DeScribe

Of all the so-called secrets of writing, perhaps the hardest to understand is ‘show, don’t tell’. Any decent writing workshop, or how-to book about writing, will at some stage wave around this magic wand. Yet many fiction students have trouble with the concept. As a teacher and as a writer, I sometimes have trouble with it. The ‘show, don’t tell’ waters seem rather murky. What exactly does it mean?

For a start, it seems too prescriptive, too rigid. Writing is about being creative, right? About letting all those brilliant words just flow out? Yes, but there is also the small matter of craft. And this is where the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule enters the equation. It’s considered to be a technique which improves writing, a way of making fiction dazzling, yet subtle at the same time. If you could only master the concept. Where I get a bit perplexed, as a teacher, is that not all writing fits into the mysterious ‘show, don’t tell’ box. So how to explain the concept, let alone teach it?

First up, let’s look at the difference between showing and telling.

Film is perhaps the easiest media to illustrate ‘showing’. A movie shows us scenes, or pictures, and so a visual story is told. Although some films do use a narrator, who partly tells the story, mostly a film narrative unfolds through images and scenes, segueing seamlessly from plot point to plot point.

Consider the film Capote, about writer Truman Capote’s famous book In Cold Blood and his relationship with two young murderers which forms the heart of the work. Quite early on in the film there is a party scene where Capote is holding forth to a group of adoring listeners. He is in turn witty, shocking, fascinating. He is working his audience. It is obvious that he loves the limelight and the attention. You can tell at a glance the setting is the New York arty social scene of the 1950s; the participents are cultured and possibly well-to-do - we see all this by their clothes and their relaxed attitudes. They are enjoying themselves. This is Capote’s world. We, the viewers, instantly see Capote as a certain kind of person. The viewer is being shown a picture which contains inherent information. This is one way film can show character.

Fiction does something similar. In a novel, the same scene might be presented in fictional terms, using dialogue, a little description and a certain point of view.

On the other hand, if an authorial voice told us something along the lines of, ‘Truman Capote loved parties’, then we are being told a fact. And it’s boring. There’s no life in it. It’s infinitely more interesting to see Capote holding forth at that party - that is, seeing the character in action.

And perhaps that is the key to the old ‘show, don’t tell’ rule: action. I don’t mean action in the form of sword fights and high drama (although it could be that too). Action, in fictional terms, is simply a character doing something. Consider this line, for example, from the accidental by Ali Smith:

Astrid puts today’s newspaper on the armchair and sits on it, keeping her arms and hands tucked into herself away from the arms of the chair.

The character is doing something - that is, sitting down in a certain way - and the action of sitting down offers physical information about that character. In other words, the way Astrid sits down tells us something about her, but without telling us. Small difference, maybe?

Let’s take another example. Here’s a paragraph from The Perfect Man by Naeem Murr:

‘Anyway,’ Annie said, ‘we’ve got to find the shadow demon and kill him before he gets any more souls. He was last seen at the sinkhole.’ Annie stepped across the dark hollow and descended, followed by Lew and Alvin. Raj helped Nora down the easy side. Annie then led them all into the dangers of the forest.

So we just show characters in action - simple? Hm, not quite.

Not all writers want to write in visual scenes where characters are busy doing stuff and showing what they’re really like as people. (Aunt Mildred may bake scones for the school fair, but here she is in the bedroom trying on a pair of nine-inch heels. Oh dear.) No, writers also like their characters to tell their own story.

These are first-person narrated stories where the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule seems to go out the window. Or, does it? In Fiona Kidman’s The Captive Wife, part of the novel is told from the point of view of the whaler John Guard:

It was the girl who made me think of writing things down. The day I took Betsy to pick oysters, the day I said she had to go to school, I wrote down what had happened. It is the kind of thing my Father wd have had me do. He was never a man of greatness but he worked in the city and he read books. When I think of him, I think it should not just end here with me dead, which could happen any time, the life I lead.

Yes, Guard is directly telling us something about himself. But Kidman has good reasons for this. She is showing us something more about Guard’s character - a softer, more contemplative side, a man who wishes to record his life. This explanatory paragraph is also crucial to the narrative as it explains why a rough guy like Guard is writing something down in the first place. If you will, it’s a clever little device, tucked in there in the guise of character development.

And just to confuse the issue, there is also narrative summary.

Sometimes it is useful, even necessary, to tell the reader something - to succinctly convey important information. This might be a passage describing a series of events that is too long or involved to write out as fiction.

Here’s a fictional example: Adonia Smith is a juggler who has survived an abusive marriage to a lion tamer. You could write a chapter showing how Adonia took a year to learn how to juggle. But how relevant is this to the overall work? If the theme involves the overcoming of a disability (Adonia only has one arm), then by Jove, it is relevant. If, however, the real story is about how Adonia escapes her abusive husband then perhaps the juggling chapter isn’t quite so necessary. And in this case, it can just be summed up in a paragraph or two, bringing the reader up to date and allowing the real action to continue unabated.

Here is an excerpt, which I would call narrative summary, about the character of Pita from Patricia Grace’s novel Tu:

During his time at the freezing works and while working at his between-seasons jobs, he’d often thought about finding work with better prospects. But because of long hours and overtime whenever he could get it, there hadn’t been time to look for anything else. Now he decided that he didn’t want to go back to the meatworks, and since he was off work with his injured hand there was an opportunity to look for something better, a job for life.

If Pita had been shown prevaricating about getting a better job (maybe making himself cups of tea, pacing the room, flipping through the newspaper job ads) it would be far too long-winded and probably derail the narrative flow.

Instead, Grace shows us a scene where Pita cuts himself, then she has slipped in the above paragraph, to give the reader some important information, and next there follows a brief exchange between Pita and a Railways foreman (again showing). So the narrative continues, without being delayed by too much extraneous story-telling.

Grace has made a judgement call about how much to tell the reader and how much to show. At every step of the way, in fact, she is making decisions about showing and telling.

But then there is also ‘voice’ - that elusive concept which is also quite hard to grasp. Voice can play havoc with the ‘show, don’t tell’ precept.

Some contemporary novels such as The Stornoway Way, by Scottish poet Kevin MacNeil, rely more on voice than on showing anything much at all. Here is MacNeil’s main character thinking about leaving Lewis:

Aye, familiarity breeds contempt. But ‘paradise’ comes from a Persian word meaning ‘walled garden’. In other words, a kind of island.

Nothing makes sense, which is why I am trying not to think these days.
I love red wine. Like putting fresh blood into your blood. The warm flush, very much like a harder drug.
I drink some more.

It’s a great voice. MacNeil uses language to maximum effect, yet I found The Stornoway Way to be quite a boring novel. I suspect this is because the narrator is so busy sounding clever that nothing much actually happens. Story has been sacrificed to character ego. Another book which is strong on voice is James Joyce’s Ulysses. At first glance it may not seem to have much action in it, yet in fact events are constantly happening in Ulysses. Even if it is just a cup of tea being made.

The trouble, though, is that the so-called rules of writing aren’t as clear cut as applying a prescription such as ‘show but don’t tell’. Not all good writers are constantly ‘showing’, many are also telling. Others use a narrator who tells a story. This is where it gets murky. There is actually a place in narrative for telling.

Ultimately, there are as many different writers out there as makes of car. Some of them show. Some tell. Most would use a mixture of both. Every writer ‘shows’ a scene in their own unique way. The aim, for nearly all of them, will be to write to the best of their ability. In the end, it’s all about finding the most effective way to bring a story or an idea to your intended audience; to tell a story in a way that is interesting and will involve the reader. And if you can’t involve the reader in your story, then you’re wasting your time. In the words of Australian writer John Marsden, in Everything I Know About Writing:

‘Show, don’t tell’ is a simple way of urging you to convey information to your reader with subtlety. Only the naive writer hands over everything packaged and ready to go.

About the Author:

Tina Shaw is an Auckland-based writer; author of five novels, including The Black Madonna (Penguin) and numerous short stories, she also writes for children and young adults.

© Tina Shaw, 2008.