Beyond Showing and Telling

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, May 11, 2006
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This might raise some hackles, but . . . . The first bit of advice every novelist receives is this: show, don't tell. As ubiquitous as it is misunderstood. Why misunderstood? Because writing fiction isn't the same as making a film. It's all about words, all about telling. The way many teachers discuss showing and telling, you'd think that film was the inherently superior medium, and that good writing aspires toward the transcendence of words. As a result, a lot of writers think of their task as forming clean, generic sentences that don't call attention to themselves, sentences a reader can "see through" to get to the Image, which is what really matters. This is ridiculous. The real antithesis in writing isn't between showing and telling, or even between scenes and exposition. The real antithesis is between living and dead prose.

One way to bring prose to life is by dramatizing action. The writer imagines the scene and finds vivid, concrete ways of bringing the details into focus. When this is done well, the reader "sees" the scene in his mind. That's what people really mean when they talk about showing. The words conjure images in the mind -- but they do even more than that. They conjure sound and smell. They invoke thought and emotion. Writing that merely "sees" makes for a fast, superficial read. The difference between fiction and film is how much more depth the novelist can bring to any moment, by helping the reader to go beyond seeing.

Scenes are easy, though. Bringing a scene to life involves many different things, but they're fairly obvious. The more concrete, the better. Suggestive details are better than meaningless ones. Particulars are better than abstractions. You get the idea. But exposition is where the real challenge comes in. How do you write "living" exposition? Some writers try to get around the problem by minimizing exposition or cutting it altogether. (After all, exposition in the strictest sense isn't possible in film, and film is seen as storytelling's purest form.) That's fine, but it's also cheating. Books that read like film scripts are never as good as the film; they're incomplete.

Living exposition is one of the reasons some brilliant nineteenth century books are almost unfilmable. You'll never see a film of a Henry James novel, for example, that lives up to the experience of reading one. Part of the reason is that, for James, exposition isn't necessary dross. It is as living, as well crafted as anything else in the book. Some of the tools that bring scenes to life will do the same in exposition: particular, well-chosen details, vivid images and sensory interjections. More than these, I think living exposition requires a "slant," a personality to carry it. Remember, exposition is "pure" storytelling. When you tell your friends a story, you rely as much on set-up as on scenes. Your perceptions are colored by word choice and tone, by gesture. It's not just the story that counts; it's you telling the story. That's the trick to living exposition, I think. Instead of dumping blocks of undramatized information or "back story," every sentence must be worked and slanted so that it's not just a story, but you telling a story. In that sense, merely showing won't do. You have to tell the story and tell it well.