The SHOW ME State-You've gotta live there

Does anyone remember when I said, three months ago, I was writing a series on revising a finished manuscript?
I sure wish the answer was NO so I could forget all about that.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid someone will remember, so here is lesson THREE.
Here’s what I look for as I give a book a final read through.
1) Grinding action to a halt--Read about that HERE
2) Consistency—Feel free to review that HERE
3) Telling
4) Dialogue tags
5) Comedy
Today, I’m writing about—Telling
Here’s the thing about telling. I do it a lot on the first pass. In fact I PLAN to do it a lot. Maybe you’ve heard me say here that I tend to shy away from tough scenes, procrastinate, go back to the earlier part of the book and fiddle with it, revise it, all to avoid a new scene that I know I’m going to do wrong and have to fix. Then, when I finally FORCE myself to write it, I have to give myself permission to do it badly, just plow through, set up the foundation and the frame of the house but don’t put siding on or windows and certainly don’t do any landscaping.
One of the ways I force myself through is with telling. I simply tell what happens. Well, that’s all fine to get it down the first time but of course I can’t leave it like that.
The scene that comes to mind is from Montana Rose. If you’ve read it, there’s a scene where Cassie has been dragged by a horse and is all scraped up. Red gets upset because he doesn’t like her doing the outside chores when she’s so vastly pregnant plus incompetent. So they argue and Red forbids her to do any more outside chores until after the baby is born.
When I first wrote that scene it was two paragraphs long.
All telling.
When the book came out it was five pages long.
If I had it to do over again, I’d have had the horse actually drag her.
Now I look back on that and wonder why I skipped such a juicy opportunity.
I wish I could show you the old and the new. But the old is forever deleted and you don’t want five pages to read today—you’re busy people. But I’ll say that to me ‘showing’ means acting the scene out on stage. I picture it happening live. Characters moving, dialogue, the furniture, food cooking, the smell of the log cabin and the winter breeze and the frying chicken. That’s showing. It’s four dimensional height, depth, width and time. And has the five senses. Telling is flat. Characters should always be talking, the senses of the reader should be engaged.
The thing I love about showing versus telling is showing takes way, way more words. If I’ve got a book that is too short, I can go in and find telling spots, (some of them are okay) and show them instead, act them out. It’s the right thing do it, but it has the added advantage of lengthening your manuscript greatly.
Telling is one of the main things I look for when I’m revising a manuscript. No matter how much I learn it seems I can always be trusted to lapse into it.
Any questions? Maybe I’d be better at answering questions than explaining to begin with. Just know that if you’ve got paragraphs of your manuscript unbroken by dialogue and action, then you’re telling. Internal musing is telling. Backstory is telling. It’s all dead, dull and needs to be ripped from your story and cast into the dust bin of history. If you do that, tell me how the dust bin smells and how your shoulder aches after you’ve done the ‘casting’.
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