Trials and Tribulations is my first attempt at writing a story. Needless to say, I had a lot to learn and I was lucky enough to come across two people, Wayne and Louis, that were willing to help. Wayne has been teaching me how to make the story flow better and Louis has been teaching me the laws of writing.

I have also sought other sources to improve my writing skill to better my telling of Trials and Tribulations. One of the awesome sources I found was Editor-Proof Your Writing: 21 Steps To The Clear Prose Publishers And Agents Crave by Don McNair.

The following is some of the information I've found to be very useful.

"You have two choices. Write in the "here and now" or dump information. I'll tell you right now that editors and agents want you to write in the "here and now."

Unpublished writers often present information dumps, sometimes in the form of back-stories, in their manuscripts. How do you recognize one? Generally, in the midst of an information dump, your character don't do, they think. They think as they drive a car. As they sit in their office. As the ride an elevator. Nothing of interest happens in real time.

The dump includes information you think the reader needs in order to understand your character, but the way it's organized makes the reading process a dull experience."

If you have a good beta or editor, I know you have heard the statement a time or two, show, instead of tell. I know I have, but for the longest time, I really didn't know what I was being advised to do.

"When writers tell instead of show, they're generally make the mistake of writing the story from the author's POV, and not the characters'.

Let me give you a before-and-after example from my own work years ago. The first version, written in the author's POV, read like this:

But the site itself had been inhabited for much longer. The previous day she and Mike had jogged along an old path which edged the Knob, and she spotted the stark, vertical rock chimney of a burned-out cabin. It jutted from a weather rock foundation which was now covered with thick vines and forest debris. The cabin had been built near the Knob's edge, which plummeted almost two thousand feet to the valley floor. When that one-room cabin was built, its owner had probably cleared trees away to open the valley up for a spectacular view.

Notice that the author is telling about the discovery, just as one tells ghost stories around a family campfire. There is no action. There was action yesterday, but that doesn't count as action today.

I thought that excerpt was fine writing until an old writing pro pointed out the problem. I read it again, and--by gosh, she was right. What follows is the passage as I re-wrote it to put the scene into a character's POV and show the action, instead of leaving it in the author's POV and telling about it:

Mike stepped aside and she saw a clearing. Grass, kept at bay in the deep woods they'd passed through, covered an area the size of an average yard.

"This it it?" she asked.

"Yep. The original cabin site. See if you can find it."

She saw nothing but the trees and grass. Blue sky appeared over a huge, waist-high stone outcropping at her left.

"Why, we're right at the bluff's edge," she said.

"That's right. Jump off that rock, and you'll fall almost two thousand feet."

And then she saw the vertical stone chimney. She's overlooked it before, since it resembled the surrounding tall trees. She stepped tentatively towards it. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the stone foundation of a long-gone, one-room cabin. Its chimney rose from one corner, its hearth opening toward the center. Slanting rays filtering through the treetops brought the chimney and foundation to life.

She turned to Mike, "Look at that--it's just like a shrine. Why, I feel like I've just stepped out of a time machine."

The secret is to always write in real time. Use back-story information only as needed, where needed, and in context. Don't tell what happened in the past, but show it as part of the action. You'll find that. although it can be useful research for the writer, most of the back-story information is not needed in the final story."

I hope this little bit of information is useful for you as a writer, editor, or beta reader. I will continued to post more along these lines in the future, if I receive some good feedback.

Good luck in all your endeavors, especially in writing, editing, and beta'ing.

Billy