Neo-Victorian Voices: The Witches of New York, Ami McKay (2016)

Welcome back to my long-running Neo-Victorian Voices series, in which I review books set in the nineteenth century but published in the twenty-first. Today, I’m blogging about Ami McKay’s 2016 novel, The Witches of New York, which combines three of my favorite things—the 1800s, NYC, and a little dash of magic. 

Beatrice Dunn arrives in New York in 1880 on the same day as the great obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, which is nearing the end of its long journey to Central Park. Beatrice is seeking employment in a teashop after reading an advertisement that warns, “those averse to magic need not apply.” She already has a keen interest in the occult, but it’s only after touching the city’s Egyptian wonder that she starts to see and interact with spirits, making her of great interest to Adelaide and Eleanor, the teashop’s proprietors, to alienist Dr. Brody, who takes a scientific approach to the supernatural, and to a preacher and a demon, both of whom wish her ill. 

The novel’s best moments are those where Beatrice interacts with ghosts—when she sees a small boy playing around his mother in the teashop, before realizing he’s dead, and when she scribes messages from spirits using Dr. Brody’s scientific instrument—and the portions dealing with the history of New York (e.g., the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island and a terrible hotel fire). I also enjoyed the inclusion of the raven familiar, Perdu, and the newspaper articles, journal entries, and grimoire excerpts that head each chapter, painting a charming picture of McKay’s magical world. 

Less satisfying was how overstuffed the novel felt at times, with some plot lines (e.g., the relationship between Adelaide and her ghost mother, Eleanor’s affair with a married woman, the threat posed by the woman who deformed Adelaide’s face, and the conflict between the demon Malphas and the witches of the novel’s title) feeling unresolved. I went into the novel expecting it to be a standalone, but it became clear early that I was reading setup for future books, and I was unsurprised to learn that a second novel, Half Spent Was the Night, followed in 2018. I also would have loved to better understand the theological underpinnings of McKay’s magic system. The proponents of Christianity in the novel are uniformly terrible, but this is a world where demons roam. Is there a God? And, if so, what does He/She/They think about witchcraft?

Overall, I’d recommend the book to those who enjoy their dark magic on the lighter side and to readers for whom a series is a bonus, rather than detracting from their enjoyment. What novel(s) should I read next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want future blog posts delivered straight to your email inbox? Sign up here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Edith Holler, Edward Carey (2023)

Welcome back to the Secret Victorianist and my Neo-Victorian Voices series, where I write about books published in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth. Today, I’m breaking my own rules by reviewing a novel set in 1901, but, since that was the year of Queen Victoria’s death and this is mentioned in the opening pages of the book, I’m going to give myself an exception.

Our main character, Edith Holler, is a 12-year-old girl who lives in a theater in Norwich in the East of England. In fact, she has never left the Holler Theater due to a curse cast upon her as an infant. Carey’s love for the theatrical world is apparent on every page. I particularly enjoyed how he compares backstage to the different decks of a ship, the strong contrasts he draws between the front and back of the house, and the inclusion of actorly superstitions, such as referring to fire in the theater as “Mr. Jet.”

But as much as this is a book about the stage play world, it is also a book about Norwich. The character of Edith is an expert on the city she has only seen from the roof or through the windows of her theater, and Carey draws on a wealth of Norfolk history about and myth while embellishing upon it too with his vivid imagination.

I didn’t realize when I first picked up the book how much it would veer into the territory of historical fantasy, but I was delighted as the chapters became more and more unsettling and surreal. The Norwich of Edith Holler is overrun by deathwatch beetles, which locals make into an (apparently) appetizing paste. The problem? Edith suspects that murdered children are the secret ingredient in the city’s famous Beetle Spread, and her father is planning to marry into the family of (cannibal?) entrepreneurs behind the historic recipe. 

You’ll love this book, like I did, if you’re a fan of the bizarre and the macabre. I wrote before about Edward Carey’s 2018 Little. In both novels, Carey includes his own illustrations, bringing his creations to life. In Edith Holler, many of these illustrations are the pieces of a toy theater, which transported me back to the world of Pollock’s Toy Museum, a nineteenth-century gem I reviewed for the blog a decade ago. You can even download the pieces of the theater from Carey’s website if you fancy recreating the Gothic delights of the novel for yourself. I don’t know personally if I’d want to bring Edith and her dark world into my apartment, but I’ll undoubtedly be reading whatever Carey writes next.

Which novel would you like me to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want more blog posts like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022)

Historical fiction meets science fiction in the latest book I’m writing about as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on novels written in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth. Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022) is inspired by H.G. Wells’s classic tale of man playing God—The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).

Readers of the original novel will recognize some common elements—the mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau, his alcoholic assistant Montgomery, and a host of Beast Folk (here, “hybrids”), the result of the scientist’s experiments. But there are significant departures too. While The Island of Doctor Moreau is set in the South Pacific, the action of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes place in a remote part of the Yucatán peninsula in nineteenth-century Mexico. And while our characters are isolated, they are not on an island—a backdrop of real political strife ups the stakes as the novel comes to its dramatic conclusion. Then too, there’s the daughter of the title. Carlota Moreau (the doctor’s illegitimate child) is one of our two point of view characters, along with Montgomery. There’s no straight man, like Edward Prendick, to mirror reader responses to the story—all the characters are implicated in the ethical questions at the novel’s heart, some in ways they don’t initially realize.

There’s lots to love here—a well-paced Gothic tale, a classic Victorian story in an unusual setting, and feminist commentary layered over the moral questions that Wells’s classic raises. I would have enjoyed a few more concrete descriptions of the hybrids, especially given the medical training Carlota receives from her father, to keep the novel more clearly in the realm of scientific speculation, rather than sheer fantasy. Another line Moreno-Garcia walks is in her depiction of the relationship between Montgomery and Carlota. While their age gap isn’t unusual for the period, she seems aware that modern readers may take issue with Montgomery’s attraction to a girl he first met as a child. As a result, the conclusion to the story between them seems a little non-committal, in a way that, for me, made the ending less satisfying. 

Did you read The Daughter of Doctor Moreau? I’d love to know what you thought of it. And do let me know which novel you’d like to see me review next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates about this blog and my writing straight to your email inbox? Sign up for my mailing list here. 

2022: My Year in Reading – A Retrospect

Happy New Year! For the last two years, I’ve taken part in the Goodreads Challenge and posted a retrospect on all the books I’ve read to round out the year (check out the 2020 and 2021 editions here). It’s New Year’s Eve today which means it’s time for the 2022 round-up.

As in 2021, I read 60 books in total. To keep myself on track that meant I aimed to read 60 pages a day (sometimes more than matching that goal and sometimes falling behind). I read 47 novels and 13 works of nonfiction, marginally more nonfiction than in the previous two years. Thirty-eight books were by women and 22 by men (again more balanced than in previous years). Just under half of the books (28) were historical fiction, the genre I write in, and 10 books were published this year, meaning I read them when they were hot off the press. 

Favorite Fiction Read

As ever, it’s difficult for me to compare such different books, but some of the best novels I read this year were: Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens (2022), a ghost story about the spirit of a fourteen-year-old girl haunting George Sand and Frederic Chopin during their time in Mallorca; Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), a classic for a reason; Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001), a masterclass in point of view; and The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith (2018), which did a great job weaving together narratives from different centuries.

Favorite Neo-Victorian Voices Read

The book I most enjoyed reading for my Neo-Victorian Voices series of blog posts on books written in the twenty-first century, but set in the nineteenth, was Julie Cohen’s Spirited (2020)—check out my review here. 

Favorite Non-Fiction Read

The non-fiction books I read this year covered a range of topics—from French culture to the Yorkshire countryside; from race relations to witchcraft trials; from Native Americans to Scientology; from a nineteenth-century serial killer to both World Wars, and many more. I most enjoyed The Exit Visa by Sheila Rosenberg (2019) and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwyne (2010). 

Feeling Fantastic?

One theme I noticed in my reading this year was that I read more books that fall into the Fantasy genre or were historical with a Fantasy twist. Three I’d recommend are Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2021), The Library of Legends by Janie Chang (2020), and A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin (2016). 

Looking Forward to 2023

I’m planning to go a little easier on myself in 2023, aiming for a minimum of 50 books again, as I did in 2020, rather than 60, as in the last two years. After the holidays, I have an impressive stack of new volumes on my TBR begging to be read. However, as always, I’d love your recommendations. Let me know what books you’d like to see me read and review next—I’m always on the lookout for reads with a nineteenth-century connection for this blog so let me know here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Writers’ Questions: What IS Historical Fiction?

Hello and welcome back to my Writers’ Questions series, where I answer burning questions you might have about the craft and business of writing. As a writer of historical fiction, I’ve posted previously about some of my favorite and least favorite tropes in the genre, but I’ve never posted about what historical fiction actually is. Think the answer is straightforward? You might be mistaken…

At its simplest being an author of historical fiction means writing stories set in the past. But how far back would you consider “history”? As anyone knows who’s ever been to a thrift store and noticed clothes from a decade you remember being labeled as “vintage” knows, it can be very disorienting to see period you lived through being treated as historical. Yet, at the same time, World War II, one of the most common settings for historical novels being published in the early twenty-first century, is within living memory for some people alive today. 

Because of this, rather than choose an arbitrary number of years’ distance for a book to be labeled as #histfic, I favor Margaret Atwood’s definition: historical fiction is “set in a time before the writer came to consciousness.” That means that if I ever write a novel set in the 1970s, 1980s, or even the super early 1990s, I’d consider my setting historical. If another writer were a teen or adult during those decades and wrote a book drawing on memories as well as research, I wouldn’t consider it to be historical in the same way.

So much for the “historical” part of the name, but what about the word “fiction”? Believe it or not, this can be controversial too, as it’s very common to see real (and really famous!) historical figures showing up in the pages of historical novels. My answer here is much simpler: it doesn’t matter who your characters are; if your novel is set in the past and you’re making things up, it’s historical fiction. 

If your novel is primarily about a real person who lived in the past, you might like to use the label “biographical historical fiction”, and this is valid whether or not your protagonist is a household name like Napoleon or someone lesser known, like Lydia Robinson, the titular character of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress. Super recognizable historical figures are sometimes referred to as “marquee names” by those in the publishing industry as they are powerful marketing tools, but this term isn’t one that readers are usually familiar with. On the other hand, if a big historical figure just makes a cameo appearance in your book (e.g., you’re writing about London in the 1590s and William Shakespeare wanders into one of your scenes) that’s not enough for the sub-genre to be “biographical”.

Historical fiction is a wide genre bucket, so we see many crossovers with other genres too. Love stories that are set prior to the writer’s consciousness, which follow the romance novel structure, are designated “historical romance”. If your book is about a detective character solving a murder, many decades or centuries ago, congratulations, you’ve written a “historical mystery”. And if your historical setting has a magical twist, it sounds like you’re an author of “historical fantasy”.

Let me know what topic(s) you would like me to cover next in my Writers’ Question series! You can always contact me via the comments below, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Writers’ Questions: What Mistakes Do Beginner Writers Make When Working on a Novel?

Since the sale of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, I’ve been answering aspiring authors’ burning questions about writing and publishing as part of my Writers’ Questions series.

Today I’m tackling the biggest mistakes newbies make and the traps they can fall into when penning that first book (trust me, I’ve been there). This list isn’t exhaustive and it’s more focused on process than craft. Check out the rest of the series for more sentence-level insight and introductions to technical topics.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the mistakes…

Jumping the gun

You got there! You typed “The End” and the novel that’s taken you months, or even years, to write is finished. This is definitely a moment to celebrate. So treat yourself, pop a champagne cork, call up a friend. But, whatever you do, don’t immediately hit “send” and shop your manuscript to every agent and editor in the business. If you haven’t edited the novel, through several rounds of revisions, it’s not ready. If no one else (or only your parent or partner) has read it, it’s not ready. If you haven’t read it imaginary cover to imaginary cover again and again until you could almost recite the entire novel, it’s not ready. Sorry! You’ve achieved a lot, but there’s still work to be done.

Talking about your book too much

Writing doesn’t have to be a dirty secret. Plenty of authors now document their full drafting journeys via social media, and if that motivates you, I say, go for it! However, in my experience, talking in detail about the plot points of my work in progress even to just one friend is usually counterproductive. It deadens some of the urgency I feel to “tell” a story, making it harder to stay motivated, and it leaves me vulnerable to receiving feedback when I’m in a creative vs. an editing mode (i.e. not ready to hear it).

Getting stuck on just one thing

Vague, I know. But the biggest “things” I see early career writers getting stuck on include research (especially in historical fiction), world building (especially in science fiction and fantasy), and first chapters (this can happen to any of us). Are research and world building key parts of the writing process? Yes. Is it a problem when you’re so lost in them you’re not writing? Also, yes. At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and start writing. You can “fix” details later. The same thing goes for first chapters. They’re really important, but if rewriting Chapter 1 ad nauseam is prohibiting you from working on Chapters 2-29, you have a problem.

Being too ritualistic about writing

Drinking a glass of lemon water, meditating for 20 minutes, and doing a yoga session to unlock my creative flow, before sitting down at an antique writing desk with a mug of tea to my right and a cat on my lap, sounds lovely, but this isn’t how books get written. Books get written by writers deciding to write whenever and however they can, even if that means in less than ideal circumstances. If you’re envisioning the author profile a journalist will write about your perfect writing nook but you haven’t passed 10k words, it might be time to reassess…

Being impatient

With yourself and with the industry. If writing a book was easy, everyone would do it. You have to put in the time to hone your skills and make your novel as good as it can be. There will be many hours of work, and, once you’re ready to try to find a publisher, there will be many more hours of waiting. If you know patience isn’t your strong suit (it’s definitely not mine!), experiment with the powers of distraction. Hint: the best form of distraction is always writing another book.

So that’s what I’ve got for you today—five big mistakes to avoid when starting out on your writing journey. I hope the blog post has been helpful and that you’ll consider reading my novel, Bronte’s Mistress, if you haven’t already. I’m always open to topic ideas for my Writers’ Questions series, so please contact me via Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. And make sure you sign up to my monthly email newsletter below. 

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Neo-Victorian Voices: Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

The crowded, murky streets of Victorian London. A detective. And a missing child. Pretty standard fare, you might think, for a historical mystery set in the nineteenth century, but Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars (2020), the latest novel under review in my Neo-Victorian Voices series, is anything but expected.

Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

First there’s her detective, Bridie—fearless, flame haired and ugly bonneted. Then there are the protagonist’s sidekicks—a seven-foot maid, with a penchant for a woman snake charmer, and a tattooed boxer, who may be either a ghost or a drug-induced hallucination. Christabel, the child Bridie has been employed to find, isn’t ordinary either. She has teeth like a pike. Snails, newts and other nasties trail after her. It’s said she can drown enemies even on dry land.

Things in Jars isn’t for the weak-hearted or stomached. But that doesn’t mean the novel offers only darkness. There’s a humour to the story, which is a wonderful complement to its macabre subjects, and an empathy to the shifting point of view, which plunges us into many characters’ motivations, feelings and desires, even those of a raven wheeling high above the scene. Kidd’s use of language is also astonishing. Her vocabulary is vast but her words always well chosen. Her Irish characters’ voices are expertly rendered—believable and lyrical without relying on cliché or non-standard spelling to convey dialect.

The fantastical elements of the story stood out for me in particular. I’m not a huge reader of historical fantasy, though I have reviewed a few favourites for this blog in the past (e.g. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus). But Kidd’s creatures are unique and genuinely uncanny, as unnerving as any creation straight from the pages of a nineteenth-century Gothic.

Things in Jars is a wonderful book to read if you want to stray outside your normal genre choices. The novel takes a familiar historical setting and makes it alien, gives us a satisfying conclusion to its central mystery while leaving us with more, and gives readers a creature of the ocean depths that belongs in neither The Little Mermaid, nor The Shape of Water.

Which novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on novels written in the twenty first century, but set in the nineteenth? Let me know, here, on Facebook, on Instagram or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you want to read about my novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which was edited by the same editor as Things in Jars, click here and/or sign up for my monthly newsletter below.

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Writers’ Questions: Should I write an outline (plotters vs. pantsers)?

In the last two posts in my Writers’ Questions series I dived into the business side of being an author with posts on finding literary agents and how to query them. Today, I’m returning to craft, with a discussion of how writers approach plotting out lengthy and complex novels.

G.R.R. Martin (1948- )

First, let’s start with some definitions:

The plotter: The writer who prefers to plan their novel meticulously before typing “Chapter One”. They may follow a specific novel planning method (you’ll find many for free online) or their feeling for plot may be instinctual, but either way they create their own map to take them from beginning to end of the writing process.

An outline: The plotter’s map and their secret weapon. This can vary in length and structure but it’s usually a document that sketches out the events of the novel, chapter by chapter, hitting all major plot points. Other plotters may eschew written outlines and plan using post-it notes or whiteboards (think: the murder detective’s office in a TV drama).

The pantser: The writer who prefers to fly by their seat of their proverbial pants. They make up their story as they write and may have little to no idea about where or how their novel will end at the outset.

Discovery writing: What the pantser engages in. Writing is an act of exploration where the writer is “surprised” by the events of their own novel.

Architects and Gardeners: Game of Thrones author G.R.R. Martin’s preferred terms for plotters and pantsers respectively. The only key difference here is that Martin sees gardeners as planting seeds, which bloom later on in their stories. This suggests a little more forethought than simply “pantsing” it.

The ARCs (advance reader copies) of Bronte's Mistress

The plotter vs. pantser debate is one that divides writers—and not along neat lines of success. Some swear by outlines, others feel they’d limit their creativity. But, if you’ve never outlined before and any of the following statements are true for you, I’d advise giving it a go:

You’re super organised in other areas of your life

Your calendar is colour-coded, your inbox is empty, you keep lists of birthdays and set reminders on your phone? If so, outlining isn’t just something that might be helpful for you—you might even enjoy it!

You’ve been writing the same novel for YEARS

Maybe an outline will help you see the finish line.

Your novels are never long enough

If you’re making the transition from shorter fiction to works of a novel length, outlining in advance could help you see if your plot is really complex enough to stretch across 70,000-110,000 words.

Your story loses its way

Your middle is slow or you’re getting feedback that your ending doesn’t quite map back to your opening. An outline could be an answer to your woes.

For my upcoming novel, Bronte’s Mistress, I acted more as a plotter than a pantser, although I’ve played with both approaches to writing. Because my novel is historical, and about real people, I started with a spreadsheet of all known events, categorised by whether they were important to my protagonist, the men in her life, her children or the Bronte family. I used this list to determine the best opening, climax and ending of my novel and then played the fun game of “fill in the blanks”, inventing the imagined events that would fall between those history had recorded.

A sneak peek at my early planning spreadsheet for Bronte's Mistress

Using Scrivener, I then noted the (real or made up) events I was sure would be scenes in the text sections where I’d go on to write them. I also inserted any snatches of prose (usually dialogue) that had come into my head during this plotting process to ensure I didn’t lose them.

My outline then was less of a standalone document than the sketch an artist applies paint over or bones later clothed with flesh. There was still so much I “discovered” along the way (especially related to flashbacks about events before the novel started and the characterisation of more minor characters), but my map kept my ship on course, not dashed against the rocks.

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences. Do you have a favourite outlining technique? Or do you love to invent as you go? As ever, if there are any other topics you’d love me to cover in my Writers’ Questions series, let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

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Writers’ Questions: What’s the deal with Showing vs. Telling?

I’ve been blogging about historical fiction for the last six years, but, in the summer of 2020, my own debut historical novel, Brontë’s Mistress, will be released by Atria Books (more on this here).

In this series, titled Writers’ Questions, I’m sharing some advice about the writing and publication process to help other writers. Last time, the passive voice was written about by me (not zombies!). In this week’s post, I’m exploring one of the most common pieces of creative writing advice: ‘show, don’t tell’.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

You wanted to become a writer because you like to tell stories. But now someone is telling you that telling is bad, and you should be ‘showing’ instead. What’s up with that? And what does showing vs. telling even mean?

Simply put, writers are advised to show, rather than tell, when a) they’re narrating something that readers should be able to work out for themselves; or, b) they’re summarising, rather than immersing the reader in the story. Let’s look at some of the most common places where writers tell, when showing would be better:

Telling emotions

Search your work-in-progress novel for emotion words e.g. angry, happy, exhausted, sad. Then consider whether there are ways you can show characters’ emotions, vs. telling readers how they’re feeling. Often you’ll find that body language cues can replace the telling of emotions and bring more action to your story.

If John is banging his fists on the table and turning red in the face, readers will probably conclude that he’s angry. If Susan is tired make her yawn. If she’s sad, maybe she’s hanging her head and sniffing back tears.

You may run into a problem where you keep repeating the same body language and/or actions. Maybe your characters are constantly shrugging, slamming doors, or crossing their arms. This is a great opportunity to hone your writerly powers of observation. What are the different ways the people you know in real life respond when they’re angry, for example? Not everyone is the door slamming type!

Telling relationships

Relatedly, writers can also fall into a trap of telling readers the state of relationships between characters e.g. 'Priya had a crush on Kevin', or 'Michael and Jayden had been best friends for five years'.

Often this is totally unnecessary. You can show Michael and Jayden’s friendship through how they speak to each other and the length of their relationship through references, in dialogue or narration, to their shared past. Humans act very differently with each other depending on their level of intimacy so bring some of these nuances to how your characters communicate in your story.

There are lots of great ways to show that Priya has a crush on Kevin too, many of which will give you the opportunity to develop your characters a lot more. Consider something like this:

Oh God, there was Kevin, looking beautiful, as usual, with his winning smile and perfectly messy hair. And Priya was just messy messy, dressed as a hot dog and covered in real ketchup. Maybe he wouldn’t see her. Maybe she could make a run for it. “Priya!” Kevin called from across the room. 

Telling people about your world

Lots of writers spend months, or even years, building the worlds where their novels are set. Maybe you’re writing fantasy and have dreamed up a complicated magic system. Maybe your sci-fi novel is set on a different planet in a different galaxy. Or maybe, like me, you write historical fiction and need to transport your readers to a different time and place.

In each of these cases, it’s very easy for telling to creep in. Are you opening with a prologue describing how your world was created? Are characters telling each other things both of them should be aware of (watch out for the tell-tale words ‘as you know’)? Are you writing paragraphs and paragraphs explaining the workings of philosophy, physics, and politics?

If so, consider how you can introduce features of your world more naturally by showing vs. telling. Want readers to understand a plumbing system? Maybe your characters get stuck in the sewers. Want readers to be aware that two tribes of people hate each other? Use dialogue to reveal their prejudices. No need to say ‘back then people travelled by horse and carriage’ or ‘in the Land of the Fairies, only wizards use wands’. Just have your characters travel by horse and carriage or a character say ‘he must be a wizard!’ when someone uses a wand.

However, despite the popularity of the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim, there are times when telling is a valid, even preferable, choice over showing. Here are some examples:

Telling in dialogue

People tell each other things all the time when they speak so it’s natural for your characters to do the same. For example, while above I recommended you avoid telling emotions, it can be very powerful for characters to confide their feelings to each other and discuss their emotional responses to what’s going on. Dialogue is also a great way for characters to learn necessary information they wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. Why do you think Harry Potter and friends are constantly eavesdropping under the cover of the invisibility cloak?

Telling to jump through time

Telling vs. showing is a problem when you’re writing a scene but between scenes it is sometimes necessary to tell, especially if you’re skipping a large chunk of time. Consider a sentence like ‘for the next few weeks it was business as usual’. Telling here helps you avoid the ‘boring bits’, bridges the gaps between interesting events and delivers key information to readers.

(Story)telling

The premise of many novels, especially those written in first person or omniscient third, is that readers are being told a story. Maybe a teenage girl is telling us about the time she ran away from home, or an all-seeing godlike narrator is drawing a moral from an epic adventure.

In these cases, especially at the beginning and end of scenes, chapters and the novel itself, there will be sentences that tell, rather than show. The quintessential storytelling opening, ‘once upon a time…’ for example, is of this type. Most first person novels establish why a story is being told in the opening lines and we expect this telling voice to guide us similarly throughout.

Consider, for example, the first paragraph of Mark Twain’s 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

Ultimately, we all write to tell stories and telling and showing are two of the techniques in our toolkits to do just that. The advice ‘show, don’t tell’, shouldn’t make you eschew telling entirely, but if you’re getting this feedback a lot, especially around relationships, emotions and world building, consider taking it to heart and telling your story via showing instead.

What topic would you like to see the Secret Victorianist cover in the next instalment of Writers’ Questions? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.