Show Don’t Tell
I’ve just abandoned reading another literary novel. I didn’t understand what the protagonist wanted or where the story was exactly going. The writer had a clear facility with language. Intriguing things were happening with time. It was all vibes—all lines—and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Out of curiosity, I flipped through the first chapters once more. It’s clear that the writer took the old show don’t tell writing advice as seriously as the laws of thermodynamics. The protagonist’s job, the blocking, their relationship with the other characters were all shown. It took forever to understand the basics of what was happening. The scenes stretched on and on. If there was any tension, I was too daft to pick up on it or, more accurately, the only real struggle was between me and understanding the story. It was frankly bewildering to read. Beautiful prose isn’t enough.
Showing Everything is an Art Film
I suspect that the advice, Show don’t tell, addressed an earlier problem. Just as problematic as showing everything, telling everything isn’t a story; it’s a recounting of events. Similar to the mixture of fuel and air for combustion, there is an optimal ratio of showing and telling for the best results. Genre conventions dictate this.
- An upmarket mystery that bends more toward literary fiction, Tana French’s The Likeness is going to have a much higher rate of showing. Those novels are often very long. But French understands the value of telling the reader what they need to know, the one-two punch of showing a truth and then having it told.
- A mystery thriller like Robert Dugoni’s, My Sister’s Grave, is going to have a much higher rate of telling, but not at the cost of emotional depth. The novel is shorter with a far swifter pace.
SHOWING WASTES WORDS: A NEW APPROACH TO SHOW DON’T TELL WRITING
I would like to posit that writers should tell more. A sentence like, “She was an accountant,” is far more efficient than a scene of the character crunching numbers.
While genre writers tend to tell more in their prose—pshaw, what a faux pas—even some of the best literary writers: Adam Johnson and Otessa Moshfeig, understand the value of just telling. At its most fundamental level, writing is conveying information.
But if you’re just telling, aren’t you treating the reader as though they are dumb? We’ll, it depends. Showing costs words. Showing asks the readers to do some work, to be challenged. While I’m a firm believer that great books should have an element of challenge to them, the story should be as clear as possible.
Maybe we should amend, show don’t tell, to show and tell.
PACING
The ratio of show vs. tell is going to have a profound effect on your pacing within a scene. (I’ll post on this later.) For emotional moments or just because the story demands that you slow it down, you might spend more words to render the scene more fully, the senses, the action, and interiority of the characters. But rather than a page of prose, you can type, “She opened the door.” Or you can cut that seven-page dinner scene where the characters discuss national politics with your thinly-veiled views to, “After dinner,…”
HOW MUCH DO YOU SHOW AND TELL?
Tell the reader what the story needs. Tell us that the main character runs a coffee shop, is the best shot in Kootenai County, has been sleeping around since her divorce, and her sister has gone missing.
Show the reader the emotionally powerful components: show why she needs the shop, how her dad taught her to shoot (and all the contradictory feelings), how her ex-husband betrayed her, and how her sister redeemed her.
SUMMARY
Everything included in a book is important to the story. A better adage would be: Tell what is necessary. Show what is crucial. You need both.
Telling the crucial bits—the emotional core, what the protagonist truly needs, or stating the theme too clumsily—is amateurish and stills the resonance of the story. When caught in my own writing, my readers say it’s “flat.” Showing the necessary bits, like an entire scene about fly fishing without much else going on, readers are going to ask for some meat on the bone.
