The Fraudulence of "Show Don't Tell"

Everybody who has ever looked into being a fiction writer has been told the first rule of writing is "Show, don't tell." Show the character's upper lip sweat, his eyes dart about, his hand tremble; don't tell us "he's nervous." Let the readers come to their own conclusions, they say.

And while that's true, that's also the lie of it. I'ts true to the extent no one likes to be told what to do. Fiction writing that is just telling is bossing people around, and most of us don't like that. But at the same time, everything we say in a story is telling; we're using words and all we can do is tell with them. And the reader still has to get at least some of the conclusions that author has intended for there to be any real communication. It's just that the reader wants to be told at a slightly subtler volume level. The reader wants you to hint, not tell it plain. The catch is, as a writer, if you are too subtle they will miss your hints all together.

In the next state over, in Iowa at the Writer's Workshop, they like to talk about the bridge between the reader and the writer. Only go as far as you have to go as a writer, let the reader work to meet you half way. Well, one person's halfway is another one's oblivion. A writer I know used the phrase "chaos theory" and expected the reader to get the implicit irony in the remark. I, for one, didn't get it. He had to come out and tell me 'chaos' means deeply messy and disordered, but 'theory' indicates a deep, orderly structure. Therefore, "chaos theory" is a contradiction. I suggested he needed to use a few more hints.

The higher your level of education, the more English classes you've taken, the fewer hints you need. It's like a fancy acrostic puzzle system we're running. We get subtler and subtler in the clues. We can guess that song in one note.

My parents and grandparents used to play bridge, and I would watch sometimes. All that bidding they did first, it took me a long time as a child to catch on to what that was. My uncle was the one who clued me in: "We're asking each other what cards we have, but we are doing it in code."

It's about normalizing to our common esthetic. Look at the French, how they love novels of idea, how they love the declarative sentences. They like being told. And honestly, we do too, at least sometimes. I was talking with a friend of mine about this, and he says some of his favorite books were just the author talking at him, like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint or Saul Bellow's Herzog.

Well, beauty works in all the codes, somewhere. It's all about normalizing. That's what I meant by 'fraudulence'--the "Show don't tell" is not one of the universe's fundamental esthetic principles, it's just an agreement we make. One nice thing about telling, it's efficient. I can make this point pretty quickly in an essay, just telling you. But it would have taken me a long time to say this if I'd used characters and a situation instead. Doable, but slower, and, yes, somewhat different. And then not everybody gets it. Thanks for getting it.