“Finally, the passage [quoted from “Dulse,” by Alice Munro] contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers — namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell.”
“This whole language of euphemism has sprung up around the inability to be honest. You can’t just say ‘This bored the hell out of me.’ So instead, you say, desperately, ‘I think you should show instead of tell.’ Where’d that come from? I mean, tell that to Jane Austen!”
Francine Prose — Reading Like a Writer — 2006
“Show, don’t tell” may, in fact, be the single most common piece of bad advice given to writers and would-be writers. Every class, every lecture, every workshop since the first tribal storyteller’s son or daughter was old enough to be taught the craft, has included this piece of “wisdom.” Put six writers in a telephone booth, and one of them is bound to come up with this old chestnut at least once during any given ten-minute period. But they’re all missing a very simple fact:
We don’t call it storyshowing.
Stories use words. Words show nothing. If I want you to know what’s parked in my driveway, I can show you. I can send you a photograph, or paint you a picture, or grab you by the scruff of the neck and drag you into my front yard and show you. But if I want you to know what’s there, and I want to use words, I have to tell you. Yes, yes, I see you there, digging through the books on your shelves, lining up all the rotten tomatoes of “show, don’t tell” that you find in there, getting ready to throw them at me. But guess what? I have all the same books. I’ve read all the same advice. I’ve read all the same examples of “look how bad it is when the author tells, and look how great it is when the author shows.” Tell you what, when you find an example like that that doesn’t use words for the “show” part, let me know.
“Dramatize, dramatize!”
I’ve read several times now that an “early example” of this is found when Henry James left himself a note in a margin saying “Dramatize, dramatize!” Well, perhaps it should have been left alone. As an exhortation toward vivid and dramatic scene work, “Dramatize, dramatize!” has a lot to be said for it, and doesn’t fall into the internal inconsistency problems that “show, don’t tell” does.
Orson Scott Card says in Characters and Viewpoint (1999) that “under some circumstances, that advice is good; under others, it’s exactly wrong.” A page later, he says this is because “. . . showing is so terribly time-consuming.” In other words, sometimes telling is more than just ok; sometimes it is exactly right.
It seems to me that all of the people who say “Show, don’t tell” so authoritatively need to find a better way to say what they really mean. They’re trying to tell writers to write vividly, to write scenes and not narration, to “Dramatize, dramatize!” And yet the best they can come up with is an internally inconsistent logical fallacy that has no real meaning.
Write life.
Build real characters. No cardboard cutouts allowed. No ping-pong balls on sticks, as stand-ins for the CG department. There is no CG department. You are the CG department. Build real characters and put them in real situations and write about what they see, touch, hear, smell, and taste. Write about what they feel. Write life.
Forget “Show, don’t tell.” What it means is so simple it doesn’t need an axiom, and what it says so ludicrous it should only be laughed at.
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