First of all, happy 2014! I don’t know about you all, but for me 2013 was a doozy. I learned a lot, grew a lot, and have a lot to show for those 365 days. And I hope I have a lot more to show for 356 days left of this year!
Second of all, I would like to begin tonight post being completely honest. It was a pain to get myself to sit down and write. Mostly because this is what happens when I go too long without writing in a certain way. For instance updating this blog. But it was also hard to sit down, because I felt for the longest time that I didn’t have enough to say.
I feared that what I had to say would be boring. But I knew that writing here was something I needed to do. To continue my healing process as a recovering creative, and also to continue to step forward and bigger and better ways.
So here we go… This week I’d like to talk about the idea of Show Don’t Tell, in creative writing circles, and the idea of Show and Tell as a way of approaching this particular issue. That’s why this week’s piece is titled “It Takes Two.”
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I prefer a mixed approach – an equal dosage of creativity and practicality. You know that I hate the definite lines that can and are often drawn in creative concepts, classes, or approaches. I believe that they are all valid, but that no matter what you do, there must be soul present.
When I was learning how to write well – how to write in a way that people would want to read and take seriously – I was often told “you’re telling too much; don’t tell us, show us.” And, for a while, like many new writers, this was a difficult concept to understand. Because when you’re writing you are telling a story. There’s no way around it. You are going to be telling something somewhere, but showing in writing is also telling.
So what do we mean when we say that someone is “telling” too much? Well, in general we are talking about a scenario in which someone is recounting events and emotions, rather than experiencing them. Now, as many of you have probably experienced, this is like splitting hairs. There is a fine line between recounting events and experiencing them. Because when you recount them, you are in effect experiencing them. But to a lesser degree.
I will just use an example here to illustrate showing verses telling, since it will be more useful, and much easier than trying to explain it.
Telling a story:
“Kel felt anxious. Today was the day. He would be setting out to learn magic to learn magic with his sister, and you wouldn’t see this place for another year. Maybe two. And it saddened him. Though his father and he had done nothing but fight for the last six months, he would miss it all the same. He would miss being here, next the beach. Thinking about everything that he would miss out on – the Winter Festival, homemade cider, and staying up late without any homework to do – Kel felt even worse. Of course he was excited to be going away, but at this moment that didn’t seem to outweigh the weight was on his heart.”
Now, don’t get me wrong – there’s really nothing wrong with what I have written here. It’s fairly well written, and for the most part it evokes some sense of emotion. Some sense of experiencing something, but it’s quite. It’s muted, and it doesn’t really evoke a strong sense of kinship. Of empathy. Just sympathy, and this is what makes that paragraph telling too much, instead of showing. Because we’re using words like “anxious” and “sad” as a shortcut for showing these emotions. Giving them signs and signals in the human body – which is what readers will identify with. We are narrating too much here, and not experiencing enough.
Showing a Story:
“Kel was up in his room. He should’ve been comfortable sitting there, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t sit still. On the edge of his hands, he needed to feel something. His fingers needed to grab something. Needed to hold onto something, and no wonder. In less than 12 hours, he would be gone from this place. He sat back on his bed, feeling a sour smile form on his lips. It was almost a sour and traitorous as the sweat growing on his hands. For the last six months he had done nothing but fight with his father, saying he couldn’t wait to leave. But now that it was here? He wasn’t so sure. He traced his finger across an old crack in the wall. Sarah and him had been roughhousing one night, and the house, not them took the beating. The crack left the wall, and found its way into his heart. His new place wouldn’t have memories like these. It wouldn’t have walls with cracks. It would have his sister, yes, but that would be all that would remain the same. The rest – Kel’s chest began to ache – the rest would be changing, and faster than anything had ever changed. The ache in his chest found its way up to his throat, and Kel hated to admit it, but his eyes hurt under fresh tears. At first he tried to write off the blurring in his vision as tiredness, but when that tiredness fell down his cheek, there was no way to deny it. He would miss this place, and he would miss what he was missing for the next year or two of his life.”
Okay, so the first thing I know you’re going to notice is that this paragraph is longer. That is less precise, and as a result doesn’t feel as succinct. But this example was not really about to sink this, but about what showing looks like. Notice that instead of saying “he was sad” or he was “nervous” I showed you that by his actions. By what was going on in his body. I showed you his nerves by his restlessness; by the sweat on his hands, and by needing to hold onto something. I showed you his sadness, by letting you feel his heart ache. By letting you feel his tenderness, and by him running his finger over a crack. And instead of saying “he was crying” I say that his eyes are stinging under what? Tears! I let you identify with this experience, in a way that you have probably felt it, rather than just telling you in a “reporter” sort of way what happened.
So telling, as a general rule, is a mode where you are simply narrating what is going on in your story, but you aren’t actually allowing people to identify with it closely. You are actually allowing your readers to become part of the character and to use their feeling bodies to feel for the character – but are simply allowing the readers to watch them. To observe them, not really step into their shoes.
Showing, on the other hand, is the active process of allowing your writing to become personal. To become something that reflects the life force of the character, rather than simply the life events.
There are times to show, and there are times to tell. So writing a book, short story or whatever creative endeavor you are in right now, is not necessarily the product of one of these modes, and not the other. A book is actually the product of both of these processes – showing and telling – (after all, your characters become like a show and tell item in front of the class) – but in the appropriate parts.
You will want to show your readers what’s going on in the story – you want them to feel the characters – when the moment requires it. The moments that usually require this are significant moments. Moments that change your character for better or for worse. That affect them in profound ways. You want to have this kind of emotional synchronicity between your characters in your reader drawing these points, because it is these points that are going to help your reader develop compassion and a kind of blindness. In other words, this allows for your reader to trust and believe everything the character goes through, and this is important in storytelling. Even if you undermine the stress later in the story because of plot twists, you will still want your readers to identify so closely with characters, that they actually feel slighted – this respected by being led on. But that is for another blog.
Telling is best used when you are not at a critical point in the story. When you are not right at the moment where a life altering event happens, and instead you need to pass time. You need to move the story along. The telling is usually best saved for the connective tissue between a really important development, and the integration of that development. One begins to happen as a result of it.
In other words, if there’s a part that would be “boring” for your readers to experience as the character themselves – finishing in the exam for example – where there is nothing life altering about it, or nothing that happens that deserves to be written home about it, then you can get away with telling in this particular aspect. But right after doing that, you have to jump right back into your character’s skin, and begin experiencing the story all over again. That is, until it is necessary for you to narrate another connective piece.
Your book relies on your ability to make us see and feel the world of your character, the heart of your character, the body and the soul of your character. In this cannot be done through simply telling someone about it. But your book also relies upon your ability to move the story along, to get us to the points we really need to see, and for this we require a skilled, reliable (or not) and discerning narrator to help us continue on our journey.
Keep in mind this week as you write, and accomplish your goals. Until next week, write on!
The Write Alignment: Your Daily Creative Attunment 