![]() Writing teachers have captured the way to do it in the oft heard chestnut, Show don’t tell. A scene gives a story a sense of immediacy. There’s action occurring at a specific time in a specific place. In scenes readers experience events as they happen rather than being told about them. In a good narrative, stories are told by creating scenes. While story telling styles today are quite different than they were in Reeve’s day, the basic rules she described haven’t changed much in 228 years. ![]() is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written… gives a familiar relation of such things as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to a friend, or to ourselves and perfection of it is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in the story, as if they were our own. And she wasn’t talking about Harlequin bodice rippers when she wrote: Clara Reeve, in The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries and Manners written in 1785, might have been the first to state them. The rules for modern narrative have been around since the 18 th century. ![]() Writers would be well advised to understand that narrative and narrative summary present a similar problem. Mark Twain once observed, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”Ĭourtesy of veggiefrog under Creative Commons
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