Transferring a tell into a show

The Power of the Heliodromus will be thick in history and backstory and refer to events from The Slaying of the Bull. How to keep all that interesting? It is the bane of any work, but it is even more difficult with a historically-focused book. I can tell you, I’m not there yet. As I lay the groundwork for what will likely be close to a 500-page novel, I’ve found myself telling the reader a bit too much as I get the story on the page. I will need to find exciting ways to bring everything to the reader’s attention by showing rather than telling.

I will use the chapter I’m currently working on as an example. It deals with an important secondary character, Lwica. She’s been a sidekick of Isa’s (my main character) since the midpoint of The Slaying of the Bull and accompanied him to Baghdad. Lwica has a strong personality, and it didn’t make sense for her not to be helping out for the last 15 years since The Slaying of the Bull. I needed her to be doing something just as interesting as what Isa’s been doing. I have big plans for Lwica in this book, and to accomplish all I’ve set out for her, I need to build a strong foundation. This may sound suspect as my book takes place in 1258, but I finally decided that she would be on her way to becoming a physician.

It is not as crazy as it sounds. The medieval Islamic world was quite progressive in many ways. It was primarily a segregated society, but that meant there was a strong stigma for male physicians to treat female patients. Hence, although it was relatively rare, women did pass the strict licensing exam and became physicians in 13th-century Baghdad. Also, at this time (as with many other things), the Islamic word was at the forefront of medicine as you can see just from the mention of a licensing exam above. By 1258, Lwica is working in the large teaching hospital complex, Al-‘Adudi. But how did she get there starting as a Christian woman who didn’t speak Arabic? What was the driving force for her to face these hardships? If you check out The Slaying of the Bull, you will see some of this, but how to relay all these details without just telling the reader in thick paragraphs?

For me, I start drafting a chapter by getting the facts down in an information dump right in the beginning. I put everything I have on the page. A lot of this might not end up in the book, but it still gives me a frame of reference and somehow makes the text more productive and rich in the end. Using that repository of information, I then trigger some action and pepper that information throughout until I whittle away at the first paragraphs as much as possible. In this case, a pregnant woman and her husband enter the hospital. The woman is struggling, but the husband is refusing the male doctor to exam his wife. Lwica steps in to save the day. This situation shows that she has learned much over the 15 years of observing while doing menial tasks in the background. Her actions and skill will impress the male physician, who will be integral in a later chapter. By the time the reader gets to the end of the scene, hopefully, they will have all the information I wanted to convey while being engrossed in the action of Lwica delivering a problematic birth. Now, instead of a wall of text, I have a rich and engaging story with action and dialogue.

I’m not there yet for this chapter, but I now have a path, as you can see. What is great about writing this blog, is that when I started working on it this morning, I didn’t know how I was going to convey what I wanted to convey in my third chapter. As so often happens, putting my thoughts down here produced an idea that I can run with. So now, when you read The Power of the Heliodromus and get to that chapter, you can say, “I was there when that idea came to life!” Which I think is kind of neat. I have the research done and the information down, but now its time to head into the birthing room with Lwica. It should be interesting as it will be the first birth for both of us.

Cheers!