Show is Tell: Anais Nin describes Paris
I didn't want to cover this subject, but it's haunted me until I have no choice.
Literary Theory
In today’s article, I share what several people have to say on the subject of “Show Don’t Tell,” until I offer my own contrarian view which asks us to approach the terms differently.
But first: If you want to support my efforts here:
How to Show us Paris like Anais Nin
Rules exist for a reason, but too often we don’t know what that reason is. Part of my focus in these essays has been to reveal the limits of rules that are often mistaken as absolute, and after I’d done that for passive voice,
suggested I take on “show don’t tell” next. I was having none of it. Never was I going to touch show don’t tell, or so I thought; but if I must, I’m going to show you why I tried to stay away.According to Eric Bennett and his book Workshops of Empire, the concept was pushed as a way of keeping communist dogma out of literature. CIA-funded literary magazines focused on New Criticism which couldn’t reference the author’s historical context, and writer’s who followed show don’t tell couldn’t very well preach a counter-capitalist ideology. That kept literary artists out of politics and focused on writing about adulterous college professors. I don’t know how much of these claims are fact or fiction, but the claims exist and you can read all about them in an article by Annie Levin in currentaffairs.org.
Everyone has an article about the limitations of “show don’t tell.” Everyone is ready to tell you why the advice isn’t universal.
Stormwritingschool.com and Writer’s Digest say that, misapplied, it leads to “hyperdetailing.”
Joey Durso points out that showing through dialog has its limits.
Anne R Allen says it risks slowing the pace, skimping on information, distancing the reader from the character, annoying the reader with withheld information, and not saying anything original because everything is reduced to body language.
E M Welsh says it removes playfulness from the narrative.
Everyone—everyone—has a suggestion about where telling works better than showing.
Brenda Smit-James suggests that we show emotion and tell interority, but Abbie Emmons would disagree and shows you how to show interority.
Memoir Writing for Geniuses tells us that “show don’t tell” actually means that we should tell points and show events. If something happens, show us, but if you have a point to make about why New York is special in the fall, tell us. (I like this video and recommend it for your personal viewing.)
Jericho Writers says, “If you have essential factual information to deliver, and that information has no dramatic interest in its own right, then just tell it.”
These are all people to read and watch. Many of them are teachers of the subject, while I’m merely a fellow student, but this is my newsletter; you’ve come to hear my view. So here it is:
I learned to hate “show don’t tell” thanks to one writer on Twitter. Some author would share a line he was struggling with, and Mr. Twitter Expert would swoop in, always replying the same way…
“Why would anyone want to read that?”
He would proclaim the sentence was telling and proceed to write five sentences to show the same thing.
Whoever Mr. Twitter Expert is, I hate him down to the darkest depths of my soul—but he led me to a personal revelation about showing and telling. That a clause, taken out of context, is neither showing nor telling. That’s why to show, Mr. Expert had to write so many lines.
We tend to say that showing is detail and action, but any clause isolated from its greater context is going to look like telling. The difference between the showing and telling is that missing context. When we tell something, we speak directly to the fact, but that same clause becomes showing when used to obliquely illustrate a fact.
Tommy was half asleep.
This is a difficult choice to demonstrate my point, because the “was tired” example is universally pointed to as a use of telling. I’m arguing otherwise, and that it’s only telling if the point being communicated is that Tommy is tired. What if the fact being conveyed is that the class is boring?
The clocks stopped moving. Debbie smacked her gum. Sunlight streamed through the windows with the promise of missed adventures. Randal itched. Tommy was half asleep. Billy drew cartoons in the borders of his book, and Mr. Bismuth’s voice droned liked an old air conditioner on a hot summer afternoon.
Most of those clauses, quoted out of context, would sound like they were telling us something instead of showing.
Sunlight streamed through the windows! Who wants to read that? Show us the heat radiating on Tommy’s back and the shadows slanting long across the wall.
No! Why not? Because the point being obliquely made isn’t about the sunlight but that the class was boring. The accumulated details show us that fact. Inappropriate details would simply confuse the image being conveyed.
In my example, the fact of a boring class is one I expect the reader to identify with, but sometimes, ideas are more complex. In these cases, touch points of telling help us understand what we’re being shown .
In the video I recommended by Memoir Writing for Geniuses, the host quotes this description of Paris by Anais Nin:
Sometimes I think of Paris not as a place but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. Paris is intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy.
This is where the video begins to explain the concept of telling points but showing events, which is really good. I love what she has to say, but she also says that this paragraph by Anais Nin is, in a positive way, “a whole lot of telling.”
I don’t want to see it that way. If you hold with my notion, you could argue that there’s a combination of showing and telling here, with the strongest candidate for telling being “Paris is intimate like a room,” because that’s exactly what she means. The rest of it? She shows us Paris through the intimacy of a room, and because of the abstract nature of that showing, there are touch points of directness to help us hold onto the meaning.
You don’t need my theory to see the interweaving of showing and telling. There’s an example that lingers in my mind, and I’m not sure who said it, although it might have come from The Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray. Wherever I read it, the author gives the example of pairing a telling sentence (that states the character was by the lake) with a showing sentence (that describes the light dancing on its surface.) It’s that same idea of telling touch points used to secure our place within the showing—only in this example its a more conventional description.
Even if you think I’m full of malarkey, I’d still argue that I’m only wrong according to the letter of the law. According to the spirit, this is exactly how you show us Paris and do it as beautifully as Anais Nin.
— Thaddeus Thomas
Short Story: Ship and Sighting
In the weeks to come, I’ll begin presenting all my fiction on Literary Salon, and here I offer this first short story, written as an effort to learn from our recent explorations of style.
Odd, don't you think, that my kids never said, "Mommy, show me a story." Tell me. Read me. But never show me. "...but Abbie Emmons would disagree and shows you how to show interiority." How is that done with no telling? "John caught his wife and Henry in bed and vomited on Cheryl's new duvet." Unless we are TOLD that Henry is their Dachshund puppy and that John has the flu and that Cheryl is the name of their daughter-in-law to be, we might think the wife's name is Cheryl, and is being unfaithful with a guy named Henry instead of wrapping the duvet in wedding paper as a wedding present.
As for noir, "Billy pulled out his (insert picture of gun) and it (picture of gun firing) into Cheryl 's (insert picture of human heart). She (insert picture of a woman lying down with the word LAST issuing from her mouth.) Billy (insert picture of a man running) to (insert picture of a street sign.)
That's how I knew the rule was ridiculous when I was told about the RULE. To "set up the scene" you have to tell information; the art is in the ability to make the scene believable. We've come a long way from pictographs. We have an alphabet that we can combine and arrange to deliver information quickly and clearly. Should we describe feeling through TELLING about actions? "Cheryl laid on the sofa and cried." Why? Bill left her? Henry died? She was watching a rerun of GWTW? At some point, a writer must explain the action.
Erudite as ever Thaddeus. I share your hatred of the unbending rule. First person singular plus show don’t tell are straight jackets for the imagination. When I ask a friend how they feel they don’t describe the heaviness of their limbs and the ache of their eyes, the nimbus of fog clouding their thoughts or the energy that has flowed from their body like water. It would be bizarre if they did. They say ‘ I feel tired.’