THE TRUTH ABOUT SHOW, DON'T TELL
This is for Leon Altman who asked.
Show, Don’t Tell. If fiction has a Golden Rule, a Prime Directive, a First Law of Narrative Mechanics, it is undoubtedly Show, Don’t Tell. Show, Don’t Tell is often boiled down to that endlessly quoted Chekhov line, which he never actually said: “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
In other words:
Show describes a meal; Tell explains what it tastes like.
Show evokes an experience; Tell recounts it. These word choices are not accidental. Show is indeed a magic act, casts a narrative spell, can (in the right hands) wardrobe you away to another world altogether. Tell is many things but it is not magic, it is not a spell. It is practical, it counts.
Show, in other words, is the Wizard. Tell is the Muggle.
Other inexact analogies that I use in workshops:
In the first Stars Wars movie, Tell is the scroll at the start. Show is almost everything else.
In video games of a certain type, Tell is the cut scene you watch; Show is the game you play.
Show immerses the reader in the experience of the narrative; Tell is a summation of the narrative experience.
Immediacy, immersion, uncertainty – all dramatic aspects Show can evoke.
Show produces Immediacy and Immersion, but sacrifices Certainty and Directive (what the writer wants the reader to understand or take away from any given moment).
Tell, on the other hand, sacrifices Immediacy and Immersion for the sake of Information, Certainty, and Directive.
A related point worth stressing: by its very nature Show trusts the reader more and always risks being misunderstood. Tell is all about not being misunderstood, and therefore cannot trust the reader very much.
Both Show and Tell are essential to good writing, and while abominating Tell might have worked for Hemingway -- “Show the readers everything, tell them nothing” -- I couldn’t make my work fly without Tell.
Tell allows me to transition and abstract and intensify, allows me to leap — but most importantly of all, Tell helps set up my Show.
To use a theater analogy: Tell is the production team that assembles the stage and the set decorations and the lighting and the music. Show is the actual play itself, the transportative alchemy of script and actor and the production (which in this analogy is the Tell).
Tell in the service of Show is nearly as powerful as Show itself, and is perhaps the secret behind Show’s elemental power. And as writers who wish to harness that transportative elemental alchemy of fiction, we need to master both.
For me, Show and Tell are a generative dialectic. For me, the best stories are awesome exactly because they achieve the perfect ratio of Show and Tell for their particular needs. Each story ultimately has a different Show / Tell ratio. It’s up to the writer to discover it.
2
Show, Don’t Tell is axiomatic precisely because it’s simple and straightforward, easy to teach, easy to learn -- and because in general it works.
There are, of course, debates over how much or how little Show or Tell is needed — or if Show, Don’t Tell has been oversold, especially to non-hegemonic writers.
Whatever one’s take on Show, Don’t Tell, I believe it’s important to be clear on exactly how Show, Don’t Tell works at a structural level. That means understanding Show, Don’t Tell in relation to Audience (or more specifically, Strategic Audience).
In my homebrew: Show, Don’t Tell and Strategic Audience are part of the same interlocking narrative mechanism, and the former only makes real sense when you put it into conversation with the latter.
Sure, what we Show and what we Tell might be up to the writer — but what we Show and what we Tell also inform and are in turn informed by our story’s Strategic Audience.
If, for example, the Strategic Audience in my book is comprised of Dominican immigrants from a certain poor campo background, then as a writer there are some things (like, say, pichirrí) that I will never need to Tell because I’ve constructed a Strategic Audience that understands perfectly what I’m talking about when I mention pichirrí. Or, if my immigrant self needs to talk about a certain immigrant emotion and my Strategic Audience is from my same background, then the name of the emotion would be enough without any additional explanation.
Alternatively, I could also construct a Strategic Audience where I explain pichirrí or a certain immigrant emotion and that would say a lot, not only about the kind of book I was composing — my choice would also reflect on the characters within the story in other subtle ways1.
And it would reflect on the narrative world as well2.
In sum, whether one is a hyper-marginalized writer or a writer from the sepulchral heart of the hegemony, what we Show and what we Tell depends a lot on our Strategic Audience, as it is Strategic Audience that determines a story’s definitional economy.
If you focus strictly on Showing over Telling without interrogating who is on the other end of that Showing and Telling, you end up giving the Show, Don’t Tell imperative way too much power. And you sure as hell make everything harder for yourself as a consequence.
—End of Part I.
Next up is THE ROAD TO TYRANNY IS PAVED IN TELL or the real reason you need to be incredibly wary of Tell, no matter what your Strategic Audience is.
Remember that Strategic Audience is a way to keep our writing consistent and to stabilize our descriptional economies. It’s not here to lock anyone out or to create hierarchies in our readers. What Strategic Audience mirrors are two related reading pleasures: the pleasure of being the person on the receiving end of a secret note and the pleasure of being the person who intercepts a secret note not meant for them. Which of these pleasures is superior? In my book neither, and the best fiction has a reader experience both pleasures throughout, sometimes on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence.
This cannot be stressed enough. Show, Don’t Tell is also a component of worldbuilding. Even if your story doesn’t have a lot of worldbuilding in it per se, a narrative world with a generosity of Tell is one kind of world; a narrative world with a parsimony of Tell is another.
But let’s say your story does have a lot of worldbuilding: stories with lots of worldbuilding that assume we know the world and make no concessions to our ignorance are fundamentally different from stories with a lot of worldbuilding that take pains not to lose us readers. While both approaches to worldbuilding are valid, each strategy creates a different world ethos. Your world might need one of these more than the other.
This is the best piece on show, don’t tell I’ve ever read. I’ve struggled with this rule for years. It’s more complicated than it may seem.
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/search/label/contests
This post was was interesting. From Steve Liskow on writing contests.
Several years ago, I joined four other writers judging submissions for the Al Blanchard Story Award, sponsored by the New England Chapter of MWA. Let me share what that five-month stint taught me.
The submission time was three months, and we received 142 stories of 5000 words or less. Only a dozen came in during the first several weeks, and only 41 through the sixth week, so I read them all, Because I was used to reading lots of papers, I read EVERY story (even though I only had to read every fourth one) and took notes. (Some people have lives. I'm not one of them). I graded them all from 1 to 10 and made a spread sheet of my comments.
I didn't award any story a 9 or 10, but I gave NINETY-ONE stories a 1 or 2. That's right, nearly 2/3 of the entries earned that score, and for the same reason(s). They started with turgid--often unnecessary--backstory and most of them wallowed in description. They tended to tell rather than show, had little or poor dialogue, and a few had endings that came out of nowhere.