You’ve heard it over and over – show, don’t tell. But does that mean we never tell? What’s the difference between good telling and bad telling? And how can you move effectively between showing and telling? All that and more on today’s episode of Writer Unleashed.
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Big Takeaways
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most common mantras we write to. And while it’s excellent advice, it doesn’t mean we never tell. There’s good telling and bad telling. There’s good showing and bad showing. You don’t do one or the other arbitrarily.
Why Show? [02:23]
Nothing frustrates your readers more than being told about your story or about your character. You can spend a whole page telling us your character’s father is the neighborhood loan-shark. Or you can give us a scene showing Dad, after picking Tommy up from Little League, pulling over into a vacant parking lot to scoop up his bag of loot from the owner of the Blue Bay Diner. The reader will crave the latter because it invites him into the characters’ world. It allows him to come to his own conclusions rather than have the writer make those conclusions for him. Readers actually don’t enjoy being spoon-fed. Showing leaves room for interpretation. For the reader to collaborate with the prose.
Showing allows your reader to participate. To collaborate with your prose. To experience it firsthand. We all have a natural instinct to fill in patterns, to make associations, to fill in what’s not said, what’s not told.
That’s one of the thrills of reading. We get to participate in the story.
Why Tell? [05:32]
Carol-Lynn Marrazzo in her essay “Show and Tell: There’s a Reason It’s Called Storytelling,” has this to say: “
The wise writer is not afraid to tell… writers blend telling and showing… when the writer depends solely on showing and neglects the narrative that artfully shapes, characterizes, qualifies, or in some other way informs the character’s actions, the reader is abandoned to extrapolate meaning based upon what is observed — for example, a character’s sweating palms or nervous twitch — and the reader then, rather than the writer, creates the story.”
Effective Telling from Amy Hempel’s In The Cemetary Where Al Jolsen is Buried [07:42]
I have to go home,” I said when she woke up. She thought I meant home to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back. I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated.
Blend Both Showing and Telling [09:20]
from Richard Yates’ novel, Revolutionary Road
Frank took two wrong turns in driving Mrs. Lundquist home (Mrs. Lundquist, lurching against the door and dashboard, tried to cover her fear by smiling fixedly in the darkness; she thought he was drunk), and all the way back, alone, he rode with one hand pressed to his mouth. He was doing his best to reconstruct the quarrel in his mind, but it was hopeless. He couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive. His throat was still raw from shouting and his hand still throbbed from hitting the car –he remembered that part well enough – but his only other memory was of the high-shouldered way she had stood in the curtain call, with that false, vulnerable smile, and this made him weak with remorse. Of all the nights to have a fight! He had to hold the wheel tight in both hands because the road lights were blurring and swimming in his eyes.
The house was dark, and the sight of it as he drove up, a long milky shape in the greater darkness of trees and sky, made him think of death. He padded quickly through the kitchen and living room and went down the hall on careful tiptoe, past the children’s room, and into the bedroom, where he softly shut the door behind him. “April, listen,” he whispered. Stripping off his coat, he went to the dim bed and sat slumped on its edge in a classic pose of contrition. “Please listen. I won’t touch you. I just want to say I’m — there isn’t anything to say except I’m sorry.”This was going to be a bad one; it was going to be the kind that went on for days. But at least they were here, alone and quiet in their own room, instead of shouting on the highway; at least the thing had passed into its second phase now, the long quiet aftermath that always before, however implausibly, had led to reconciliation. She wouldn’t run away from him now, nor was there any chance of his boiling into a rage again; they were both too tired. Early in his marriage, these numb periods had seemed even worse than the humiliating noise that set them off: each time he would think, There can’t be any dignified way out of it this time.