This is the second installment of my New Year’s resolution to stay current on my blog. This week in the category of craft improvement I worked on executing gems of instruction I found in the excellent little book, Twelve Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing, C.S. Lakin, editor. I was working especially on the entries regarding writing dialogue and show vs tell.

In other recent reading I learned that editors today do not want to see omniscient third person POV. Among other flaws, they consider it to be a sign of new and/or unskilled writers. Guilty! Unfortunately, much of what I have written so far deserves that description. I am working to up my game in that area.

So I was particularly interested in the book’s articles related to showing and to choosing the correct POV. It definitely takes more work and time, but “showing” results in a much more relatable story – as the experts said it would.

One way of showing is to use dialogue to convey what the POV character is seeing, feeling, etc; or to use secondary characters to comment on the POV character. I think I am finally beginning to understand what that means.

My dialogue – if you can call it that – in what I had written in the past was clunky. More like diatribes or essays than dialogue. I love rules, and one of the editors of the Fatal Flaws suggests a “Rule of Three”. In a nutshell, this prescribes changing speakers after every three lines of dialogue and inserting action or thought after every three exchanges.

I found that very helpful. My writing has benefitted greatly from my take-aways from just those two discussions – becoming a “storyshower” vs a “storyteller”, and the Rule of Three. I will continue my study of this book and will write more about my discoveries next week.

Since I am writing historical fiction, along with craft books, I am simultaneously reading about the era, people, and geography included in my novel. This includes Africa, the Netherlands, and Virginia, in the eighteenth century. My current task is to get a better understanding of the slave trade inside Africa. I want to have a better handle on which of the kings were involved in helping the Europeans and which of them might have worked to end their own participation in the trade. This – as well as all of the other issues I touch in the book – is controversial. I am bound to be criticized, no matter which position I take. So be it. But I want to have my facts straight and I owe no less to those whose lives I portray.