Show? Tell?

Office Hours

First, I want to thank David Sedaris and Deborah Treisman for their deeply felt and generous talk about my story “Love Letter,” which you can listen to on the New Yorker Fiction podcast.  I wrote to Deborah and told her that, listening to this, I felt like Huck Finn, up in the rafters, listening to the most generous and moving eulogy ever.  And David does just a beautiful job of reading the story (just as he did a beautiful job of reading the part of Roger Bevins III, on the Lincoln in the Bardo audiobook – an experience he talks about a little on the podcast.

David is simply the best humorist working today and his work seems to be getting both deeper and funnier with the passing years – such an honor to have him choose “Love Letter” for the segment and discuss it with so much insight and passion. Thank you, David. (And thank you Deborah, for hosting that excellent podcast series so skillfully.)

Also, thanks to Gilbert Cruz and everyone at The New York Times for this podcast, on which Gilbert and I discussed Lincoln in the Bardo, which ended up at #18 on the Times’ list of Best Books of the 21^st Century (so far).

Now, on to our question – which concerns the James Joyce story,“ Clay,” the subject of a lively and enlightening discussion beyond the paywall.  I plan to write about Joyce’s approach to storytelling in “Clay” on Sunday, but this question got my attention, so I thought I’d go ahead and take a shot at it here.

Thank you all, as always, for being part of this.

Q.

Hi George,

Hope you are doing well.

Thank you for sharing “Clay” by James Joyce in Story Club. I have read it several times now and even though there is a lot of sensory detail, the story feels mostly like a narration by the author with hardly any dialog. While there is a lot of talking in the story, it is reported rather than being actually shown in dialog form. Not just the lack of dialog but overall, the story feels much more of “tell” rather than “show” and I am wondering why Joyce chose to write it like that.

I had a similar feeling about “The Child,” by Bobbie Louise Hawkins that we reviewed some months ago. That also was a story with almost no dialog and more of a “tell” rather than “show” feel, but the writing was amazing.

We hear so often that we must “show, don’t tell” in writing but here are a couple of amazing stories seemingly doing the opposite. I wonder if you have any comments about this.

A.

Yes, and thanks for the question.

I have mixed feelings about “show, don’t tell.”  I think it’s especially useful in the teaching of beginning writers. 

Sometimes, a teacher might get a beginner piece like this:

I’ll never forget the summer before my first year of high school.  I was a naïve kid and had never had much to do with girls.  Then I met Melinda.  She changed my mind about a lot of things.  She was confident and even a little bossy sometimes.  This really helped me, because she gave a lot of good advice.  And I tended to be a little thoughtless.  She saw this in me right away.  Once we were at the pool and she gave me a big lecture about manners, which I really took to heart.  Another time, she and another girl, Sally, were walking along, talking, and I barged in and interrupted, and Melinda explained that this was rude.  I didn’t like it at the time, but over the years, that message really sunk in.  So, that was the summer I started to become an adult, and Melinda was central to that, which was kind of odd, since she was, at the time, in a relationship with an older guy who treated her badly.  But I didn’t learn this until a few years later.  I’ll always remember that summer fondly.

And so on. 

This is an (exaggerated) example of a mode of writing that is telling more than it’s showing.  It’s full of assertion, unsupported assertion.  None of it is written in scenes and we don’t hear anyone talking.  It’s wandering around chronologically. 

As opposed to, say:

The sun was just setting.  Up ahead, on the lake trail, I saw Sally and Melinda.  Sally was leaning into Melinda, as if fascinated by what she was saying.  I jogged to catch up with them.

“Maybe you should just tell him,” Sally was saying.

“Tell him what?” I said.  “Tell who?”

Melinda turned, shot me an angry look.

Here, we’ve gone one small step in the direction of “showing,” in part just by forcing ourselves to write in-scene.  What are we “showing?” Well, ideally, we’re not sure yet.  We’ve picked one incident to dramatize, and this commits us, somewhat, to a chronology, and to specific action and speech.  This narrows the path for the story and allows us to be alert to it (rather than to, as in the first example, our idea of what the story wants to be about).

But notice how much more open this bit is - we haven’t named or reduced anything yet. We’re still waiting to see (to find out).

Why do we care?  About “showing?” Well, in the abstract, we don’t, or shouldn’t.  (We should just do whatever we like, and make that work.)

But we might notice that “showing” tends to ground a reader more strongly in the fictive reality.  It does that crucial work of making the reader see, and believe in, and feel, what’s happening.  And that’s a good thing – it’s part of the internal dynamics of fiction.  In a sense, it’s the whole game, the whole magic act: can I get you to forget that this thing has been written, and, instead, cause you to feel it as part of your own experience?   

It’s why we can sometimes feel fiction to be a sophisticated moral-ethical tool – fiction can really “get in there” – can be full of nuance and ambiguity, much like a lived experience. When “showing” instead of “telling” we are urging our writing away from concepts and overt intentions and opening ourselves up to the moment we’re in the middle of describing – we’re on the alert for new things that might want to happen, and for little “tells” (in the action, in the speech) that are more exciting and alive than whatever we might’ve had planned. We’re moving away from, let’s say, overdetermined outcomes. 

A piece full of “showing” tends to be full of things unfolding just that minute, that are under-interpreted and that, as in real life, accrue meaning as time moves forward.

A piece full of “telling” – well, it sort of works from the surficial part of the mind, maybe.  It’s anecdotal and the writer hasn’t taken the time, yet, to work through the prose and inject it with detail. It’s more susceptible to being managed by the writer’s pre-concept, we might say.

So, “show, don’t tell” has some general value, I think, but, like all writing advice, if we lean too heavily on it, it can become a form of AutoPilot.  (“Always show!  Never tell!”)

I prefer to see it as a specialized subset of a better bit of advice, which is: aspire to move things in the direction of specificity.

If you’re “telling” – tell specifically.  If you’re “showing” – show specifically.

For me, that’s really what revising is: working with prose to make it more specific. (In my view of things, specificity is often the pixie dust that takes something from “a bit of writing” to “an experience I, the reader, am having.”)

Now, forcing ourselves to write in scene moves us toward specificity pretty naturally – above, Sally and Melinda are “on the lake trail.”  (They’re somewhere.)  The sun is “just setting.”  (It’s a certain time of day.)  The anecdote in the “all-tell” version, re the narrator barging in on a conversation, is now going to have to be about a specific conversation.  And so on. 

But (complicating things a little, because that’s what it’s all about) it is completely possible for a writer to be specific while “telling.”  Something told specifically enough….becomes showing. 

How do we know a piece of writing is engaged in “showing?” 

Well, I’d say: we feels as if we’re learning/seeing/experiencing something. Something new appears in the textual reality. And there’s a quality of openness, of unfolding discovery - a non-static quality. We “buy into” that little morsel of fictive reality.

In the comments re “Clay” on Sunday, Byram made me aware of a lovely quote from the Irish writer John McGahern on this subject: “I think that all bad writing is judgement and statement and that all good writing, in some way or other, is suggestion. Because you leave the characters alone and through the suggestions and the images, their completed life is in the reader’s mind…and consequently, there are as many versions of the novel as it has readers."

(Thanks, Byram.)

In “Clay,” the whole story plays out within a tight temporal setting, from when Maria leaves the laundry until Joe gets teary a few hours later.  There are scenes, although they flow into one another and don’t necessarily, it’s true, contain much dialogue. I’d say the story is a terrific example of “showing” that we might at first mistake for “telling.” I keep seeing things I didn’t know existed before, and believing in them.

For example:

“But wasn’t Maria glad when the women finished their tea and the cook and the dummy had begun to clear away the tea-things!  She went into her little bedroom and, remembering that the next morning was a mass morning, changed the hand of the alarm from seven to six.”

I see action (the “finishing” of the tea, and the “clearing” of the things, and the going into the bedroom and the changing of the alarm), and this action is infused with specific feelings – her anticipation of the coming party, her strong sense of responsibility (she has to get up even earlier tomorrow, to get to church and remembers, even in the midst of her excitement, to reset the clock, a detail which we will, maybe only subtly, feel, later, when, excited, her attention to detail flags and she forgets the cake on the train). (Imagine the difference between the sequence above and, say, “Maria did the same stuff she did every morning.”)

Even in something like Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Illych,” which spans seventy years, and is full of general-condition telling (where Tolstoy speeds through ten- or fifteen year periods, with very little scene work at all in those sections) keeps us seeing (a new) reality, because he is always, showing, by it seems, saying to himself, about a given assertion: “Tell me more.  Prove it.  Help me help them see it.”

So, my advice would be, maybe, to set aside “show, don’t tell” if that setting aside seems helpful (i.e., if complying with that idea currently seems to be hanging you up) and concentrate on some version of increasing the specificity.  (Of course, that can become AutoPilotish too - I’m sure we all know a writer or two who, trying to be specific, overloads things and then the fictive machine grinds to a halt.)

Anyway…this is a good approach in general, I think: if a piece of writing advice is confusing you or making you feel unsure, no need to feel guilty or inadequate.  Just say to it: “You are somehow not for me right now.  Maybe someday, but not now.  I’m sure you’re valid sometimes but, for now…goodbye.”

In general, as I’ve often said here, I think we should be leery of writing advice, which can easily harden into dogma.  All writing advice should, maybe, have a question mark after it, or some as-yet-uninvented universal symbol meaning: “but only if it helps.”