April 2008 Newsletter

Show, Don’t Tell

Show, don’t tell.  The mantra of every screenwriting teacher. Film is a visual medium in which character is revealed through behaviour.  As novelists, we are afforded the luxury of exploring the internal lives of our characters, but this can often be misunderstood by the novice fiction writer as ‘telling, not showing.’  The novice writer can sometimes become so absorbed in the internal lives of his characters that the story collapses into burdensome exposition.  The writer doles out more and more backstory in a desperate attempt to get the reader ‘caught up’ so that the actual story can begin.  The art of storytelling is in disguising or dramatizing information so that the reader is compelled to continue turning the page. Showing is not relegated to film writing.  The art of storytelling, regardless of the medium, is dependent upon showing and not telling.

Let’s examine the difference.

Showing is objective.  Telling is subjective.  Showing allows us to draw our own conclusions.  (Do we trust what we are told in our everyday lives?  Hell no!  So why should we trust some dude we’ve never met just because he filled a couple of hundred pages with words?)  Telling suggests opinion.  Readers are not interested in opinion.  Readers are not interested in psychologizing, intellectualizing, philosophizing or conjecture.  Readers are only interested in what happens.  Story is nothing more than the series of beats that leads to our hero’s shift in perception.  This is an infinitely broad canvas on which to paint, but it is a canvas, meaning that it does have borders, that there is a context for the novel.  And when that context is broken, it becomes something else; essay, manifesto, diatribe, or worse, therapy.

Showing is visceral, immediate - the author is telling us what we are seeing - whereas telling is playing God.  Telling is dictating what one ought to believe about a given situation.  Telling is describing to the reader a version of what happened, as opposed to the truth. Telling is boring.  It lacks energy and immediacy, and it engenders distrust in the reader.  As I write this, it occurs to me that I am telling you my opinion.  This concerns me.  How the hell does this guy know what he’s talking about?

Which bring me to my final point.

There are no rules.  It either works or it doesn’t work.  You are accountable to no one.  You may write a story that is entirely in the mind, a completely non-narrative book that defies all known laws of structure, and nobody will stop you.  But after you step back from it and the dust settles, you may discover that you have shown us something new.

Until next month…

Your fellow writer,

Al