Jun
29
The Case of Show v. Tell
If you’ve ever read a how-to guide on storytelling, taken a creative writing course, or read a blog post about fiction, then you’ve probably heard the advice “Show, don’t tell.” More than likely, you’ve heard it hundreds of times, as it’s been parroted by countless writing gurus. In fact, this advice is repeated so often that it seems to have become a veritable First Commandment of American fiction writing.
Is “Thou Shalt Not Tell” a cardinal law of writing? Far from it! There are times where an author needs to know how to tell effectively. Moreover, there are many writers who tell superbly, and even some who tell better than they show.
Showing and Scenic Representation
Before getting into an apology of telling, let’s first address the strengths of showing and identify the ineffective sort of telling that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to eliminate.
Showing’s domain is the scene. Whenever characters interact, their language and mannerisms speak for themselves. Thus, in scenic representation, it’s generally true you shouldn’t overstate that which speaks for itself.
In a scene, it’s far more striking to present the reader with an image of what you’re trying to express rather than merely telling her about it. For example, have your character throw a fit and start screaming at others rather than writing, “He became extremely angry.” When a writer relies on that “extremely” to heighten the moment, when he hopes it will carry the emotional weight of the scene for him, he fails to engage the reader’s imagination. Thus, telling can be a form of condescension.
This also explains another old saw of the writing gurus: “Avoid adverbs.” If Carol has just said, “Goddammit, James, I hate it when you yell at me!” there’s no need to add that she said it “angrily.” The dialogue alone conveys her anger clearly. In such cases, telling with an adverb is redundant and results in an overwritten scene.
The same is true of the actions and gestures you describe. If James responds by slamming a door in Carol’s face, there is hardly any reason to mention that he, too, is angry. In a well-written scene, the characters’ language and actions speak for themselves, even when they’re being ironic, sarcastic, funny, wistful, and so on.
Hemingway is a master of scenic showing. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, he conveys an enormous amount of information about his characters without directly telling us anything about them or delving into their thoughts. The reader feels as though she’s overhearing a conversation, and it takes a bit of listening to realize fully what’s going on.
Hem boils this principle down to a single sentence in A Moveable Feast (though he’s talking about the end of one of his stories, not about showing): “[...] you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
In short, within a scene, it’s often best to let what’s left unsaid speak for itself.
Writing dialogue that stands on its own and that conveys the scene naturally, dashing in a few illustrative gestures—these are effective ways to build a scene. However, it must be noted that relying on nothing but scenes can itself be a very limiting way to tell a story, and it’s not the only way. There are plenty of other narrative strategies that incorporate telling.
The Effectiveness of Telling
Scenes are certainly the driving force in a story. They are the crucibles in which characters interact, conflict, and resolve issues. Typically, the major developments of a story occur in scenes, and the reader expects the most important events to be narrated in a direct, real-time fashion. (This, too, is not always the case. Take a mystery, for example, where the most important event—the crime—occurs offstage and is ultimately narrated secondhand by the detective at the end of the story.) But if scenes are the domain of showing, then the bridges between them are, or at least can be, the domain of telling.
While scenes form the skeleton of the story, their connective tissue is often some form of telling: exposition, backstory, summary, reflection, analysis, reinforcement. Even within a scene, telling can be used to jump ahead in time or to comment directly on the situation. Understanding how and when to tell is every bit as important as knowing how to show within a scene.
Let’s say Carol has just thrown a vase at the door that James slammed in her face. The scene has climaxed, and the next will have James returning home drunk. After such an intense moment, narrative pacing might demand a short breather, a relaxation of tension so that the reader can prepare for round two. The author could jump directly into a scene of minor importance, a few pages of light dialogue to let the reader come down from an emotional high. (Segueing into a toss-off scene is the decision many commercial fiction writers would take. Some would even insert a line break in the text to imply a filmic “jump cut” to the next scene.) But this bridge between scenes could alternatively use telling to achieve one of several different effects.
A writer like George Eliot or Jane Austen might bridge the gap with a discussion of social mores, of male and female relationships, in an authoritative omniscient narrative voice that tells us how to read the preceding and upcoming scenes. Dickens might comment on the social significance of the events. Cervantes might intrude with a humorous side note or ironically poke fun at the ridiculousness of his characters. Or another author might simply fill the space with a quick summary of the time between scenes.
This is where we can see some of the advantages of telling. Not only is it an efficient way to move a longer story forward quickly or to accomplish other narrative housekeeping tasks, it also gives a story depth that showing alone cannot provide. Hemingway might be able to get through “Hills Like White Elephants” using showing alone, but Gabriel García Márquez has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through One Hundred Years of Solitude without frequent telling sections. And there’s no way at all to have novels like Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, or Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities without a significant amount of telling. These last three examples rely on telling almost more than they do on showing. (See the examples below for more on this, as well as my article on Musil’s use of “essayism” in his fiction.) A narrative that seeks to go beneath the surface of events requires a bit of telling, and the “novel of ideas” is entirely dependent on it.
Too Much Showing?
Telling unlocks narrative techniques that are not available to other art forms. And a writer should be free to use any tool at his disposal to get his ideas across.
With the exception voice over and soliloquy, which are basically literary borrowings, films and plays are limited to what is seen and heard. They employ pure showing. A filmmaker cannot tell the viewer the same sorts of things an author can, and in most cases he wouldn’t want to—it goes against the nature of his art. Film and theater have their own unique strengths and limitations. So, too, does literature.
The telling toolbox (non-scenic representation) belongs almost exclusively to literature. When a story only shows in its narratives, when a novel uses only scenes and does not include any summary or argument or exposition, it might as well be a film or a play. And to my mind, a novel that could just as easily be a film is no novel at all, for it doesn’t use the full range of techniques available to the author and certainly doesn’t push the limits of its form. Such a book is merely an imitation of another art form.
A novel is weakened when it relies solely on filmic techniques. If you’ve ever read a book by Dan Brown or Harlan Coben, you’ll understand what I mean. A novel should be a novel, not a film treatment. In that sense, most commercial fiction is not “literary” at all, and how-to guides and fiction professors who preach “Show, don’t tell” as dogma instill an impoverished approach to short story and novel writing. (More on this below.)
A Better Approach to the Case of Show v. Tell
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Rather than taking “Show, don’t tell” as an eternal law passed down from the fiction gods on high, it’s more effective to think about showing and telling as the extremes of a narratological spectrum (represented by the x axis above). However, your decisions about whether to show or to tell are intimately associated with your choices regarding your narrator and the revelation of information in the story. These, too, are spectra, and they in turn help to determine where on the showing/telling spectrum the narrative might fall.
Narrative voice is represented above by an y axis perpendicular to x. Here we can plot the level of narrator consciousness from very limited to all-knowing and from first to third person.* Your narrator might be a first-person witness to events with little ability to comment on them (Benjy in The Sound and the Fury), a witness who is capable of seeing deeper than those around him (Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby), a detached third-person narrator who can dip into a single character’s mind (as in the Harry Potter series) or one who can slip in and out of omniscience and the subjective experience of the protagonist (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in a more complex way, Ulysses), or a truly omniscient narrator who can plunge into any character’s mind at will (as used in most epics, from Homer to Tolkien).
Finally, perpendicular to x and y, the z axis plots the level of detail the narrator uses, as expressed by the compression of time employed. This can range from an extreme condensation of time (a summary of years reduced to a matter of pages, as in the middle part of To the Lighthouse) to the standard real-time scene (“Hills Like White Elephants”) to a slowing down of time within a scene (as when a character becomes absorbed in something and the narrative slows down to explore it in microscopic detail, or stream of consciousness narratives).
Naturally, the narrator choice and the representation of time in a story will determine the showiness or telliness of the narrative. Returning to the x axis, then… On the showing end, we have things like most films or plays, as well as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” On the far side of telling, we have Grimm’s fairy tales, epics, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. And in between is a vast array of books that use both showing and telling effectively, works that shift into scenes effectively and seamlessly. Indeed, the vast majority of novels do use both showing and telling as time is compressed or elongated and per the narrator’s capacity to go into more or less detail about events.
*Second person is just a variety of third person, since “you” are never really the narrator but merely the subject of the narration.
A Few Examples of Telling
Tales
There are countless examples in literature of effective telling. Older stories, epics, fairy tales, etc., often tell much more than they show. You can find a sort of “pure telling,” for example, in Aesop, Homer, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and even Edgar Allen Poe and O.Henry.
The tales these writers (or their narrators) recount use scenes sparingly. The stories are usually told in broad strokes and time is densely compressed. In a tale, it is more appropriate to say “The queen was angry, and she punished her stepdaughter by locking her in a tower,” rather than rendering it as a subtle scene that shows.
The downside of tales is that they are coarse-grained and less vividly “real” than a scenic story; the benefit is that they tend to be short and highly memorable.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs as infinitum! What does this mad myth signify.
Whether you like Kundera or not (I used to love him as an undergraduate, before I’d read much of the philosophy he refers to in his books, and today I find him more than a little tedious and sometimes downright wrong about the works he refers to), you have to admit that he has a distinctive style. His books are meticulously crafted, and the “essayism” of his approach pulls his books along every bit as much as his scenes do. Indeed, rarely does a scene go by without some commentary from the narrator, some type of telling.
American and British readers seem to dislike this kind of writing, and prefer purely scenic books (the uninterrupted narrative dream that John Gardner describes in his guide for young writers). The rest of the world, however, especially Europe, is apparently less disturbed by the author/narrator coming in and telling them something. To my mind, it is precisely the “telling” aspect of the European novel that allows them to be both literary and philosophical. There is a reason America has produced Hemingway and not Musil. We don’t like novels that intellectualize or shift into essay—we prefer a seamless show.
Even our most intellectual writers tend to prefer showing to telling. Essayistic fiction is a rarity in America, and our most sensitive and intelligent authors treat very realistic subjects in very realistic terms, with little philosophizing from the narrator. An author like Jonathan Frazen says a great deal about American society in his books, but he generally does so in a self-effacing style.
The “contemporary American voice,” if such a thing exists, is a kind of stripped-down Flaubert. For as much as Flaubert intended to remove himself from the narrative, his gorgeous, unmistakable style keeps him in it. James Joyce’s does too. Commercial American writers are indistinguishable precisely because they use the same flat, bland language and the same “Show, don’t tell” approach to their narrative structure.
Tropic of Cancer
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue to be bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. They hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in a step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
I’m not sure what this is, but it isn’t showing. It is a particular type of telling, one that relates events but that does so in a way that is far more concerned with language than with plot.
Miller’s books are about language first and foremost. He’s the fictional equivalent of Walt Whitman, full of great torrents of words, words, words, overflowing with contradiction. Plot and even character (aside from the narrator’s) are of little concern, and the stories he tells are more like what you might hear on a stoop in Brooklyn or a trottoir in Paris than the neatly packaged fictions of other writers.
Lolita
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
This is a description of a sort, but not really. It does not show, exactly, but rather conjures. It is completely absorbed in the author’s style. It goes beyond mere showing.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
General description, pure telling so infused with poetry that it evokes the world we are about enter.
And yet, Nabokov moves into chapter 2 in such a straightforward telling mode:
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. […]
This is pure telling. But it is told crisply, clearly, and with a dash of humor.
Intense Telling
Political novels often use telling to educate the reader on the required history and philosophy. (Even Dan Brown tells us all we need to know about the history of the Templars through exposition.) Consider how much telling there is in George Orwell’s 1984 or Richard Wright’s Native Son (specifically, once the action moves to the courtroom). Telling is fine as long as you are writer enough to do it interestingly…
No need to quote from The Man Without Qualities. Practically the whole book is told. Musil barely even bothers with scenes, and when he does set them up, he seldom stays in them. Instead, he resorts to summary and essayism. The book is dense and deeply philosophical, but it does not feel quite like a typical novel.
A lot of experimental fiction relies on telling. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz use telling to create a sense of playfulness. Their books are far more novel-like than Musil’s, but they have nothing in common with the movie treatments of more commercial authors.
In all of these case, the work is often as much about the language and style as it is the story and characters. They are all intertwined.
Why Then Are We Obsessed with Showing?
Writing instruction depends on blanket proscriptions like “Show, don’t tell” precisely because good writing is so hard to teach. The problem is the reverse of one found in literature courses.
In Literature 101, the texts are typically chosen for their difficulty: the density of historical or literary references, the use of complex language and opaque symbolism. In a way, it’s actually easier to teach a class on Ulysses because there’s so much to explain and break down, so much meaning that the average reader might simply miss without a background in Irish history, European literature, mythology, and a huge vocabulary. Teaching a class on Henry Miller, on the other hand, is less common then perhaps because the text itself is so self-evident: to read Miller is to understand what he is trying to do in his fiction. The same is true with Dickens, a staple of high school literature classes, who is less likely to be included in a college survey course. These two might be studied in the context of cultural history, as examples. But the kind of textual analysis that Samuel Beckett demands is not really required when reading Trollope.
For writing instructors, the opposite is true. Since great literature is highly original and idiosyncratic and tends to break the so-called “rules” of fiction writing with narratological legerdemain, there’s little hope of offering simple tricks to students to make them the next Virginia Woolf. Instead, how-to writing guides and classes can, at best, teach students how to write like Dan Brown: that is, in a tried-and-true formulaic, albeit efficient, fashion.
Although “Show, don’t tell” is not bad advice, it is given far too indiscriminately. The examples to which it is applied are usually straw men: they’re typically just examples of clumsy writing rather than illustrations of some unbreakable rule. Since there is no easy cure for a writer who just isn’t very good at putting words together, the mantra “Show, don’t tell” will not much improve a work by an author of little talent.
But the obsession with showing in MFA programs and writing guides is also indicative of two truths about mainstream contemporary American fiction, as already touched upon. It is split between commercial writers who write what really amount to film treatments rather than novels (because they are more salable), and literary fiction writers who are stuck in a late modernist fictional mode.*
*I am speaking very broadly here, and that there are, of course, dozens of counterexamples to these trends. Naturally, there are excellent writers in all genres and forms who make narrative decisions in full consciousness of their ramifications.
So In Short…
In scenes, make your characters’ emotions and attitudes self-evident in their words and actions (or just as ambiguous as they need to be). In the bridges between scenes, strive to evoke what you are describing rather than being too literal. But recognize where it’s easier just to tell us something rather than spending the time to show it scenically. Finally, never be afraid to make an unconventional narrative choice when you think it suits the story, and use the full range of techniques available to you as an author.
Add a comment to share your reactions and your own experiences with the case of Show v. Tell.
