Yikes. That’s someone who knows the rules but not when they shouldn’t apply. I’d probably be scribbling “this is melodramatic” all over her stuff. Next time her character acts this way, I’d ask her to act it out. See if she can honestly envision someone acting in that manner.
“I think I’ve seen enough to make a decision,” Bob said coldly, slamming the book shut. “You’re fired.”
John took a deep breath and released it, counting to five under his breath, trying to resist the urge to leap across the table and strangle his old friend. “You sonofabitch,” he hissed, “how could you do this to me?”
Bob nodded to the guards by the door. John looked over his shoulder at the two muscular men coming toward him and stood, pushing the chair beneath the table. “My lawyers will be contacting you,” he said to Bob as he walked past the guards.
Yes and no. People aren’t just talking heads. They do stuff while they talk, whether it’s fiddle with a pen, tuck their hair behind their ears, or slam their fist on the table. What you as the writer have to understand is what reaction a person has under different emotions. Do you fiddle with a pen when you’re angry or when you’re bored? Does your breathing grow shallow and quick when you’re scared or angry or happy? Even if two people are having a nice, polite conversation they still occasionally take sips of their drinks, smile at a humorous remark, wink at a stranger across the room.
In my example, first paragraph, the first sentence isn’t enough to convey the tone of the character. “I think I’ve seen enough to make a decision” could be said happily, sadly, or any number of ways. I probably could’ve left off the adverb, since the phrase “You’re fired” would definitely indicate an unhappy outcome, but it comes after the first sentence and might cause some initial confusion.
The second paragraph could get away with just the dialogue line, but I wanted to add a bit of visible action to John’s emotions and tell a bit of his thoughts (wanting to strangle Bob). If the story had been from Bob’s POV, then he would’ve seen John taking a deep breath but not known he was dreaming of murder.
The third paragraph’s dialog line should have conveyed John’s anger and indignation, but only because of the setup of the previous sentences. I could also then show him straightening his suit, or pulling away from the guards when they grab his arms, depending on how much he reacts to the events going on. As it’s written, it hopefully conveys the idea that John doesn’t want to make a scene. He doesn’t wait on the guards to reach him; he stands and leaves before they reach him.
Hmm, I always thought the squirrels in question were merry, i.e., they were doing cute stuff and were generally a bright spot of entertainment in the otherwise grinding cubicle hell.
As to the OP, one advantage of showing, not telling, is that it allows you to use some subtlety and display your characters’ conflicting emotions and motivations in a way that elicits sympathy and investment from the audience. People like to pick up little clues and speculate about what the characters are really feeling and thinking sometimes.
Imagine any TV show where two characters had a lot of unresolved sexual tension. While that can be really compelling (how many shows have jumped the shark when said characters finally do it?), it would be totally boring just to say, “John and Marsha are attracted to each other, but not sure they want to pursue it.”
I think people have caught the gist of the rule, which is that when you can, it’s better to have a character exemplify a behavior or characteristic instead of saying “sometimes, he did X” or “he liked to do X.” Another thing that can make telling boring is the use of the passive voice. If you avoid that, descriptive passages are more lively and will feel less like telling.
I think the idea is that “show, don’t tell” isn’t as tied to literary vs. visual media as your OP implies. Either way, you’re trying to convey an idea to your audience, and the way to make the idea have the most impact is to let them figure it out for themselves based on the information you give them.
“Jethro was prone to fits of violence” is too direct, and as a result doesn’t tell you enough. How do you mean? How violent? Instead, you could write “When asked to pay his part of the bill, Jethro stood up, flipped the table over, and punched our accounts manager in the face, kicking him in the kidneys as he writhed on the floor.”
Because you’re working in print, you “show” things to the reader by describing them. And describing only what you have to describe, because the reader can’t see what’s in your head. In general, you describe the events that happen, but leave the reader to determine the meaning of those events himself.
Just remember how it is with people in real life. You build up an impression of that person based on more than just what they tell you directly. If someone tells you “I have a very good sense of humor,” you probably tend to think, “Yeah? Prove it.” It’s not until they demonstrate their sense of humor over time that you really believe them and establish that as part of their character.
Those sound more like questions of pacing rather than showing vs. telling. If they’re things that are important to the plot, then you should be describing them in a way that shows the reader why they’re important. There’s nothing inherently “better” about a flashback vs real time; you can have a flashback that’s as overly demonstrative and exposition-heavy as any description of stuff happening in real time.
And don’t let any one rule overtake everything at the expense of variety, either – if you’ve got a bunch of stuff happening over a long period of time, it’s fine to use exposition or simple demonstrative sentences as long as you know what you’re doing, and realize that they’re not going to have as much weight. For example, “and then in 1972, I fell in love, got married, then got divorced.” If you’re trying to be romantic, that would fall flat, but if you’re trying to show that a lot of stuff has happened to the speaker and he’s dismissive of it at this point, then that works fine.
And Milton definitely says “and I could see the squirrels and they were married.” That’s one of my favorite lines from the movie.
Telling: “Rjung has nothing interesting or even relevant to say about the topic of this thread, and lamely chooses to insert one of his usual anti-Bushg screeds.”
I meant; you ‘showed’ the line (yeah, we did get it) that demonstrated why showing was better than telling, and then you ‘told’ the line by explaining it. Showing was easily better, as that was funny, while telling wasn’t. Categorical proof that showing is better than telling. Your post worked on two levels, proving the same point twice over.
But I guess this means you didn’t do it deliberately and you’ve missed your chance to pretend you did.
Another aspect to this rule as it applies to writing can be seen in amateurish attempts at characterization.
“Mike was a teenager who was 5’6” and had freckles and braces and he was a nice kid and he loved his grandmother and sometimes helped her by mowing the lawn, and one time he had a parrot. Mike always got mad when people would tease him and there was this one bully, his name was Bobo, who would always make fun of him and Mike would cry except he wouldn’t tell anybody and Mike was very smart, all his friends said so, except sometimes he didn’t clean his room.
One day Mike was waiting for the bus to school when…"
…and the rest of the story contains no characterization. It would obviously be an improvement to show how messy Mike is. When he washes his hands, he tosses the towel on the counter-top instead of hanging it up. When his grandmother calls him that night, Mike digs out the cordless phone from beneath a stack of Mountain Dew cans. His grandmother wants him to come mow the lawn, so Mike fishes out a couple sorta-dirty socks from his laundry pile. These tell the reader messy in an economical yet persistent way while at the same time advancing the action.
From this example, we see that Harper Lee was a no-talent hack. She could have used a good editor.
Ahem.
Don’t listen to the pedants. Stylistic guidelines are fine, but don’t be blindly worshipful of rules in writing (or in any artistic endeavor). (Which is the point Krokodil was making, I imagine, by using Harper Lee for an example.)
(All right, I’m at home now, so I can put something into my answer.)
If one wishes to be pedantic about showing the reader everything instead of merely discussing a topic in dialogue or prose, JRR Tolkien would have grossly violated this rule numerous times in The Lord of the Rings. After all, he told us all about a villain—Sauron—which never once appeared within the pages of his book. Saruman was little more than a man Gandalf talked about, at least until after he had been defeated and we visit him as he broods in the ruins of Isengard.
And every Doyle murder mystery, where the Holmes and his redoubtable sidekick Dr Watson smoke pipes in their lodgings in Baker Street and discuss the possible ways the murder may have been committed, would have to be thrown out. “Show us the murder!” the pedants would cry. “Don’t just tell us about it!”
Further, every story containing a monster or a zombie or an alien would be given the heave-ho. It’s not enough that we’re told a creature is an alien. We have to see that he is an alien! Even if nobody else in the story is aware of it, we have to know.
Yes, and every opportunity for ambiguity would be lost as well: no more romances where the heroine wonders “does he really love me?” because we, the readers, would be shown explicitly how the hero loves her and why he doesn’t show it to her. When a character says “I love you” we cry show, not tell!
Oh, and:
…this guy is obviously a no-talent hack too, right?
I honestly believe that the show, don’t tell rule is meant for mostly for characterization, as I previously posted, and for expression, but not for motivation. What is motivation but a character’s intent to do something in the future? And how do you write the future? When it gets here, of course. Meanwhile, the reader is left twisting in the wind.
Both of them admit that there are times when a good writer will show things happening rather than merely talking about them, and explain why showing is better (at those times) than telling. Other websites believe in the rule:
but admittedly, that seems more invested with educating children in the art of using descriptive language than in imprinting them with a philosophy of story-telling.
This website, about self-editing for fiction writers, explains the show/tell rule best, by using citations from The Great Gatsby as example. This advice tell us:
and
In other words, HPL, you as the author must choose which things to show and which to tell. Some things which you believe should be ambiguous or undecided should clearly not be shown but they could be shown to be ambiguous. You may use the rule to remind yourself to take advantage of an opportunity to show the reader how a particular adjective applies (as in the example of the broken-down car, above).
I agree with SolGrundy’s advice on your exposition and flashbacks. You may use a narrative description to set up events which are important to your story’s structure, but use specific scenes to show how those events are important to your story’s characters. That is, you may say “it was the height of the Great War.” That is important to your story’s setting and needn’t be shown. If, after explaining the significance of the particular battlefield in question, you need to show how Joey was affected by the death of his friend Bill, that’s something you might choose to “zoom in on” and show us the muddy ditch in Dresden where Bill is buried to the waist, coughing up blood, as Joey fumbles to tear off his wet sleeve to bandage a wound—if you want Joey to really be affected by this event, that’s when I would begin to show.
Of course, if you want Joey to have gone numb and psychotic as a result, you may wish to convey the scene a different way: maybe Joey talks about his old war buddy Bill to a train conductor and we can see how emotionally detached he is from the recollections he is having.
Under “show, don’t tell” you would never just say
unless you were deliberately keeping the readers in the dark.
I’m not a professional writer, but when I write fiction I do try to do it well. Hope this helps.
“Merry” makes more sense – if it were a normal person talking. “Married” is funnier and fits well with the quirkiness of the character.
As for the OP – when you’re thinking about how to establish a character, read a Michael Crichton novel, learn his technique, and do the opposite. If you want to write an action scene, read a Cormac McCarthy novel and do the opposite. (My opinions, obviously.)
Seriously, all these “rules” are guidelines, not ironclad laws. The essence of good story writing is to get something out of your brain, onto the paper and into the brain of the reader. Whatever achieves that result is a good thing. I suck at it myself, but there’s always hope.
It’s been years since I read a Crichton novel(I tried to read “Congo” but couldn’t force myself to get into it. At least the movie had Bruce Campbell, which is the only part I ever bother to watch). I have no idea who Cormac McCarthy is.
Actually, I agree with you. I’ve always somewhat felt that the “rules” of writing are more like a set of guidelines then actual unbreakble rules. Kind of like the Pirates code in POTC.
Exactly. The reason the rules are pounded into new writers’ heads as if they’re ironclad is because most new writers aren’t capable of distinguishing between well-done telling and poor telling. Too many new writers with delusions of Hemingway think they’re writing in a style reminiscent of a classic writer when in reality they’re just writing poorly. If you know what the rules are and how to use them, you can then know when to avoid using them.
An engaging, well-written good story is an engaging, well-written good story. Period. Doesn’t matter how many rules you break getting there.
Remember, though, that the point of those stories was to vicariously enjoy the company of a character as thrilling as Holmes through the eyes of everyman Watson – and so while Doyle was telling what had happened, he told it in Watson’s voice, in such a way that we were shown (and came to feel) Watson’s admiration for Holmes.
On the flip side: one of my chief complaints about Faulkner is how exclusively he relies on SHOW instead of TELL. There are things which the character takes for granted, and these things do not become apparent in the story until their assumption has an impact. Even then, it’s not always clear.
That’s a coincidence: there’s a rule that the longer a thread goes on, the chance of someone mentioning Hitler tends to one. Man, that’s just another way those two are alike.
I kid, I kid. And, also, I think I shattered several such rules at once, with a big side of irony.
Anyway, just like to say it’s been a very instructive thread. That’s what I’d thought, but nice to see people agree. Note that, “show don’t tell” isn’t an end, but a means: if telling is better, do, but if you’re attempting to show something important, especially an attitude or something, it’s a good approximation.
That’s what we call business, which is definitely useful in breaking up dialog, and keeping the reader in the scene. Some of this can show emotion - fidgeting, perhaps, one character moving closer to another. But a lot of it, like sipping coffe, doesn’t. Still useful.
This is close to what I was asking. Some might considfer John’s thoughts telling. Showing would be him making subtle strangling motions with his hands. I think that would be too much, unless you wanted to show him as having anger management problems.
Your scene would be a turning point in the story, and as such seems to lend itself to action. But what if the scene were Bob giving John an unsatisfactory review, which John sees as unfair? I’d think the action would be a lot more subtle, perhaps John turning the paper upside down to keep from having to look at it. But there wouldn’t be any books slamming, or raised voices - unless the scene were a climax, not part of a buildup to the actual climax.
I disagree that this is telling. The point of these stories is not the murder, but how Holmes solves the murder. The discussion of the possible solutions is showing us Holmes’ chain of reasoning, which is far more interesting than being shown yet another murder, especially since knowing what happens takes away some of the suspense, and the thrill of playing along. Telling here would be for Watson to say that Holmes went though the possibilities, without saying what they were.
The alien/monster example is interesting also. “The monster was horrible” would be telling. Describing the goo of the monster would be showing, but since prose is usually not up to this, a lot of horror involves showing the character’s reaction to the monster.
I’ll have to look at the conversation with Card. I’m most of the way through his book on characterization. I don’t like his fiction much (not because I think it is bad, it doesn’t connect with me) but his book is fantastic. But talking about characterization would be a giant hijack.
Of course, Jurph. Nobody is a bigger Holmes fan than I! I used Doyle to illustrate by counter-example that there are many stories where it is necessary and desireable to keep the reader in the dark: that the author need not show everything. We are certainly not privy to Holmes’ reasoning until the moment comes which he unveils the answer.
Such a story could only work if we, like Watson, knew only of the original crime what the client said of it.
A crime drama such as Columbo has a different set of needs, of course. For one, it is visual performance. More importantly, by showing the crime take place, we are later able to see how Columbo not only discovers clues but draws the necessary inferences from them. Columbo has no Watson, only the audience. And his character—unlike Holmes who is so masterful and brilliant and melodramatic in his discoveries—is such that we are never ever certain of the moment where Columbo knows the answer. Watching Holmes in a Columbo-style show where the answer is given at the start would be dull.
