The Completion Club
Module Twenty-one – Show don’t Tell
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken
glass.” – Anton Chekhov
Show don’t Tell
If you’re a writer of fiction, you’ll frequently come across the adage ‘show don’t tell’.
This is particularly useful for writers of fiction but I believe it can also be useful for
non-fiction writers too.
First, however, let’s define what we mean by the phrase ‘show don’t tell’.
Effectively, ‘telling’ is where a writer tells us something but does not demonstrate it.
For example:
‘Sophie saw the aeroplane in the sky and felt immensely happy.’
‘Showing’ is where the writer demonstrates the facts through action or dialogue or
direct description of experience. For example:
‘The aeroplane spun across the sky, spiralling downwards and Sophie experienced
that fall as a light thudding in her chest; it made her want to leap up from her chair
and dance. Except it was not possible. Nothing like that had been possible since the
accident. All the same, she began, quite suddenly, to laugh.’
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In truth, good fiction is a combination of showing and telling. There is no hard and
fast rule that says we must never ‘tell’ the reader. Sometimes we may need to give
purely factual information. However, the effect of ‘telling’ can be to distance us from
the events of the story – to make us aware of the narrator. I often talk about the
‘fictive spell’: that is, the way in which prose can make a reader truly believe they are
elsewhere, as they are so caught up in the story. When I read a manuscript to assess
it, I am often watching for the places when the ‘fictive spell’ is broken and I become
overly aware of a narrator ‘telling me’ – rather than simply believing that I am ‘there’.
Naturally, you may wish to use a narrator if you are using an omniscient voice – or
you may wish to draw attention to a narrator if you are writing a post-modern
experimental novel. However, in most cases, we are simply looking to enthrall the
reader with our story, in which case this rule becomes particularly relevant.
Emma Darwin, one of the Writing Coach consultants defines the difference between
Show and Tell really well in her blog post on the subject. She writes:
“SHOWING is for making the reader feel they're in there: feel as in smell, touch, see,
hear, believe the actual experience of the characters. As John Gardner says, it's by
being convincing in the reality and detail of how we evoke our imagined world - by
what the characters do and say - that we persuade the reader to read the story we're
telling as if it really happened, even though we all know it didn't. That means working
with the immediate physical and emotional actions and experience of the characters:
your rage beating in your ears, the wind whipping your cheeks, a beggar clutching at
your coat. The more I talk about Showing, the more I call it evoking.
TELLING is for covering the ground, when you need to, as a narrator (whether the
narrator is a character, or an implied, external narrator in a third person narrative). It's
supplying information: the storyteller saying "Once upon a time", or "A volunteer
army was gathered together", or "The mountains were covered in fine, volcanic ash".
So it's a little more removed from the immediate experience of the moment. The more
I talk about Telling, the more I call it informing.”
Emma also gives some excellent examples of the difference between showing and
telling in her post.
I see the difference between showing and telling as the difference between an author
who stands back and gives us information and an author who plunges us into the
moment – which generally means drawing a dramatic scene complete with dialogue,
action and a character’s inner perceptions. For the most part, the closer you get to
your character, the more you are ‘showing’ and dialogue is a vital part of this.
I often think of the example of DH Lawrence who ‘shows’ more than he intends to
about his character Miriam in ‘Sons and Lovers’. Lawrence is writing in a third
person narrative in that novel, yet we know that his perspective is very close to the
character of ‘Paul’. The narrator ‘tells’ us facts about Miriam, yet when I read that
novel, I found myself wanting to cry out, ‘but that’s not TRUE! We KNOW Miriam
is not like that!’ The reason for my rebellion against the narrator’s view of Miriam is
that the narrator is judgmental, yet Lawrence has in fact ‘shown’ a very different
Miriam through the text (we can perceive, through her actions and her dialogue that
she is different to the way in which the narrator perceives her to be – in other words,
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his ‘showing’ is more powerful).
I find that new writers sometimes hold back from exploring the inner thoughts of their
characters for fear that this is ‘telling’ when it is usually far from the case. When we
are in the thoughts of a character, that character is generally being revealed to us and
thus we are most likely to be in ‘showing’ mode. This is one of the reasons why it is
often easier to master a first person narrative than it is to master a third person
narrative. When we write a first person narrative, we are effectively writing a
monologue and thus we are closer to the character. If a character is speaking about
her past, for example and this forms part of the narrative, she may be ‘summarising’
her past but it may still be ‘showing’ because there is a dramatic reason for her to talk
about her past at this point.
I’ll use an example from my own novel ‘Bluethroat Morning’ to illustrate what I
mean. The narrator, Harry, writes:
“I noticed her as soon as I entered the room. She was the only one before that
particular painting, The Baptism of Christ. I remember halting, briefly, when I saw
her. I did not recognize her, but rather, what impressed me, was her apparent
communion with the painting. Not just her eyes, but her whole face, even her body
seemed affected by what she saw, as if the whole of her attention was focused on the
image before her. It was most remarkable. She lacked the distraction of ordinary
people.”
This passage is not ‘dramatic’ in the sense that there is no dialogue. But I would
argue that it is primarily ‘showing’ because it is a scene that allows us to get
emotionally close to Harry. We are ‘shown’ the way in which he sees her body and
his particular perceptions of her. He is also in the process of remembering –
conjuring the scene vividly – and thus we are drawn into his viewpoint and the drama
of his remembrance. He chooses emotionally charged words too, such as
‘communion’ and he observes her closely. The reader can take a single sentence “It
was most remarkable” and call it ‘telling’ but if we look at the overall effect, it is one
of ‘showing’.
Darwin’s post elegantly explains how the ‘showing and telling’ debate is so linked to
the oft-quoted suggestion to avoid adjectives and adverbs. This can feel like
confusing advice as we might wonder ‘if we should avoid adjectives and adverbs then
why on earth are they a part of the English language?’ In addition, we only have to
look at some of the most popular books of the day such as the Harry Potter books or
‘The Da Vinci Code’ to see how littered with adjectives and adverbs they are – so it’s
tempting to suggest that there’s an element of literary snobbery in the advice.
To an extent, this is true. I’m all for adjectives in fact – but I’d suggest that writers
should use them sparingly. Elmore Leonard suggests avoiding adverbs in his ‘Ten
Rules for Writing Fiction’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rulesfor-writing-fiction-part-one). Whilst I don’t agree with all of Leonard’s points, I do
personally agree with that rule.
When we use an adverb, we are ‘telling’ the reader how an action is ‘done’ so we
immediately sense the presence of a narrator.
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Compare:
‘‘Help!’ he shouted, desperately, as he began to run. He was very afraid.’
with:
‘Help!’ He was already running. The man was getting closer; Bill could hear his
breath and sense his shadow.
JK Rowling’s books are bestsellers but as this critic points out, the books are
engaging without the adverbs:
http://blogcritics.org/books/article/harry-potter-and-the-evil-adverbs/
In the end, it comes down to one simple rule:
If you make yourself invisible, then the reader is able to enter the fictive spell entirely
and thus is more likely to be totally captivated by your book.
How does this apply to non-fiction writers?
Essentially, we are talking about the difference between the use of dramatic example
and stories to draw in the reader versus dry facts that are presented without proof or
illustration or anecdote.
When you show, you make your work come alive for the reader and you engage that
reader’s attention.
Exercise:
Take a random extract from your work – 5-10 pages. Read the pages and ask
yourself, sentence by sentence ‘when am I telling and when am I showing?’
See if you can tell the difference and if you find passages where you are primarily
‘telling’, then ask yourself, could they and should they ‘show’ more?
Ask whether the narrator is overly present in the work? Are there words that reveal
your presence and could they be removed?
If you are writing non-fiction, do you use bare facts or are your facts backed up by
proof and stories?
Even if you are already primarily ‘showing’ – how might you show more?
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