Writing: Show and tell 1: Francine Prose · 12:25am Feb 18th, 2013
Someday I hope to write a longer post on this, but today I need to type in this passage from Francine Prose's excellent Reading Like a Writer, which I recommend you get immediately if you're serious about writing and have already read a lot of basic books about writing. (Beware that its lessons are advanced and difficult to emulate, and gave me many bouts of hopelessness as I read it.)
The opening of "Dulse" by Alice Munro:
At the end of the summer Lydia took a boat to an island off the southern coast of New Brunswick, where she was going to stay overnight. She had just a few days left until she had to be back in Ontario. She worked as an editor, for a publisher in Toronto. She was also a poet, but she did not refer to that unless it was something people knew already. For the past eighteen months she had been living with a man in Kingston. As far as she could see, that was over.
She had noticed something about herself on this trip to the Maritimes. It was that people were no longer so interested in getting to know her. It wasn't that she had created such a stir before, but something had been there that she could rely on. She was forty-five, and had been divorced for nine years. Her two children had started on their own lives, though there were still retreats and confusion. She hadn't gotten fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on this trip.
Prose writes:
... Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers--namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out--don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy--when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in whcih telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.
Richard Yates ... Here, in the opening paragraph of Revolutionary Road, he warns us that the amateur theatrical performance in the novel's first chapter may not be quite the triumph for which the Laurel Players are hoping:The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed up halfway its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.
When we ask ourselves how we know as much as we know--that is, that the performance is likely to be something of an embarrassment--we notice that individual words have given us all the information we need. The final dying sounds ... silent and helpless ... blinking ... hardly dared to breathe ... naked seats ... raspingly.
This second passage is a mix of showing and telling, or telling disguised as showing. "Silent and helpless" is not really showing--how does an actor look helpless? How does one see that they "hardly dared breathe"? A truly talented group would be described as "talented", not "damned talented"--is that little hint showing or telling? This passage illustrates that the important question isn't whether you're "showing" or "telling", but whether you're using the right evocative words, in your narration and your dialogue.
The thing is, I think this advice gets given so often (I've done it myself) because it's so hard to "tell" well, and so easy to do it poorly. I've found that Dickens "tells" well, for instance, but I can't quite even put my finger on why, other than to talk about work choice and other technical considerations as you've done above.
Brilliant. Basically, forget showing and telling and use words that convey the story dramatically- whether those words are narration or description or, most likely, a combination of both.
Very interesting, the show not tell advice is best applied to emotional states I think, you can't really tell your reader to be excited by something.
Though maybe a bit above my level, what basic books would you recommend? Or any advice for non-fiction?
So would this be a Dicken's Tell?
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
One thing I think a Show and a Good Tell both do is allow the reader to mentally construct a 'picture' in their head, preferably the same picture the writer was thinking about on plot-specific items. On non-plot items, the reader should be allowed to 'read into' whatever they
wantlike, provided it does not interfere with the flow the writer is trying to accomplish. In 'Monster', I've had commenters 'read into' some of the most amazing jumps of logic from single words or phrases. Hey, as long as they like it, I'm good. Feral Twilight is best pony.Yeah, I can recall several times where I've tried to write evocatively like this (or seen someone else do it), and then been called out for telling and not showing. An amateur tells; a student shows; a master does both at the same time.
840940
Yes, but an even more proper example is found a few paragraphs later:
Classic advice would be for you to show that Scrooge was all those things by his actions rather than having the narrator tell us them. In this case, that would deprive us of a rather colorful passage that does not, in fact, detract from the work.
841079 Truly one whom the milk of human kindness has curdled into a hard rind of sharp cheese which even a starving mouse would turn up their tiny nose rather than touch.
841077 Practice, practice. I've only been really at this for six months, and yet 'Tutor' is an order of magnitude better than 'To Sleep'. At this rate of skill improvement, in 5-10 years I may catch up to where Sky is now.
Does anyone know who originated Show Don't Tell as a one-size-fits-all piece of writing advice? And what he or she meant by it?
I ask because everyone has their own interpretation. I've seen it use as a commandment to write Alien Anthropologist Prose[1] -- no words for emotion. You can't say that someone looked away shyly. Oh no. You must describe the wavering stare, how it flits away, how the pupils expand, how the skin changes hue in an psychosomatic erythemic response[2], every little detail. The end result is twofold, depending on the severity of this approach:
a) Character end up emoting like lunatics, sawing at the air and drawing breath or letting it go explosively all the time. This ends up being, essentially, a hammed up bad performance which is then faithfully described. This is the low-severity approach.
b) Your emotional prose becomes biological field notes. This is the high-severity approach.
And lest you accuse me of belaboring the point, I have seen people rebuked for using the word 'shyly.'
My own interpretation used to be for the longest time that this applied chiefly to characters. Don't rely on informed attributes -- don't describe a character as brave, show them being brave, or at the very least put your telling in the mouth of a character and put it to work telling us something about that character, too. And it is all good advice, but having read the above post I'm slapped by a number of realizations:
a) I was wrong.
b) Writing is complex, go figure, and my attempt to create my own one-size-fits-all piece of advice smacks of hubris.
c) It's a good job I'm not in a Greek myth or it'd be raining thunderbolts where I am right now.
So, obviously, telling works. Sometimes. We've all seen places where it kills the narrative, but sometimes it works, and works well, much better than any sort of 'showing' might. This leads me to suggest an alternative wording to the old chestnut: "Evoke, don't inform."
What the cited examples suggest (to me, at least) is that "show don't tell" mistakes a tool for the purpose of the tool. The purpose is to get the reader to experience an emotional landscape like the one imagined by the author. If the author describes a harrowing run through a dark wood, there should be some part of the reader that's bewildered and a little bit scared. If the author describes a character, we should see the character as a person, not as a collection of traits held together by a name and the stern dictates of the plot. To, in short, evoke a feeling or a thought. To elicit a response. And one of the best ways of doing it is to show the reader something, and let them come to their own conclusions. But it isn't the only way, now is it? Sometimes telling in a certain way works. Sometimes the right word at the right place does wonders all on its own[3] (in the cited example what gets to me is the 'helpless'), and even the sound of a sentence, surprisingly, suggests quite a lot[4].
So the point is to affect the reader, not merely inform him or her of the facts of the matter[5]. Hence: Evoke, don't inform.
So. I just decided to rephrase the most prevalent form of writing advice on the planet because, obviously, I know better. Now that is hubris. And yet, I remain thunderbolt free. Pack it in, Zeus, you are rubbish at this.
What do you folks think? Stupid? If so, how much?
[1] Term I came up with while taking about Our Gracious Host about this very topic.
[2] Probably safe not to say 'blush'. Show!
[3] A fairly obscure poet I'm fond of has, as an epitaph, left a line of verse that can roughly translated to "I was killed by too strong a word." I approve of this sentiment.
[4] Forgive me the alliteration. I'm running quite a fever. And I can't sleep. Wisdom teeth. Goddamn wisdom teeth. Damn my gracile Homo Sapiens skull.
[5] Unless the feeling of reading a matter-of-fact list of details is the one we wish to elicit, of course.
840890 I wish I could make recommendations, but my memory isn't up to it! The books I hear recommended most often are probably
The Elements of Style
On Writing, by Stephen King
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
How to write science fiction & fantasy, by Orson Scott Card
Scene & Structure by Jack Bickham
I've read all of them, but except for the last one, I can't remember what they said, or even whether I liked them! There are a couple famous ones that are good and dangerous, like Bickham's "38 most common fiction writing mistakes" and that book on the "basic 28 plots", which give advice that is practical and cynical in the way screenwriters are, that will help you write better but may hinder you from becoming great.
Ray Bradbury, John Gardner, Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, & Damon Knight all wrote books on writing that are likely to be good, as they are good writers, but I've only read some of them and, of course, have no memory of their contents.
There's a separate list for screenwriting, which is much more formulaic and cynical. It's only in the past few years that any books on screenwriting have become available that were written by actual screenwriters: the Save the Cat! series, and "Writing movies for fun and profit".
And there'd be another list for play writing, which is surprisingly unlike screenwriting.
Oh wow, I own that book. I've read it, too (some parts repeatedly), though I can't claim to have learned half of what I could from it. Actually, I think I own several of the books mentioned above... Hmm, time to do some homework.
840940, 841079, 841159
Dickens was really something. Every one of those just leaps off the page at you. It's wonderful stuff to read.
I've been writing for a while, but rarely in a capacity where I'd receive solid feedback. So I operate in my own little bubble, and like the opinionated old bastard I am, I have my own way of looking at things. I honestly wasn't all that aware of the "show, don't tell" advice. And while I'm reluctant to call it crap, I definitely think it's far wide of the mark. The heart of the issue, to me, is that reading is an active process. Each word written costs the reader time and attention, and if too few of those words are worth reading, goodbye reader.
I think Ghost is much closer to the mark when he says "evoke, don't inform". SDT is a great, concise way to sum up the idea. But it seems like it'd be easy for the literally-minded to decide it meant "everything has to be expressed through action, never through narration or description". On the other hand, I think when Dickens writes "he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone," or "secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster," that really is a form of less literally-minded showing. Not showing action, but showing information. No reader will come out of those snippets without (1) a clearer view of Scrooge as a character and (2) deeper engagement with an actively-written story.
There's a bargain to be struck, between reader and writer. The writer wants her ideas heard. The reader wants his attention grabbed. Showing and telling flit around the periphery, but they never enter that bargain except as silent partners. I'd rather worry about being clear, succinct, and attention-grabbing than any particulars of narrative style.
Or, after my usual long-winded diatribe, to give credit to a short idea, well-expressed, I could just quote 840853.
841079
I guess I look at this whole subject:
Largely as a by-product of "point of view." When I read the examples folks are quoting here, I see an author creating an narrative character, a storyteller who is directly addressing the reader either omnisciently or in a more limited fashion. I mean, Dickens even uses the first person in the narrative of A Christmas Carol--the second paragraph begins, "Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade." This isn't to my mind "authorial intrusion" or "infodump" or whatever else anyone wants to call the bad sort of telling. This is the author creating a character who is telling us the story.
The storyteller, then, is a character who is of the story but not in it, a character who doesn't act and therefore can't be shown in action the way the other characters can. Which means the author only has one way to show the reader who the storyteller is: the storyteller's word choice. The reader is seeing the story entirely through the storyteller's eyes, after all, so the words the author gives to the storyteller are vital and not at all the sort of telling we writers are always being cautioned against.
But then I'm a point of view nut. Just about every story I've got up on this site is a point of view experiment of some sort or another...
Mike
I think "show, don't tell" is all in all pretty good advice. There are a lot more cases of authors telling when they should have shown, as opposed to showing when they should have told, after all. Of course, as with all "rules" of writing (and all other forms of art), my favorite piece of advice applies: follow the rules until you're good enough to know when to break them.
841429 Does anyone know who originated Show Don't Tell as a one-size-fits-all piece of writing advice? And what he or she meant by it?
This is certainly an early quote, from Chekhov--quoted on p.201 of Reading Like a Writer, but it does not give the source or date:
843757
And now I can make a project out of hunting down the instances where he,himself, didn't follow this rule.
I remain unconvinced he meant it as an absolute. We often feel things we don't act on, for instance. Are those to be closed to writers, then? Internal monologue? And which sort of actions, say, depict a sense of directionless melancholy that overtakes Character X every early autumn and which he suppresses because he's been taught that that's the sort of thing a wastrel improper type feels, not a serious gentleman? This is vital information for a character, but how do I show it without slipping into mawkish cliche of him standing in an park amidst fluttering leaves sighing and wringing his hands like a cut-rate stage actor in a production of Subtlety Who Needs It?
The more I think of Show Don't Tell as concept, the less I understand it.
841079
And the passage is so delightful, among its other sterling qualities, because it feels like someone telling us a story. There's that word again.
Also, am I childish for always bristling at 'solitary as an oyster?' Oyster's live in close proximity in huge reefs!
...I am childish, aren't I?
843924
And Scrooge lived in London. No matter how many other beings he was in close proximity to, he never touched any of them, shelled in as he was.
842719
I guess it does sort of make it more palatable if the telling is done by a character you're getting to know as well as those that appear on-stage, as it were...
844090
All I'm saying it impugns the, otherwise impeccable, character of oysters. Their fate is already to be squirted with lemon juice and horribly devoured while alive. They don't need to be compared to Scrooge. That's just adding insult to (grievous) injury. Give bivalves a chance!
Besides. Plenty species of cephalopod are quite solitary. Could have used them. Cuttlefish, say. Though they do congregate during mating season, I guess. Anyway. Could have made the thing more biologically sound, is all I'm saying.
I was joking, of course. But I like the way you said that, I really do. Hah. 'Shelled as he was.'
843924 I doubt that would be hard. Francine Prose has a Chekhov portion in her classes where she goes through the rules of writing and shows that Chekhov breaks all of them.