How useful is advice like ‘Show, don’t tell’ and ‘Write what you know’ for authors in general and writers of historical fiction in particular? Jem Poster, who’s an author and an emeritus professor of Creative Writing, takes a closer look.
Whatever genre they work in, good fiction writers know better than to give unqualified assent to the neat formulations regularly trotted out by instruction manuals. Two maxims in particular seem questionable, and perhaps especially so in the context of historical fiction.
Let’s begin by acknowledging that there’s a value in the punchiness of Show, don’t tell and Write what you know. Succinct, straightforward and composed entirely of emphatic monosyllables, both are eminently memorable. It might be added that neither is nonsensical: it’s obviously true that we need to be on our guard against clumsy forms of exposition; true also that we should avoid writing in ignorance of our subject.
But the more closely we examine these neat capsules of received wisdom, the less satisfactory we’re likely to find them. Most writers of fiction are likely at some point to encounter a situation in which telling seems to be not only the easiest way of conveying information to the reader, but also the neatest and most effective.
And writers of historical fiction, recreating worlds unfamiliar to most or all of their readers, may need more licence on this front than those whose fictions address contemporary life.
‘It is generally better to show than to tell, but sometimes telling is necessary or desirable’: that sentence may not be as punchy or as memorable as Show, don’t tell, but it’s a better guide for developing writers. It’s also, of course, a more accurate reflection of what experienced writers intuitively know and do.
Similarly with Write what you know: no writer could sensibly take this to mean that every aspect of a fictional narrative must be drawn directly from the author’s personal experience, but the injunction, in its concise form, can still seem problematic, particularly to the writer of historical fiction.
We can’t know, in the fullest sense of the word, what it was like to be a wealthy merchant forced from his home by the Great Fire of London in 1666, or an impoverished young family emigrating from famine-stricken Ireland in 1847. What we can do, however, is to widen the scope of our understanding, both by means of careful research and the skilful exercise of our imaginations.
In the best writing, the distinction between researched and imagined material will often be difficult for the reader to discern; good writers will also be skilled in blurring the distinction between showing and telling.
Take this passage from Hilary Mantel’s extensively researched and superbly imagined Wolf Hall, in which Mary Boleyn, sister to Anne and a former mistress of the king, engages Thomas Cromwell in a conversation about her sister:
‘When the king turned his mind to Anne, he thought that, knowing how things are done in France, she might accept a… a certain position, in the court. And in his heart, as he put it. He said he would give up all other mistresses. The letters he has written, in his own hand…’
‘Really?’
The cardinal always says that you can never get the king to write a letter himself. Even to another king. Even to the Pope. Even when it might make a difference.
‘Yes, since last summer. He writes and then sometimes, where he would sign Henricus Rex…’ She takes his hand, turns up his palm, and with her forefinger traces a shape. ‘Where he should sign his name, instead he draws a heart – and he puts their initials in it. Oh, you mustn’t laugh…’ She can’t keep the smile off her face. ‘He says he is suffering.’
He wants to say, Mary, these letters, can you steal them for me?
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Telling, in its cruder forms, gives the effect of coming from outside the action of the narrative, with the writer seeming to present information direct to the reader – for example, ‘At their first meeting Victoria had been struck by Albert’s upright bearing and expressive features, and now the spark of that first encounter was fanned to a flame.’
One way of embedding information of this kind more firmly in a fictional narrative is to convey it through dialogue: an imagined discussion between the young Queen Victoria and her mother in the wake of Albert’s second visit would almost certainly immerse the reader more deeply in the action. But dialogue can itself be crudely used, and it’s the writer’s task to find ways of using it that convey information with style and subtlety.
There’s no shortage of either quality in the passage above. Mantel has from the outset been building a picture of her protagonist’s character, revealing Cromwell as a canny operator in a world of intrigue and danger: he watches, he listens, he waits. Mary’s behaviour is utterly different. She is garrulous, flirtatious, giving herself away where Cromwell holds back: her drawing of a heart on the palm of Cromwell’s hand provides a significant subtext to the explicit information she conveys to him and, by extension, to the reader.
And as we examine the passage, we’ll appreciate its subtleties more fully. It feels like a passage of dialogue but is, in the strict sense of the term, hardly dialogue at all: a single non-committal word is all Cromwell offers Mary here. But the reader gets far more than she does.
At first sight, the paragraph that follows his interjected ‘Really?’ may look like an instance of telling, but it’s actually something subtler and more complex.
By this stage in the novel Mantel has drawn us so deeply into Cromwell’s mind that we understand, without being told, that we are being made privy to his thoughts.
And when we enter his mind again (‘He wants to say…’) we understand that he is simultaneously examining the idea of possessing the letters as a tempting option and rejecting it as too dangerous to be acted upon.
There’s much more that could be said about Mantel’s nuanced approach, but the essential point is this: the complexities and subtleties of her writing – of any good fiction-writing – are not reducible to a set of principles. It follows from this that we should be wary of instructions that seek to pin down the difficult craft of writing in a pithy phrase or sentence.
There are no simple answers; only a process of exploration, perhaps in the company of guides – teachers or fellow writers – who help us to see clearly what questions might most usefully be asked.
The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write: A Handbook for Fiction Writers by Jem Poster and Sarah Burton was published in 2022.
A companion volume of writing exercises, The Prompts You Need to Help You Write the Book You Want to Write, is due out in December.
Jem and Sarah are also the authors of Eliza Mace, published in paperback on 27 February, 2025.
He’s the author of Courting Shadows and Rifling Paradise and is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University.
Read Jem’s feature about feisty Victorian women.
You may also enjoy Emma Darwin’s Dr Darwin’s writing tips here in Historia, where she tackles readers’ questions about writing historical fiction.
See also Tracy Borman‘s TV review of The Mirror and the Light.
Images:
- Evangelist portrait of St Mark from a gospel book by a scribe identified as Aristakes, 1475: Walters Manuscript W.540, Walters Art Museum for Flickr (public domain)
- Portrait of a scribe by Bartolomeo Passarotti, 16th century: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Thomas Cromwell by Holbein, 1532–3: the Frick Collection, New York via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Hilary Mantel by Nick Lord, 2014: Chris Beckett for Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
