Craft Chat CRAFT CHAT: "Show, don’t tell" is a load of old tosh!

[Katie-Ellen]

Life is just a bit of shit
When you really look at it

Monty Python

Helpppp. Is that show or telllllll. I don't knowwwww.

I do like empty space in writing. We've all seen moonlight., to supply our own vision (except for the folk with that thingie someone was talking about...where you can't create mental pictures.)

I only need to be shown the glint on broken glass to warn me the character/I might step on it. You know, skulking about in the moonlight like I do.

Old Romany saying, 'the sun shines on mud but doesn't get muddy.'

The moonlight has its limits. It's not going to help me out, and do something really kind and helpful, like show me where the dog poo is.

And there is bound to be dog poo in the story.

Like Monty Python said, it comes in so many guises. The poo, that is.

Hamlet sees a ghost.

We are told he sees it.

Maybe we are shown it too, on stage or on film depending on the production.

But the crucial thing in the story, the roots of the ensuing tragedy are in the empty gap. The horrific doubt, the toxic suspicion.

The stink of murder, evil and treachery.

The stink of shit.

 

[Carol Rose]

'Sometimes the answer is yes when someone asks if it would kill you to take out the trash,' said Mary.
vs.
Mary is depressed and sarcastic. Her home is dirty.

Amy Tingle was her real name and she was tingle-ishous. High pitched, baby voice, impolite curves, an embarrassingly rich family - the kind you don't talk about. When one of her boyfriends wrote to her: "I want to hold my beauty queen, instead I'll hold my M16", she thought it was original poetry. Five minutes later, she was flirting with the guru by telling him that he smelled like a Dorito. Other than that, the only thing I remember her saying was, "I need diaper cream." Over and over. It was yet another sign that the food didn't agree with her. She was my partner for the ten-day retreat.
vs.
Amy Tingle was wealthy, sexy, slutty, and spoke like a child. She had a boyfriend in military school and the food at the retreat gave her diarrhea. She was my meditation partner for ten days.

Great examples!

 

[Leonora]

With - don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass - I think Chekov meant that the story is told in the empty spaces. The writer gives us the surrounding imagery and makes us work to make the appropriate associations and tell ourselves the story.

This. And also: it's no generic moon shining, but a particular one, shining on a particular place.

 

[RK Wallis]

Kirsten's examples say it all.

For my writing, I'd say part of my "show" includes (if relevant) how the glint in the moonlight makes a character feel.

 

[Chase Gamwell]

Recently, I've taken to writing in first-person present tense. It feels more immediate. And it allows me to do interesting mixes of showing and telling:

There’s a bitterness to the act of stepping past the threshold with the weapon held high. At one point, I would have crept into the apartment gripping the gun with a sweaty palm, my other holding a flashlight in white-knuckled fingers. Now, however, one lump of metal is held by another. And I have eyes able to see in the dark.

This selection is a memory of the past, but it mixes telling about the past event and showing how the MC felt during it.

I think the perfect balance lies somewhere in the middle of "show" and "tell". Too much showing can be tiresome to the reader, because constant emotional turmoil can be difficult to read. On the other hand, being told through events can be boring. Somewhere in the middle gives the reader that emotional connection that they crave, while filling in other details that are pertinent.

Obviously, all this boils down to personal preference, which is why there are so many unique writers here!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

@Rich. announced he was playing Devil's Advocate at the outset, turning this over like a pebble, because when do we hear 'TELL not Show?'

I think everyone knows telling gets over used. It is a healthy counterpoint to consider the ways in which showing gets over used.

The moon glinting on broken glass was specific in its original context, as @Leonora commented, but has subsequently been made to stand for something generic.

I love landscape writing. Apocalypse Now. Night Wing. Egdon Heath. Wuthering Heights, Jamaica Inn. Dark Matter. Old St Paul's, Windsor Castle, Red Shift, et etc.

(Why do so few people seem to know W. Harrison Ainsworth these days? He was an absolute cracker of a historical novelist)

These books achieve telling by showing.

I never get fed up with having that telling- by- showing picture painted for me, and it's a great tradition in classic literature, as mentioned by @Tim James. Not fashionable right now but it is coming back, folk horror, and long may it thrive.

A detail may be very telling. But it isn't done for its own sake. That's the problem when 'showing' misfires or drops a dud, as when it seems to be done for its own sake, doesn't blend seamlessly into setting, ambience or portraiture, and punches too little weight for the time it takes to read it.

 

[Leonora]

Apocalypse Now

Do you mean Heart of Darkness? Probably the best evocation through description ever.

 

[Leonora]

Shall look for Ainsworth!

 

[CageSage]

A detail may be very telling. But it isn't done for its own sake.

The above is the most pertinent message of all: anything in the story that isn't necessary to move either the story or the reader forward in the story, or deeper, or any other thing related to the story, then it becomes the writer showing off skills, whether telling or showing.

Everything described in the story must have a relevance to the story, and/or the character/s, or it's fluff.
The problem I have with a lot of the newer stories is the words that don't fit the purpose of the story, words written to overplay something that isn't used later, sometimes never returned to (if a setting), so what was the point of spending time and words on something that isn't a key element.

The moon shining on glass is only relevant to the story where the glass is going to cut your feet as you try to run from the enemy and your only light is the setting moon.
If the words don't make me feel the moment, the words don't belong. If the words don't move something in the story, the words don't belong. If the words create a picture that is a once-off and has no play for the character and no play in the story, the words do not belong.

My message, whether tell or show, is if it's needed to do a job in the story, find the best way to do it - either as a tell, to keep the story and reader moving through the moment, or a show, to create that depth of feeling in the moment, a strong connection (even if it is a stinky herring).

I think that may be a 5c comment. Sorry, get a bit carried away sometimes ... maybe that's why I'm a writer and not a talker?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Do you mean Heart of Darkness? Probably the best evocation through description ever.

Yes...that! Tssk. (Rolls eyes) The language is a little archaic, like Scott, but I hope you will love Ainsworth. I started with Old St Paul's...about the Great Plague and the Great Fire. Then The Tower of London, and Windsor Castle. Melodrama bedded into the history.

 

[Rich.]

For Show, don't tell!, for @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine and @Leonora, and, in fact, for me:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899), Penguin Classics ed. 2007, p35/36:

"I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised—on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with six young children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to come out there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an enthusiast and connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud under the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to go over his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading it solemnly on a bush to dry.​

"I slapped him on the back and shouted, 'We shall have rivets!' He scrambled to his feet exclaiming, 'No! Rivets!' as though he couldn't believe his ears. Then in a low voice, 'You... eh?' I don't know why we behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and nodded mysteriously. 'Good for you!' he cried, snapped his fingers above his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out of that empty hulk, and virgin forest on the other bank of the creek sent it back in thundering roll upon the sleeping station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager's hut, vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished too. We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river. 'After all,' said the boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, 'why shouldn't we get the rivets?' Why not, indeed! I did not know of any reason why we shouldn't. 'They'll come in three weeks,' I said, confidently.​

 

[Katie-Ellen]

We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not.

Superlatively ominous show AND tell.

 

[Rich.]

Isn't it just!

 

[Leonora]

And it's not even his first language. Unbelievable shivers.

 

[Leonora]

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.

My personal favourite extract. And a seamless mix of show and tell.

 

[Rich.]

Unbelievable shivers is exactly right. And this...

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

...makes me want to laugh and cry. All of human nature, right there, in one line.

 

[Rich.]

Right then, we're coming to the end of this five-day Craft Chat, and I for one have enjoyed it immensely. Let me try to sum up.

After the opening flurry of discussion (summed up here), and the deepening of the debate that followed, we got to talking about Chekhov. @Kirsten said, and others agreed that:

With - don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass - I think Chekov meant that the story is told in the empty spaces. The writer gives us the surrounding imagery and makes us work to make the appropriate associations and tell ourselves the story.

The conversation continued, further highlighting the need to create space in our texts for readers to feel the story (I say feel; you might say experience; or you might say something else essentially the same). That is, allow our readers to feast on their terms; don't spoon feed. Again, quoting Kirsten:

Sometimes the answer is 'yes' when someone asks if it would kill you to take out the trash. This was what led me to the meditation retreat.
vs.
I went to a meditation retreat because I was depressed and my home was dirty.

Towards the end of the conversation, the need for balance was raised again (a balance of narrative devices, of showing and telling), the importance of characters' feelings, and the need for everything written to serve the story.

And then we waxed lyrical for a bit about Joseph Conrad. But damn, the dude deserves it.

I'm going to finish where I started because (I reckon) you've all proved my thesis:

Beware of pithy rules. Taking them at face value will cripple your writing. Writing is a craft. It’s an art. It’s messy, subjective and contradictory. It cannot be reduced to an algorithm. These rules we throw around are codes for complex ideas. We forget that at our peril.​

Oh, there is one more thing...

I don't mean to be harsh, but I think your examples are borderline sardonic.

Sardonic, moi? Never!

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion. These chats would be nothing without your involvement.