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"ADAPTATIONS" An introduction to transforming your play, novel or short story into a screenplay. Learn the basics of taking your written work and adapting it to the big screen. You can grab this FREE download here

The weekly Writer's Digest e-mail newsletter offers writers of every genre ways to improve the quality and marketability of their writing. Each week, "Tips and Updates From Writer's Digest" provides subscribers with expert tips and ideas from working authors, agents and editors who possess intimate knowledge of the publishing world and the ways to succeed within it. The newsletter also includes updates on new products and resources that help writers take their ideas from conception to publication.

Whether you are writing about a place, about the people (the characters) in your life, or any other aspect of your story, it is usually more powerful to show your readers what you want them to know rather than to tell them. Show your reader by letting the details of your story or the actions of your characters suggest what you wish to convey, and trust your reader to understand the implied meaning. This engages your readers by allowing them to interact directly with the story.

It is sometimes necessary or desirable, however, to tell the reader some facts. This telling is referred to as exposition; it provides description and general information. Exposition can give the reader a bit of history to put a situation in context, which in turn can contribute to the reader's understanding of what you've written.

For example, if I have a scene showing our car breaking down on a long road trip, I might include the following bit of exposition: "Before we left on the trip we had taken the van to the dealership for a complete overhaul. We'd had the brakes redone, bought new tires, had the engine tuned up and even had the air conditioner charged." Now readers have some important additional information—they know some care has been taken to avoid the very crisis that now presents itself, and they're much more likely to be sympathetic to our plight.

Instead of merely organizing the order of the events in your memoir, an outline will help you plan the "scenes" that you'll use to describe each event, as well as the transitions that will get you from one scene to the next.

Here's how it works: Working from a dateline, select the events that will begin and end your book. (It's important to do this first to give yourself a solid framework.) Once you've identified the event, describe in a few sentences the scene you associate with that event. Once your basic outline is in place, it may need a little fine-tuning.

First, consider the scenes that make up your outline with an eye toward viewpoint. Is every scene told from the same point of view (yours or another narrator's)? Or are there scenes that suddenly skip to another character's perspective? The easiest way to deal with the question of viewpoint is to decide up front who the narrator of your story will be (chances are it will be you, which makes your job that much easier), and then make sure that you describe each and every scene from that narrator's point of view.

Now evaluate your outline for a sense of unity. Look for any scenes that seem to wander from the main path, or that seem disruptive to the flow of the story. In order to do this effectively, you must have a strong sense of your book's scope, theme, and intended reader.

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