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!
writeforfun says:
Great post! To be honest, I never really think of showing verses telling when I write, although I should. It confuses me too much…so I do the lazy thing and don't worry about it. Not a good idea, but I figure it's fine until the day that I actually want to publish (a long, long way off, I assure you. My writing needs some work!)
And yes, I have an area that mystifies me. I don't think everyone struggles with this, and I'm not even sure if it's an element so it may not count,but the thing that I struggle with the most is detail (how much is too much, when do you use less, when do you need more, what details are good, ect.. That's the only one I can think of off the top of my head right now, only because that's my current problem!
Khanada says:
Thank you for the poem, and thank you for this post! It's downright refreshing to not see "showing" held up on a pedestal. I imagine aspiring writers do not do nearly enough showing and that's why we see that advice so much. But as you said, it's the purpose of the passage that should guide us.
gailcarsonlevine says:
writeforfun–Thanks for the question. I'm adding it to my list.
gailcarsonlevine says:
From the website:
Very interesting post today, Mrs. Levine! I know you've said you want us to call you Gail, but I somehow can't bring myself to do it. You're my writing idol and I'm still so honored by the very fact that I can interact with you. I mean, you're actually reading this comment! – Fan squeal – I still can't get over that, and I've been reading this blog for years.
But seriously, that one prompt raises a question for me.
How can one portray hatred? It's such a strong emotion, but so often senseless and illogical. How does one show the difference between, say, dread of talking with somebody hatred, and all-out hate-your-guts Romeo-vs-Tybalt wish-you-were-dead hatred?
Just interested in your thoughts on the subject. How do we justify hatred? Do we even NEED to justify it? Does it make a character less appealing if they can hate?
Maybeawriter
gailcarsonlevine says:
Maybeawriter–Interesting question! I'm adding it to my list.
gailcarsonlevine says:
Also from the website:
Hello, Mrs. Levine! I had a quick question about description. I am one of those people who loves to use adjectives, but I think I use too many adjectives! For example, is it better to say: "Her hair was brown", rather than "her luscious, long hair was auburn with flecks of dark mahogany"? I think I over-write some characteristics of my characters! Any suggestions about how to approach looks, personality, and other descriptions would be great! Thank you so much! 😀
FightingIrishFan1111
gailcarsonlevine says:
FightingIrishFan1111–I'm adding your question to my list, too.
Unknown says:
Ms. Levine,
A friend recently showed me your blog and I feel as though I've just discovered a gold mine! I'm an aspiring writer in my senior year of high school and have millions of ideas! The problem is, I have a hard time sitting down and focusing on writing for very long without being overly self-critical. Do you have any advice for staying interested in an idea and persevering to the end?
Thanks in advance,
Hannah S.
gailcarsonlevine says:
Unknown–I suggest you read my post on this subject. You can get to it by clicking on the label "staying with stories" on the right. You may find the comments that follow helpful as well. Then, please come back with any follow-up questions.
marveloustales says:
I definitely think stories need a mix of showing and telling. I like the idea of describing it as high detail and low detail–in some ways that makes more sense to me! Some parts of a story need high detail; others are less important and can be handled with low detail. All high detail will drag; all low detail will never let the reader enter into the story in any depth.
I've recently had an interesting situation choosing showing and telling. I've been writing a companion story to a story I had written previously–same events from a different POV. Some scenes overlap; I wanted to make them coherent independently but not too repetitive for anyone reading both. One tactic I discovered was to show in the second story where I had told in the first, or to tell in the second where I had shown in the first. It's also helped me think about what needs to be shown–and what doesn't!–for each story.
Tisserande d'encre says:
Hello Mrs. Levine! I always find your posts very interesting, clear, funny and great advice. They are a silver lining in my writing clouds!
Sometimes I also deal with the show and tell issue and what has been useful to me so far is to define my intention at the moment. In fantasy, I think it's necessary to "show" the strange lands and culture when we introduce them for the first time and "tell" when they are things obvious to our human readers. They know that if you drop a glass it will shatter. But if you are in another world maybe the glass has a spell and will make it to the floor without a scratch. You need to put some logic on it 😉
@writeforfun just making a comment about the detail question. It's good when you introduce detail and characteristics about the people and places and all… But something I still love in books and try to follow is not to put so many specific details. I like it when the author lets MY imagination run wild. For example, "she had a long flowy dress" and that's it, so I can add up the color, the texture of the dress, the design of sleeves and any other details I want as a reader. Every person imagines the characters and places slightly different, no matter the details they know, unless they are crucial to know the character. In InkHeart, one of my favorite books, we know DustFinger has three scars on his face, two in one cheek, and one in the other. Well, I respect those three scars, but I've always imagined them together. Or Elinor, she's fat, but I imagine her slim. And so on. Sometimes even when you give the whole description like it was a police file, readers set their creativity, ignore your details and imagine their owns. And I really love it when they just tell me the necessary to imagine it for myself. It's like the images where we are given a few lines and we mentally complete it to form a cat. So, I think the best is to keep details simple to boost creativity. It's my opinion… Hope it helps somehow.
However, I've been having a problem with my MC. Some time ago I discovered I didn't know my character at all. We have tried reactions to problems, thoughts and things she likes, but I still can't discover her personality! Because of this, I'm unable to say how will she react to the situation or how she relates with other people. Nothing comes up to my mind. The first pages were easy to write because I knew her feelings, and ten pages ago I still did. But now she has closed to me. How can you get free from character's block? I still have a plot, but it feels like I'm having the script in my hands and an uncooperative cast! I thought I knew her, but now it seems I don't. And that doesn't thicken the plot, it thickens my worries… Any advice, word, help on this?
writeforfun says:
Gail – thanks!
Tisserande d'encre – thank you for your thoughts! I see what you mean, I think. I've never realized it before, but I suppose you're right – I do like it better when I get to imagine what the characters look like. As for your problem, I have two suggestions that worked pretty well for me when I've had that problem before. In one version,I knew the personality at first, but it sort of slipped away as I wrote. So, I read from the beginning to the point that I thought I knew her best, and I tried to get a fuller picture of her at that point, and then I did a little writing exercise with her that was completely different from my story, so that I could see what she was like in a different environment. The other time, I didn't know my character in the first place, so I decided to pick a stareotype and use that as the personality. The stereotype can be whatever you're familiar with; I chose a dog. You may laugh, but I made the particular character friendly, optimistic, easily distracted, energetic and forgetful. It worked great, because I love dogs, so whenever I thought "what would he do?" I could think, "What would my dog do if he were human and in this position?" Do you see what I mean. Yikes, this is really long, but I hope it helps!
gailcarsonlevine says:
Tisserande d'encre–I'm adding your question to my list. But I hope people will weigh in in the meanwhile.
Julia says:
Tisserande d'encre- Sometimes when I don't really know a character's personality very well, I take this personality test (http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp) and answer the questions the way I imagine my character would answer them. At the end of the test, it links you to a detailed description of the character's personality. I've found the results to be amazingly accurate. I hope this helps!
Charlotte says:
I read a book on writing lately that said you should never use em dashes in your manuscript (if anybody doesn't know, that's these thingys: –). I think that's a terrible and miserly rule, probably because I can't write two paragraphs without at least one em dash. In my opinion, it goes along with the other rules that tyrants impose on us, like never starting a sentence with "and" or "because" and never using fragments for effect (I do that all the time too).
gailcarsonlevine says:
Charlotte–Seems like silly advice. I use em dashes; I just try not to overuse them – or anything else.
gailcarsonlevine says:
From the website:
I couldn't comment on your blog, so I'm doing it here.
@Tisserande d'encre: Ha, I've read Inkheart too and I imagine Dustfinger and Elinor in exactly the same way!
Hm, your predicament sounds similar to mine. I like the advice given so far and can't think of anything else off the top of my head right now, so I suppose I'll leave it at that.
@Gail Carson Levine: I'm in book 3 of a series of fantasy novels, and my two MCs' families are now involved in the adventure. Trouble is, everyone is vying for my attention and I find that I'm neglecting the MCs' inner struggles. Their struggles were real and defined in the first two books, but now with an overload of other people's problems, it's getting harder to 'focus' on the right ones. I think this is something that doesn't require particular advice (although if you have any, I'd welcome it). Rather, it's something I just know I need to be disciplined about.
But I do have a question. One of my MCs – the boy – is falling for a girl. This girl drives my female MC nuts, as she is smooth-tongued and rather beastly. But I'm having a difficulty protraying this girl differently from each MC's POV (attractive vs. detestable), and also with not making the budding romance thing too obvious at the beginning. Any tips? Sorry for the long post!
Michelle
gailcarsonlevine says:
Michelle–I don't think you have to portray her differently. It's the response that needs to differ. Beastly girl says something sarcastic. Your MC and the reader get it, but boy doesn't. He thinks she was being kind. If you can't get inside his head, his interpretation can come out in dialogue. If this doesn't help, please ask follow-up questions. And any thoughts from others?
welliewalks says:
I agree with writeforfun's problem, about detail. I love detail and sometimes I add too much. I feel as though I have improved a lot in adding a good amount… I think it's a skill to acquire, but at the same time, it always differs. Sometimes I add too little about the surroundings. A bit of that problem is POV. I LOVE first POV. And I know that I don't always think to myself 'The sun dappled the driveway as I walked away from the house, dreaming of time gone by.' or whatever. Sometimes I do, when I'm daydreaming about writing a story, but that's not NORMAL. I dont really know if there is a question in all that or if it's just a rant. Haha sorry.
Maybeawriter- Ha, I just wrote a big long thing about some characters in Downton Abbey that deal with hatred, but decided to condense it :). DA is simply amazing for characterization. It's so realistic- each 'good' character is shown to have flaws (some tragic, some small) and each 'bad' character is shown to have a heart. I suggest even watching only one episode. Anyway, I think hatred does not always have to be justified. When subtle hints are dropped about the reason, it really tightens the story's hold on the reader.
Tisserande d'encre- Try to spend time with your character(s). Ask her questions (try surveys, that have things like how many friends do you have, are you loud, etc) and put her into really random situations. You have her personality, so tinker with how that translates into reaction. For example, a quiet thoughtful person may calculate everything, from how she must react to other's actions, and think through everything before acting. Also, attempt to get INSIDE the character's head. Discover her motives, what she wants… create a brief or extensive history, because that will effect her reactions to things.
wow this is long! So sorry!!
writeforfun says:
Welliewalks – glad to know I'm not the only one:D
Hey, I've been wondering about this for a while, and I just thought I'd ask and see what you all thought.You see, when I was younger, I really loved stories about the misfit underdog that nobody liked, who became the hero in the end. I can think of three movies I used to love that were like that (Balto, Barbie Fairytopia, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer), although at the moment, I can’t think of any books. But now that I’m older, I can’t help but notice how cheesy they are, even though the general storyline of underdog to wonderdog still grabs my interest. I was wondering: are those types of characters Mary Sues, and is there any way to do that without it seeming cheesy? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts!
carpelibris says:
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan starts out as sort of a "misfit underdog," and those books are excellent.
carpelibris says:
(They're more adult than YA, though.)
Robin McKinley's books come to mind, too.
Agnes says:
Writeforfun ,Actually I think FAIREST is that type of story and we all like that book.
Rina says:
I see nothing necessarily Mary Sue-ish about a victorious underdog character. What can get Mary Sue-ish is only if they seem to rise in the world by pure luck and coincidence. If they work for their prosperity and succeed that way, that's not cheesy or Mary Sue-ish. It's more when they seem to get favors and fate dumped into their laps that's a bit aggravating. And if they're generally good and decent folk, I think no one would object to their having a bit of good luck once in a while either.
writeforfun says:
carpelibris – thank you, I'll have to check out those books!
Agnes – you know, I guess you're right. I've read Fairest, and I love it – and it's not the slightest bit cheesy.
Rina – Great advice! Thanks!
Tisserande d'encre says:
writeforfun – Thanks for the advice! I never thought about writing her in another environment, though it might work. And the stereotypes seem to be a great way to get quick personalities… I'm glad I helped somehow 🙂 Thanks!
Julia – Thanks, I'm going to give it a try.
Michelle – How ironic! Haha, "we are never alone, are we?"
Welliewalks – I've tried that several times, some with success, others not so great… My problem is that I think I've spend too much time with her lately and as I already said, I kenw her, but now she is "closed". No matter the situation she would always do the same things, and I'm afraid she is getting quite predictable…(sighs) Good news, now I'm focusing in other characters and they seem to be an open book for me!
However, I'm not giving up, and I got some ideas about those random scenarios… This may work. 🙂
Girlgirl5218 says:
my brother has this list of words called "said is dead" which has all these words that you can replace said with. have you seen the mysteries of harris burdick? they're a bunch of pictures that you use to do short stories with…