Great Writers "Tell" All the Time

there is no alternative, really

Folks, on April 21st I’ll be giving a presentation at the SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University (the med school), in Brooklyn, as part of their “History & Ethics of the Deinstitutionalization Movement” symposium. My talk is titled “Severe Mental Illness, Violence Risk, and Involuntary Treatment: What the Evidence Demands.” The flyer is the event is available here, and the registration link is here. My talk is largely pulled from my next book, which you can preorder now.

Substack Notes is, like all social media, about 75% annoying and 25% useful. (And I probably contribute about 5% of the annoyance all by myself.) It’s a forum of writers, as much as anything else, which is sometimes troublesome for someone who is on record as feeling permanently alienated by writer culture; most of this can be chalked up to my distaste for the whole performative “I’m a writer who hates writing!” bit, which there’s plenty of on Notes. But it’s cool that there are still discursive spaces out there where reading and writing matter, where they’re taken seriously, in a society where most people are happily becoming the passengers on the Axiom from Wall-E, drooling while TikTok flashes minimally-amusing videos in front of their faces for hours a day. Of course, people talking about writing means people arguing about writing, and like all digital platforms Notes ends up privileging rancor, so you get long debates about abstract principles of writing, best practices in writing, the business of writing, the current health of the publishing industry and of media…. Anyway, here’s a provocation that I shared positively on the network because I agree with it:

Unsurprisingly, many disagreed!

“Show, don’t tell” is among the most repeated piece of writing advice in the English language, up there with hatred for the passive voices, disdain for adverbs, and endorsements of George Orwell’s dusty old essay full of maxims that probably made sense in 1946. It’s a mantra drilled into MFA workshop participants, stamped into the margins of manuscripts, and recited by well-meaning teachers from middle school to graduate seminars. And in its dogmatic form, it could be used to pathologize some of the greatest prose ever written. Like a lot of writing advice, “show, don’t tell” has a legitimate kernel of truth; like almost all writing advice, I think its actual utility for inexperienced writers is near zero. The people who need advice the most won’t know how to use a given piece of advice effectively and the way they’ll misuse it will only serve to make their work worse.

Part of what makes me frustrated by this particular piece of advice is that, in most cases, it clearly descends from best practices in artforms that are very different than written ficiton. The axiom, in its modern form, largely migrated into literary instruction from drama and screenwriting. In those mediums, the prohibition makes literal sense; a playwright can have a character turn to the audience and announce that her husband is cold and dismissive, or s/he can write a scene in which he is cold and dismissive. A screenwriter is generally well advised not to bombard the audience with emotional exposition but should instead let the camera do the work. (Often, usually, mostly - never always.) The instruction, in other words, is bound to the constraints of the formats of plays and movies. When it crosses over into prose fiction, something important gets lost: in fiction, there is no “showing.” There’s literally only telling. Every word on the page is narrated! A description of a gray sky is telling. A line of dialogue is telling. The most cinematically vivid action sequence is telling. The writer is always the intermediary, always the voice between reader and event. The medium is fundamentally, irreducibly narrative; the etymology of the word “narrate” stems from the Latin narrare - to tell, relate, recount, or explain.

Which perhaps explains why the greatest prose stylists have ignored the rule with total shamelessness. Leo Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with one of the most baldly declarative sentences in the canon: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is not showing! This is a novelist stepping in front of his own story to announce a thesis. It’s a famous, influential little masterwork of aphorism, and it’s pure telling. Jane Austen, whose prose is sometimes recruited in defense of showing, is in fact a relentless teller; her narrators editorialize, judge, and explain with confident irony. “She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them,” she writes of a character in Sense and Sensibility, not bothering to demonstrate that character having an excellent heart, an affectionate disposition, and strong feelings that she nevertheless knew how to govern. She just tells the reader because that is what was required for that particular moment in the book. Part of the advantage of telling is that it’s efficient. Not every character needs their traits demonstrated dramatically! And Austen is surely an example of how telling can deepen the themes and message of a work of fiction. She tells in a confident, sardonic, wise voice, a voice which readers fall in love with every day. Strip it out, try to make all points by laboriously demonstration in dramatic scenes, and you make her novels purely scenic, you’ve killed the vibe.

George Eliot is perhaps the most instructive case. Her narratorial intrusions in Middlemarch aren’t failures of craft; they are craft. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” No scene, no dramatized moment, could do what that sentence does. It requires the narrator to step forward and think out loud. I promise that Eliot knew what she was doing. She trusted the reader to receive authorial commentary as a feature, not a bug. Or look at Charles Dickens in Bleak House: “He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity.” These little flourishes are peppered throughout all of Dickens’s work; his direct commentary is core to his approach and contributes to his status as one of the great moralists in British fiction.

We could go on. Russian? Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is, structurally speaking, almost nothing but telling, a neurotic narrator explaining his own psychology at grinding, brilliant length. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina contains the passage “There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day - that is, forget oneself.” This is reflecting the internal philosophy of a character, but, well… so what? Fiction writers are forever occupying the mindsets of characters to make observations or deliver maxims or similar. I see no reason to think of this as somehow not “telling.” Nabokov’s Lolita depends entirely on the voice of a man telling us, shaping us, manipulating us, performing for us. Indeed, if Humbert Humbert “showed” instead of “told,” the novel would not exist because the whole point of the novel is the reader’s constant awareness of the distance between what Humbert insists to us (tells us) and our understanding of the moral depravity of his vision. The unreliable narrator, one of fiction’s richest devices, is entirely a product of telling, of giving us access to a consciousness we must simultaneously inhabit and doubt. Indeed, narrators of all kinds often tell, because… how could they not?

Yes, there are certainly ways in which telling can go very wrong. A writer could indeed simply write every attribute of every character out explicitly rather than through the work of characterization; they could deliver ever lesson and moral baldly in prose rather than building them through plot and theme. A writer could go wrong that way. But in real life, among real writers? I just don’t see a lot of that problem, frankly. It’s certainly true that, for beginning writers in particular, a scene dramatized will often be more alive than an idea summarized. Inexperienced prose tends toward passive recap, toward characters who “felt sad” rather than scenes in which sadness occurs. Yes, I get that. The instruction to show is a corrective for a specific failure mode, and it can work when applied wisely. But that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? The people who are seeking out basic writing advice are precisely those who are least likely to apply advice wisely. This is the same phenomenon where, for example, young writers hear that they should avoid adverbs and then come up with tortured constructions to approximate what the word “quickly” achieves much more efficiently. My problem with writing advice, so often, is that the wisdom necessary to use that advice effectively is precisely what the person reading it lacks. Editing, workshopping, reader response… these are essential for any writer. Lists of static writing advice that never change and which have already been absorbed by the worst writers you’ve ever read in your life? I just don’t recognize the value in them.

A lot of people who endorse the “show, don’t tell” advice will respond by saying that those examples I listed above aren’t really telling, that these aren’t what they mean when they complain about telling…. This is very similar to how some people say that, when they condemn adverbs, they aren’t really talking about sequential or ordinal adverbs like “First, I walked” or “I baked cookies last,” nor are they condemning approximator adverbs like “I almost won”; no, they’re only complaining about classic adverbs of manner, like “Hermione smiled impishly”! The problem is that the writers who turn to static lists of advice don’t know how to make these distinction. That’s the whole issue, that they don’t know how to parse fine points of language. When critics bleat on about how you should avoid the passive voice, they will often tell you that they don’t mean to condemn sentences like “I was born on the Fourth of July” or “He was awarded the Nobel Prize,” but rather those like “The bone was chewed by the dog.” But the ability to wade through these distinctions intelligently is precisely what inexperienced (or inept) writers lack. They can’t pull useful sense from these little commandments.

When writing advice hardens into dogma, when workshop readers circle a paragraph of authorial reflection as inherently broken - because that’s telling, not showing, you see - when students learn to distrust the most essential instrument of prose, the narrator’s voice… something is lost. The writer does have a voice; that is ineluctable. The writer’s voice thinks, asserts, observes, and yes, tells. To scrub that voice in pursuit of cinematic neutrality does not help to achieve transparency. (If in fact transparency is what we want.) Instead, it’s a kind of amputation, a disarmament, stripping the author of some of their most potent tools. The best writers have always known the value of telling. “Show, don’t tell” is advice for a particular problem, not a law. Stop treating it like one.