Show, Don't Tell: What it Is and Isn't

[big soft moose]

King Rat by James Clavell is also an interesting example in the show vs tell... 99% of the first chapter is pure teling exposition giving the reader an overview of the law out of changi... he could have doine it through showing in later chapters instead but it would have slowed the story down, then in the last line of the first chapter he throws in a great bit of showing which sets the scene for the rest of the book. "these men were criminals, and their crime was vast. They had lost a war, and they had lived"

 

[Trish]

as to the purple not purple thing, i'm going to trust that John Sandford with his multibook big five deal, 30+ best selling novels, and the pulitzer prize under his real name John Camp knows how to write...

Where did I say purple was bad? I said it was a stylistic choice, and it is, regardless of awards or Big 5 pub deals. I absolutely did not say either example doesn't "know how to write".

For the record, I thought we were having a discussion - in a discussion thread.

 

[Stuart Dren]

There are layers to implication, which I think is what causes these contrasting opinions, especially about single sentences and lines.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

But I personally reject the premise that we live in a binary world where every element of the story must declare itself as either show or tell. Or moreover, that every element of a story could somehow be altered from one to the other as if were a simple matter of color. I seem to be the only one carrying that torch, however.

I doubt you're the only one who asserts that. But does anyone hold that the story elements "must declare themselves as either show or tell"? I would have thought they are what the author makes them, and it's fellow authors and, less often, readers, who make the judgement.

I'm with you in thinking story elements can't be arbitrarily switched from show to tell or vice versa . . . not without changing the story itself.

In my opinion, "Show, don't tell" as a diktat is superficial and foolish, down there with "never use adverbs" and "always/never use 'said.'" Early in my writing effort I bought a book called Show and Tell. I'm not at home at the moment, or I'd name the author. But her thesis was that you use either depending on what that part of the story needs. A lot of "show" isn't immersive; it's a crashing bore. And too much "tell" can race the reader past scenes that should be felt deeply by the reader and strip them of their impact.

 

[Also]

A lot of "show" isn't immersive; it's a crashing bore.

And it's hit-or-miss whether the reader will even comprehend what they're seeing, what it reveals about characters or events. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner characterized such writing as "frigid" (opening a whole other can of worms around the loadedness of that word in the era in which he came of age). Part of the author's job is to interpret what is portrayed. Selection and interpretation define the writer.

too much "tell" can race the reader past scenes that should be felt deeply.

Not to mention that much of the best free narrative is not scene-based at all. A chapter about "a certain splendid autumn" or someone's gradual disenchantment with — well, I was going to say a marriage or a relationship, but it could really be disenchantment (or enchantment) with anything at all — must almost by definition transcend scene-writing, and will likely fall flat if we try to reduce it to or crystallize it into enactment of specific scenes. Adaptations to screen or stage must do so, but one of the splendors of written fiction is that it need not cinematize.

I really need to come up with a better example, but for now I refer people to Chapter 13, "The Conductor," of Erica Jong's 1973 second-wave feminist novel Fear of Flying for a masterful example of recounting an entire relationship richly in under 6,000 words without resorting to a scene-written approach. Almost any novella by Jim Harrison, once regarded as the foremost American literary novella writer of his time, further exemplifies masterful storytelling with a narrative rather than scene-written approach. The very heart of masterful storytelling is powerful telling.

 

[Homer Potvin]

must almost by definition transcend scene-writing

What do you mean by that... interior monologue in its longer form?