It’s the writer’s equivalent of, “Yo, that was pitchy, Dawg.”
Basically the reader knows something is wrong, or off, or out of joint. You’ve lost your excitement and made it a chore for them to read. This is the nugget of truth behind this standard advice, which is why it has persisted, though it often only scratches the surface of the problem.
If you're the reader, you know something is wrong because you’re dissatisfied. The author simply didn’t dig deep enough, and tried to cover it up with some glossy overview that you found lacking.
It’s okay to say that. It’s helpful to say that. It’s kind of your duty to say that, if you want your criticism to be constructive.
Example time…
I binged on Danielle Steel when I was a kid, this is no secret. It’s also no secret that Ms. Steel mixes “tell” and “show” quite a bit, to varying degrees of success.
Considering she’s a bestselling author who can boast millions of books sold to millions of happy, loyal readers, I’d say she sinks the ball far more often than she misses.
Part of that has to do with the genre in which she writes. Some are simply more forgiving of this particular style than others, and she has flourished very well in the romance/saga genre with her brand of storytelling.
Back in the 1980s, when I found her, I liked that exposition background stuff that got you “up to speed” with the character and the world in which they lived. It was like the first, clanking incline of a roller coaster, which takes its sweet time getting you to that first drop where you can do nothing but hang on afterwards.
If you’re familiar with the kinds of things Danielle does to her characters, you’d know why a safe passage of exposition was often needed. This woman knows angst. Her basic formula is Girl Has Everything. Girl Loses Everything. Girl Gets Everything Back. Girl Loses It Again. Girl Finally Triumphs. Though they are considered “romances,” these stories covered every single facet of life as a woman, as mothers and daughters, sisters and friends, wives and mistresses, survivors and victims.
I’m known for my angst because I have followed this particular formula. Story is all about conflict, remember. And I have been told more than once that I was nearly responsible for broken e-readers.
All I have to say to that is if you ever have any problem with the things I throw at my characters, pick up a copy of “Zoya” and get back to me. I know this angst because I was taught this angst, and it works very, very well for me. (Thank you, Danielle.)
Sadly, I lost some steam as a fan in the 2000s, particularly when I realized that Danielle’s heroines were almost always going to be the kind of thin, fabulous women that have always dominated modern romance. Some view that as part of the “fantasy.” I do not. I prefer to see women like me represented on the page, which is why I’ve built my entire career making it so.
Fast-forward to 2010, when Danielle Steel published her novel “Big Girl,” which – surprise, surprise – finally starred a larger woman. This was about three years after I had started writing my “Rubenesque” romances, and I was beyond curious to see how she would pull this off, given her earlier work was so pivotal to me as a storyteller.
I'm no Danielle Steel by far, but by the time I got around to reading this book in 2014, I knew a thing or two about storytelling just from experience alone. I had written and published fourteen "Rubenesque" romances to varying degrees of success all my own. So I felt confident in my ability to pinpoint exactly where this particular book fell flat for me.
The biggest reason for this was that the exposition and overview that used to take place in the first chapters of her previous work dominated the narrative throughout “Big Girl.” This left me frustrated and dissatisfied both as a reader and as a fan.
As a writer myself, I was able to take everything apart and examine what went wrong with a little bit more authority... which is what I did. (You won't set out to do this, by the way; you'll both want and seek to lose yourself in the story. It just happens, occupational hazard.)
I can only assume this lackluster storytelling had something to do with the fact that while Danielle Steel knows more than I will ever know about being thin, rich and fabulous, she wasn’t able to channel the experiences of a big girl because she’s never actually been one. This means she broke two bumper sticker rules in one. She didn’t write what she knew AND she spent most of the book telling instead of showing as a result.
There were a lot of things missing from her book that should have been there, scenes and experiences that are commonly shared by most girls and women who are heavier than their peers. The world around us is set up to be critical and derisive, and it shades our entire lives and everything we live through, from the very moment we figure out (or, more commonly than not, told) that we’re different. Someone who hasn’t shared that experience might miss these tiny details, leaving the story half-baked and unrealized, particularly for someone who knows what is missing.
I can tell you why “Duck, Duck, Goose,” was one of the more traumatic experiences of first grade, because I was slower than all my peers and, as such, a favorite target for the “game” I was set up to and often did “lose.” I can share in painful detail, either in scenes or exposition, why co-ed P.E. was stressful when we had to “suit up” in similar clothes that only made me stand out even more. I can tell you what it was like to have boys tease me in the lunch line, calling attention to me and mocking me by acting like they were interested so all their friends could see how the fat girl responded to a popular boy dangling the “dream” in front of her face.
In my books, you’ll live those scenes, experiencing them in every harrowing detail.
People who simply “tell” their stories often do so because they don’t have the background to show us through action. This is Problem One. They haven't done the research, they don't fully know their topic enough to translate it for the reader, or they have no emotional connection with the work and just want to treat significant scenes as if they aren't all that significant. This is where you will get cold-busted for exposition. Readers recognize immediately when you’re trying to “cheat” the process. This is the meat behind the advice, “Show, don’t tell.” By no coincidence, it’s also the reason we’re told to “write what we know.”
Or at the very least, “write like you know.”
Spending an entire book “telling” me how this character responds to her world is not as emotionally satisfying as showing me what she has to face and how she overcomes it. This is why the story demands to be told in the first place. You need those action scenes to drive the story, to engage the reader, to make them care. Confidently put yourself in the shoes of your character and live in their skin a while. See how life would treat you, experience it down to the most seemingly insignificant detail. When done well, these “snapshots” of action will tell your story far better than you can on your best day.
Problem Two: You don't trust your readers to fill in the dots.
Consider my writing sample many days back when I added the small detail of making my fictional social worker’s attaché scuffed to show that she had been on the job a while. That detail wasn’t needed for that passage, but it was a good way to convey the information in a subtle way that the reader will pick up on, even subconsciously. This adds layers and dimension to the story, fleshing it out and coloring it in with vivid color.
Inexperience demands that you over-explain, rather than trust your reader to tie the pieces together on their own. You keep hitting the same notes and that will put your reader off as well. Give them a little bit and move on, which is the real intent behind “show, don’t tell.”
But sometimes you do need those exposition passages because those are the best, most emotionally satisfying, most efficient ways to tell that part of the story. I challenge anyone to show me a successful book that is strictly action from start to finish without some form of exposition added to enhance the narrative.
Most great books I’ve read marry the two forms together so seamlessly you really don’t know the difference. You’re swept along by the momentum of the story and the finesse of an experienced storyteller. (Notice I didn’t say story SHOW-er.)
Problem Three? You simply don't have the experience to know the difference, and you won't until you write boring exposition passages that you have to correct later, when someone shows you why they failed and how to fix them.
This is what makes “Show, don’t tell,” so freaking useless to a brand new writer, who regurgitates onto the page a mish-mash of everything they’ve ever read. They need to know why it doesn’t work for that particular scene/passage.
“Show, don’t tell,” often boils down to the fact your exposition has bored the reader and bogged down the read itself, enough for them to realize there’s something wrong with how it was done even if they can't articulate it. Maybe you’re balls deep in a “talking heads” scene, where your characters are transcribing action rather than showing you the action. Maybe you’ve glossed over something that the reader needed in order to properly engage or empathize with the character, like what happened in “Big Girl.”
It’s a marriage, a yin and a yang. Absolutes like “Show, don’t tell,” only confuse new writers who haven’t yet learned how to strike this balance. This can’t be your only advice to them, even though it fits ever so neatly on a bumper sticker.
The only place that “Show, Don’t Tell,” is a firm, no-room-for-error rule is in screenwriting. Everything you write on the page has to translate to the screen in moving pictures that the audience can physically see. Exposition is wasted in a screenplay if it’s not spoken in dialogue, which is usually cautioned against because it, too, will bog down the action and screw up your pacing. Instead you have to provide those deeply layered scenes that define your character in a very limited space, with pictures that pack a punch, and carefully constructed dialogue that tells you what you need without telling you that you need it.
Take, for example, the award-winning movie “American Beauty,” by the amazingly talented screenwriter, Alan Ball. For those who haven’t seen it, the story revolves around an all-American family that is nothing what it looks on the surface. This family includes young Jane Burnham (Thora Birch,) who is a sullen, alienated teenager who hates her parents, her body and her life in general.
When enigmatic Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) moves in next door, he is immediately fascinated by this girl, which is brand new experience for her. Normally her vivacious bestie, Angela (Mena Suvari) gets all the attention, even the creepy, pervy attention of Jane’s own father, Lester (Kevin Spacey.)
When Ricky finally approaches her at school, singling her out and vocalizing his interest, Jane decides to accompany him for a walk home, where they end up at his house. There she learns a little bit more about him, like we do as the audience. He takes her into the room where his militant father keeps all his guns in a case to protect them. Also in this case there’s a white plate with black trim. Very simple in design. Ricky pulls this plate out to show it to Jane, instructing her simply to, “Turn it over.”
There, on the back, is a swastika.
In one very powerful visual, we get all we really need to know about Ricky’s father. They didn’t need to sit for five pages talking about it. He didn’t have to share his history with her, no matter what great stories he has to tell, and we already know from their walk from school that he has some interesting ones to share, ones that warranted the time taken to tell them.
In this scene, he just has to show her one very small, very important detail that she would have overlooked had she not turned over the plate.
(This, by the way, fits in with the theme of the movie to “Look closer,” which makes the scene even more genius. We’ll get into this subject before the week is over, and you’ll see why this chapter needed to happen first.)
Since Alan was juggling six primary storylines in this movie, Lester and his frustrated wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening,) Jane, Angela, Ricky, and Ricky’s father, Colonel Fitts, he didn’t have a whole lot of time to worry about exposition. He had to marry it with killer dialogue, which he did, and artistic visuals, which he did. Some scenes needed a little more exposition than others, so he had to strike that balance by being extremely economical with his choices, piecing those tiny bits of rope together in ways that delivered the quickest, strongest punches.
Like say, showing a swastika. Jane gasped when she saw it, as did most of the audience.
You can do that in your books. You will do that in your books. You will learn to layer your writing with all the necessary elements to keep your readers engaged. You will learn to walk the tightrope. Experience will teach you this delicate ebb and flow.
In the beginning, though, hearing, “Show, don’t tell,” without being told how or why is a bit like being told you’re lost, but given no map or directions to get you back on course.
It’s only as useful as you make it, and it’s too limited to be useful on its own.
Here’s how you can make “Show, Don’t Tell” work for you, particularly in the framework of Nanowrimo. You have plenty of room to tell your story with these “moving pictures.” Nano only asks for 50,000 words, and adding action scenes will help you reach that quota quicker than exposition, or on-the-nose dialogue. If I tell you how my day went, I can condense that into a paragraph or two. If I “show” you, with action and dialogue, it’ll beef up the narrative with things that the reader can “see” and experience along with me.
As an experiment, write both. Write what happened to you yesterday in a glossy overview, and write every single thing that happened to you in action scenes. Odds are extremes either direction will bore the piss out of you. You’ll see that the second option of "showing" will give you way more words than the first, but it will also likely bog down the read with a bunch of unnecessary details that mire down your pacing.
In the end, I think you’ll find that you’ll marry the two together more often than not, which is a trick you learn by doing, not hearing.
Sometimes showing the action is necessary. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you’ll do both at the very same time, like that aforementioned scene from “American Beauty,” where Ricky then goes on to tell Jane that a lot of people hoard Nazi memorabilia, but his father only has the one plate.
That added bit of “telling” dialogue reveals a lot about Ricky’s character. He didn’t need to narrate this detail; a savvy observer from the audience can see that there is only one plate in the case. But that he felt the need to describe it says something about Ricky himself. He both wanted to alert Jane to what kind of man his father was, but he felt a need to protect him as well.
See? Layered. This is how deeply faceted storytelling can be. That’s why the most useful advice has to be deeply faceted as well.
If a scene you’ve written bores you, or your own eyes glass over when you read it, (and they will,) then ask yourself how you can convey this information in another way. Maybe there is a scene you can interject there, where you can “show” the reader something instead of merely “tell” them. Dig deep. Visualize something from that character’s life that illustrates what you want to say without actually saying it.
This is often a challenge in and of itself.
If it’s some boring talking heads scene, you need to figure out ways to pick up the pacing with action, rather than dialogue. If you need some inspiration, read movie scripts and see how they do it. Pick apart why it works. Try to explain why it doesn’t. Take it all in as part of your education to become a more efficient storyteller.
When you’re describing action, it should work as a gas pedal, something you can blast through your story full-throttle, keeping your reader on the edge of his or her seat as they turn page after page to see what happens next.
If you’re “telling” the story through exposition, then that works like your brake pedal, useful when you need to slow things down so we can all catch our breath. Maybe you need to piece together periods of time that would bulk up your book to over 200,000 unnecessary words if you explained every single scene that gets you from point A to point B. You only need the scenes that propel the story forward, and sometimes those need to be bridged together.
Hence, the “Describe Your Day” experiment above.
You’re a storyteller and that’s what you do. You find the most efficient, exciting and engaging way to convey your ideas. If you hit all the points that emotionally satisfy your reader, your sins of “telling” when you could have been “showing” will be forgiven, because you’re going to do both, guaranteed.
There is no absolute beyond this: If you don’t balance this art well, believe me, readers will tell you. Sometimes it will be as frustratingly unhelpful as, “Show, don’t tell.” Take that cue to reexamine where you lost them. Maybe they’re 100% right and you do need to put a scene of action there. Maybe you need to scrap that part entirely.
It’s bogging down the read, and you need to deal with it.
Trust your instincts to do that.
And teach yourself the skill to know the difference, so that when you’re spoon-fed half-baked advice, you’ll know how to use it.
Started First Draft: November 18, 2015 8:21am PST
Completed First draft: November 18, 2015 9:23am PST
Word Count of first draft: 1,891
Completed revisions: November 18, 2015 10:52am PST
Updated WC: 3,002/61,271
No comments:
Post a Comment