Before I start, here’s a link to a poem I read this week and loved that seems to me to get (metaphorically) to the essence of fiction and poetry: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/12/20.
On August 16, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, ….The best stories are the ones which show more than tell. I’ve heard this advice many times in articles and books on how-to-write. Yet I wonder sometimes if I’m not underestimating the value of telling. I feel that telling instead of showing helps the reader get inside the character’s head more easily than a simple chronicling of events (she runs, she slides, she fidgets) ever could. As I write, I wonder if I should focus on describing the events only or if I should probe at the thoughts and inner monologues of the character (for isn’t telling readers how the character feels considered less powerful then showing?) Is it okay for a character to say that they are nervous: “There is no need to be nervous—why it is so very silly really…” ? Or is it better to show the character’s nervous state instead: “the old man looked away from the person’s face and fiddled with the zipper of his sweater.” In other words, is it really important to be able to display what a character is thinking or should a reader get to know a character purely through actions? How do you pick when it is more advantageous to “tell” instead of “show”? Is there any value at all to telling instead of showing?
My chapter in Writing Magic called “Show and Tell” discusses the difference between the two, so I hope everyone who’s puzzled over this will take a look.
I believe that thoughts fall into the category of showing, just as dialogue does. Telling, in my opinion, is narration. Here’s an example: The young princess collapsed on the bed in a deep sleep while beads of blood from her finger stained the counterpane. And showing might be: Her mind went cobwebby; her knees turned rubbery; the bed seemed to rise to meet her. Her last waking thought: The prince, when he comes, will not approve of blood on the counterpane.
But the difference is hard to tease out and may even be a matter of debate. In my telling sentence above, I’m not even sure about the end of the sentence. The young princess collapsed on the bed in a deep sleep is certainly telling (I think!), but while beads of blood from her finger stained the counterpane may be showing.
Unless we’re writing from the POV of an omniscient narrator who reveals everyone’s thoughts and emotions, we have to rely mostly on action for our non-POV characters. But we learn tons about people from what they do, and dialogue, revealing dialogue, is also action. We have other cues, too, like dress, facial expression, and body language. If, for example, Yolanda is usually a fashion plate, the reader and other characters are going to wonder what’s going on when she comes to school looking like she dressed with her eyes closed. If she’s usually quiet in class but now her arm is waving wildly at the teacher, we’re likely to think something is up.
But, when it comes to the POV character, if we omit his thoughts and feelings, we’re writing handicapped. He has thoughts and feelings. Why would we keep them secret? In sleeping princess’s thought above, we learn a fair amount about her from just thirteen words. She’s fastidious and worries about making a good impression a hundred years off but not about nightmares, and she isn’t looking forward to all that rest.
This blog is mostly telling. I just looked at a magazine article and concluded that it was basically telling with a few incidents sprinkled in, examples of showing that livened up the prose. I also looked online at the front page of two major newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Just about all telling there, reflecting the reportorial nature of telling, which certainly has a place in fiction.
These three sentences of pure telling start a chapter in Fairest: A week passed. The mood in the castle was bleak. The corridor troubadours sang of pain and grief. For some reason that I no longer remember I needed that time span to go by but I didn’t want to show a week in which nothing of plot importance happened. Telling is great at moving a story along.
Showing allows the reader to draw his own conclusions about the characters and the unfolding tale, and usually that’s preferable. But sometimes we want to nail a thing down and say nothing that could be misunderstood. Sometimes we want to say, Perry hated Willa.
I just revisited The Birthday Room (ten and up, I’d guess) by Kevin Henkes, a book I love. The first page is strictly telling and, as I skipped through, it seemed to me that there’s more telling throughout than I usually use, and yet it’s a marvelous book. I think the telling contributes to the thoughtful tone. Read it, if you haven’t already, and learn.
The maxim, Show don’t tell, may be a shibboleth we can do just as well without. Writing that, as bluekiwii said, gets the reader inside the character’s head (when we want him to be there) is doing its job whether it’s showing or telling.
A more useful distinction may be between high detail and low. A week passed is low detail. This is from later in the chapter: I put the letters in the top drawer of my bureau and dressed in yet another of Dame Ethele’s horrors. This one had so much draped cloth in the sleeves that they would have been useful on a sailing ship. The headdress too was cursed with excess cloth, which culminated in flaps that fell on each side of my face like the long droopy ears of an Ayorthaian hare.
Is it telling or showing? Don’t know. I’m pretty sure, though, that there’s high detail. I loved describing the costumes in Fairest, most of which came from fashion history books. The silly outfits people used to wear! (And still do!)
I could have gone into much greater detail. Notice I didn’t mention the color of the “horror” or the kind of fabric or the quality of the dressmaking. The goal was to demonstrate how ridiculous Aza felt. With that accomplished I moved on.
So purpose can guide you when you choose between showing and telling and level of detail. When you’ve done what you’ve set out to do, stop. That can be hard to tell in a first draft. You may need to wait for revision and revision and revision to arrive at certainty about where to cut and where to expand.
Prompts:
• This is the first sentence of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” from Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book: “There once lived a poor tailor, who had a son called Aladdin, a careless, idle boy who would do nothing but play ball all day long in the streets with little idle boys like himself.” This is an example of extreme telling, very compressed. Unpack the sentence using detail and showing to draw the reader in. Interest the reader in Aladdin and his unhappy dad. See if you can get at least three pages out of the one sentence. (The Lang fairy books are the source of most of my books based on fairytales. If you don’t know them, each is a different color. They’re in the public domain so you don’t have to worry about copyright, and they’re available online for free.)
• Let’s take Perry hated Willa from above. Write a scene that shows the hatred without stating it outright. Then revise the scene with tiny tweaks that turn the hatred into a different emotion, like love or curiosity or despair.
• This is a prompt for the blog itself. Are there other rules of writing (some we’ve discussed here, like words teachers despise) that mystify you? Post about them.
Have fun, and save what you write!