Writing: When only to show · 8:05pm Jan 11th, 2014
Sometimes you shouldn't "tell" at all. Hemingway and Elmore Leonard want their protagonists to be "manly" and not show external feelings, so they use little telly language.
Here's a different but common reason not to tell. This is a long passage from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, end of part 2, with lots of body language and almost no "telling" at all. After it, I'll give my opinion on why that is. (You don't need to read the spoiler at the end.)
I have to qualify that in two ways. First, there is telling. John Singer complains "furiously" and is "beside himself" when the slot machine doesn't work. The humidity oppresses him, and he has a headache. But these things are indirect. He isn't furious because of the slot machine, or because of the heat, and you need to figure out why he has a headache. This is similar to what Mystic calls "Implication outside the initial scope." You need to figure out what deeper feeling caused these feelings.
Second, there's a continuum from telling to showing. Categorizing things into "showing" and "telling" is a simplification. Maybe I'll post on that later, with examples.
And, yeah, she uses "listlessly" too often.
I changed the "telly" speech tag from maroon to brown, so you can distinguish it from adverbs, which in this passage are not very telly. Key:
Telly:
red = adverb
brown = "telly" language
Showy:
yellow = sensory language that describes Singer's feelings in a non-telly way
lavender = body language
For comparison with other annotated passages:
green = simile or metaphor
blue = an adjective, adverb, or verb that isn't literally correct (metaphorical)
At the asylum he sought Antonapoulos first in the sick ward where he had been confined before. But at the doorway of the room he saw immediately that his friend was not there. Next he found his way through the corridors to the office where he had been taken the time before. He had his question already written on one of the cards he carried about with him. The person behind the desk was not the same as the one who had been there before. He was a young man, almost a boy, with a half-formed, immature face and a lank mop of hair. Singer handed him the card and stood quietly, his arms heaped with packages, his weight resting on his heels.
The young man shook his head. He leaned over the desk and scribbled loosely on a pad of paper. Singer read what he had written and the spots of color drained from his cheekbones instantly. He looked at the note a long time, his eyes cut sideways and his head bowed. For it was written there that Antonapoulos was dead.
On the way back to the hotel he was careful not to crush the fruit he had brought with him. He took the packages up to his room and then wandered down to the lobby. Behind a potted palm tree there was a slot machine. He inserted a nickel but when he tried to pull the lever he found that the machine was jammed. Over this incident he made a great to-do. He cornered the clerk and furiously demonstrated what had happened. His face was deathly pale and he was so beside himself that tears rolled down the ridges of his nose. He flailed his hands and even stamped once with his long, narrow, elegantly shoed foot on the plush carpet. Nor was he satisfied when his coin was refunded, but insisted on checking out immediately. He packed his bag and was obliged to work energetically to make it close again. For in addition to the articles he had brought with him he carried away three towels, two cakes of soap, a pen and a bottle of ink, a roll of toilet paper, and a Holy Bible. He paid his bill and walked to the railway station to put his belongings in custody. The train did not leave until nine in the evening and he had the empty afternoon before him.
This town was smaller than the one in which he lived. The business streets intersected to form the shape of a cross. The stores had a countrified look; there were harnesses and sacks of feed in half of the display windows. Singer walked listlessly along the sidewalks. His throat felt swollen and he wanted to swallow but was unable to do so. To relieve this strangled feeling he bought a drink in one of the drugstores.
He idled in the barber shop and purchased a few trifles at the ten-cent store. He looked no one full in the face and his head drooped down to one side like a sick animal’s.
The afternoon was almost ended when a strange thing happened to Singer. He had been walking slowly and irregularly along the curb of the street. The sky was overcast and the air humid. Singer did not raise his head, but as he passed the town pool room he caught a sidewise glance of something that disturbed him. He passed the pool room and then stopped in the middle of the street. Listlessly he retraced his steps and stood before the open door of the place. There were three mutes inside and they were talking with their hands together. All three of them were coatless. They wore bowler hats and bright ties. Each of them held a glass of beer in his left hand. There was a certain brotherly resemblance between them.
Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.
He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose.
His head was still inclined to one side and his glance was oblique. He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation. And when they had paid for the rounds of beers and were ready to depart they did not suggest that he join them.
Although Singer had been adrift on the streets for half a day he almost missed his train. It was not clear to him how this happened or how he had spent the hours before. He reached the station two minutes before the train pulled out, and barely had time to drag his luggage aboard and find a seat. The car he chose was almost empty. When he was settled he opened the crate of strawberries and picked them over with finicky care.
The berries were of a giant size, large as walnuts and in full-blown ripeness. The green leaves at the top of the rich-colored fruit were like tiny bouquets. Singer put a berry in his mouth and though the juice had a lush, wild sweetness there was already a subtle flavor of decay. He ate until his palate was dulled by the taste and then rewrapped the crate and placed it on the rack above him. At midnight he drew the window-shade and lay down on the seat. He was curled in a ball, his coat pulled over his face and head. In this position he lay in a stupor of half-sleep for about twelve hours. The conductor had to shake him when they arrived.
Singer left his luggage in the middle of the station floor. Then he walked to the shop. He greeted the jeweler for whom he worked with a listless turn of his head. When he went out again there was something heavy in his pocket For a while he rambled with bent head along the streets. But the unrefracted brilliance of the sun, the humid heat, oppressed him. He returned to his room with swollen eyes and an aching head. After resting he drank a glass of iced coffee and smoked a cigarette. Then when he had washed the ash tray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.
(I marked "wild sweetness" as non-literal because wild strawberries are not sweet at all, so presumably the author is trying to convey something else with that word.)
The author (Carson McCullers, a mere 23 years old when she wrote this) doesn't tell us how Singer feels because Singer doesn't know how he feels. Exploring feelings that we don't understand and can't name is one of the main purposes of literature. One mark of great fiction is showing characters have feelings that there are no words for. For this, you usually need to show rather than tell. At any rate, you can't tell it with a single word. You must be indirect. Perhaps the closest you can get to telling such a thing is this line from my annotation of The Last Unicorn: "She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand."
So most great stories need sections that show but don't tell, often (like here) at the climax. Causation doesn't run the other way, though: Showing but not telling doesn't make something great. If you want to tell us that Bill is sleepy, and you show us instead, that's no great improvement. But if you want to convey that Bill feels something that there are no words for, you have to show us.
I created a group for story and episode annotations: Story & Episode Annotation & Analysis. I'll add this post there, and anyone who wants to do annotations themself can also add them there.
First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed the fragment you annotated[1].
Second, wild strawberries are sweet. Or those I ate were, anyway. Possibly there was some cross-pollination with strawberries grown in the region?
Third, I like the idea that you need to use pure showing to represent an emotion we've no words for, but I'm not sure I agree with it completely. My disagreement, much like Gaul, comes in three parts:
1. The paucity of terms for emotions. We don't really have that many terms for emotions in any language. Certainly we have terms to cover the primary colors of emotion--happy, sad, angry, &c. We even have the words to depict certain shades--exuberant, melancholy, vexed. What we don't have is an extensible vocabulary to talk about them with a degree of specificity. How do you call the emotion of wanting something, being ashamed of wanting it, but being unable and to an extent unwilling to give up that want? Or what word describes the admixture of melancholy and nostalgia which happens when you return to a place you haven't been for a very long time and see the fragments of your past life scattered and decontextualized, familiar yet foreign?
Now, I am being very, almost preposterously in fact, specific with these emotions, but the fact remains that we can't discuss them in a straightforward manner, but must approach them obliquely with or without show-y (as opposed to tell-y) language.
Indeed, an argument can be made that to discuss emotion with any degree of granularity you can't really be telling-as-opposed-to-showing because no adequate words exist for the things you want to discuss.
2. Unnameable vs. ambiguous. I think the reliance on show-y words in the above fragment is not an artifact of the emotion being unnameable--it is but as shown above, most are--but that the author wanted the nature of the emotion to be ambiguous.
This ambiguity helps put us on the outside, possibly because this outside perspective lets us see the main character as the Other. Or, the outside perspective serves to underline that not even the main character knows quite what he's feeling. It's also possible that the outside perspective helps the writer control information available to us, slowing down the formation of our understanding of the main character's mental state, all so that the spoilered lines have the desired effect.
Personally I think it is a mixture of all of the above. It's certainly true that presenting the actions of the main character without internal commentary--without justification--lends them a certain poignancy, especially in retrospect.
3. Applicability with focus on pony words. Using showing language like this is not only tricky and risky but, I maintain, of limited applicability. Certain emotions, for a start, don't lend themselves to expressions or body language, nor do they change behavior significantly. Overpowering emotions do, of course, but not all worthwhile emotions are overpowering.
Even if an emotion is one that will be visible enough to describe and affect behavior, it's not guaranteed that reactions to emotion are the same for everyone. The writer relying on show-y language for effect has to be both imprecise enough that several interpretations are possible and imprecise enough that they avoid the Alien Anthropologist Syndrome and precise enough that they preclude all unwanted interpretations. This limits the applicability of this approach.
Lastly, and rather peculiarly for this corner of the writerverse, it's extra-tricky to do this with ponies because we don't have an universal model of (sentient) equine body language. It is possible to do it with behavior, though. Making tea, fr'instance.
[1] I had been meaning to read it for some time, but never got around to it. Also, damn, but the Kindle edition is pricey. How can it possibly be more expensive than the paperback? How does that even make sense?
1707295
First, the important matter:
Wild strawberries, where I have eaten them in Michigan, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts, were nearly tasteless and only a tiny bit sweet. Wild fruits and vegetables are always smaller and less sweet than their domesticated cousins. See also: carrots, apples, grapes. Possibly your romantic imagination and memories of misleading Ingmar Bergman films supplied the sweetness.
This raises the question of why Europe and America would both have wild strawberries. I expect they were domesticated in one place and introduced to the other, so one of these places should have only the domestic variety. Wikipedia says they were grown in Rome, but adds, "The introduction of F. virginiana from Eastern North America to Europe in the 1600s is an important part of history because this species gave rise to the modern strawberry." I dunno, but wild strawberries in North America may be only distantly related to wild strawberries in Europe.
When I google image search "wild strawberries", I find mainly pictures that look nothing like wild strawberries. These are wild strawberries. Notice the seeds project outward from the surface. The insides are white, as you can see at the far left, where one has been eaten into by insects.
r24.imgfast.net/users/2412/12/27/03/album/20100523.jpg
On to more trivial matters:
I don't know if I can distinguish between "ambiguous" and "sufficiently complex". A state of mind can be described with high precision only by describing the events that led to it, much like the weather can be predicted with high precision only by simulating it.
translate.google.com:
English: wanting something, being ashamed of wanting it, but being unable and to an extent unwilling to give up that want
German: etwas zu wollen, sich zu schämen zu wollen, aber nicht in der Lage und in einem Ausmaß, nicht aufgeben wollen, dass
=>
Etwaszuwollensichzuschämenzuwollenabernichtinderlageundineinemausmaßnichtaufgebenwollendass
That one sentence:
Why do you think the author purposely omits the conductor's sex by using 'they' when she could just specify it with either 'he' or 'she'? I do understand that whether the conductor is a man or a woman is of absolutely no importance in the context of this scene, but is it customary in the English language to use the gender neutral word when sex is unimportant? Carson is the story's author, she could have picked any gender for the conductor and just be done with it, right?
1707527 "They", to indicate that Singer and the conductor (and everyone else on the train) have arrived at the station, rather than that the conductor has arrived at Singer.
1707396
They were sweeter than supermarket strawberries, but less sweet than fully-ripened strawberries, and much less sweet than senga gigana or senga segana sorts. Their aroma was excellent, but the texture was not great--they were not particularly juicy and worse yet they had a prohibitive number of seeds which gave them a gritty mouthfeel.
I know my strawberries.
Yeah, that picture looks nothing like what I ate. It hardly looks like a strawberry in the first place. The ones I ate look something like this:
3.bp.blogspot.com/_VF7shpGqI5M/TBbczNZq9MI/AAAAAAAAAHE/JdIpLHVDqus/s1600/WildStrawberries2010%2B005.JPG
Right. Important business concluded...
I think it is perhaps that 'ambiguous' and 'sufficiently complex' are part of the same complex. Perhaps it is agreeable to say that the showy language used is not about naming unnamed emotions so much as it is about enabling ambiguity and complexity. That said, I will point out that you can get complexity by using--relatively--telly language. Ambiguity, on the other hand, fits showy language much better.
Truly, the language of der Dichter und Denker.
Objection: Wild strawberries in Kansas are so sweet and delicious they make normal strawberries seem tasteless. The problem you hit is a hillside full of scattered strawberry plants only can possibly have a pint or so of ripe berries, and you eat them as fast as you find them, so it's futile to bring a basket.
No turn of phrase takes me out of the story like "mop of hair". I don't think I've ever met someone who would dream of saying that.
1707295
I personally think you're hitting on something really solid, here.
I seem to have odd sensibilities when it comes to writing. Maybe, like Ozu, I'm just in the process of conceptualizing my own grammar of writing. Half the time, the things I see other people write about writing just don't seem to make sense to me.
Showing vs. telling is one of those things—and yes, I know we've all discussed this before. In isolation, it just doesn't seem to mean much to me, except inasmuch as expository language is often less interesting. When I conceptualize writing, I think of some very particular things, and among them are reader interest and reader immersion. Choice of perspective does a lot of the immersion work, but you can modulate it within any perspective. And to me, reader immersion has a critical role in the tone of a story.
I can understand this passage through the lens of Singer not having full understanding of his own emotions. That makes sense, and it agrees with the data. But I think it's worthwhile to take a step back and look at the effect this has on the tone as a whole, whether the author is doing this intentionally or not. Now, I haven't read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, so I'm going to work under the assumption that this is a change in how the story is being told, that the language is more telly or more internalized before this point.
What happens when we pull back into a more observational view of Singer? The big result, I'd think, is that there's a certain sense of his character slipping away. Even though we're in his perspective, he's becoming more distant from us. His actions seem jumbled, capricious. This strikes me as a direct reflection of two things. The first is how Singer must feel about the world, after learning of his friend's death. The author could try to tell us how he feels. As you (Bad Horse) have said, that's not easy—but that's also not the only approach to communicating Singer's internal world. It's a bit of a Fisher King with Words sort of thing. I'm always a little wary of overanalyzing literature, but I feel like the disjointedness created by being so showy and relating these particular events meshes very well with how we'd expect Singer to feel.
The second, of course, is how this must all feel to Singer's friends after his death. I'm basing entirely off of recollections from the movie, here, but at least in that context, I don't believe any of his friends knew anything about Antonapoulos. So basically, Singer had somewhere he wanted to go one day. He went, and afterward everything that can be learned about what happened to him sounds nonsensical, right up to the point where he puts a gun to his chest and kills himself. It lacks explanation. The reader knows the ultimate cause of the act, but his friends do not—and the way the time after leaving the asylum is written, the reader gets a chance to share in that listless confusion. If the author jumps straight from Antonapoulos's reported death to Singer's suicide, everything is nice and clean, and I suspect it becomes harder to engage with his friends' later confusion. But if the author tells us, "Antonapoulos died, and then a number of unimportant things happened, and then Singer killed himself," then we're left with that inexplicable distance. Was he always going to kill himself, after Antonapoulos died? Or did something set him off, in the hours that followed? The slot machine? The theft? The other mutes? We can't know why he killed himself, not truly, because of that distancing.
So yes, the showy language serves a purpose in depicting emotions that aren't easily expressed. But I think it also lets the tone of the narrative echo the tone of the events it depicts.
Let me also say, I'm quite enjoying these annotations. Unfortunately, I haven't read the first one (from The Last Unicorn) because I kind of don't want that spoiled on me, so I don't know if you've taken the time to discuss why you think it's worth highlighting the things you're highlighting—and it's not particularly intuitive to me why it's worth taking note of these things, except as an academic exercise. I can see how adverbs, similes, and metaphors could serve to draw a reader further into a perspective while body language might push them a little further out. Or draw them in. For that matter, similes and metaphors could easily push you out of a perspective if they feel like the corners don't quite meet up properly.
So is everything being highlighted just perspective immersion modulation?
1707976 Red, brown, yellow, & lavender are to compare telly (red & brown) & showy (yellow & lavender) language. Green and blue are for comparison with The Last Unicorn, which was full of green and blue annotations.
There's a point beyond which "showing" makes the narrator seem more sociopathic than descriptive.
This is a point that I feel a lot of newer authors don't understand, since SDT is drilled into their head as a tautology without true understanding. Showing is absolutely worth pursuing in the bulk of any situation, but it doesn't suddenly coat your fic in luster dust. There could be any number of issues laying beneath--repetitive phrasing, over-reliance on dialogue or body-language, poor narrative or emotional pacing. I liken it to an artist painting without any emotion versus painting with an emotional goal; the latter will probably resonate better with the audience, but it doesn't magically make them a good artist.
1707902
That sounds plausible. But if she'd done the opposite, and gone closer into his head for the climax, couldn't you have said that was also intentional? I don't know which the author should want to do at this point.
I don't understand the Fisher King part. You seem to be saying something different here.
1707628
Agreed. But you are messing up my tidy analysis, you fiend.
I suspect most authors would be unable to "tell" anything as complex as this scene without constructing a jumble of contradictions. I suspect this scene contains contradictions, but shown contradictions are true, and the reader must accept them as true, whereas told contradictions may just mean the author is incompetent or lying.
1711433
Or the narrator is unreliable.
im in ur blogpost ruining ur[1] tidy analyses[2]
[1] Well and mine, actually. But modulo unreliable narration, it would seem that a certain level of complexity demands showy-ness if we assume that past a certain level of complexity ambiguities and contradictions, apparent and actual, are inevitable.
[2] I... I don't get out much.
1711417
You could definitely pull further in, but there are a couple points against going that route, I think. The first is that I think you're absolutely right about describing emotions a character can't really process him- or herself. It's a lot easier to move out than in, here—and especially if you're working on something as complex as what's going on in this story (at least in my opinion) there's a lot to be said for doing the easier thing. All things being equal, I'd say an easy choice is always better than a hard choice in writing; the complication is that without making some hard choices, you're not going to wind up with a very interesting story. It kind of fits in with my idea that an author shouldn't ask a reader to spend cognitive effort working through anything that the author doesn't very deliberately want them focusing on in the story.
I said there were a couple. The other reason I personally think I like pulling away rather than pulling in (aside from everything I spoiler-texted), is that it's just a bit of a dick move to bring you further into a perspective right before a character offs himself. There was a time when I'd deadened my emotions and I'd happily embrace emotional pain for its own sake, but I don't think that's culturally normative. I probably still have a higher tolerance for that sort of thing than many people, but as a mutual friend can attest, some readers really don't want to get drawn ever further into how depressing a scenario can be. Which isn't to say there aren't plenty of times where that's a sensible choice, but this story hurts enough already. At some point (and I think that point largely varies by reader), making those sorts of choices stops being challenging and starts being sadistic. Given that this is big, honking published fiction of the critically acclaimed variety, it's probably reasonable that the author is going in the way she is.
Then again, Richard Wright is well thought of, and although it's been a really long time since I read Native Son, my memory is that he kept me inside the protagonist's head long, long, long past the point where I was comfortable being there. Which is, in itself, kind of interesting and a potential refutation of my thesis here, because I think I remember Native Son being an exceptionally showy book. Maybe I'm mis-remembering? It's been close to two decades since I read it.
1707628 Also, you're saying that showing is better for ambiguity (of internal feelings and thoughts), while people usually say that it's better for increased specificity (of imagery). These seem to be going in opposite directions.
I have a general remark about the comments here and in the last several blog posts. I understand that there's a lot of interest in understanding the things that interesting authors write, and in understanding why authors write things as they do. That said, I don't understand why there isn't much discussion on how the writings of good authors come off to readers. These authors are obviously good for the effect their words have on readers, but I'm seeing a lot more theories on what these words are supposed to do, and almost no introspection trying to determine what these words actually do. This would make sense if writers were judged only by what they intend to do with a story, but as far as I can tell, they're not.
Am I missing something?
I've seen four instances here where people here try to explain the effect words have on them. I'm sorry if I missed anything.
And Bradel's posts: 1707902 1711554
You seem to have a tropism for lonely characters who blow their brains out. Not to confuse the batter with the baker, but you ever feel that way yourself, give me a call, I'll take you out and get you too drunk to pull the trigger. My treat. OK?
1707396
Thanks for this post. I found it quite illuminating, as it demonstrates a mixture of different storytelling elements coming together to form a solid piece of narrative.