Text Box: Susan Shay Text Box: Home            About Susan            Cowboy Excerpt            Manuscripts            Ah-hah!            Blog    Text Box: My biggest forehead-slapping moment came when I was writing my third book, and not because I could have had a V-8! I had been struggling for so very long trying to "show" and not "tell" that I thought I'd need heavy duty medication to deal with my frustration if I didn't grasp the concept soon. Then it came to me and my writing just took off. The trick is to imply. That's the biggest word in the world to me. Imply. I used to have my characters running around "realizing" everything. She would realize he had betrayed her. He would realize he was in love with her. The litany of realizations was just horrendous, but back in the day, I thought my solution was a thesaurus. My characters could understand, comprehend, grasp, and perceive--not just realize! Oh, how wrong I was--and how much telling I had done. It was while trying to come up with a new way to tell the same things, that I had this huge epiphany--or "realized" what I had been doing wrong. Instead of telling the reader my hero realized he loved my heroine, I would imply that he did. "Her skin glowed in the morning sun. The sweet curve of her jaw, the tender fringe of lashes on her cheek, the delicate hollow of flesh at the base of her throat. He committed these to memory, studying her as she slept, and praying with every beat of his pulse he could keep her safe. Without her, he wouldn't be able to breathe." It's so much better than, "In that moment, he realized he loved her." It's also much more fun to pretend to be a man in love--for the first time of course. Once I began to understand, or realize, that if I implied emotions, histories, thoughts, and actions, showing became simple. The smallest details became almost obsolete. I could concentrate on the important things and almost skip completely the most tedious parts; eating, dressing, grooming. It's also a lot of fun to use in dialogue. I didn't have to explain why a character lied, I just had to show it: She turned away, afraid he would see the truth burning in her eyes. "No, I don't love you." By implying that this breaks her heart, showing her unable to look in his eyes, the reader understands that she truly does love him--yet I didn't have to spell it out (literally) and didn't have to go through a long explanation. Discovering the word “imply” has to be my most break through moment! J R Turner  www.jrturner.com Her book, My Biker Bodyguard, Echelon Press, out in April, 2007