SHOW & TELL
By Cody Goodfellow
Remember how utterly lame Halloween costumes used to be?
What kid-hating idiot in the 1960’s decided that kids had to be the Platonic ideal of a character, instead of a mimic of the real thing. that a kid who wanted to be the Wolf Man for Halloween really should instead become a billboard for the Wolf Man. Spider Man was supposed to go begging for candy in a rubber suit with a picture of himself on it. Perhaps because irritable cops kept shooting at anything remotely resembling Tatoo or Gene Simmons, we were forced to wear these retarded costumes that told who we were supposed to be, instead of elegantly showing what we were.
Show, don’t tell: an ironclad dictum, the kind of rule you must obey to produce bearable writing, but must break to produce anything enjoyable. For no better reason than that I love to donkey-punch conventional wisdom whenever I see its loathsome, helpless haircut, I tried to get to the heart of the show and tell controversy. They got along so great in elementary school; what the hell happened to split them up?
Showing makes prose more cinematic, but it also limits its palette. Artfully and dynamically painting the scene in words satisfies every writer’s frustrated dream of making movies, but overuse is like trying the same roundhouse punch until your reader drops, or drops you.
As much as we are expected to produce Technicolor, Odorama brain-movies for our reader, the glassjawed ham & egger will swiftly succumb to the shocking uppercut of just coming out and telling the story, now and again.
In film, showing is essential, because everything is fed to the passive viewer, who slips into a waking dream, if the particular film doesn’t suck out his will to live. In literature, of course, imagery is an expensive illusion generated by a flurry of words, the visual writer a tourist in the cinematic dream state, saddled with a horrible exchange rate and indecipherably showy directions. It falls to any writer above fortune cookie counts to weave a spell in which the reader must actively pull the words off the page one at a time, and still daydream according to precise and purple instructions.
Showing gets a lot of unfair praise, while telling is often unjustly maligned. You drop a fortune to take your brats to a Hannah Montana “show,” while a “tell” is what cost me my kid’s college money at the Commerce Pai Gow Casino. The highest praise lavished on modern genre hits usually applauds their relentless pace and vivid imagery, and readers often cite the cinematic quality of their favorite prose.
But even the zippiest thriller books can only chase after the hypnotic buzz of movies, and “breathless” thrillers often lumber along glacially under a welter of cinematically redundant detail that shows nothing at all (Witness Patricia Cornwell describing an entire dream kitchen with only the brand names and colors found in the catalog).
I love cinematic detail in my own and others’ writing; I try to nail every image as vividly as possible, but that’s why all my favorite work is double the word ceiling for any paying magazine. Something had to give, so I tried to make my descriptions more strategic, to pick nodes of detail that triggered mnemonic responses in the reader that would fill in the gaps. Some readers would prefer you count every palace guard’s pocket change, but they’ll unconsciously thank you if you find a way to make them think you did it, and save a few trees.
Still, there must be a simpler way, and a better way, that wins back the atavistic, hoary old charms of good old-fashioned storytelling, that has kept our backward art alive and kicking against all comers, from cave paintings to the Playstation.
Harlan Ellison is a past master at evoking vivid settings while leaving the darkest conclusions to bloom in the sleepless reader’s mind. His strongest stories, particularly his asshole-fables from the Gentleman Junkie era (at the risk of getting sued [Hi, Harlan’s Googling Lawyers!] I won’t quote anything, but trust me), he pointedly tells you just what kind of shithead you’re about to share spit with, in colorful, but indisputably telling tones.
Tom Picirrilli’s hallucinogothic noir style revels in decadent but svelte imagery, then counterpunches with direct apostrophe, the narrator flat-out telling you the fucked rules that govern his misbegotten character’s lives. The hairy brass balls on this guy drop out of the book and onto your chin, when he does this trick right.
This kind of technique breaks the wall, turning off as many readers as it probably turns on, but reader’s aren’t reflexively turned off by a voice, so long as its distinctive qualities add to the delivery of the story. The words aren’t magic smoke or dancing army ants. They’re words some guy or gal wrote to trick you into dreaming their dream.
Having only muddied my own neat personal definitions, I picked up a case of Heineken and went to see the Wise Old Owl. He told me some stuff that made me nod gravely and scratch where I hope one day to glue a convincing beard, because all his wisdom directly contradicted what I thought I totally understood. “I think telling plays best in moments of relative stillness,” he hooted, “the calm
between the storms. That’s where literature can pull off cerebral effects that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Now, I’d supposed that showing would be called for to lace less dynamic portions of a story with theme and atmosphere, while telling would be good for hustling readers through the unlovely mechanical tuff that intrudes on every story. And I had to agree, because NOBODY can put them away like Mr. Owl.
Then he got loopy, like he saw juicy, tender pink mice flying out of my pockets. “But when it comes to action, it’s all show me show me show me. And every single word that ISN’T a show-me word has to do the work of at least a dozen others, in order to replace them, add velocity, AND still communicate something deeper.”
Sure, we all want more action, but as it gets bare of metaphor and imagery, doesn’t it approach telling what happened, baldly, tersely, to speed the reader ahead all the faster under the falling expositional brick you’re dropping on the next page.
A long time ago, I stopped trying to tweak my story ideas so much that the idea alone would give you an embolism. I realized that just articulating my simplest idea so another could and would want any part of it, would tax every last brain cell to destruction, and so the weirder things get, the more plainly they have to be described.
Mr. Owl chided me for the foolishness of only bringing one case of beer, and flew away. I was left no closer to any solution, but it’s still my dream to see show & tell reunited again, and not like on that Captain & Tenielle special, where you could totally tell they’d both been hit with curare darts.
If nothing else, I learned anew that reexamining the purpose and approach of each sentence as an entity, an attack, unto itself, can make any writer break up the numbing patterns that surface in veteran career writers as well as novices.
But we must remember first and foremost that we are writers of stories, not movies. All writing is storytelling. If your words string together to form an image, you are playing with powerful tools, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find what all the other tools can do.
And don’t give beer to owls.
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
Dave Wilson
And there I was SURE you were going to say that you asked the Owl how many words it took to create the tootsie roll center, after which he bit to the core and said THREE.
Tootsie Roll Center.
Good topic, and point well made, but I think there’s another level to this. The tell-don’t-show styles I’ve seen told things in a manner that it read like a synopsis of life, rather than life. You can paint an image with action, dialogue OR narrative, and I don’t think the details are what is meant by “showing” To me it’s more action built from words - in whatever fashion the words are penned.
Still, it’s true that if you just paint word-pictures, you will lose everyone but the art critics…you got to tie ‘em all together…
Good, thoughtful essay.
D
Jan 10th, 2008
Janet Berliner
An extremely well-written essay. Sounds rather like a plug for the bards of old.
–Janet
Jan 10th, 2008
Cody Goodfellow
David–– Thanks, David! I agree, and I wish I had enough beers to get to the heart of the matter, which I saw clearly when I set out, but was still zip codes away by the time I ran aground.
I think that where telling is craftily used, it does synopsize a bit more, but the choices made, the priorities of emphasis in the story, come to (gad! more mud!) show you a bit more about the narrator, the writer and the narrative voice itself. I’m always interested in where people’s eyes go first, when they enter a strange environment, and what governs those choices.
And it was interesting to me as I hashed out disputes of terminology with the Wise Old Owl, it seemed we agreed on what the words should do, but had reversed our words for that longed-for ideal.
Crazy fucking owl…
I don’t know what the hell that kid was expecting… owls can’t produce spit.
Janet: Indeed it is, or at least for the mindfulness of voice that makes the storyteller an active ingredient in the mix again, instead of a director or artist, trying to paint out her own brushstrokes.
(And thanks, as always to the Wise Old Owl, my excellent friend, the inestimable Mr. Skipp.)
Cody
Jan 10th, 2008
John Skipp
Dear gang —
I’m the WHAT?
So let me pop another beer — the brain-lube of champions! — and offer my perspective on the brilliant Mr. Goodfellow’s template, here.
1) I LOVE TELLING. I think that storytellers tell stories. And a great storyteller — a great raconteur — fills a tale with vibrancy and wit and perspective, with a singular voice that makes you want to listen in.
2) I LOVE SHOWING. Making the picture as clear as it can be.
But since all writing is telling — no matter how much your prose shows us, in graphic detail — the bottom line is that you’re ALWAYS both…
3) SHOWING AND TELLING.
So writing is Show & Tell.
If I write, for example, “I punched him so hard his eyeball squirted like a fucking grape,” I just told you something. But I also showed you.
So where do the lines break down?
4) Excessive telling is when you tell ABOUT the story, instead of just TELLING THE STORY.
5) Excessive showing is when you spend all night describing someone’s kitchen, before you get to the point where somebody actually DOES SOMETHING IN THE KITCHEN.
6) The goal is always to keep things interesting, in ways that the reader can grab ahold of, so they want to keep going.
In other words: WHATEVER WORKS.
Show. Tell. Evoke. Recount. Insert vivid historical detail. Reflect on detail. Add context. Digress. Encapsulate. Do what you will.
Just make it good.
If I make it to the next fucking page, you probably did your job.
7) Honestly? I haven’t drunk a full case of beer in 15 years. Whatever Keene and now Cody might attempt to suggest, I AM NOT A FUCKING HUNTER S. THOMPSON! Half a case is more than plenty.
But good to have around, just because ya never know.
Your feathered friend,
Skipp
Jan 11th, 2008
Celeste Talbert
Dear Veterans,
At what point do you believe you are subverting your own literary flourishes to appease the populace of a non-reading nation? Do you believe that it’s possible our tendencies toward florid language are being stifled by consumers who demand internet blogs and Entertainment Weekly spreads on celebrities who eat Fig Newtons?
I swear, I’m not being contrary for the fun; I’m genuinely curious.
Of course, I don’t think I represent most people (especially most people my age) when I say that, while I am fascinated with the modern gunslingers, I am also starved for the careful, challenging prose of the masters who reward you for paying attention. You know exactly who I mean when I say this.
This being a conversation about art, I think it’s appropriate to relate this discomfort I feel for contemporary conventions on writing The Right Way, with my concern for where independent rock music has gone. VIRTUOSITY (*ahem*, Mr. Owl) can be perceived as pretention, yes? So, what makes Dostoevsky any different from Frank Zappa? Where do Bach’s F Minor concerto and King Lear part ways?
The point being: how much is TOO much in this modern world? At what point are we losing the language in the hopes that we might communicate on a less educated (or should I say, MORE ACCESSIBLE level?
This is not be disagreeingm, by the way. This is me asking you to help me understand your position better.
You guys are divine.
Much love and admiraition,
Celeste
Jan 12th, 2008
edwin mcrae
Nice work, Cody. Worth buying you a beer for, although it’d have to be a nice NZ lager rather than that Heineken muck.
Anyway…
“and so the weirder things get, the more plainly they have to be described”
Too true. I believe this is where a few key details win out over avalanches of description. Jeff Noon is a master of this. He depicts psychedelic concepts with snappy, witty word play. A cyberpunk Lewis Carrol.
And he’s not above a bit of author intrusion either, which is all good, as long as the reader likes the sound of the author’s voice.
cheers
Edwin
Jan 12th, 2008
John Skipp
Dear Celeste –
1) Frank Zappa is MUCH funnier than Dostoevsky.
2) To paraphrase Frank: “Virtuousity is not dead…it just smells funny”.
3) As I understand it, Thomas Pynchon is still writing, and there’s still an audience for him. Which means that maximalist virtuoso work is still being done.
And our own young Mr. Goodfellow is FAR FROM SHY about goin’ to town linguistically. Every time he opens his mouth, dense and thunderous mutant bebop zooms out.
4) That said: this kind of writing is not “pop music”, and it never will be. Even Zappa didn’t make the charts with “The Black Page, Pt. II” or “Echidna’s Arf (Of You)”. He made it with “Valley Girl” and the thing about eating the yellow snow.
5) Speaking personally: my earliest writing was ALL maximalist, stream-of-consciousness, everything-from-every-direction kind of stuff. A handful of people I knew thought it was genius. Most everybody else scratched their heads and said, “Yeah, so that yellow blotter acid’s PRETTY GOOD, huh?”
And of course, none of it got published — I had NO IDEA how to get it published — so it’s all just sitting in storage, awaiting my death, so that future generations can go “WOW!” or “YEESH!”, as is their wont.
As I went along, I decided that a) I wanted to be read by more than my five best (or most tolerant) friends, and b) MY STYLE WAS BLOCKING MY MESSAGE.
So instead of writing prose so dense and weird that it literally DARED people to read it, I went in the opposite direction: aiming for a prose style so lean and reader-friendly that it picked you up and carried your ass, snug to its bosom…
…and THEN proceeded to whack you around, with actual undiluted content that was all the more potent for being painfully clear.
The question was: did I want to fuck with a tiny handful of the already-converted, or did I want to fuck with the culture at large?
Posed in that manner, it was barely even a question. THE CULTURE AT LARGE, BABY!
So now, my own quest for virtuousity would be defined as “making incredibly difficult things look easy”.
And then, every once in a while, whippin’ out a hot little dissonant tri-tone lick in 7/4 time, just to show that I still got it.
Some would call that “pretenious”. Others would call that “showing off”. Still others would say, “HEY! Nice tri-tone lick in 7/4!” And then get back to dancing to the zesty, primal groove.
Sorry about the whole extra essay! And hope that made a lick of sense.
Big love,
Skipp
P.S. — Dear Edwin: now I wanna read Jeff Noon! THANKS!
Jan 12th, 2008
Cody Goodfellow
Celeste–
To paraphrase Goethe (y’know, to pander to the kids), it’s a miracle that anyone can communicate anything to anyone meaningfully, ever.
As dense and incomprehensible as my prose often is, I’m always striving to communicate, and to make the style serve the message. I love playing games with style, but if it gets in the way of what I’m trying to say, all I end up saying is, “Look at me, I ate a thesaurus.”
That said, I have to presume that any reader who passed up the more well-rounded, celebrated, less aggressively offensive writers before me in the queue is hoping for something a little more erudite. The myth of the small press is that it offers what the corporates dare not, while the sad truth is that it just has lower standards. Working outside the mainstream market, I try to reward the reader’s leap of faith with something wilder than they’d find on the spinner rack at Wal-Mart, but at least as coherent, and as accessible as it needs to be, to do the job.
That said, if you want to write for money, you will sometimes have to tailor your message to an audience. Just because someone is less literate than you doesn’t necessarily make them idiots, and the bedeviling paradox about idiots is that they never realize it. they think they’re normal, and everyone smarter than them is just weird. If someone only has two brain cells to rub together, one is sure to be fully committed to sniffing out condescencion.
So there is an art to speaking to these people as if they are as intelligent as you, and getting them to imagine something that opens their minds a little bit… not to their own stupidity, but to the immensity of the world around them, and the possibility that they don’t know it all. This is vastly more satisfying than just pissing in their coffee.
So… I’m always on guard against the threat of my literary flourishes subverting the message I hope to transmit. I don’t think that amounts to self-censorship… in fact one could make an argument that armoring up in pointless perspicacity is the vainest form of self-censorship, because it hides away what one hopes to say, and leaves readers with the worst possible judgment… that you HAVE nothing to say.
Thanks, Celeste… if readers like you didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent you.
Edwin–– Duly noted, and eagerly anticipated!
And interesting you should mention Noon, because he pulls in a whole other branch of this topic that got lopped off so I could fit the essay in the door. Noon seems a sterling example of a branch of new New Wave British fantasists who seem, to my myopic eye, to have leanred exposition and descriptive techniques from Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, who had an uncanny genius for turning every line of exposition into a kick in the brains. While this stuff was less effective for big belly laughs even in their lifetimes, it spiked whole uncharted territories for new ways of engaging the reader.
Adams’s style of parody not only took sci fi plot conventions to task, he subverted the fundamental conventions of genre storytelling, which had become so hidebound in satisfying reader expectations that they no longer seemed capable of, or interested in, surprise.
Noon, Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith and Charlie Stross al exemplify this slightly absurdist style to me, but the principle of plainer description for crazier ideas came to me while reading Rudy Rucker’s Live Robots books, which are utterly fucking mad for exactly the opposite reason: the prose gets so plain and dry to describe riproaringly inconceivable insanity, that you have to laugh, just to release the bubbles of irrationality forming like nitrogen bubbles in your brain.
Cheers!
Cody
Jan 13th, 2008
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