So I remember teachers telling us in middle school and high school. So I still see some writers or teachers telling and retelling today. My favorite writing handbook, my old yellow copy of Writers INC, provided a good demonstration of ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’ writing. And yet for most of my adult life I’ve considered the maxim bunk.
Below: a few musings.
I.
Let’s start by getting on the same page:
- Show, don’t tell (Wikipedia)
- Show, Don’t Tell (Television Tropes & Idioms)
Why argue when I can let others do it for me?
Pro:
- Grammar Girl: Show, Don’t Tell
- DailyWritingTypes: Show, Don’t Tell
- On Writing: Show, Don’t Tell by Robert J. Sawyer
Con:
- Why “Show, Don’t Tell” Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops”: “You will never be told you’re cheesy if you describe a couch, but you might very well be told you’re cheesy if you try to describe loneliness. The phrase ‘Show, don’t tell,’ then, provides cover for writers who don’t want to do what’s hardest (but most crucial) in fiction.”
- When ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is really Bad Advice (Jenny Martin)
- 3 Reasons Why ‘Show, Don’t Tell It’ Is Bad Writing Advice (Bang2Write)
- Show Not Tell/Show Don’t Tell (Bright Literary Agency): Alas, I must discount everything this writer says because of this little inclusion on the page: “Using ‘was’ and ‘were’ tells the reader something about the character, rather than showing the reader the something and letting them work out what that means. (it’s also an example of the passive voice, but that’s another blog post entirely!)”
No, it is not an example of the passive voice, and you have no idea what ‘voice’ is …
Miscellany:
- Quotes About Show Don’t Tell (goodreads.com)
- Writing in Pictures using the ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Rule (PDF) … go ahead, look it its rules about good or interesting stories or books, and I hope you realize that all the good works out there that aren’t just books on the bestseller list not only break but demolish and disregard these ‘rules’ or ‘observations’.
As for the cons, alas, I could go on … but excepting the first, often cited by others, there is no reasoning employed as to why “show, don’t tell” isn’t good or proper advice aside from “rules were made to be broken” or “sometimes you just need to ‘tell’!” or “write how you want to write” or “I think a combination works best”. These are pointless and useless ‘observations’.
A few more to wrap things up:
- This Writing Life: Some Writing Bullshit (write what you know; show, don’t tell; write every day; write to please yourself)
- Chuck Wendig: A Long Look At ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ … a bit more nuanced than those above
- Tell, Don’t Show. Yes, you read that right (at FimFiction.net, more detailed with some decent, concrete examples)
But there’s an underlying assumption in most of those links, even those against the “show, don’t tell” approach, and that’s that showing, not telling, is generally appropriate to fiction writing. Most of the objections accept it in general but want to find exceptions. They find a grain of truth in it. They agree about the point of writing (fiction), such as providing a more immersive experience. And so on. They’ve already surrendered; they’re like the Star Wars fans who object “Han shot first!”
No. Han Shot. Greedo died. There was no shooting by Greedo, before or after. There is no first. First already admits multiple shots, already partakes in the edit. Already changes the terms of the discussion.
Hello, Newspeak.
II.
A few critics of “show, don’t tell” retort that showing is what film and television do (out of necessity or nature); writing is open to telling. It’s a different medium; it should use all the linguistic tools at its disposal.
They are not wrong. And yet they’re missing a larger, older discourse, in this case one taken up by Lessing in his “Laokoon” (Generally Laocoön or Laocoon in English). Broadly outlined, Lessing considers the different potentialities of painting and poetry as evidenced mainly through Greek and Roman-era works and works inspired by them.
Useful References:
- Laocoön, the figure in Greek mythology
- Lacoön and His Sons, the sculpture that is the subject of Lessing’s work
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the author under consideration
- Works on Lessing’s work:
- “Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason” by David E. Wellbery … this is the work!
- “Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe” by Simon Richter … alas, I do not have a copy of this
- Others reading Lessing:
- Laocoönbleg at ‘Crooked Timber’
- Lessing on Laocoön an the limits of painting and poetry by Joshua Butcher
To make a long story short — it’s about showing, not telling here –, Lessing supports both showing and telling at different points, but the reasoning is similar and has little to do with narrative purpose, creating an immersive reader/reading environment, making more lively prose, etc. It’s about the limits of painting and poetry (or language) as media, and how they work as mimetic forms.
According to Lessing painting presents images concurrently (and statically) in time, spatially parallel, spread out. Poetry employs words that are arranged sequentially and are apprehended sequentially, in time. The problem may be thus: painting freezes everything at once, so it’s difficult to depict a sequence of events that should occur, with cause and effect, over time; in contrast language must be taken in over time, so those things we would like apprehended all at once will be spread out. A banal conclusion would be that painting better describes scenes and poetry actions. But what about when painting and poetry attempt the same subjects? That is how Lessing’s analysis runs … looking at the same material presented in different media, looking at how they work (or don’t work).
Painting can only show; if it is not shown, it does not exist; only in a poem (vs. a painting) can you directly represent thoughts or feelings, those things usually unseen. Yet painting can present details all at once, the color and depth and texture and design of an object; attempting to recreate in language what a painting does in a single image is overwhelming. Lessing argues the following (somewhere between summary and loose translation):
- Painting and Poetry use different means and signs, the former figures and color arranged in space, the latter tones in time (thinking of poetry mainly as spoken language here). Both represent ‘objects’.
- Objects — or their parts — that exist next to each other are ‘bodies’ and the (proper) subject of painting; objects (or their parts) that follow one another (in time) are ‘actions’ and the (proper) subject of poetry.
- But bodies exist not only in space but also time; they persist and stand in relation to each other, and these moment to moment appearances and connections can signify cause-effect relations. Thus painting can represent actions through objects. Similarly actions do not exist on their own but inhere in beings, and insofar as these beings are/have bodies, poetry can also represent bodies.
- Painting can use its coexisting components to represent only a single moment of action, so must choose the most pregnant; poetry, he argues, can likewise choose only one attribute of a body, so must choose the most salient.
This comes from Chapter 16.
In short: poetry — language more broadly? prose and the novel are not considered — can be descriptive in a ‘showing’ sense but is limited to picking the most characteristic traits rather than a great many traits. In Chapter 17 Lessing points that that, indeed, poetry can build more elaborate descriptions by stringing together descriptions of multiple objects, the parts to a whole; this, too, he compares to how it is done in a painting, but he concludes that all too often in a painting while the detail of the parts is great, the notion of the whole is lost.
Chapter twenty-two compares a painting and poem in portrayal of (a) beauty:
For just as the wise poet shewed us the beauty, which he felt he could not paint according to its constituent parts, merely in its effect; so the no less wise painter shewed us that beauty by nothing but those parts, and held it unbecoming for his art to have recourse to any other means of help.
(page 153, translated by E. C. Beasley)
What Lessing suggests is that — at least in matters of the beautiful, but we can extrapolate and generalize — that in showing, descriptive power and technique, the word should focus on actions, on cause and effect. Show how not with adjectives but with actions.
III.
But I’ve rambled on too long.
I merely meant to link a few passages from Lessing to the old saw, “show, don’t tell”.
When I read pro-“show, don’t tell” pages, they frequently go heavy on the description. They prefer moving from predicate adjective statements to elaborate and detailed scenes that illustrate those adjectives. To borrow from Grammar Girl (mentioned above), we have a telling sentence:
Mr. Bobweave was a fat, ungrateful old man.
It is then replaced by a more “showing” passage:
Mr. Bobweave heaved himself out of the chair. As his feet spread under his apple-like frame and his arthritic knees popped and cracked in objection, he pounded the floor with his cane while cursing that dreadful girl who was late again with his coffee.
It is … denser. Yes, I can “visualize” it. The first passage, however, has preceded the second; we decode the second into the former. We are shown how he is fat, how he is ungrateful, how he is old. It’s “colorful”. All my descriptions of the passage, though, have to fall back on the visual arts; here the linguistic has become a bit of a slave to the visual, its surrogate, yet at the same time the visual has been impoverished … it’s just rehashing the logo-centric. There is nothing novel here, nothing particularly poetic.
The merit of Lessing, then, in brief? Consider the medium, keep the linguistic poetic and do not reduce it to a second-rate version of painting or film. Consider its effects, how what might lend beauty in one medium could turn toward the grotesque in another.
