Neil Gaiman #004: Hit ’em hard!

          Take a look at how Neil Gaiman piles on the negatives at the beginning of chapter 7 of The Ocean at the End of the Lane:

The next day was bad.

My parents had both left the house before I woke.

It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and charmless gray.

The first three sentences all have a negative tone, so the foreshadowing is firmly in place: something bad is going to happen. But look how he does it… tell and show?

          The first line is a dead summary, 100% tell, something the “show don’t tell” people tell writers NOT to do. But then Gaiman gets more specific by showing the child alone with a nanny he fears as both parents are off to work. And there’s a bit of pathetic fallacy as well, as the weather seems to match the mood of the protagonist in the third line.

          So why does it work here? Because of the order. He moves from general to specific. The details move from general summary of a mood, to an action, to a specific description of the weather. Notice what it would lose if you reversed the order:

It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and charmless gray.

My parents had both left the house before I woke.

The day was bad.

See what it loses here? It feels like the energy is being sapped from the writing. The last line seems completely unnecessary here, since it’s already been shown. So what’s the lesson? If you want to use show and tell, put a short bit of general tell first to make people curious–why was the day so bad?–and then give the details.

Try this:

Start with a general sentence:

It was the happiest day of my life.

My brother is annoying.

Forget Mondays–Sundays are the worst day of the week.

Then move into showing specific details (at least two) that show WHY.

Coming tomorrow: Our final technique from Gaiman: Exploring a difference…