by judyatlarge

Created on: April 30, 2008

Advancing the Plot Through Action and Dialogue

We could start out a story by giving a lot of background information, telling the reader who the characters are, why they are where they are, and what they expect to eventually achieve. But that would be telling, not showing, and the best way to hold a reader's interest is by showing the action and events, by letting them get involved, by hearing the characters speak and interact with each other, by using their emotions and their senses. We need to pique the reader's interest, make him ask questions, make him want to learn the answers to those questions. We need to give him a character he can care about.

There are many tactics to use, but the best one I've found is by combining action and dialogue. For instance, if I were to write:

Luke sat in his ninth-row window seat of the 737 staring out at glimpses of green water between clouds over the Gulf of Mexico, thinking about how he had come to be there.

He had spent the years since high school behind the counter in his father's hardware store, which struggled under the pressure of big-box chains. Other than that-clerking was all his old man had permitted him to do, not wanting him to know the full extent of the business's tottering health, Luke now supposed-his experience was useless. He had no other training and no education beyond that high school diploma. He was not, in the opinion of a good many job placement people he'd visited, an easily employable person unless he wanted to go on doing exactly what he'd spent the past nine years doing-running credit and debit cards through a machine or taking cash and making change. He was familiar with computers, but so were millions of high-school kids. His knowledge base was a lot less than that of most tenth-graders.

Entry level positions in business were for kids just out of college-and there'd never been time nor money for him to achieve any higher education. When his father died, the store was bankrupt, the house mortgaged and remortgaged, leaving nothing after the sale. All he'd gotten from the old man was a letter he was supposed to deliver in person to a woman in Costa Rica, a woman the old man claimed would want to see him. Who could that woman be? His only other relative had been his mother, who'd died nearly thirty years before at Luke's birth.

He wondered if he was doing the right thing, using his the small, left-over bit of his "inheritance" getting a passport and buying a plane ticket to a place he'd scarcely heard

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