some of those things we talked about backstory. Some of those things will come in. As they're needed to show that, but, but think about it that way, and that will really, really help you focus on on your memoir. For those of you writing memoir, it's really important to look at it that way, because then it will really help you decide what stories are you going to tell and inside those stories, not changing them, because obviously they happened in your real life, but inside those stories, What are you going to highlight, right? What are you going to teach? What are you going to highlight in those moments that are going to make people interested or get Your, like, get yourself, show that change that's happening and checking in on how you're changing as it goes. What are the stories that are going to do that? So, your actual question here, Karen, was that there are three separate memoir topics that you'd eventually like to write, and they're separate books. And that's how you can do that, is by picking that change, and it's going to help you focus. And it will mean that you can write more than one memoir about your own life. And it's not like, okay, here's Cradle to grade 12, and now here's, you know, my formative years as an adult, and now here's my retirement. Like, it's not like that. It's, it's, what is that journey? And what are the stories that are going to highlight that journey? Because we are hardwired, humans are hardwired to accept story in a certain way. It's the reason that fables and fairy tales have lasted thousands of years because they were passed around, right? And they were told mostly with a moral at the end. To be interesting and for people to learn, you know, that bears are scary and you know, all the things and the dangers in the world, that's how stories were passed down before the written word happened. And so that is actually still ingrained in people and we are still looking for that, even if it's a memoir. So if you've got a memoir where your life kind of went like this, that's gonna be hard to read. It's going to be hard for people to accept. So take a, take a, not accept in that they're judging your life, but just it's going to be hard for them to actually process and read and enjoy and go on that journey with you. So pick a journey. I hope that helps. Okay. So. You also said that you have various chunks of story but haven't figured out the way to best package it. Feels like once you have a better outline of perhaps the story arc, yeah, that's exactly it, is, is when you figure that piece out, you'll know where each of those stories can go, and if they don't help show that change that you've chosen, then they belong in a different story. And that's okay, they belong in a different plot. And since you're already planning to write three, you're in good shape. Okay. Halle, can you talk about Show Don't Tell specifically in memoir? Okay. So show don't tell, I could talk about this all day long, so, but specifically in memoir, so when we talk about show don't tell, show don't tell is the concept, um, this is why this concept is so difficult. I think that show is actually a misnomer. Because we can tell you what happened. It's kind of like, oh my gosh, you know, this morning, oh, I could tell you a story actually. Yesterday morning, I woke up to construction in my yard and I heard the sounds outside, but I assumed it was a neighbor. And then I looked out and I saw this huge crane. This is a true story, by the way, it might end up in a newsletter. There was this huge crane and it was like lifting pallets over my kid's car, which is a little tiny car. And so I was like, Oh, then my drop on the car. And where are they going with that? We live on a corner. Whose house are they craning this to? And I looked and they were craning it to my house and they put all these pallets on my roof and there was like five guys on my roof and I didn't order a new roof so they'd actually come to the wrong house. And it was absolutely overwhelming because just waking up, it was like really early in the morning and I was like, what's going on? And then I go running out like, what are you guys doing? But I can tell you that story, right? But it was different to experience it and that rush. And I felt it even telling it again, I'm like, Oh my gosh, why are people on my roof? I maybe should have let them replace that roof because we could use a new roof, but I didn't. I went and told them they had the wrong house. But it's the difference between, oh my gosh, you had to be there. Right? I could tell you about it later and you're never going to experience it the same way. I could tell you, you know, that it went out, the conversation that we had, and I could give you more detail and more, like, stuff. I told you about the car. I told you about, you know, all these things, and that's what showing is all about, is making you feel like you woke up and saw people on your roof of your house, lifting all these heavy materials, and they'd also filled my backyard with stuff. They just went into the backyard and started loading out their stuff on our grass. It was very weird. And we have lots of stuff in our backyard that I don't want damaged, so it was very strange. Anyways, I digress, but that's the difference between showing and telling, right? Feeling like you're there and me telling you, showing you all of these details and show is more than just sight, right? It is also, it is also sound. It is also feelings, internal reactions, all of these things that happen. You know, it felt hot. I was like, oh, this huge rush. And I'm trying not to be rude, but I'm like, what are you doing on my roof? All of these things that happen. And I just told you that story and it's true, right? So you could still use all of those techniques in a memoir. Just because it's true doesn't mean that you have to pull back and say, One morning I woke up and there were people trying to install a new roof when I didn't order a new roof. That would be telling you, right? And you didn't get any of that. You didn't get any of the emotion or any of the Feels that I had when I woke up and saw that now here's where there's a bit of a mindset thing with memoirs. So narrative memoir to bring you into the moment. You do have to make some assumptions, right? You don't have to stick to exactly. I mean, yes. And take this with a grain of salt. It's a true story. However, you are going to have a disclaimer that says some places or names or things are changed in order to protect things. You're going to have some disclaimer that says that you changed stuff. So you don't have to have it verbatim. There's no, otherwise there's no way you could write it. You can't possibly recall everything. Well, you might think you can. But if somebody else was there, they might recall it differently, right? You can't. And so you still have to construct scenes that are in the spirit of what happened. But you still want to bring us into that scene. And so you do. You have to add things. You have to add things based on your imperfect memory. And you just have to trust That that's okay. And you're going to have a disclaimer that that's okay. But you still want to construct it in that way. And you can use all of the showing techniques in memoir. I hope that's helpful. Okay, we're on memoir. My goodness, you guys are lots of memoir writers. Robert, I'd like some guidelines, uh, guidance on my outline and layout of the book. I have an idea of how to organize, but would love some feedback. Okay, so Robert, You shared a little bit about your memoir story. So hopefully I think I've already answered this, but I would pick a moment in time. So specifically, I think you mentioned that your memoir is about your coming out and the reaction from your family. So that, you know, I would choose you're the protagonist. Where were you at the beginning of the story and where were you at the end as your book ends? And then choose the scenes that you want to, in your outline, choose the scenes that are going to show that and that are important to that journey and let everything else go. I hope that's helpful. I look forward to talking with you about that more. Okay. Do you recommend writing a prologue? I don't. I don't recommend that, but that's my own opinion. Like I mentioned earlier in the presentation, there are It's sort of a trend, like, there are lots of people out there that don't appreciate prologues. It is a bit of an old timey feel to a book. So it depends on the genre, but I do see them coming back. My suggestion would be, if you have something that you absolutely need to include, try your best to make it chapter one. Just call it chapter one. If your publisher wants to call it prologue later, that's up to them. And somebody asked about epilogues as well. Epilogue is at the end of a book, right? So in the Harry Potter series, there's an epilogue that shows them like 20 years later, all married and all the things that happen and moving on, right? So, so epilogues, again, depends on the genre and depends if you need it. Epilogues can be a lot of fun, especially in historical. Or in romance, they're often used. You skip ahead and see them all happily ever after. But it depends on the genre. And again, there's lots of rules out there or people's opinions out there. At the end of the day, it's a case by case basis. In general, I wouldn't include an epilogue unless you have no other way to give that information. I would, I would explore lots of other ways before I would recommend having an epilogue. Just because, again, lots of people out there will not enjoy that or will reject because of it. I think prologues are a bigger issue than epilogues for sure. Because again, when you send out those first three chapters and they decide whether or not to, like, look, or whether or not to keep reading, the prologue can either help or hinder that, right? It's an extra chapter that you're putting in there before you get to the story that might not hook them. Blog is just gravy right? And you might even want to save that and give that to your readers after, like not put it as part of the book, but you need to give it to your mailing list or give it as a bonus or something. Like what happens? Or maybe it becomes a whole book of its own. Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori. I'll be continuing to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also, visit suzybedore. com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training, events and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our show to tell page for you every day. Remember, that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet. And I can't wait to help make it the absolute best. If you're feeling called to write that book, keep going and I'm going to be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.