Writing: Show us the theme · 7:46pm Jan 16th, 2014
[I'm notifying people who favorited "The Corpse Bride" because I discuss it at the end.]
There is one part of every story that must be shown rather than told: The theme. If the theme is something that can be told better than it can be shown, then what you're looking at isn't a story.
Why do we write stories rather than essays (or jokes, in the case of crack-fics)? Writing a story is harder and takes longer. But a story can do some things better than an essay can. The civil rights and gay rights movements didn't succeed using logical arguments, but with fictional and true stories about black and gay individuals. A story can bring you into someone's world, make them a non-stranger to you, and suddenly you find your attitude towards them has changed, without an argument. A story can explain someone's behavior in terms of their previous experiences, and we may understand them better by imagining how we would respond to those same experiences than by following a chain of logic in a psychology journal.
This may be due to the peculiarities of the human mind. We've evolved to understand other humans, not essays. We can comprehend a person who is a mass of contradictions better than we can comprehend an essay that dissects the epistemology of a tangled philosophy. Stories are our native language, and we may perceive things in them more easily than if they were stated formally.
(More easily, not more reliably. Stories are a dangerous methodology for discovering truth. This, again, is due to the peculiarities of the human mind. See my author's comments (if you dare; they're long) on "The ones who walk away from Equestria". Certain things only "make sense" as stories because they don't make sense; they trigger context-insensitive emotional responses that short-circuit logical thought. So storytelling is a double-edged sword: you can convey truths that can be perceived only in a story, and lies that are convincing only in a story, and it's hard to know which you're doing.)
A story shows it main message. An essay tells.
Neither stories nor essays are mere communication. They're creative. Communication passes on chunks of information. Creativity takes chunks of information and assembles them in new ways. If a story doesn't give us any new or interesting combinations of old familiar chunks, we get the uneasy feeling that it wasn't really a story, and it wasn't.
"Showing" means, I think, that we can picture the assembly of those chunks in the real world and mentally simulate what they'll do. "Telling" means we are given the chunks, and a sentence or formula to plug them into.
That is far from meaning that body language is "showing" while adverbs are "telling". The chunks that we assemble may be entire chapters of a novel. I previously cited an example that Mystic gave about "implication outside the initial scope", quoting someone else:
There is a technique where you baldly state how a character feels or what a character thinks about something, and that statement can imply things far beyond the scope of what you wrote. If you've ever read Bubbles you might remember how the style is very simplistic, with Derpy telling the reader all sorts of things that other writers might try to show instead, like the things that makes her happy, or her favourite foods, or what might make her sad. The thing is, telling here is not an error, because what the writer was trying to portray subtly is not Derpy's emotions or her interests. The thing the writer was trying to infer here was Derpy's simplemindedness, and the relationship she has with her mother.
You are told many chunks of facts about Derpy. These chunks describe events or pictures in the world. You assemble them in your model of the world, and you see a bigger picture of Derpy emerge. That's showing, but on a higher level of abstraction than that of body language or adverbs.
A good essay uses showing to give examples of its points, and a good story may use telling to build its chunks (as in the Derpy example). So what's the difference between a story and an essay?
If the top-level creative concept is shown, it's a story. If the top-level creative concept is told, it's an essay.
Some of the same people who have stricken the adverbs from my stories have written "stories" in which the top-level concept is told. This is often the case in crack-fics; a classic example is "To Serve Man". I think it's okay in a crack-fic, since there's no need to distinguish between a crack-fic and an extended joke (think of a crack-fic as a long stand-up routine). But I'm never left satisfied by serious stories in which the top-level concept is simply told.
I don't want to give specific examples from fimfiction, but many of them are stories with twist endings. A twist makes you reinterpret a story. That means the twist has to involve the theme. But if you've avoided touching the theme in order not to give away the twist, you haven't shown (or told) us pieces of the theme, and can only baldly tell it in the reveal. Any story where the twist is that pony W is a changeling, pony X is just imagining things, or pony Y secretly loves pony Z, is at risk of being a "story essay", unless that revelation makes you reinterpret the entire story with a new meaning that now suddenly makes a point.
The story of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov is almost entirely "telling" dialogue. Christ returns a second time to earth, and is immediately jailed by the Catholic Church. The Grand Inquisitor explains to Christ why they must kill him, and his reasons sound convincing.
If the story ended there, it would be an essay. But it goes on for one more paragraph:
When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!' And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away."
The kiss is Christ's response to everything the Inquisitor has said. We feel that Christ has won the debate, and yet no one can tell why. There is no shorter way to explain the story than the story itself, and that is what proves it is a story.
Here's one of my own stories that didn't quite work out in this respect: "Special". On a family outing, Pound Cake says that Discord is hiding behind a rock just beyond the shoreline. Everyone else thinks he's just playing, because that would be a silly thing for a god to do. The twist is that Discord really is hiding behind a rock, and he's doing it just to destroy Pound's faith in his parents and in society at large, and prepare him for a role in some larger plan.
The story before the reveal should have touched on the importance of growing up with parents you can trust, the danger in thinking you alone know the truth, and so on. Then the reveal would have been the final piece needed to assemble all of those things into a picture of how Pound should have grown up, and another picture of how he will now. But instead, I rushed to the reveal, trying to write the shortest set-up necessary for it, rather than the one that would give it meaning.
I think I did this better in "No Regrets", which was very short, but showed specific times when Twilight had avoided Derpy, explained why, and related that to her relationship with the ponies she considered friends. It gives enough pieces of story to put together in a big "show" by the end. AbsoluteAnonymous' "Two Cups of Tea" also did this pretty well. It gradually reveals Rarity's feelings and dreams, and how they are crushed, and how she can handle that.
It's harder to do with a twist ending, but I think I did all right in "The Corpse Bride", because the build-up to the reveal planted many things to show that Twilight and company were not living up to the ideals that Twilight expressed in her speech. Also, the ending reveals the twist (Fluttershy loved Discord), its cause (they are over-confident in their perceptions) and the other consequences of that cause (they had abandoned their friend; they have murdered Fluttershy). And I did all right in "Trust", which also has a twist ending, but the story before it explains the significance of the reveal to Celestia, and shows specific instances of misplaced trust.
The key distinction is whether the story leading up to the twist just plants clues about a fact that is to be revealed, or plants clues about the causes and consequences of what is to be revealed, which the reader can assemble into a theme. The latter is a story; the former is a story essay.
I like and approve this blog sir.
I didn't understand a single iota of what you said. I'm a literary idiot
I've found that:
Writing non-fiction makes me writhe in agony, doubt my every instinct, and second guess every word I type. I mean, I abandon maybe 80% of the responses I write to posts here on FimFiction without ever clicking the "add" button. Stories, I can do. Reality, not so much...
Mike
1724766 The first third is the toughest part. I tried to restate it a little more clearly and accurately now. Don't know if it will help.
1724849
It's Chinese to me.
I just have difficulty understanding the more "in-depth" mechanics of writing.
This reminds me of how some psychological models propose that our very sense of self (and by proxy our relationship with others and reality) is build out of stories, be they fictitious or not. The idea is that we can only relate to and understand our own experiences by analogy with those of others. In way, this would mean that one of the core characteristic of human beings is that of being a story teller.
It also reminds me of how News Media has evolved over time to focus more on the story rather than the news being presented, as a way to get more people to read their stories. However, and I think this is at the crux of the issue here, there is always the risk of trading substance for narrative. Maybe the best writings, regardless of which field, must exist near the center of a spectrum between "showing" and "telling".
I think it also relates to an important question: Can you be objective when focusing on storytelling? Or is there something in the format that makes it necessarily subjective?
One hundred years after...
There was a TED talk related to this recently (skip to 3:50)
The implication is that abstract thinking, the kind required to understand abstract logic, is not a thing that most people develop naturally. Telling a story, rather than a logical argument, is one way to sidestep the need for abstract thinking in the audience.
You say that stories are double-edged swords because they short the logical mode of thinking and can tell either truths or lies. I don't think a story is required for this. Most one-liner "words of wisdom" have the same effect without any context. See http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marcus_tullius_cicero.html.
1725855
So long as the story isn't written in a formalized logic, I think most of us agree that the answer to this is a solid "no" to the first, "yes" to the second. Purple to you means different things to you and me, for personal, cultural, and other reasons. (How many people associate "purple" with "authority"?) The same is true for most, if not all, words written in any natural language. There are other issues when trying to be objective with a story, but I believe this is the easiest to explain.
1724849
I don't know what this means.
1726831
>>Stories are opaque
>I don't know what this means.
I re-read that, and began trying to explain it, and I decided that what followed immediately after said what I meant to say by that more clearly. So I removed the statement "Stories are opaque".
1730344
I figured, but I'm a fan of weird analogies. Maybe something like "Stories are opaque, like blackbodies. The light of truth can bounce around inside however it likes, but it rarely escapes unchanged."
I'm here from your blog index, as I've been reading through your posts on show vs tell. This blog in particular encourages me, because I have come to many the same conclusions separately. Feel free to skip the following speech, but overall my thoughts on showing and telling have become as such:
"Show, don't tell", when applied on the level of prose is a lie. "Showy" prose is not necessary. Leave the writer to his or her own goals, personal tastes and predispositions. There has been lots of fiction and nonfiction, both telly and showy, equally hailed as great.
Principle: You can tell with the language or prose, but you show with the events—and what you are showing is the meaning of the story.
The events can be those things which happen to a character (internally or externally), or the actions that character takes (internally or externally). Those which are internal may either be clearly expressed (what is usually called telly prose) or implied (what is usually called showy prose). But I believe it is the events, the internal and external action—something happening—which will stick together into some mass that the reader most strongly gleans meaning from.
They are like LEGO pieces which you use to construct a form. You don’t simply “tell” what you are going to make, you build it. But the individual pieces you use may involve lots of telling.
For example, if I wanted to write a story to make you really feel the tragedy of Billy losing his dog Fido to a car on the highway, I don't think I should simply show you the accident and talk about how many years they spent together while Billy cries over Fido’s body, isn't it sad. I should build for you the years they spent together. Within those episodes it’s perfectly fine to describe Billy’s pride “welling up within him” as Fido learns to fetch, or the terror that gripped his heart when Fido once ran off without his collar. I could go into great detail about how Billy would often wonder if there wasn’t something beyond simple instinct resting behind those hazel eyes, how he swore he could see joy in them as real as in any human.
But what I won’t say is how tragic it is that Fido dies on a highway. That I am going to show you, because it is the point of my story. I show you by displaying all the internal and external events over the years which will make you know the tragedy when it happens.
/speech.
...So yeah, I agree with this blog.