"Show, Don't Tell: The Great Lie of Writing Workshops

I'll try not to go on at too great length here, though I could, believe me. No wonder people think writing workshops are a waste of time when so many writing classes consist of the mindless repetition of the mantra "Show, don't tell."

OK, let's dispense with the obvious, namely, that there's a kernel of truth to the old saw. Fiction is a dramatic art, and you need to dramatize, not simply state things. You need to use the sound, feel, smell, taste of language to make a reader undergo an emotional experience. The sentence "John was a handsome man" is not a handsome sentence, and though a writer is welcome to use it, she shouldn't think it will do much work for her.

It doesn't follow from that, however, that all a writer should be doing is showing. A story is not a movie is not a TV show, and I can't tell you the number of student stories I read where I see a camera panning. Movies are a perfectly good art form, and they are better at doing some things than novels are. But novels are better at doing other things. Moving around in time, for instance, and conveying material that takes place in general as opposed to specific time (everything in a movie, by contrast, is in specific time, because all there is is scene--there's no room for summary, at least as we traditionally conceive of it). But more important, novels can describe internal psychological states, whereas movies can only suggest them through dialogue and gesture. To put it most succinctly, fiction can give us thought: it can tell. And where would Proust be if he couldn't tell? Or Woolf, or Fitzgerald? Or William Tevor or Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore?

And yet, day after day we hear Show, don't tell. And there's real fall-out. I see it constantly among my students, who are nothing if not adjective-happy. "The big brown torn vinyl couch." Do we need to know this? We are writing fiction, not constructing a Mad Lib. Yet writers have been told to describe, and so they do so, ad nauseum. It's like the sentence that's used in typing classes--"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Well, this is a good typing sentence (it contains every letter of the alphabet), but it's a bad fiction sentence.

If you ask me, the real reason people choose to show rather than tell is that it's so much easier to write "The big brown torn vinyl couch" than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language. In other words, "show, don't tell" provides cover for writers who don't want to do what's hardest (but most crucial) in fiction.

Besides, the distinction bestween showing and telling breaks down in the end. "She was nervous" is, I suppose, telling, while "She bit her fingernail" is, I suppose, showing. But is there any meaningful distinction between the two? Neither of them is a particularly good sentence, though if I had to choose, I'd probably go with "She was nervous," since "She bit her fingernail" is such a generic gesture of anxiety it seems lazy on the writer's part--insufficiently well imagined.

Comments

[Lee]

Hurrah! (And Francine Prose has quite a good bit about this in her Reading Like A Writer.)

[Jim Murdoch]

Personally I get tired with too much description, even well-written descriptions. I only need a pencil sketch to let me know where we are; the gist of a description and I'm off. that's what's MY imagination's for.

I think the whole show-not-tell mentality disparages our audience. They are a whole part of the equation. They like to work things out for themselves.

Good article.

[Edan]

Sometimes, I think the bigger problem is the writer who tells what they have already shown. I see this a lot from my beginner students, who have decent dialogue and action that shows how a character is feeling/reacting, and then some terrible dialogue tag like, "he said, trying to calm her down."

[Max]

I think your essay would be more effective if you showed up more examples, instead of just telling us about them.

[Tommi]

Wow. Maybe what we need today is more badly written stuff.
-tgs-

[Marco]

Marge: "Homer, it's easy just to sit there and criticize."

Homer: "Fun, too."

[Dylan K.]

Okay, so you "show, don't tell". Now, the next question is "show what"? You have to tell some things, as the fingernail example above shows well. A good writer should know which images are the most meaningful, and use them in the best way. Telling and showing go together like words and punctuation.

[Andy Lee]

I never thought "show" meant "describe" in the torn-vinyl-couch sense. I would call that telling, not showing. I interpret "show, don't tell" to mean that merely describing is not storytelling. We need to "dramatize," as you say in your second paragraph.

I agree that the tired old phrase should be questioned, and that the show/tell distinction quickly gets blurry. After all, any declarative sentence "tells" in some sense.

[Drake]

"the real reason people choose to show rather than tell is that it's so much easier to write "The big brown torn vinyl couch" than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language."

This is a false dichotomy, isn't it? One isn't forced to choose between *showing* the state of an apartment's interior decorating, on the one hand, and *describing* "internal emotional states," on the other. For one can also *show* internal emotional states. Or so the argument would go.

[PaulJ]

The advice to "show, don't tell" is to allow readers to think for themselves, to make up their own minds about what's happening in a story rather than having it thrust down their throats.

Your example "She was nervous" is telling the reader that this is the intended interpretation of events. Saying "She bit her fingernail" allows the reader to engage in the story and make an independent interpretation. Maybe she wasn't nervous, but had simply snagged her nail and didn't have a nail-file to hand (the rest of the story might give some hints as to whether this is the case).

This is basic fiction craft. Take 'telling' to its logical extreme and you might as well write that stuff happened and everyone lived happily ever after, or not.

A lot depends on the POV. Your viewpoint character might have good reason to believe that 'she was nervous,' but how is the reader to know, unless you 'show' us what your viewpoint character sees? (If you simply 'tell' us that your viewpoint character "saw that she was nervous," how are we to know whether your viewpoint character is making an accurate interpretation?

[Ester Verwoest]

Who ever introduced the rule show, don't tell? I cann't find that information. Maybe one of you knows? I am investigating the pro's and conta's of show, don't tell. Thank you for answering. Ester

[kk]

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