Showing, telling and breaking the rules
This week is a good and beautiful week, but also a sad week; a week that enters with the last note of a bugle fading on the evening air.
Why? Because it is week four of our Write with Jericho course, and therefore the final week of the course. Premium Members will be sad because WWJ is drawing to a close, but they will also be happy because there are a host of other courses they can relish – and because new courses will be popping up all through this year like mushrooms in a damp October.
And yes, non-members will have an extra sadness because they’ve missed so much excitement of late… Except that they know doing this one small thing will give them abiding and highly cost-effective joy.
(Also: if you’re a non-member and want to enjoy week one of Write With Jericho for FREE, then go on. Enjoy it. It’s open to all.)
In this week’s final lesson, my colleague Sophie Flynn is teaching about showing & telling, which is a topic that kinda drives us mad at JW Towers, because so many people get it wrong.
The rule is “show, don’t tell,” and it’s a good rule. I like it. It’s always helpful to have at the back of your mind.
But it’s also a terrible rule, because it’s so often false.
Sophie gives an example of this.
Telling: “It was now midday.”
Showing: “The short hand was already more or less pointing at the twelve and Josie saw with panic rising in her throat that the long hand was now all but upright too.”
That second version is terrible in so many ways it’s hard to count. For one thing, it’s mystifying. It’s so obvious what “it was now midday means”, whereas the second sentence needs a kind of anxious decoding… And even once decoded, it leaves the reader with a slight well, that was weird feeling.
Of course, the second version is also far baggier and less efficient than the first. What’s more, it still uses telling, because it tells the reader that poor old Josie – trapped as she is in a terrible novel – has panic rising up her throat. On a strict show-don’t-tell model, you’d have to somehow show that panic rising. How you’d go about doing that, I just don’t know.
So, the Idiot Version of the rule is just plain false.
In a way, I’d prefer it if we replaced that formulation with a simple command to dramatise. Suppose Jane Austen had written the following:
Telling: “Mr Darcy proposed to Elizabeth Bennet, but she refused him with some asperity.”
That’s a perfectly accurate account of one of the most famous scenes in English literature – but also quite clearly a terrible replacement for the scene that Jane Austen actually wrote.
Dramatic action needs to unfold in what feels like real time to the reader. Everything else can just be neatly stitched in with brief but accurate snippets of telling.
I won’t talk about this more – Sophie does all that in her course video – but I’ll do again what I’ve done throughout these Write With Jericho emails and just take a look at what one of my own scenes does. I’ll use the same scene as I used last week which, if you remember, I just picked at random.
So here we go again. The scene itself is in bold. My comments are in italics. Where possible, I’ve shortened the text for brevity.
Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.
This is telling: Fiona’s swift summary of something that isn’t that interesting and doesn’t need to detain the reader for long.
I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’
That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.
‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’
This is showing – dialogue always is. Even here, though, Fiona doesn’t try to show that her statement was a a stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. That’s not something that can be easily shown. It’s not dramatic. So she just tells it in a perfectly straightforward manner.
I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.
This is still probably showing. We’ve dropped the direct speech, but Fiona is summarising reasonably accurately what she actually said.
‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’
‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’
‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’
Dialogue = showing. This is the dramatic heart of this (tiny) scene. But just feel how flat the scene would be without this dialogue at its heart. The heart of ANY scene should be showing, That’s where the drama is.
He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.
His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.
And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards… even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental…
Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.
All telling.
But there’s absolutely no way to show this past history without diving into entire chapters of pointless backstory. Those chapters would have murdered any forward momentum in the plot, whereas three or four paragraphs of reflection work perfectly fine – especially because the reader will by this point be very curious about that past of Fiona’s. (They’ll still be curious, because Fiona still hasn’t talked about The Big Thing that makes her the way she is.)
Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.
‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’
‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’
Back to showing.
It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.
Back to telling.
REFLECTIONS
In a way, there’s not much to reflect on this week. For me, two things stand out:
- The movement between showing and telling is constant and seamless. A reader wouldn’t remotely notice the movement from one to the other.
- The dramatic heart of the scene is shown – in this case through dialogue, but you could imagine something purely physical instead, a fist-fight, for example.
Really, the choice between showing and telling is a choice between Efficiency (telling) and Drama (showing.)
Altering the reader to the fact that it’s midday? Probably better told. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennet? I’d show that if I were you.
***
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. Sophie has asked you to:
- Rewrite a scene from your novel or non-fiction project, focusing on when to show and when to tell.
- Choose 250 words of this scene and share the before and after over on Townhouse.
Once you’re ready, post yours here.
***
That’s it from me for this week.
Til soon,
Harry
Responses