Hints and Whispers

If I was going to state the number-one flaw of most writing I've been asked to edit over the last 20 years, it's probably the adage of show don't tell. I mean, I have edited grammatical nightmares, writers who never met a comma they didn't love, and writers who apparently have never met a comma, or gave them all away to the writer who loves them. But practical matters of grammar and punctuation and typos galore aside . . . show don't tell is one of the hardest things to get across to new writers or writers who haven't yet mastered it.

I consider show don't tell in the same category as back story dumping. It's all this telling and not enough showing. And I think, myself, I finally "got" it about the twentieth time I highlighted three pages of text and pressed "delete." Believe me, I get it. I think of it like this . . . I recently had dinner with a new friend, and part of the process of getting to know someone new is revealing your past--"here's my back story." How you got from birth to here, in ten major highlights. Someone asks you, "Why did you move to Virginia?" I could say "Because." But really, I am more likely to tell you the back story of the four major hurricanes, the back of my house that blew away, the roof perpetually losing tiles and leaking, nursing a baby in a closet as a category 3 blew through town and being unable to get diapers for another week. I have a back story. We all do.

And as a writer, and as a person, I understand that it is really fascinating to put it all out there. BUT . . . you often cross the line into "telling" category. You can tell the hurricane story in a flash of dialogue in your book. BUT, you wouldn't want to then add three pages of the actual EXPERIENCE of the hurricane. That's what I mean when I said I hit delete. Now I understand that all that back story doesn't belong. Instead, what I am left with is hints and whispers. Just enough that the reader can guess and surmise, enough to let the mood waft through the book. Enough to keep people reading until, little by little, the WHOLE back story comes out. I have a book now in which the entire journey of the heroine is to discover who her mother really was as a person, and readers will not know until the LAST page what the mother's whole back story is. That's 300 pages of whispers.

Go back to the dinner with a new friend. Even as they tell you all that back story, the hints and whispers are there. Think about it. You ask, "Do you have any siblings?" They say, "I have one sister and a brother. My sister lives about ten minutes away. We're really close. My brother . . . well, hmm . . . you know, he married this woman and we haven't spoken in ten years." Hell yeah, there's a story there. But it's, perhaps, a story for another day. You have time to get all the back story. Maybe even a whole book.

Thoughts? Hints and whispers in your own book? Your own life?