Dear Dr Darwin,
People in my writing forum keeping telling me “Show, don’t Tell,” but I don’t understand what they mean. How can I not Tell, if I’m telling a story? And while I think I get what Showing means, I get desperately bored putting in all the details – so I’m sure a reader would too. What should I be doing?
Frustrated of Fishguard
Dear Frustrated
So many writers, like you, get stuck on this ‘rule’. The thing is, Showing and Telling are genuinely useful shorthand for two bundles of ideas and techniques which are actually quite complex – but the ‘don’t’ is simply nonsense. Both Showing and Telling are essential tools, and the challenge for writers is learning to use each to best advantage.
I often talk about Telling as ‘informing‘, ‘explaining’ or ‘summarising’, because it’s all about getting the reader to understand what matters at this point in the narrative, and as clearly as possible, so the writer can be sure the reader will understand what’s happening. Telling can be used to great effect, with the narrative standing back and leaving space in the reader’s mind for the passion or grief of the moment to flower.
That slight distancing can alternatively make for comedy, as the writer and reader stand back and observe the absurdity of the human creatures under our microscope. For example:
- That was the year the famine came.
- Today I found my husband dead.
- Her wound needed cleaning and dressing, but though the high street proved to have all the usual shops, there was no sign of an apothecary.
- His new life would start in his unlamented lodgings, where he’d put on his smartest clothes, then head for Charing Cross to board a mailcoach to Dover.
- The great birthday party proceeded in its usual cheerful, multi-coloured, good-tempered way, until Uncle Faisal took it into his drunken head to drive his chariot triumphantly into the lake.
I often talk about Showing as ‘evoking’, ‘presenting’, ‘detailing’ or ‘channelling’, because it’s all about evoking the lived experience of what’s happening in the story, so that readers feels what the characters are feeling. Using the senses, working with vivid language, and conveying the physical experience of time and space, are all crucial.
As the novel form developed and readers got more sophisticated, writers could increasingly rely on Showing the experience close up, without Telling/explaining its signficance, and trust that the reader would nonetheless intuit what was important.
- In village after village lay bodies no more than skeletons, skin stretched to breaking-point over their bones.
- I open the door and he’s white and silent, no sound of breathing but only the scratching of the trees at the window – and when I touch his hand, his cheek, his lips, they’re cold.
- She limped past the corn chandler, butcher, flower-shop, baker, grocer, cordwainer, tailor, ironmonger, even a flower-shop and an undertaker. Where was the apothcary? There must be one in so large a town! But there wasn’t.
- His new life would start when he left his horrible lodgings forever, and strode in his best black velvet coat and glossy top-boots to Charing Cross, praying not to hear the bray of the guard’s trumpet announcing that he’d missed the Dover Mail.
- But this time the thunder of hooves and rattle of wheels didn’t stop out in the road: with a brandy-soaked whoop, Uncle Faisal whipped his team forward, scattering the shrieking guests, until the horses careered to a dead halt on the banks of the lake, and he sailed over their heads into two feet of duckweed-garnished pond water.
Most of these are longer than their Tell-y equivalents, because when you need to supply enough evocative data for readers to feels what matters, there’s always a risk of Showing too much. But it’s not the amount but the specificity of the nouns and verbs that makes the difference, because the human brain imagines specifics more easily and vividly than generalisations and abstracts. So “They met under the old tree” gets Showier, more evocative, if it becomes “They fought under the rotting oak” or “They kissed under the ancient elm” – but the plot-point and the word-count are both unchanged.
Of course, good writers work both modes together. This next example starts with Telling – because the reader already knows what Jamal has to say – but Shows Aisha’s reaction, because that’s new to him and us, and important for the story:
- Jamal took his time to gather his thoughts, then explained carefully why he’d come. But before he’d finished, Aisha turned away in a furious swirl of silk and clattered the wine cups together, then crossed the room to drop them into the water-pail with a splash.
And this one starts with Showing, but exploits the power of Telling to set up some suspense:
- Aisha turned away in a furious swirl of silk, clattered the wine cups together without speaking, and by the time she’d dropped them with a splash into the water-pail, she had made her plan. Now all she had to do was put it into action.
So, generally speaking, Telling takes the reader a step back from this moment in this story world, to explain and contextualise, while Showing draws the reader close into the moment and the world, but may lose touch with the larger business of storytelling. You need both.
Emma Darwin’s latest book, This is Not a Book about Charles Darwin, is an account of three disastrous years trying to write a historical novel set among the branches of her family tree.
She has a PhD in Creative Writing (so she really is a Doctor) and has taught for the Open University and recently Oxford University; her how-to book, Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, does what it says on the tin, and she shares her knowledge on her blog This Itch of Writing. Her fiction includes The Mathematics of Love, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book and other prizes, and the Sunday Times bestseller A Secret Alchemy.
Image:
Christine de Pisan instructs her son, Jean de Castel, from the Collected Works of Christine de Pisan, c1413: BL Harley 4431 via Wikimedia (public domain)
