Free Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence by Lisa Cron Page B

him glance at her face, his eyes quickly darting away, and quickened her stride.
Ann’s heart sank; she knew Michelle must have mentioned the dirty rug thing again. Why else would he just sit there, staring at the damn carpet, the coward. He was probably waiting for her to figure it out and send him packing. Jeff’s such a fool, she thought. I’m better off without him.
     
    In this version, even though we don’t hear the exact details of what Michelle said to Jeff, Ann’s insights go a long way toward filling us in on their dynamic. And see how clearly we understood what Jeff was thinking simply by reading his body language? Since we know what Ann wants (Jeff), and what she’s realizing she’s not going to get (Jeff), her body language told us what was going on in her head as she paced. Just as Jeff’s body language reveals his reaction to hers. It is purely visual. It works because, story-wise, we know what it means, emotionally, to both of them. Otherwise, the scene would be opaque. Sure, we’d know something intense is going on between them, but we’d have no idea what.
    But wait. Instead of all that, couldn’t you just leap in and tell the reader how they’re feeling? And while you’re at it, give us the heads-up on who’s right and who’s being a little bit of a jerk? I mean, what if the reader gets it wrong?
    And that brings us to another common pitfall: editorializing. It’s what writers resort to when they don’t trust the reader to get it.

Hey, You’re Not the Boss of Me
     
    Make
us feel, and believe me, we’ll know who’s right and who’s probably not.
Tell
us what to feel, on the other hand, and what we’ll feel is bullied. That’s why when you’re checking to make sure you’ve conveyed how the action affects the protagonist, you want to resist the urge to jump in and take it a step further, by telling the reader what to think or feel about it as well. Editorializing is perfectly fine in a newspaper (remember those?) op-ed piece, where the whole
point
is to tell readers what you believe they should think or feel. In a story, telling readers what to feel not only annoys them but pushes them right out of the story. The reader’s goal is to experience the story on her own terms, not to have it explained to her or be herded toward a specific hard-and-fast conclusion. This even applies to something as seemingly benign as exclamationpoints. They’re almost always distracting! Really!! What’s worse, they pull the reader’s brain right out of the story by giving her an overt order rather than trusting the story to trigger her reaction all by itself.
    So if you want us to think that John’s a bad guy, show him doing bad things. It’s just like in life: Imagine your coworker Vicky is telling you about her next-door neighbor, whom you’ve never met. “That John,” she says. “He’s such a jerk; he’s the most self-centered, unscrupulous man I’ve ever met.” Now, even though this may be an absolutely accurate assessment of John, because you don’t know him, nor do you have any idea what Vicky’s basing
her
assessment on, you have no way of knowing whether it’s true. But you
have
been listening to Vicky rant on and on about how awful he is. And it sounded sort of bitter. So now you’re wondering what she did to make John into such a meanie. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of her intent.
    But if, instead of telling you how to feel about him, Vicky tells you that John steals from his grandmother, shoves past everyone on the train, and spits in his boss’s coffee, you’ll not only agree with her, but you might dislike John even more than she does.
    Your job is not to judge your characters, no matter how despicable or wonderful they may be. Your job is to lay out what happens, as clearly and dispassionately as possible, show how it affects the protagonist, and then get the hell out of the way. The irony is, the less you tell us how to feel, the more likely we’ll feel