Now that I have my new story up and running (and I love it!) I decided to write it in first person, since this is the recounting of how things happened. Only, now I am having a spot of bother with getting rid of telling sentences and using showing ones. The way I write my story is like the MC is telling the story to someone else after the fact. My previous story was riddled with telling sentences and I tried to extradite them as far as possible with moderate success. Now I do not know how to handle showing vs. telling in this first-person account.
If any of my readers know how to handle this, please tell me! I am brand new to writing in first person. I am pretty new to writing creatively as a whole. So any advice in this regard would be greatly appreciated.
Switching from one perspective to another is very difficult to a finished book. I tried it once, and the WIP is still on the back burner.
ReplyDeleteI do however rotate my usage's with other works, and love doing both. For some great tips on showing vs. telling check out Misha @My First Book. She did a really great post about it a while ago, and it might help you out!
http://sylmion.blogspot.com/2011/06/showing-vs-telling.html
When I have a character telling me their story in first person, it does sound an awful lot like telling. I have to step back from them and think about what they're saying. When you write in first person, you need to think not of what a character is saying but that you ARE the character. Step into the person's shoes, so to speak, and walk around with them. Even act out a scene to get a feel for it. Imagine everything through their eyes. What do they see? Feel? Touch? Hear? Smell? Do that, and you'll get out of telling the story and into showing it. Writing in first person is so much more intimate than writing in third. It can be difficult, but it can also tell some stories better.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great question and you've really given me pause to think about a story I've been tinkering with in my head that I was thinking of writing from first person point of view.
ReplyDeleteI think Cherie has hit it on the head about needing to get into the characters shoes to experience what they do in order to write it.
Reading your manuscript does it reflect what the character sees and experiences as it happens?