Fantasy has to mean something

I was quite mean about Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant in my review a while back. Not that I suppose he cares a jot, but I've had a few qualms. No review can express the totality of what you feel about a book, and once I'd started criticizing Mr Ishiguro's storytelling craftsmanship the whole thing flew off in one direction and, while I did make mention of the elements I liked, maybe the overall tone doesn't give an accurate impression.

You can see the other side of the coin in my remarks on the Fabled Lands blog here. I like fantasy, but it has to serve a purpose; it can't just be escapism. Mr Ishiguro feels the same way, it seems, as he told The Guardian's books editor Claire Armitstead in this podcast interview. His example of the pixies and what they stand for is indeed a reminder of the powerful impact the book has in places. It still isn't a patch on Never Let Me Go, but a work of quality nonetheless. I won't even mention curates' eggs.

That interview is partly a riposte to Ursula K Le Guin's defence of fantasy in reply to an earlier interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in which she felt he was denigrating the genre. Gosh, what a set-to when authors start sniping over the barbed wire of genre boundaries. The debate about The Buried Giant obviously inflames fiercer passions than would ever be stirred up by reading it. Oh, there I go again. Don't take any notice of me. As I said before, you should judge for yourself.



As it happens, I sympathize with the point that Mr Ishiguro apparently wasn't making. Coming to a novel with a set of genre expectations means that you are locking out the overdetermination that (whether intended by the author or not) is open to you when reading a non-genre work. See for example "Can we really call Frankenstein science fiction?" on this blog a while back. Genre invites a literal interpretation - that dragon is unequivocally a dragon - whereas if you find the same book in the LitFic section of the bookstore then you'll likely approach it with an open mind.

I have nearly first-hand experience of this because of my wife Roz Morris's novel Lifeform Three, which tells the story of a robot who was built to serve mankind but finds himself wanting something more. The word robot is never used in the novel and, while I'm sure Roz wouldn't be ashamed of parallels with Ray Bradbury or even Isaac Asimov, that's not really where her book belongs. If you think I'm slighting genre by saying that, let me just direct your attention to the masthead of this blog.

Some chills and a thrill

Halloween is nearly here. Tell my next-door neighbours - they've had plaster pumpkins and a big witch's-hat display on their porch for weeks. If you get yourself all worked up that early, I think the actual day loses its spooky shine. Premature horripilation, Dr Freud would've called it. But if you're not sick of ghosts and goblins yet, here are some suggestions for an enjoyable shudder:

The image above is from "Wrong Turning", a comic strip in the Creepy style that I wrote for Martin McKenna after a fog-shrouded week at Shute Gatehouse. You can read the story here for free, but if you want to see the works of real genius that inspired it, Steve Ditko's collected Creepy and Eerie strips are here.

If that lights your turnip lantern, the comics connection gives me a segue to "A Dying Trade", a story I originally cooked up for a ghost-written Clive Barker book that didn't happen. I tried turning it into a comic with the help of Russ Nicholson, but that didn't get off the ground either. But eventually Dermot Bolton produced it as a short movie directed by Dan Turner, and you can watch that here.

Talking of movies, The Book of Life is out now and has to be worth a watch, because if two Mexican maestros like Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez don't know their Day of the Dead, who does? As del Toro says:

“[What is it with Mexicans and death?] Ultimately you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character. And when people ask me, what is so Mexican about your films, I say me. Because I’m not a guy that hides the monster: I show it to you with the absolute conviction that it exists. And that’s the way I think we view death. We don’t view it as the end of end all. You say 'carpe diem' in Dead Poets Society; we have that in a much more tequila-infused, mariachi-soundtrack kind of way.”

That whole vibe of wild partying and the flowering of life in death resonates with me, maybe because I got married in Mexico (just after the Day of the Dead, in fact). I like the fabulist notion of death teeming with all these passions and possibilities, which probably accounts for me being such a big fan of Tim Schafer's adventure game Grim Fandango. Boy, I wish somebody would turn that into a movie. Or a kids' TV show. Or a comic or a series of novels. (Well, maybe somebody did the last of those, kind of, only without Manny Calavera's decent-little-guy charm.)

The thing about Halloween is the fairground fun side of it. It's the ghost train version of scariness, a chill to enjoy by the fireside on a dark and stormy night. That's why I love John Whitbourn's classic series Binscombe Tales - not exclusively horror stories as such, but all of them open a window on an unsettling world of weird. They've been anthologized more widely, and won more awards, than any eerie English yarns this side of Algernon Blackwood, and the main reason for that is the storytelling warmth that accompanies the grave-deep chill and feverish fizz of Mr Whitbourn's imagination.

A more serious take on a tale of dread is to be found in Frankenstein, which (I'm sure you know) I turned into an interactive novel a couple of years back. There's no comfort to be found there, no cosy shiver before bedtime. This isn't the Universal horror movie version to be taken with popcorn and a pinch of salt, it's Mary Shelley's bleakly brilliant work of SF - only with more humour and characterization and fewer descriptions of mountain walks and river journeys. Oh, and I added a solution to the knotty problem of how the monster got the corpse of Frankenstein's murdered friend to Ireland, which otherwise makes no plot sense whatsoever. (Sorry, Mrs Shelley.) Read Dr Dale Townshend discussing the story with me here, or go and grab a copy (for iOS or Android) here.

More exploration of nightmarish unease was supposed to happen in Wrong, the online magazine I launched with Peter Richardson. Unfortunately the creators involved were all too busy trying to make a crust to throw in their time for free - myself included. But I still stand by our manifesto:

The most unsettling fears are the ones you can’t quite put your finger on. It needn't be anything as cosy as werewolves or vampires; nothing so comfortingly concrete as a madman with a knife. The supernatural, when it appears, can be a catalyst evoking the real horror that comes from within. ...Dreams are also a kind of truth, and bad things are more sinister when they happen to the blameless. Not everything is always explained and neatly tied up. There are often loose ends that will leave you uneasy. Rod Serling would be at home here. 

To round off, let's go back to Mexico. As well as getting hitched, I was there researching Maya mythology for my gamebook Necklace of Skulls. Eldritch encounters abound with skeletal noblemen who invite you to join them for a chat, threshold guardians on the way into Xibalba, disembodied heads, and the like. You can buy that in its new Fabled Lands Publishing edition, and if you get the paperback then the Kindle version is free, but I recommend waiting a week or two for Cubus Games's all-new app version. The full gleeful ghoulishness of the Day of the Dead has rarely been so vibrantly evoked as by Xavier Mula's artwork.

And a little snippet of a whiff of a hint of news: we may have a new publisher for Mirabilis. It's no secret that our partnership with Print Media Publishing turned out a big disappointment for all involved. Book One got out to reviewers (and got some very gratifying write-ups; here and here and here, for instance) but only half a dozen copies got into bookshops, and those I had to deliver myself! Book Two simply never arrived in Britain - apparently the lorry carrying the stock went missing somewhere in Germany, and I may have one of only two copies in existence.

But now we're on the verge of signing with a big-name comics publisher (no, not Marvel) and I'm hoping that will be the catalyst for getting our story out to all the people who I'm sure would love to read Jack and Estelle's adventures if only they knew about them. 2015 is looking good!

Those unheard are sweeter

Ever thought novels ought to have soundtracks? I have to admit, it's not something that ever occurs to me when absorbed in a good book, but I do occasionally use music as part of the writing process. On the site for her novel My Memories of a Future Life, my wife Roz has a series called "The Undercover Soundtrack" in which she talks to authors about the music they use to unlock the muse. In her own words:

"If a novel could have a soundtrack, what would it be? Writers often have a secret ur-score that helps them shape their world, understand their characters and unfold their story."

This week, Roz talks to fantasy author Katherine Langrish, acclaimed author of several fantasy novels for children and young adults, including the Troll Fell trilogy. For her latest book, Dark Angels (US title The Shadow Hunt*), Ms Langrish used the troubadour songs of southern France as part of the creative process; "I needed the plangent, plaintive music of the 12th century to understand my lead character's pain," she explains.

If you're interested in good fantasy literature and how it gets written, the interview is right here.

Odd btw that the US edition has a much more evocative title, but is marred by a cover that seems to have been taken from a Mills & Boon bodice ripper of the early 1950s. Don't look (via the Amazon US link above) unless you have a high tolerance for saccharine and chintz. The UK cover, which you can see here, is no Mozart symphony but at least I'd say it passes the old grey whistle test.

Reader, I married her

It comes as a bit of a shock to find your wife has written the best novel of 2011.

Traditionally, fiction has divided into two camps. On the one hand we have literary or "contemporary" fiction, characterized by beautiful writing but often said to have no story. And then there's genre fiction, with a hot high concept to hook your interest and a series of reversals to keep you on the edge of your seat - but typically written with all the charm and elegance of a Haynes manual.

Virginia Woolf was vexed by ungainly prose styles. "Something tore," she said of such a book; "something scratched. A single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes." Well, quite. But recently, reading a book where every phrase sparkled, I realized that the (very famous) author had given me no reason to turn the page. There was no problem facing the characters, no impending disaster that they would either triumph over or succumb to. If the craft of words was all I wanted, I would do better to read poetry.

Why should style matter? Try this:

Few things have been more beautiful than my note book on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back, while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.

That's E M Forster. Or this:

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

Mark Twain. Now contrast with:

The speeding vehicle clung to the road, squeezed down by the slip-stream of its speed over the flat-dish shape of its outlines.

Enough, already! Because if the writer cares so little for language - or at least, cares so little for his story that he didn't trouble over telling it well - then why should it be worth my time to read it? And I think it kinder to leave the writer in question anonymous, except to say you are unlikely to hear him mentioned in the same breath as Forster or Twain.

Read the first page of Lolita, or A Clockwork Orange, or To Have and Have Not, and you know you are in the hands of an author whose intelligence and insight will take you somewhere new. The journey will be worth your attention and it may change you. But over the last half of the twentieth century, good prose became a peacock's tail that grew so big as to obscure the beast itself. This allowed a new strain of style-only authors to evolve, with no story to tell but all the trappings of style necessary to pass themselves off as good writers, the way a hoverfly masquerades as a wasp.

Yet there's an interesting trend in modern literary fiction. There are definite signs that story is starting to matter again. Borrowing a little from genre writing, novels such as The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife have blazed the trail. Between the extremes of geeky high concept and ethereal but aimless prose, we now have a hybrid: the compelling page-turner that is also beautifully written. Which, after all, is only what good fiction is supposed to be.

And so, back to Roz and that "best novel of the year". Of course, I'm partial. But not so much that I can't tell great writing when I see it. Hence the shock. I've been hearing about this book over the dinner table for the last five years. First the core concept: if (double underline that if) hypnosis can reveal past lives, what about future lives? Suppose you could be shown glimpses of an incarnation of yourself - your soul, whatever - in the future. What would that mean to the way you lived your life now?

Publishers loved the concept, but they wanted to Roz to take it off into the realms of genre. Murder, clues, a race against time: Dead Again in reverse. Crass? Of course, but I was right there adding my voice to theirs. A thriller with a reincarnation hook - sorry, preincarnation; what a gift to the bestseller racks. A career vista opened up of a new Roz Morris high concept genre title every year. It was the obvious way to take the idea, and exactly what Roz didn't want. She's already had that career, as a million-selling ghost writer. Now she's honed her craft and she wants to write fiction of genuine quality. Commendably, and in spite of the chorus of editors, agent and husband, she stuck to her guns. And My Memories Of A Future Life turns out be a work far more astonishingly original and more exquisitely written than anybody imagined - certainly including yours truly.

Roz released My Memories Of A Future Life originally on Kindle in several parts for 99 cents an episode, arguing that literary fiction can and should be compelling enough to bring readers back for more. After all, it worked for Dickens. Reviewers have talked about the surprise-&-delight factor - something that all novels ought to have, but which is rare enough nowadays to be worth remarking on. Even the readers who normally stick to genre have seen that Roz's literary treatment of the idea allows her to take it in unpredictable directions - because, wherever you think that preincarnation concept might go, I can guarantee you won't anticipate what Roz does with it.

Now, naturally you should take all that I say with a pinch of salt. But you don't have to take my word for it. The book is available in episodic ebook form for another month, and in paperback, and you can also hear Roz read the first four chapters in a podcast. All the details are on the book's website. It's not as a husband that you can trust me, but as an author and fellow reader.

Darkness is too easy

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

Nothing but blue skies

The glorious early summer weather that London is enjoying at the moment provides the perfect excuse for a photo session with the scrumptious new Mirabilis hardback from Print Media Productions. This is the first copy to reach Britain - the rest are even now en route by lorry from the print works in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or possibly resting in a lay-by while the drivers fit in a well-earned cuppa and a sandwich.

I've previously gone on record as saying that the Mirabilis iPad edition looks "better than print", but that was before I saw the quality of colour printing that publisher Ivo Miličević has brought to this project. These books really look amazing - even better than iPad, in fact - and are such a feast for the eye that they almost eclipse the ravishing Dirty White Candy, who took time off from her punishing schedule of blogging, tweeting, script-doctoring and novel-writing to pose for the camera in a Mirabilis t-shirt.

London Calling

My wife Roz, in addition to being a million-selling ghostwriter, runs a thriving blog called Nail Your Novel, where she dispenses advice on the craft of writing. Most of the discussion there is about novels and screenplays, so I thought it might be interesting to see what Roz makes of a comic book. She certainly fits my definition of a casual reader of the medium as, while she might accompany me to the local comics store, she couldn’t find her own way there without a map and she won’t actually cross the threshold unless I drag her inside, preferring to poke around in the dress agency down the road while I’m sorting through the latest Dark Horse and Vertigo titles. Anyway, without further ado or indeed any ado whatsoever, here is what she made of London Calling by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page:

In a London flooded so deeply that nothing below the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is showing, a woman paddles a boat. She tells her three child passengers a story about Charlotte Corday, a French psychic agent who was sent to London on a secret mission. And so we flash back to the meat of the story. It’s the 1950s. Corday is newly arrived in London, waiting for further orders about her mission and avoiding a number of unsavoury folk who seem to know more about why she’s there than she does herself.

Ultimately the mystery is about vampires, which I thought was a pity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find vampires as interesting or original as many of the other ideas that were casually slipped in just for atmosphere.

But the strength of London Calling is not the story. The real fun is the richness of the world, drawn in a boldly inked black and white style with plenty of retro drama.

It seems to have diverged from ours around the Second World War, when Winston Churchill used psychics to tell him what Hitler was thinking before he thought it himself. Walsh and Page have had a lot of fun taking recognisable elements of London - both fictional and factual - and reweaving them into a punkish world of their own. Many ideas are used as throwaway textures in the background - for instance, Quatermass’s alien discovery is fact and Martians stride around central London against recognisable buildings such as the BBC headquarters in Bush House. Charlotte gets some of her orders when a TV puppet called Dennis the Donkey speaks to her from her landlady’s TV set (and, with fairytale humour, tells her switch off and to go to bed).

Charlotte herself is a likable and distinctive guide to this world, alienated by her Frenchness and harbouring a breezy disdain for the foes she meets. Her superiority and plain speaking in the midst of the madness is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Despite the slightly pedestrian vampires, it’s a charming and likable romp. London Calling is published by Time Bomb Comics. Walsh and Page have continued the adventures of agent Charlotte Corday in The Iron Moon published by Print Media Productions.

London Calling doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, but you can buy it direct from Time Bomb Comics. For comics cognoscenti, there's a longer review on the Forbidden Planet blog, and you can find out what artist Keith Page is up to (The Soho Devil with Christopher Fowler - looks intriguing) over on his blog. The Iron Moon is on Amazon (UK only) with the further - or earlier, or parallel - adventures of Charlotte Corday:

Holmes improvement

On the whole, I'm in favour of reboots. Often the cultural drift in society results in a movie or book or TV show that started out fresh and exciting starting to feel out of touch. It certainly happened with Star Trek - which, if not actually dying, looked like a franchise suffering from Alzheimer's under Brannon Braga and Rick Berman but was gloriously rejuvenated last year by J J Abrams and his team. And they did that by going back to the original series and figuring, "If Gene Roddenberry had launched this in 2009, how would he have pitched it to get the equivalent effect that in had on audiences in 1966?" In the same way, an English translation of War & Peace, say, can always be contemporary, but the prose must seem increasingly archaic to a reader in the original Russian (and French).

That's why a reboot can be so effective. It's like a new translation.

Last week Roz and I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan about the same time I was watching original Star Trek, so I could easily be defensive about such a major reboot. Yet... a few years ago at Christmas the BBC broadcast a Holmes TV movie with Rupert Everett. And it was perfectly good, and Everett was excellent in the part. But it all felt rather too cosy, a comfortable mystery to watch when stuffed with turkey and mince pies, and I got to thinking that's probably not the effect the Holmes stories would have had on Victorian readers. Because when Holmes went over Reichenbach, the public outcry was immense and men went about in black armbands - and, well, yeah, fans will be fans, but you don't ever get that level of excitement from a cosy little detective drama about ticking clocks and puffing pipes.

The new movie tackles the so-what problem head on. Holmes was always meant to be a flamboyent, brilliant, unconventional and slightly disreputable central character, and who plays that combination better than Robert Downey Jr? I grant you this is not the Holmes of traditional dramas: the tall, thin, loftily commanding figure as drawn by Sidney Paget. And yet this Holmes is convincingly a genius, a misfit, one who is a master of all the facts but fares less adroitly in polite society.

Jude Law's Watson is a stronger character than he comes across in the stories - as he needs to be on screen, where the personal reserve we can accept in a literary first-person narrator would not only come across as blandness, but would weaken our impression of Holmes's genius too. And this Watson indulges in little bits of bad behaviour too, though unlike Holmes he recognizes the very specific contract under which Victorian society granted men a degree of licence to do so.

So those elements work, and the relationship between the two is sparky and engaging. It's more of a modern bromance than a Victorian friendship, true, but in a toss-up between historical accuracy and emotional veracity, a good storyteller should always plump for the latter.

Best of all, though, this is no sedate whodunnit to be mulled over in a cosy drawing room. It's a cocaine-shot-in-the-arm of a movie: visually thrilling with some fantastic set-pieces, driven like a hansom down narrow streets at high speed, written and directed with real verve and energy. Oh, and like all the great Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it steers a course very close to the supernatural without ever quite losing sight of the beacon of rational explanation.

Currently it's taken about a tenth of Avatar's revenue at box office (which is one of those things that makes me feel like giving up writing fiction, frankly) so you should get out there and see it on the big screen while you can. I'm going to be buying the DVD too, you bet, but this is a movie that merits the full cinematic experience.

Writing 101

We've had posts from time to time about the creative process, so I feel justified in this plug for my wife's book Nail Your Novel, which is available free in PDF format on her blog. (You don't actually have to have an iPhone, she just took those photos to show it's perfectly readable on a small screen.)

If you're planning on writing a book - or a comic, come to that - grab it while you can. Roz sold half a million copies of her own books last year, so her advice is worth getting.

Show not tell

My wife, though an author under her own name and a ghost writer with over one million books sold, also does a lot of literary consultancy, editing and story polishing. One day, looking over her shoulder as I brought her one of many morning cups of tea, I saw another editor’s notes she’d been sent. The other editor had been working on a short story by Angela Williams and had come across this passage:

“Max had rather quaint ideas about a lady of nobility. As a result, to please him, I took to smoking Black Russian cigarettes in a holder (without inhaling) and drinking neat Cognac as an aperitif before dinner.”

The editor had seized on this as a failure to “show not tell”, and gave an example of how to expand it into a 250-word scene in which Max introduces the narrator to Russian cigarettes for the first time.

That advice was completely wrong. Because Ms Williams had shown, and very elegantly too in only 37 words. The telling version of that passage would have gone something like this:

Max had rather quaint ideas about a lady of nobility. As a result, to please him, I began behaving in a more sophisticated way.”

There are two writing rules that often, as here, get confused. “Show not tell” is a corollary of Forster’s “Only connect!” (the most important rule of all) and it means that the writer shouldn’t just communicate a fact, but must also make us feel it. “The room was very big.” Well, “The room was as big as a cathedral nave” at least evokes a mental image, though possibly, “The room was so big that it made Jeff feel like a child being led into a classroom for the first time” is better because more personal.

The other rule, which I suspect the editor who commented on Ms Williams’s story was thinking of, is “make a scene of it”. This is a lot less of a hard and fast rule. In There Will Be Blood, for example, we might expect a scene of Daniel Plainview dragging himself back to town after breaking his leg in the shaft where he’s just struck oil. Instead, Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer/director, just cuts straight to Plainview on a stretcher watching the men he’s hired tally up his newfound wealth.

You’ve got to be a little bit careful about breaking the “make a scene of it” rule. Audiences can be mistrustful of things that happen off-stage and that they only get to hear about later. It’s safe enough if the scene you’re skipping would only have covered routine details that the reader or viewer can fill in for themselves. For example, after Episode 8 (“The Sleep of Reason”, DFC #37) we cut straight to Jack in Paris. You didn’t need to see him pack a bag, go and get his ticket from the Royal Mythological Society, and catch a boat – all that was obvious. But if we’d missed out the earlier scene of Gus escaping from Bedlam and just referred to it in a later episode, you’d have wondered if the info was kosher. And quite right too.

Show not tell comes in when, for instance, Jack balks at shaking Gerard’s hand in Episode 1. Or later, on the beach at Selsey, when he remembers himself as a child watching his parents go off in a boat. Hopefully you empathized more with Jack then than if he’d simply stated his feelings – though indeed, dialogue can show instead of tell:

SAM
This is it.

FRODO
This is what?

SAM
If I take one more step it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been.

(Frodo gives Sam a pat on the shoulder.)

FRODO
Come on, Sam.

That is showing. It connects us with Sam even more effectively than a wide aerial shot of the two little fellows slogging across a big field, and certainly more than any factual statement of distance would have done.

My wife, by the way, has a thousand writing tips like these and she explains them a whole lot better. (I know, I know – but I’m a fiction writer. When it comes to nonfiction I’m as articulate as Gort the robot.) Anyway, you can read more of Roz’s tips here.