Show vs Tell a new perspective

[VKALFIERI]

I keep seeing "Show don't tell" as a hard and fast rule, this is pretty close to my thoughts on the whole thing:

From a tumblr post:

“The quickest show not tell tip ever:

‘Always show, not tell,’ is a big fat lie. If you always show, you’ll have half a novel of descriptive words and flowery sentences that will be hard to read.

Here’s a quick tip:

Show emotion.

Tell feelings.

Don’t tell us she was sad. Show us- ‘Her lip trembled, and her eyes burned as she tried to keep her tears at bay.’

Don’t show us ‘her eyelids were heavy- too heavy. Her limbs could barely function and she couldn’t stop yawning.’ Tell us- ‘she felt tired that morning.’

Showing emotion will bring the reader closer to the characters, to understand their reactions better. But I don’t need to read about how slow she was moving due to tiredness.

Likewise, when you do show, keep it to a max three sentences. Two paragraphs of ‘how she was sad’ with no dialogue or inner thought is just as boring.”

 

[EJDeBrun]

This is useful! Thank you!

 

[DelActivisto]

Here is a good article on the subject as well:

Showing vs. Telling: How Do We Choose? | Jami Gold, Paranormal Author

 

[tinkerdan]

I don't know: sometimes when I am otherwise abusing and desecrating the English language.

This:

She lifted out of bed slowly, waved an angry hand in the vicinity of the clock, satisfied when touch activated the snooze and she continued to shuffle across the hardwood floor toward the kitchenette where the fragrance of steaming coffeepot greeted her, which she gratefully lifted to tip into the microwave baking tray, while her free hand grasped a cup and firmly planted it in waiting for the cereal that she measured out by impact sounds and lastly she acquired a bowl, taken along to the fridge where bacon was added before entrance into the microwave.
Across the room her boyfriend's voice rang loud. "Tired?"
The alarm went off again and bowl and bacon made a crash dive to the floor.

Sounds so much better than:

When the alarm went off she'd woke up tired to start her routine.
Across the room her boyfriend's voice rang loud. "Tired?"
The alarm went off again and she dropped everything.

 

[VKALFIERI]

Another perspective: Lee Child Debunks the Biggest Writing Myths

 

[Guillermo Stitch]

I'm involved with another website for writers and this comes up all the time. Any writing website that gets traffic will be overwhelmingly weighted towards commercial fiction, in whatever genre, and therefore discussions are skewed towards what seem to amount (to me) to algorithms - research based conclusions on the writing 'behaviours' that have resulted in maximized sales.

This in turn tends to lead to the presentation of guidelines as absolutes, a further skewing of the conversation.

I would always beware of opinions presented as facts. If your aspiration as a writer is to establish a business model where the production of stories is viewed as just one of the many commercial elements, then the conversation framed in this way will of course be very useful to you.

But what if you see yourself as that most awful of things - an artist?

What are you out to do when you write? Forget all the context - what are you trying to do right then, in the moment, on the page?

Make magic, right?

And how would you know magic, even if it bit you in the bath?

Because you've seen it, right?

To learn how to make magic, go directly to those you've seen do it: the writers who make you want to join them in that arena. It could be Stephen King for you, it could Alain Robbe Grillet. Doesn't matter.

Go back to the source, again and again.

Don't worry too much about the plethora of commentaries.

 

[ZlodeyVolk]

TESTIFY, sibling!

 

[Brian G Turner]

But what if you see yourself as that most awful of things - an artist?

Good artists have a very good understanding of the technicalities of what they're doing. The trouble is, they make what they do look easy. Don't overlook the years of training and development they have to go through to master the technicalities.

 

[MaeOrwell]

Good artists have a very good understanding of the technicalities of what they're doing. The trouble is, they make what they do look easy. Don't overlook the years of training and development they have to go through to master the technicalities.

Very true - and a lot of the best ones make a name for themselves by breaking the rules, but you have to understand them before you can toss them aside effectively.

 

[Guillermo Stitch]

Good artists have a very good understanding of the technicalities of what they're doing. The trouble is, they make what they do look easy. Don't overlook the years of training and development they have to go through to master the technicalities.

Oh I didn't suggest otherwise, or mean to, and I don't believe I do underestimate the time and application needed to attain a certain mastery of any art. It's just a question of what that time and application needs to look like. I advocate learning from the masters and you're right - they do make it look easy, so there's an extra challenge there in discerning the lesson. But as artists we should embrace that challenge, I think.

 

[Susan Boulton]

Write as much as you can. Try various ways of telling a story. Both show and tell. A blend of both. Develop your own style of telling a story and stick to it. But understand the, "rules", but don't allow yourself to be forced to use them. Read all and any advice given in critiques of your work and think on each point.

 

[CTRandall]

"Rules" in regard to any art are almost always gross simplifications. In my experience, most instructional writers/books intend them as teaching aids to help novices understand their craft. As students progress, complexity increases and students naturally discover the limits of rules.

The problem is when people confuse simplified instructional guides, like "show don't tell", for gospel truth. The creative process isn't simple and simply following a list of guidelines is simple-minded.

 

[ZlodeyVolk]

I really-really really wish that I had bookmarked the Web site I found, which suggested that about all of the buzzwords and catchphrases being bandied about in writers' workshops, nowadays, are derived from a 'nineties book about how to write a television screenplay; because Google is Google, and I can't find the damned thing now …

 

[Onyx]

"Rules" in regard to any art are almost always gross simplifications. In my experience, most instructional writers/books intend them as teaching aids to help novices understand their craft. As students progress, complexity increases and students naturally discover the limits of rules.

The problem is when people confuse simplified instructional guides, like "show don't tell", for gospel truth. The creative process isn't simple and simply following a list of guidelines is simple-minded.

All true, but even if you are a good writer, a return to some basic guidelines can often reset a problem you're finding yourself in.

The rule offered in the OP is unlikely to ever make someone's writing poor.

 

[awesomesauce]

It helps me to think of The Rules as guidelines. And to use them as one would use guidelines. They don't mean you can't leave the marked path and explore, but if you get stuck or lost out there, get thee back to the guidelines. They can most often give you an idea where you've gone wrong and how to fix it.

@tinkerdan's example was a good demonstration; neither hit the spot. The first was an overblown and confusing description of something mundane that only needs a light touch (we all know what it's like to wake up tired), the second was more clear but unsatisfying. And also still a little confusing, because without the context from the overwritten example, the reader has no idea what it is she's dropping.

 

[Guillermo Stitch]

I really-really really wish that I had bookmarked the Web site I found, which suggested that about all of the buzzwords and catchphrases being bandied about in writers' workshops, nowadays, are derived from a 'nineties book about how to write a television screenplay; because Google is Google, and I can't find the damned thing now …

Even without seeing the link, I think that's right on the button. Fiction on the page has been competing with moving pictures now for a hundred years or thereabouts. First movies and then television. I think a huge number of modern commercial novels are as close to screenplays as you can get. The orthodoxy is that of the movie-in-the-head.

The idea of writing books that do what ONLY books can do has been left to the niche and the experimental, largely.

 

[ZlodeyVolk]

I think a huge number of modern commercial novels are as close to screenplays as you can get.

It's funny you should say this. Many, many years ago I picked up a copy of Crichton's Westworld and was disappointed because it actually was a screenplay.

The idea of writing books that do what ONLY books can do has been left to the niche and the experimental, largely.

Dude, don't. There's not enough lithium in the world to get me over that idea.

 

[Brian G Turner]

if you get stuck or lost out there, get thee back to the guidelines

That's a very good point - revising a story with technical guidelines in mind can help turn a good story into an even better one.

The orthodoxy is that of the movie-in-the-head.

The idea of writing books that do what ONLY books can do has been left to the niche and the experimental, largely.

I find that older books tend to be more focused on the visual experience, while more modern ones tend to focus more on the emotional experience. LOTR wants to show us sweeping landscapes of Middle Earth, while The Hunger Games wants to make us experience the intense internal conflicts of Katniss.

 

[awesomesauce]

I find that older books tend to be more focused on the visual experience, while more modern ones tend to focus more on the emotional experience.

I was listening to the Celia Heyes episode of Social Science Bites on cognitive gadgets the other night. Her thesis is that many features of human cognition are socially evolved, rather than genetic, and one of the things she talks about in support of her thesis is "mind reading" and the predictability of human behaviour, and how in different cultures this manifests differently. In our culture, we tend to believe that behaviour is predicated on our internal state, emotions and beliefs, and we can predict how people will act based on their feelings, but in other cultures behavior is seen as situational, and in those cultures people's social roles and circumstances are seen as much more important factors in determining behaviour. (She starts talking about this around the 9 minute mark.)

Which probably seems like it's headed off topic into left field, but thinking about Aristotle's Poetics (which, despite some outmoded opinions on women and slaves, remains a fine treatise on how to tell a satisfying story) he says characters should act according to human nature, necessity or probability. If our ideas about "human nature" are both culturally based, and evolving all the time, and we're writing stories where our characters are behaving according to human nature, as we understand it in the context of our present culture and beliefs about behaviour, their motivations will be different than in literature that's the product of another culture, either geographically or temporally.

Which is a really long way of saying in Lord of the Rings the characters' relationships to the world around them and their motivations are driven by external social factors as much as internal emotional ones (e.g. Sam loves Frodo, but he's also "Master Frodo" and Sam's social superior, a relationship which carries duties and obligations) where Hunger Games is more internally focused, and the emotional relationship of characters to each other and to the world around them has primacy, but maybe that's not just because of the influence of cinematic techniques or whatever, but maybe also because of the relative differences in the factors guiding human behaviour in mid-twentieth-century British culture and early twenty-first-century American culture.

 

[Titus Groan]

I don't know: sometimes when I am otherwise abusing and desecrating the English language.

This:

She lifted out of bed slowly, waved an angry hand in the vicinity of the clock, satisfied when touch activated the snooze and she continued to shuffle across the hardwood floor toward the kitchenette where the fragrance of steaming coffeepot greeted her, which she gratefully lifted to tip into the microwave baking tray, while her free hand grasped a cup and firmly planted it in waiting for the cereal that she measured out by impact sounds and lastly she acquired a bowl, taken along to the fridge where bacon was added before entrance into the microwave.
Across the room her boyfriend's voice rang loud. "Tired?"
The alarm went off again and bowl and bacon made a crash dive to the floor.

Sounds so much better than:

When the alarm went off she'd woke up tired to start her routine.
Across the room her boyfriend's voice rang loud. "Tired?"
The alarm went off again and she dropped everything.

I agree that the first paragraph is much more detailed and lively than the second, however, I think the second would be just perfect in the right kind of narrative. If the character waking up is an important feature, a motif, or simply a moment that needs some attention, than the first paragraph is perfect.

However, if you just need to get your character up and out of bed because you're writing a crime thriller and goddamnit there's a severed ear and a ransom note waiting in the next room for her to discover, than the second one is just fine.

Some parts of a narrative are going to be more functional than immersive, and other parts are going to be more immersive than functional. It all depends on what you're writing.