 |
| Showing you my daffodils |
The
intrepid Ulysses
Reading Circle met last night to discuss Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I don’t intend to
give a full report on our discussion (some of what is said in Reading Circle
stays in Reading Circle), but the book got me thinking again about something I
raised in our conversation, addressing myself primarily to the two fiction
writers in the group. It’s
this business of “Show, don’t tell” that writers hear all the time these days.
(They are told.
Is that ironic?) Sherwood Anderson, I noted, did quite a lot of telling. His
characters were often silent types, either unable or unwilling to express
themselves to others in their little town, even to their own spouses. (Marriage
in Winesburg was more inevitable than desired.) The writers agreed, and I guess
we chalked it up to the time, this novel or group of stories – whatever one
decides to call it – being now almost 100 years old.
This
morning I remarked to David that “Show, don’t tell” these days has almost the
force of law in writing advice. Certainly it is an article of belief, a dogma of fiction instruction. Does this mean fiction before our time somehow fell short? Was it
in an earlier, lesser stage of literary evolution? Or is today’s dogma simply current
fashion, possibly “tomorrow’s outworn myth”?
David made an interesting point. If we see fiction as coming out of
story-telling, he said, why would we denigrate it for telling? A story-tellers tells a story, he said,
adding, “It’s not a movie!”
I’ve
pondered this question before. Like so many of life’s fascinating questions,
though, it has a way of coming around to nag me again and again.
Here’s
one of the first sites (following a Wikipedia entry) that turned up in my
search today. It’s a copyrighted site, and I’m reluctant to quote from it,
partly because of the copyright and partly because I’m not crazy about the
“evocative description” he uses as a substitute for flat telling. For me, the
description is full of trite adjectives. And anyway, isn’t the writer telling the reader what the
woman looks like, rather than, as in the rejected sentence, just telling the reader she’s old
-- so that the former, more descriptive telling is not called telling, but
showing?
Another site offering the same lesson and advice on avoiding the pitfall urges the
addition of detail. So is showing just telling more? Caution is urged, relevance of detail stressed....
I
keep scratching, and the itch doesn’t go away.
Then
I come upon a site where a writer calls “Show, don’t tell” “the Great Lie of Writing Workshops,” and I can’t wait to read it! Joshua Henkin makes the same
point David made, i.e., that stories are not movies and can do things movies
cannot --
most important, novels can describe internal psychological states, whereas movies can only suggest them through dialogue and gesture (and through the almost always contrived-seeming voiceover, which is itself a borrowing from fiction). To put it more succinctly, fiction can give us thought: It can tell. And where would Proust be if he couldn’t tell? Or Woolf, or Fitzgerald? Or William Trevor or Alice Munro or George Saunders or Lorrie Moore?
Henkin
blames lazy instructors’ and lazy students’ reliance on the “Show, don’t tell”
dictum for a lot of bad fiction writing, the kind full of pointless description
that does nothing to reveal character or advance plot. I really, really
recommend going to the Writer’s Digest site (so I’m giving the link here a
second time) to read what Henkin has to say. And then you might want to go back
and read again the supposedly improved versions on other sites advocating what
they call “showing.”
Read
like a writer. Write like a reader. That’s my very vague and unspecific advice.
How do you see the telling/showing question?
 |
| Showing chionodoxa |
