Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Melanie & Steve Tem: INVITING THE READER IN

Melanie: 

The other night there was a little scene in the great cable series Saving Grace that impressed and pleased me because it did so well what good art ought to do.   

The wonderful Holly Hunter is Grace Anandarko, an Oklahoma City police detective, a complex and passionate and deeply flawed and deeply noble character.  In this episode, she and her team are investigating the case of a child whose father doused him with gasoline and set fire to him.  The nurse in the burn unit (I wish I knew the name of the actress, because this was a  brilliantly understated performance) says she hopes the child will stay unconscious for a while “and miss most of this pain.”  Later, we find Grace sitting alone on the interior stairs.  She flicks her cigarette lighter on and inches her hand toward the flame.  When the fire comes into contact with her hand, she gasps and jerks it back.  That’s it.  No dialogue, no cuts to the child wrapped in bandages in the burn unit, no explanation or discussion of the meaning. 

What thrilled me was that I actually felt the split second it took my mind to “get” it.  At the fade of that scene, the creative leap my imagination took was palpable, and when I realized that Grace was trying to experience the pain the little boy would experience, it took my breath away.  The horror of it, the compassion of this woman, her inability to feel what he would feel and her need to try–all this moved me deeply, and that’s because I had to go there myself.  The writer didn’t tell me what Grace was feeling or what I should feel.  I was invited to join in the process of creation and discovery. 

It’s like that “shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits” rhythm.  If you just do the “shave-and-a-haircut” part and stop, somebody is sure to supply the last two beats.  And then it’s a shared experience of creating the rhythm.   

Steve:  

Those are the kinds of moments filmed media can do so very well—they’re like wormholes into another human being’s experience.  I remember watching the movie Stella Dallas on TV when I was kid.  In the key scene near the end of the movie the impoverished mother, played by Barbara Stanwyck, watches through a window from the cold outside as her daughter is married in a high-society wedding.  I remember being bowled over by the scene, feeling as if I had truly engaged with this character on the strength of this well-chosen peek into her world.  I remember another scene from a western I saw a few years back (unfortunately I don’t remember the name) in which a poor, beaten-down woman happens to glance into the face of a rich, happy woman in her fine clothes.  It was all there in the look—she was stuck, seeing a life that would be forever out of her reach, and I was experiencing it with her.  It’s the kind of special magic you can get through the movies, and fiction. 

This is all about a very old principle in story-making, one that many experienced writers probably take as so elementary they don’t give it  much thought anymore: Showing what happens is almost always more effective than Telling what happens.  But as I think these examples tend to illustrate, there are dimensions to this basic principle. 

For the rest of this column I’ll be using “telling” to refer to the summarizing process that happens when we try to convey the general gist of a story.  It’s the approach we take when we’re writing an outline or synopsis.  “Showing,” on the other hand, well, it’s potentially much more than just showing.  It’s not an uncommon method to “tell” your story in a detailed outline, then to translate that telling into scenes by adding dialog, specific actions, and descriptions which come about as the character is performing those actions.  That can be a very neat and structured process, ensuring that we’ve fully covered the outline we’ve delivered to the publisher.  But that doesn’t guarantee that what we’ve “shown” is a living, engaging narrative, or that we’ve done what we needed to do to invite the reader in. 

When you’re open to letting your characters discover for you what the story is about, you can let them loose in a scene and they have the potential of taking you places you might never have imagined otherwise, and showing something about themselves that’s going to take your breath away.  as the writer, you’re invited into their world, and you can take the reader with you.  To me, that’s what “showing” really means, and it’s a process worth even a veteran writer’s careful nurturing.  Part of the power of that approach is that it takes the “neatness” out of it.  If we make our fiction too neat, too easily summarized and reducible to a theme statement, then we tend to divorce it from real experience, which of course comes to us devoid of such packaged interpretation. 

I’d also like to say that “telling” a story has its uses as well.  Too often when writers learn how to “show” they assume merely telling is now worthless and they sometimes try to expunge it from their work completely (and expunge it from other writers’ works as well in a workshop situation).  And I know myself that when I’m stuck on a story and I can’t seem to bring it to life I may try the technique of writing at least one draft all in dialog and action and minimal description in order to resuscitate it. 

But the very quality that limits “telling”—by its nature it tends to freeze a narrative event into a discrete artifact with no more potential for active development—makes it an interesting piece of the story to bounce off of and react to.  For example, a “told” event which happens offstage before the story even begins can be a powerful presence—the story may be about how the characters react to that event.  To “show” that event might actually lessen its power and diminish the emotional impact of the characters’ varied reactions.  And “telling” is also a good way to convey character voice and nuance.  So for your story you might want a main character to “tell” a story or series of stories.  These particular stories aren’t “shown” because you want the focus to be on the narrating character and her feelings about what she is telling. 

Melanie:

To me, having a narrator tell stories as a way of developing the character of the narrator IS showing rather than telling.  The purpose of that strategy isn’t really to tell the stories to the reader so much as to show who the narrator is through her thoughts, feelings, interpretations, relationship to the stories she tells. 

I agree that film can do wonders with those little visual “wormholes” into a character’s world and psyche.  But I think prose fiction and poetry can do just as good a job by showing rather than telling what’s going on and especially by leaving places open for the reader to participate in creating the meaning. 

Amy Hempel’s best stories are examples of how this can work.  “The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” for instance, or the one-sentence “Memoir,” or “The Harvest,” or the novella “Offertory”–in all these, there are those breath-stopping silences into which my reader’s imagination flies before I could stop it even if I wanted to, and I’m fully engaged in the process.    I couldn’t tell you what I understand about the viewpoint characters or why they do what they do or what exactly that single sentence means, but each time I come to it something new is created. 

Contrast this with Hempel’s in-your-face animal-rights stories, in which–though I strongly agree with what she preaches–I’m cast in the role of passive recipient of that Message.  There’s little or no creative energy in the experience.  Probably these stories have virtue as dramatization of a philosophical point, but in my opinion it ain’t art. 

I think, too, of that sequence about the sailing cloud from Robert Frost’s poem “Death of the Hired Man.”   Consider that tiny, plain phrase “It hit the moon”–we aren’t told what the significance of that is, literally or metaphorically, or of the little description that follows, but it gives me chills every time, because I’m required to fill in the gaps, bring my own meaning to it, and that is different depending on, I guess, where I am in my own life. 

THAT’s art.

Sometimes this doesn’t work.  Sometimes what results is impenetrability, or obscurity, or . . .  . 

 

Related posts:

1. Steve & Melanie Tem: THE GENRE THING
2. Steve & Melanie Tem: SHOCKING READS
3. Melanie & Steve Tem: TELLING OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES
4. Melanie & Steve Tem: THE TYRANNY OF THE ORIGINAL IDEA
5. Both Sides of the Table (Reader/Writer Courtesy)

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