Destroy Dodge Ram 1500! Destroy Copple Family!

I use a popular map app on my phone frequently. Most of the time, it does an excellent job of getting me where I need to go. Sometimes, it even helps me to avoid traffic slowdowns due to wrecks and the like. But there are those times when for reasons unknown, the lady telling me where to go sends me into places I don’t want to be. This is the story of one such instance; a somewhat dramatized but factually accurate recounting of when the map app appeared to have been reprogrammed to destroy my truck and trap us in a sticky situation. I suspected Dr. Smith had broken into their company headquarters to get us lost in the plains.

The Unlikely Angel

I think this may be my first Thanksgiving story. And also my first non-fiction story. Yes, this is a true story that happened to me. I wrote it in an omniscient first person point of view, mainly because that's my view of the story. If you're not sure what an omniscient first person point of view is, ask me in the comments and I'll 'splain it to you,

Now, onto the story!

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I encountered an angel in the wee hours of the morning in 1994. A very unlikely angel, but an angel nonetheless.

I pastored a church in Weslaco, Texas at the time—about mid-way between McAllen and Harlingen in the Texas “Valley.” I put valley in quotes because there really is no physical valley. The land there is as flat as the plains in east Colorado, west Kansas, and north-west Oklahoma. First time I drove there, I kept waiting for the drop into a valley that never came.

In this instance, however, I was driving out of the Valley on my way to Wichita Falls, Texas. My mom’s aunt had passed away, and I wanted to be there for my mom and grandmother, which meant driving all night to arrive on time after taking care of pastoral tasks I had that day. By the time I turned off US 281 onto IH 37 and headed north toward San Antonio, it was past three o’clock in the morning, and I still had a long way to go.

But I was at least glad I had fixed the car before I left on this trip. The car’s battery had died. First I replaced the battery, but it died again after some driving. As it turned out, the alternator wasn’t charging the battery, so I paid the auto shop to replace the alternator. With that problem solved, or so I thought, I felt confident I could drive the car to Wichita Falls.

However, it was nearing four in the morning when my dash lights began flickering and my headlights dimmed. I barely had time to pull off onto the shoulder before the car lost all electrical power and turned into an expensive, oversized paperweight. Turning the key failed to get so much as a grunt from the engine, much less any flash of light on the dashboard.

I couldn’t understand it. The battery was new, the alternator was new; what else could it be? Whatever the problem was, I was stranded on IH 37 in the middle of the night. This was long before I had a cell phone I could call for help on, and the closest city was miles away.

“Okay, Lord, now what am I going to do?” I had no clue. Even if someone traveled this lonely stretch of road, who would dare stop to help someone like me?

As I struggled to figure out how to deal with this development, lights crested a rise behind me. The first vehicle to approach my location. I watched, fully expecting the driver to fly right on by me. Instead, he slowed until he stopped beside my car. I couldn’t believe it. God had so quickly answered my prayer!

I exited my car. An old, well-used pickup truck greeted me. Inside the truck sat a grungy-looking, rough rancher of some kind. Dirty overalls, scraggly beard, and a tattoo on his arm, along with a pack of cigarettes resting on the dash. “Lord,” I said to myself, “couldn’t you’ve sent someone a little less scary?”

He nodded toward me. “Need some help?”

I nodded back and proceeded to tell him my story in abbreviated form.

“Hop in. I’ll take you to San Antonio so you can get a new battery.”

I hesitated. I could see my mug shot on a milk carton after I’d mysteriously gone missing. This man didn’t engender any good vibes. Yet what other options did I have? Who else might drive by and stop to help? I didn’t have much choice. How could I look this gift-horse in the mouth?

“If you’re sure, Lord,” I confessed to God. I accepted his offer, locked up the car, slid onto his passenger seat, and off we headed for San Antonio. I kept waiting for the turn onto a side-road that never came.

He wasn’t much of a talker, but I did find out a little about him, and told him something about myself as well. But he seemed in a different world than I was, so a good part of the time we sat in silence, watching the miles roll under the truck.

True to his word, he pulled into a Walmart once we arrived in San Antonio. I bought a battery, and he drove me back to my car, an hour each way. Then he helped me install the new battery. When I offered him some money for his time, he refused it. By this time the dawn had arrived. He returned to his truck and rode off into the sunrise.

I marveled that someone like him was willing to take two plus hours out of his day to help some stranger on the road in the middle of the night. Despite his appearance and apparent lifestyle, he literally was an angel to me. An unlikely one, but an angel nonetheless.

With the dawning of the day I no longer needed my headlights, so I took to the road once more, knowing I’d arrive, if all went well, less than thirty minutes before the funeral was to begin. I kept expecting the battery to lose power again, but it didn’t happen. I arrived in time to attend the funeral.

That evening, I followed my mom and aunt to my aunt’s house in Granbury. On the way there, with my lights on, my car began to show signs it was about to run out of power again. I cut the lights and pulled over. The engine kept running. Obviously the headlight were pulling more power than the alternator could keep up with. So I drove behind my aunt and mom with my lights off and hoped we wouldn’t be stopped by a patrol officer.

The next day, we had a mechanic check out the car. Come to find out the shop that installed the alternator failed to pull the pin that allowed the brushes to rest against the armature. The arcing from the armature to the brushes was enough energy to power the car with the headlights off but not on. Another alternator installed, I returned safely to my family in Weslaco.

But I’ll never forget the unexpected angel God sent my way, and the lesson I learned not to prejudge people. The most unlikely person could be an angel to you as well. It is sad that so many will be judgmental instead of grateful for those God has sent to help us in our trials and struggle for spiritual growth.

For the former rejects God’s help, but the latter emboldens us to be an unlikely angel to someone else in need.

Show, Don't Tell?

The common writing "rule," show, don't tell, has taken a beating in recent times. When I started writing fiction in 2006, it wasn't long before I heard about the suggested mode of writing. Usually from a critiquer who pointed out I was in telling mode here or there.

But I've noticed there has been a growing backlash to this mode of writing. Why is it being rejected as a valid guideline for new writers to write fiction? I think for the following reasons:

1. Extreme usage in critique groups. One such person attempted to tell me that one should have no telling in fiction, everything had to be shown. So he would point out any telling, and appeared to refuse to offer any other constructive feedback until I "fixed" this one issue. If a person encounters too many like that, it is easy to overreact to the opposite extreme and throw the baby out with the bathwater.


2. Show, don't tell is the answer to every issue. Related to the above, some critiquers go overboard to using show, don't tell for the solution to any number of unrelated writing problems. Writers hearing "You're not showing here, just telling," when addressing a character's dialog only shows they don't know what they are talking about, using the rule as a crutch because they don't know what else to say. Enough of those, and a writer is tempted to ditch the rule as lame simply because they encounter people who are using it lamely.


3. Hate any perceived rules. Some folk are just anti-rule. Any perceived guideline that says one should do X, Y, or Z in writing automatically gets push back. "I'll show them" attitude prevails. Especially true if the person gets someone saying you always have to do it this way if you want to keep a reader's attention.


4. Lazy writers not looking to improve. Some writers don't care. They just want to write a story and have everyone praise them. They aren't looking for critiques. They don't want to know how to improve their writing. They feel what comes natural to them is correct for them, and any effort to write differently is artificial. So they don't gain the writing skills through practice, including knowing when and how to show instead of tell.

If you've fallen into one of these reactions to the show, don't tell rule, maybe it is time to take a step back and gain a balanced perspective. The last group may find this the hardest to do, so let's look first at why one needs to show in fiction, instead of tell.

Non-fiction conveys information; fiction conveys an experience. Few pick up a work of fiction hoping to learn how to grow a garden or how to change the starter in a car. Not that one can't learn how to do those things from a work of fiction, but that's not the reason most buy a fictional story. They buy a fictional story to be entertained. To be immersed into another person's world and experiences. To see the world from a different set of eyes.

The showing mode of writing is not an efficient means to convey information. This is why non-fiction doesn't use much, if any, showing. Even the stories told in a non-fiction book are told in telling mode, because the point is to illustrate a truth, not have the reader experience another person's life. For instance, you'll note the stories in the Bible are primarily told not shown.

However, to have a reader sink into another person's world, to see from their eyes, showing becomes critical. Telling can't effectively do that. To accomplish its goal, fiction has to be primarily showing, using telling when needed. In short, to experience another person's world, you have to convey to the reader what they are experiencing, not simply what happens to them.

A quick example. This would be telling: "Paul saw the dagger as it sank into him." It conveys the information of what happened to Paul efficiently. It does not convey what Paul experienced.

Showing would be more like this: "Paul saw the sun glint off a blade flashing his direction. He jerked back, but a pain echoed through his nerves, his skin numbed, and warmth flowed down his side, soaking his clothing. His knees buckled as darkness swept over him."

The showing doesn't efficiently convey what happened, but it does efficiently tell you what Paul experienced, thus providing emotional impact. Emotional impact is the key to entertaining fiction. Without showing, there would be little emotion conveyed, and would not be as entertaining as it could be. If a person ditches showing for one of the above reasons, then you need to be honest with yourself. You are writing fiction as if it were non-fiction.

Some will tell me, "But this writer did it effectively." Usually they are pointing to a "classic" written years ago. An omniscient narrator used to be the standard story telling mode, which involved more telling. In that day, an author didn't have to compete with more emotionally engaging stories, so writing in telling mode could still stand out, not to mention the number of published books back then per year was smaller, so easier for a well-told story to stand out.

This is not true today. You are competing with story-tellers who know how to engage their reader's emotions through effective showing. This is why you'll hear if Tolkien were submitting his Lord of the Rings book today, it is unlikely he'd gain a following. By today's standards it has a lot of problems. But you'll notice even in that work, Tolkien does show, even if it is not as much as most authors do today.

So, how does one know when to tell and when to show in fiction? I have the following general guidelines I use once I've finished my first draft and am ready to edit.

How critical is the phrase, sentence, paragraph in the movement of the story and/or character arc? The more important to these goals, the more important it is to show instead of tell.

For instance, let's say we need to get Jane to answer the telephone. The call itself moves the story forward. The ensuing conversation provides a clue to the mystery, but the fact she answers the phone isn't important other than the fact she does it. It isn't something the reader needs to experience for the story to move forward.

Indeed, to show that would likely bore the reader if they read, "A ringing echoed through Jane's head. The phone! It must be him. Her shoes snapped against the wooden floor, creaking the planks under her weight so much she wondered if she would fall through them. She wrapped her fingers around the smooth, black dial phone. A cold plastic greeted her hands. The ringing ceased as she lifted the receiver, lighter than she expected. 'Hello'?"

Unless you are building tension for a big moment/reveal, you're building emotional investment for nothing. People don't notice that level of detail unless it is new or they sense a moment of importance. You're convincing the reader something important is about to happen, and when it doesn't, they'll tend to wonder why the emotional investment was made. If you simply need to tell the reader that she answered the phone, it would be more efficient to say, "The phone rang. 'Hello'?"

To maintain the pacing of your story. Related to the last point, sometimes you need to move your characters from point A to B, but nothing happens during that time which moves the story forward. So to show all the detail of that trip would bore the reader. Reducing the trip down to a handful of descriptive words and a telling summary will keep the pacing of the novel from bogging down into drudgery.

Transitional paragraphs. Often you have a transitional paragraph between scenes that requires moving through a period of time to the next scene were story-moving dialog/action will take place. Like the last reason, it would be pretty boring to show someone on watch all night when nothing happens of significance. A simple, "George struggled to fight off sleep until the first rays of dawn arrived and Henry arrived to relieve him," gets the reader quickly through an otherwise uneventful time frame with little loss of interest.

Dialog. It is rare that you hear someone talking in showing mode. When is the last time you heard someone describe their reaction to a joke like this: "My gut tightened. I squeezed my lips tight in hopes of blocking the impending spray of coffee from my mouth. But the pressure grew to the point of shoving my lips apart. Hot liquid careened into his face." No, instead you're more likely to hear, "I laughed so hard I spewed coffee all over him."

Dialog is predominately telling. Leave the showing for the narration if you don't want unnatural dialog littering your story. Included in this is a character telling a story to another. Unless the story goes into a full flashback, in-story mode, a story told by a character in the story would tend to be more telling than showing, unless they were attempting to dramatize it.

Non-fiction. If you are writing non-fiction, one naturally uses telling mode to communicate information effectively. But there are times in fiction where a writer may want to convey some information. Back story is often given in more telling mode, often by a character. Dishing out back story needs to be in short bursts, on a need-to-know basis. You don't want long paragraphs of back story, so you don't want to show it unless there is a good reason to do so. When you need to convey information, a telling mode gets the job done much quicker.

Creating emotional distance. There are times a writer may need to create emotional distance. Especially if it is something that the point of view character is not that emotionally invested in or you want to minimize the impact on the reader. For instance, if you have a rape scene, to minimize any emotional reactions from readers who have gone through it, it could be told instead of shown.

One could come up with other instances of using telling instead of showing, but if you want your scenes to have emotional impact, in-the-story feel, you need to ensure important story-moving segments are shown instead of merely told. The uniqueness of reading a story is the immersion into another's experience, another's thoughts, another's worldview. Movies can't easily accomplish this. If you fail to take advantage of this strength in your stories for one of the reasons listed at the beginning, you'll shortchange the reader, and not give them a reason to read the next book, much less finish the one in their hands.

Do you think some of the negative attitudes toward show, don't tell are a valid reaction or an over-reaction?

How Storytelling Conveys Truth Better than Non-fiction

That is the title of my first guest article at the Speculative Faith blog. I stumbled upon a website discussing the way descriptive storytelling affects the brain, and it gelled some concepts in my head. Being I'd been invited to do a guest blog, I wrote the article for that blog. Check it out if you get a chance.

How Storytelling Conveys Truth Better than Fiction

What Does Your Story Say?

One of the big discussions in Christian writing circles revolves around the topic of what Christian fiction should do. I've discussed that here a time or two. Recently on Mike Duran's blog, deCOMPOSE, he brings this up again by asking, "Why Christian Fiction Should NOT Provide Answers." Check it out when you're done here. Some interesting discussions ensued.

But the post caused me to think as people chimed in with their various points of view. So I thought it a good idea to dive in a little further and discuss in what ways a message drives fiction.

First, understand the purpose of the type of writing, and work within that. A romance story has a particular purpose, as does a science fiction story, as does a sermon. A sermon's purpose is to get a distinct message across in a manner that impacts the listener with "truth." A non-fiction book's purpose is to convey information that is perspective enlightening and beneficial for the reader to get, hopefully in an engaging manner, that will better their lives. Both of these types of writing make judicious use of illustrations, often in story format, that highlight and serve the truth and/or information being conveyed. When a reader picks up a book of sermons or a non-fiction book, it is generally because they believe the information presented there will help them. They read the book for the message, and expect the author of the book to speak directly to them.

In general, fiction's primary aim is to entertain. When your general fiction reader wants a novel, they are little concerned with whether it has a specific message. What they want is a great story that they can get lost in and will be satisfying to them as a reader. Note, this does not mean every fiction reader feels that way. There are those who feel entertainment is a waste of time, so if they don't feel they are getting a message out of their fiction, they will feel they've wasted time. It is one of the reasons that non-fiction sells so much better than fiction. The fiction reader that likes fiction with an overt message generally view entertainment as a secondary function of any book. In other words, they read fiction like they would non-fiction.

But that group is a small subset of the fiction readers. Most fiction readers, if they feel the author is pushing a "message" or to put it in more negative terms, "an agenda," will put the book down and walk away. Why? Because if they had wanted that, they would have bought a non-fiction book. And yet, does this mean fiction shouldn't have a message? Not if you listen to many writing books. And when it comes to Christian fiction, most will tend to have a message of some kind. So what makes the difference between an engaging story that delivers a theme and message that resonates with the reader as opposed to the reader feeling the message is an agenda hitting them over the head?

In fiction, the term most often used as to what the author is trying to create is the "suspension of disbelief." That is, we want the reader to become absorbed into the story, to get lost in the characters, to "live" in the world the author has created. But when the reader runs into something that doesn't make sense or pulls them back to the reality, they are reading a story and not living it. The effect breaks the suspension of disbelief in the same way it would if in a movie you saw a camera boom momentarily dip into the top of the screen. It reminds you that you are watching actors on a set, and it breaks you out of the story.

One of the ways an author can do this is when their message turns into an agenda. That is, instead of the message serving the primary purpose of entertaining the reader, it becomes a non-fiction book by the story becoming a giant illustration for the message. Like non-fiction, the reader feels the author is speaking directly to them, rather than the characters. When the message breaks into the story in an artificial, shoehorned feeling, breaking character motivations or circumstances or reality way, then it destroys the suspension of disbelief for the readers, and they are no longer in the story. At the point that happens, the message becomes an agenda.

When does that happen? Two ways. The least used anymore but most famous is the author interruption that used to be so common in stories, especially morality stories. So after telling the story, the narrator would say, "And so, the moral of this story is..." and then proceed to spell out what the reader should have come to believe or see from the story. The other way is doing the same thing, but through either the character (instead of a narrator) or through an obvious circumstance, like the "bad" guy getting his due.

For an example, allow me to use an old flash fiction I did a long time ago (currently in my Ethereal Worlds anthology). In the story, I had the main character come to the realization that what they were doing was killing the "unborn" children of an alien race, after a few scenes of attempting to defeat these aliens from taking what they had. In the future world I had created, abortion had long since been abandoned and was looked up by them as we currently look at slavery now. So I felt it natural at that point for the protagonist to realize he was doing something that went against his morals, and gave him motivation to stop fighting them and let them take back their children.

Well, I sent that into one magazine, and the basic message that came back was that they felt I had hit them over the head with a big anti-abortion message, and that the whole story was written to come to that point. Actually, it hadn't. I didn't know where the story was going to end when I started it, and when I got to that spot, that seemed his natural conclusion and thought. But what they were telling me is that it felt like I had intruded into the story and used the story not to entertain people, but to attempt to convince people that abortion was wrong. I was in effect, giving a sermon illustration, not telling a fiction story.

So before sending it to the next magazine, I simply took out the character's realization of that fact, and made him not want to kill them once he realized why they were so adamant in getting back their children, unborn though they be. The only real difference was that I no longer directly had the character bring out the specific conclusion. Yet the dots were still there that these unborn alien children were worth saving and not killing. But it would be easy for the "pro-choice" reader to interpret it differently at that point, as being respectful of the wishes of the aliens who felt it was important, and maybe those babies weren't the same as ours, since the babies obviously were not residing in a mother's womb specifically, but in a cloud of cosmic dust.

It is also true that the more controversial the topic, the more this will happen. If I had been talking about slavery, I doubt my more overt message would have raised as many hairs. If I had my character realize the were killing a sentient being, like some cosmic pet the aliens were protectors of, I doubt the editors would have felt they'd been hit over the head with an agenda. It wouldn't have taken them out of the story, they wouldn't feel that if the character had thought that, it would feel I was using the story to make a point. The more people who disagree with your character's thoughts on something, the more it will feel to them like the author is attempting to knock you out and drag you to their side of the argument.

It is for that reason the biggest topics that create a sense of agenda in a story are religion, politics, and culture/morals. Anytime those become overt as the underlying message in a story, that's when it will feel like an agenda to anyone who doesn't agree with it. It is one of the reasons why Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy bombed as the books went along. The first book, The Golden Compass, was a big hit. Pullman's atheistic beliefs, however were subtle in that volume and didn't rise to the level of being an agenda. But as the series went on, it became more and more overt, as the whole story was about the death of God. By the last book, it was clear that Pullman's ideology had become the reason for the story. The whole trilogy was a huge illustration about how God was irrelevant and not worth believing in, and a statement where society would one day be: godless.

So a theme or message transforms into an agenda once the reader picks up that the author's primary purpose is to convey a message to him or her. And once that happens, suspension of disbelief is destroyed. Then you'll either have an amen corner from the choir that likes the message, or a closing of the book from those who do not. And even a closing of the book from those who might agree, but didn't buy your book to hear you preach a message. The message and theme must remain inherent to the story. It must serve the story rather than the story serving it. Once that gets reversed, then you no longer have a novel, but a non-fiction book. Once the reader senses, "This author wants me to believe X because of this story," then it subverts the primary purpose for fiction: to entertain.

The answers can be there, but it has to be the reader that comes to drink from that well and sees them, rather than a fire hose spraying it over the pages.

At what point does a message evolve into an agenda for you?