I’ve been reading furiously and writing furiously. The great thing about deciding to delve into the long-untapped waters of Sci-Fi and Fantasy is that now I can read WHILE I’m writing my own stuff without being too worried about crosspollination. So I don’t feel so lame.
Anyway, one of the things I’ve read a lot lately in literary criticism is people talking about “Show me VS. Tell Me” and how one is good but the other is extremely horribly awfully bad and is the first thing that will brand you a philistine when it comes to reading your work critically.
The thing is…I don’t know exactly what they mean by show vs. tell. Yes, I’m ignorant. I’ve taken very few creative writing classes in my life. And very few seminars. This seems like something they would talk about in a class or a seminar.
So I am coming to you folks to tell me what is Show Me vs. Tell Me in YOUR mind.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I’ve heard the same idea thrown about in regard to films, and I can easily grok the difference there, but I’m as puzzled as you as to how to apply it to the purely written word.
If I were a cynic, and I am, I’d suspect literary critics are trying to leach the idea from film critics without really knowing how to apply it themselves.
See, that’s kinda what I was thinking. It sort of seems like something fuzzy and undefinable to me when it comes to writing. Because writing IS telling. The few examples I’ve read on cw websites for Show Me prose seem a bit florid.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
My idea of it has always been that show me takes you into what is happening while ‘tell me’ is when two characters sit around talking about what happened and giving you a huge info dump of backstory.
David Weber is very bad about telling the readers instead of showing them. I felt like the first two of his Safehold books were basically the minutes of a bunch of meetings. But I still enjoyed the books thanks to his worldbuilding efforts.
I agree with you and Jon with regards to applying it to the written word. The distinction is a lot less important on the page than it is with TV or movies. I can’t really clarify it, but in the Safehold example I mentioned above, those books seemed to drag a lot more than many.
I think that a lot of the time it is advice for relative new writers because they don’t fill in the details that would carry on a statement like ‘She is angry’ through the rest of a scene. It’s tossed out there and forgotten and I – as a reader – get grumpy because she doesn’t seem angry to me, you’re just telling me she is.
*thinks* It’s like in the recent Sherlock Holmes. Over and over we’re told that Irene Adler is clever, brilliant, the best spy ever, etc etc and so on… and the only evidence we ever see is a brief macgyver at the end and a single outwit of our protagonist. As far as I could tell, she pretty much looks like a damsel in over her head because all the character development focused on her predicament and not on anything else.
Translating that to the written word: It is where the male protagonist is supposedly a badass and we’re told over-and-over that he’s a badass, but the author writes him into several corners and then deus-ex-machinas him out of trouble using plot contrivance and no character badassery. I essentially don’t believe what the author is telling me because I don’t think we’re seeing the same character doing the same things.
I do think that infodump is part of it, but also kind of an extreme example. If I start to not believe the author, however, I think that’s where Show vs. Tell comes in.
Maybe… Substance vs. Boast is a better way to describe how I understand it. Or Walk vs. Talk. Show me how her being angry affects the outcome of the scene or the dynamic between characters or her personal arc. Just telling me she’s angry and then letting it drift off in a void is not very effective storytelling.
Alii is right. Telling makes a claim about a character, an object, or an event; showing gives the details that let the reader see that the claim is true.
An example of showing, from some books I know you’ve read: in the Harry Potter books, Rowling doesn’t tell the reader “Nigel became more confident and took responsibilities for important things.” And she doesn’t have characters say to each other, “gee, isn’t Nigel becoming more confident etc.” which would be indirect telling. Instead, she shows you that Nigel became more confident and took responsibilities for important things. And she shows you this by scenes in which Nigel is more confident.
Don’t just say that X is so charming that no one can resist her; show X in conversation (or in wordless flirtation, whatever) attracting people with her charm. In fact, if you show it well enough you don’t really have to tell it at all.
Oh, and I think Jon and W are wrong; the distinction between showing and telling in fiction has been around longer than there have been films. And it’s a more important distinction in writing than in film, because in film you can have telling interspersed with people blowing things up or running around or walking back and forth in the hallway or making love and the audience will still be interested, whereas in writing, if you just tell the reader things and also tell the reader that something blew up or that someone ran around and can’t make that convincing, then you really have nothing.
Yeah, I retract my cynical supposition in light of Alii’s excellent explanation.
I knew this was the place to come and ask.
Because this makes complete sense to me.
I did google it and came up with a few websites, but the examples they gave were just one or two sentences–a couple of paragraphs at most.
And those examples seemed in many cases to feel forced and overly verbose. It was a style that didn’t work with me at all. And I didn’t want to write bad books, but at the same time I couldn’t write like they were exemplifying and keep a straight face.
Now NM, technically speaking I can’t be wrong or right since I did preface the whole thing by stating that it was an opinion.
That said, Alii’s explanation makes a lot of sense and my opinion has changed accordingly.
Looking for joke about engineers speaking technically….
Yeah, what everyone else said.
Though people do take this to ridiculous extremes, as if you’re not allowed to use exposition EVER. This post wouldn’t have been brought on by a certain commenter at “Mark Reads HP,” would it? 😛
Heh. It actually came about because of Mark’s repeated grousings about SMvTM in Mark Reads Twilight. 🙂
In terms of sci-fi and fantasy, for me it boils down to how a universe or concept is presented.
I recently read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, which is a good example of the show me. The novel drops readers into the universe he’s creating and the situation without the need for an infodump on how the current situation came to be and the various technologies involved. As the novel unfolds, we are given various pieces of the background and an expansion of the setting but it rarely descends into the main plot or movement coming to a screeching halt so we can bring readers up to date. Another good example is the Dune novels by Frank Herbert.
On the other side, you have the Dune prequels by Herbert’s son and Kevin J. Anderson. These are books that will come to a complete halt to explain some concept or to summarize events that happened two chapters before. I find this type of “infodump” happens a lot in alternate history novels where we have a long speech or moment when a character will reflect on the history of the universe and you can almost see the flashing light saying “See, this universe is totally different! Here’s how!”
I think Alii’s explanation is the best I’ve ever read. I’m gonna borrow it. 🙂
Cheep heyecan. Size en yakın şube Yakında.
iyi 🙂