Show vs. Tell - a Blog Chain

Several of my writerly friends and I decided do to a join/group/chain blog today with our own interpretations of - and riffs on - the age-old Show vs. Tell debate in writing.

A refresher course, for those of you who have no f'n clue what I'm talking about. Showing the reader something - a trait, an emotion, a quirk, an event - brings the reader into your world, a participant, a thinking member of the novel so to speak. Telling the reader the same bit of information is just that: the writer telling the reader.

Example:

Jimmy picked at the rough, scabbing skin around his thumbnail and kept his eyes fixed on his desk as Sister Perpetua slowly marched down the aisle - ruler-of-death in hand - searching for spitballing perpetrator. He felt his forehead break out in a damp veil of perspiration and prayed blasphemously to God that he wasn't, at that very moment, blushing a deep shape of tomato red.

Hopefully, I'm showing you that Jimmy's guilty and scared to death he'll be found out. Versus:

Jimmy was really scared that Sister Perpetua would know it was him who shot the spitball at the back of her habit.

Okay, obviously its a clunkier version, not nearly as poetic or descriptive. But what's also obvious is that I'm telling you that he's nervous instead of showing it through his thoughts and/or actions.

Get it? Yay.

Show vs. Tell has become the battle cry of the struggling writer. Every "How to Write a Novel!" has Show vs. Tell as one of its first lessons and I'll be the first to admit that it was a lesson I desperately needed to learn (and still require the occasional refresher course on). But I'm here to espouse a radical, mind-blowing idea.

Wait for it. Wait for it.

Sometimes, you need to tell instead of show.

BLASPHEMY! HERESY! Yeah, yeah, I know. Don't get your panties all in a wad. All I'm saying is that there are occasions - rare, yes - that the author really just needs to tell you something and then get on with the rest of the showing. Sometimes we don't want or need to be shown and I find myself reading a scene in a book thinking "Did this really need to be a scene? Couldn't you just tell me that this already happened and move on?"

As benign as my example was above, larger more structural variations of Show vs. Tell occur when the writer needs to tell us that something has happened in a story - either during the action or before it - but doesn't want to make a whole scene out of it because it will interrupt the flow of the narrative.

To take a popular example, I'll go with Elizabeth Bennett discovering via her sister Jane's letter that her other sister, Lydia, has just eloped with the odious Mr. Wickham. (Oh shit, did I just ruin Pride and Prejudice for you? Oops! But maybe you should pull your head out from under that rock and read the novel, mkay?)

Sidetracked. Anyway, Austen could have shown us these events, writing a whole scene with Wickham seducing the little nympho (or maybe the other way around?), fleeing for London in the middle of the night, etc. etc. But that's not Elizabeth's story and Pride and Prejudice is very much Elizabeth Bennett's story. So we get a letter telling us what has happened - artfully, skillfully - and then we get on with the aftermath of that event and how it effects Elizabeth.

I've got a point hidden in here somewhere. Basically, its very easy to point out every example of a tell when reading a novel. But sometimes, you need to weigh the effect of that tell versus its comparable show and realize maybe the author knows what they're doing. From time to time.

Want to read some other writers' take on this subject? Check out:

Amy Bai

Wendy Cebula

Dee Garretson

Bryn Greenwood

Tracey Martin

and

K.A. Stewart