This is a very annoying concept in film criticism as well. The film cognoscenti treats SHOW DON'T TELL as an axiom and deems voiceover narration to be a failure on behalf of the filmmakers. Sure, narration *can* be a lazy crutch or sloppy filmmaking (Vicky Cristina Barcelona comes to mind) but it can also be a great storytelling device, as the work of Martin Scorsese shows us.
But at least film is a fundamentally visual medium, so I can understand why people feel this way even if it's one of those classic cases -- like passive voice usage in English -- where people have decided to make a rule out of something that isn't a rule, but can be bad if used to excess or used badly. But in literature? It's literally called storytelling! It's not a visual medium! The author is telling you a story. "Telling" is not a failure while "showing" is a success
Interestingly, he posits that the phrase was applied to literature first and cinema later. But in any case, sometimes telling instead of (or in addition to) showing is good in movies, too.
The most important thing to me in the fiction I read is that intangible labeled "voice," which I suppose could best be described as the distinct way a writer's personality shows up on a page through the choice of words, syntax, & rhythms. I couldn't care less about whaling, in other words, but I loved "Moby Dick." You, Freddie, have quite a distinctive voice, and that is the reason I read what you write.
And my favorite hard & fast writing rule to always ignore (besides that one about never splitting infinitives) is one generally attributed to Ernest Hemingway: Only use "said" when you're writing dialogue, never a more colorful verb. Prose should be, uh, muscular! 😀 Spare! Two generations of post-modernists have not succeeded in erasing that dictum from the stone tablets handed down from the mountain.
If someone understands that it is okay to judiciously split an infinite (see what I did there?), I immediately trust them as an author. It's the phoniest of the phony rules.
One of the all-time great sequences in the English language, from Steinbeck's "East of Eden," is an avalanche of telling, not showing. Just masterful, the kind of thing you so devoutly wish you yourself had written because it must have felt so good to write:
"It is amazing how Liza stamped her children. She was completely without experience in the
world, she was unread and, except for the one long trip from Ireland, untraveled. She had no
experience with men save only her husband, and that she looked upon as a tiresome and
sometimes painful duty. A good part of her life was taken up with bearing and raising. Her total intellectual association was the Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it. The many places where it seems to refute itself did not confuse her in the least. And finally she came to a point where she knew it so well that she went right on reading it without listening.
Liza enjoyed universal respect because she was a good woman and raised good children. She could hold up her head anywhere. Her husband and her children and her grandchildren respected her. There was a nail-hard strength in her, a lack of any compromise, a Tightness in the face of all opposing wrongness, which made you hold her in a kind of awe but not in warmth.
Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink."
I was gonna argue with what you said about George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", but then I remembered something I've noticed about a lot of writing-about-writing of the era and somewhat earlier: it seems to be rebelling against a kind of writing that was presumably popular among mediocrities of their era. Many of your examples are of the right age that I can imagine young writers of the era imitating the very "tellings" you praise, but overdoing it in a way that fell flat.
But these days, hip would-be authors aren't likely to turn to the likes of Eliot, Austen, Dostoevsky, or Dickens for inspiration. I suppose every age generates its "rules" that mediocrities follow, and rebellion against those rules create a new set of rules.
EDIT: That said, credit for what may be Orwell's most important dictate:
> Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Been a while since I read "Politics and the English Language," but my memory is that Orwell was speaking there about expository writing (i.e. journalism or politics), which I'd argue SHOULD strive for clarity.
The whole New Journalism movement rejected this. But I'd say they're wrong. 😀
Yes, it's journalistic writing he's talking about. I've seen style guides for journalism or other fairly dry, formal non-fiction that literally include his list of rules. I think people get confused by this because his style as an author of fiction was itself very journalistic, in a way that stood out a lot more at the time than it does today (due, I assume, to the influence of him and Hemingway on later authors).
It's basically not being florid in your writing. The opposite of purple prose. Neither author goes in for "the wind howled through the trees as she wailed in anguish" stuff. They just... describe what happens. (Mostly. Hemingway's style is exaggerated by a lot of people and he can get lyrical when he wants to.) They also don't write long, convoluted sentences that bounce from colon to semicolon for ages before finally coming to a full stop (period if you're in the US), like Virginia Woolf. Those things were much more typical at the time.
I'd suggest that it doesn't seem particularly journalistic to you because those styles were so successful that they're basically just "normal writing" now. They don't stand out. When I read Hemingway I was confused as to why people called his style groundbreaking. Then, I found out that he (among others) had popularized it so much that I'd grown up with it. A bit like the writing style version of what TV Tropes call "Seinfeld is Unfunny".
I love this! It’s maddening to deal with editors who have been trained to detect adverbs and telling, and will flag every single occurrence in the manuscript. 🫠
When I read Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward I was surprised by how often the POV hopped from character to character with no obvious (e.g. chapter) breaks in between, something I'd always been taught to avoid. George R.R. Martin would never do that!
IDK, I still think it's usually inelegant; but I still loved The Cancer Ward; and it made me question whether this was another piece of writing advice we could do without.
I haven't read it, but if you found it worked, I'd like to (slightly mis)quote another author: the reason you have rules is so you think before you break them.
It's a bit like with three-act structure, the basic shape of a conventional story. If an amateur breaks the rule because they don't understand it, the results are generally poor. But if someone who knows what they're doing does it deliberately and skillfully, the results can be fantastic. The movie version (can't speak to the book) of No Country For Old Men is a great example of this.
As a generally mediocre writer who occasionally writes things that are a little better than mediocre (when I write at all), my writing is probably better when I try to follow Strunk and White and "show, don't tell." Can we go overboard? Yes, and possibly too often. But for the very large majority of us who will never be great writers and who don't aspire to be, I think those rules work well enough most of the time, even if those of us who overlearn them become jerks about it. (Myself included, occasionally.)
I feel like 90% of writing advice and critique these days is built on the principle of "Your audience doesn't want to read." Which begs the question, "Then why bother giving any advice other than 'don't write at all?'"
Shit, the writing advice I get nowadays comes with an implied word limit: "Be succinct," "Avoid being wordy." It just reads "I'm too many paygrades above you to read whatever you wrote. Why is this in front of me, and how do I get rid of it quickly?"
In a segment of a course I teach (named writing about attention, a course for first year college students where "attention" is the subject we explore on the way to giving practice in useful genres, skills, and processes), I use the showing and telling dichotomy in the most creative writing-y portion of the course as they write "scenes of attention," short anecdotal narratives that track how their attention moves in a particular situation (e.g. while driving, studying, trying to absorb a lecture, walking to class, playing sports, etc.). While I don't say "show, don't tell" as some kind of general rule, I do require that the first couple of scenes that they write be "all showing" (and I also distinguish two kinds of showing, i.e. scene and summary, which is also a helpful part of understanding what exactly "showing" is).
One reason I do this is because I want students to be able to distinguish between showing and telling, where telling, as I define it, is when the narrator is speaking directly to the audience about what it/the text/the action means and showing is the raw-ish material that become object of focus. My assumption is that one of the difficult parts of writing is giving attention to the object of focus, which in this case, is the way our attention is moving around, in and out, back and forth, as we exist across time and space. And while it is one thing to observe this "object," it is another thing to pull in outside literature and offer an explanatory framework for how we might understand this particular form of attention. (I'd also add that I am also trying to get students to stay with a thing rather than digressing, which in a sense is a kind of exercise in a particular kind of focus, but that is an aside to this discussion...)
I have found that without this admittedly artificial dichotomy that students will drift between the two such that there is not any substantial depth built around the object, where telling is constantly diffusing the solidity of the experience they are describing, adding "normative" elements to the object of focus that ultimately dilute the idea they are trying to demonstrate. As the students write more of these scenes we reintroduce "telling" in the form of making connections between the action/attention in the scene and the readings about attention (which come from a wide range of sources, academic, popular, and literary).
All said, the reason I want my student to distinguish the descriptive from the normative is because I think they are conventionally different and moreover, this distinction is quite useful for social science-y and science-y academic writing where one is gathering "results" in the one hand and discussing why these results matter on the other, e.g. it one thing to read and understand the literature from a given topic but it an entirely other thing to make connections between this literature via themes or some other organizational scheme. I tend to believe that we should separate the two tasks of a) understanding what another is trying to say, and b) discussing why it matters. So as, this dichotomy is something that can be useful across a wide range of registers and genres and is the rare concept that can be seen and used across creative, personal, and academic writing. Of course this distinction is somewhat meaningless in "real" (essayistic or literary) writing where the goal is not to fulfill some kind of formal requirement but to express an idea by any means necessary.
I don't disagree with Freddie on anything he writes here but I'd say the issue is also the (human?) tendency to create generalized rules and concepts that can be applied to all things at all times. In other words, in the context of teaching, if its not "show, don't tell," it would need to be some other generalization that ultimately falls apart. The center cannot hold!
Children's books are the worst offenders. The goat creature is already shown turning up his nose at a plate of green eggs & ham - there is absolutely no need to have him also say "I do not like green eggs and ham."
I wish someone had shown me this a long time ago
This is a very annoying concept in film criticism as well. The film cognoscenti treats SHOW DON'T TELL as an axiom and deems voiceover narration to be a failure on behalf of the filmmakers. Sure, narration *can* be a lazy crutch or sloppy filmmaking (Vicky Cristina Barcelona comes to mind) but it can also be a great storytelling device, as the work of Martin Scorsese shows us.
But at least film is a fundamentally visual medium, so I can understand why people feel this way even if it's one of those classic cases -- like passive voice usage in English -- where people have decided to make a rule out of something that isn't a rule, but can be bad if used to excess or used badly. But in literature? It's literally called storytelling! It's not a visual medium! The author is telling you a story. "Telling" is not a failure while "showing" is a success
David Bordwell wrote an interesting response to “show, don’t tell” as screenwriting advice many years back, too: https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/01/06/tell-dont-show/
Interestingly, he posits that the phrase was applied to literature first and cinema later. But in any case, sometimes telling instead of (or in addition to) showing is good in movies, too.
Good article
Your last paragraph really hits it home. Love all the examples along the way.
Your epigram here is priceless! 😀
The most important thing to me in the fiction I read is that intangible labeled "voice," which I suppose could best be described as the distinct way a writer's personality shows up on a page through the choice of words, syntax, & rhythms. I couldn't care less about whaling, in other words, but I loved "Moby Dick." You, Freddie, have quite a distinctive voice, and that is the reason I read what you write.
And my favorite hard & fast writing rule to always ignore (besides that one about never splitting infinitives) is one generally attributed to Ernest Hemingway: Only use "said" when you're writing dialogue, never a more colorful verb. Prose should be, uh, muscular! 😀 Spare! Two generations of post-modernists have not succeeded in erasing that dictum from the stone tablets handed down from the mountain.
If someone understands that it is okay to judiciously split an infinite (see what I did there?), I immediately trust them as an author. It's the phoniest of the phony rules.
One of the all-time great sequences in the English language, from Steinbeck's "East of Eden," is an avalanche of telling, not showing. Just masterful, the kind of thing you so devoutly wish you yourself had written because it must have felt so good to write:
"It is amazing how Liza stamped her children. She was completely without experience in the
world, she was unread and, except for the one long trip from Ireland, untraveled. She had no
experience with men save only her husband, and that she looked upon as a tiresome and
sometimes painful duty. A good part of her life was taken up with bearing and raising. Her total intellectual association was the Bible, except the talk of Samuel and her children, and to them she did not listen. In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it. The many places where it seems to refute itself did not confuse her in the least. And finally she came to a point where she knew it so well that she went right on reading it without listening.
Liza enjoyed universal respect because she was a good woman and raised good children. She could hold up her head anywhere. Her husband and her children and her grandchildren respected her. There was a nail-hard strength in her, a lack of any compromise, a Tightness in the face of all opposing wrongness, which made you hold her in a kind of awe but not in warmth.
Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink."
I love East of Eden. I've read it several times, including with my kids.
I was gonna argue with what you said about George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", but then I remembered something I've noticed about a lot of writing-about-writing of the era and somewhat earlier: it seems to be rebelling against a kind of writing that was presumably popular among mediocrities of their era. Many of your examples are of the right age that I can imagine young writers of the era imitating the very "tellings" you praise, but overdoing it in a way that fell flat.
But these days, hip would-be authors aren't likely to turn to the likes of Eliot, Austen, Dostoevsky, or Dickens for inspiration. I suppose every age generates its "rules" that mediocrities follow, and rebellion against those rules create a new set of rules.
EDIT: That said, credit for what may be Orwell's most important dictate:
> Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
He may have seen it coming.
Been a while since I read "Politics and the English Language," but my memory is that Orwell was speaking there about expository writing (i.e. journalism or politics), which I'd argue SHOULD strive for clarity.
The whole New Journalism movement rejected this. But I'd say they're wrong. 😀
Yes, it's journalistic writing he's talking about. I've seen style guides for journalism or other fairly dry, formal non-fiction that literally include his list of rules. I think people get confused by this because his style as an author of fiction was itself very journalistic, in a way that stood out a lot more at the time than it does today (due, I assume, to the influence of him and Hemingway on later authors).
Huh! I wouldn't call either "1984" or "Animal Farm" particularly journalistic. But I'm interested in your take! 😀 Can you say more?
It's basically not being florid in your writing. The opposite of purple prose. Neither author goes in for "the wind howled through the trees as she wailed in anguish" stuff. They just... describe what happens. (Mostly. Hemingway's style is exaggerated by a lot of people and he can get lyrical when he wants to.) They also don't write long, convoluted sentences that bounce from colon to semicolon for ages before finally coming to a full stop (period if you're in the US), like Virginia Woolf. Those things were much more typical at the time.
I'd suggest that it doesn't seem particularly journalistic to you because those styles were so successful that they're basically just "normal writing" now. They don't stand out. When I read Hemingway I was confused as to why people called his style groundbreaking. Then, I found out that he (among others) had popularized it so much that I'd grown up with it. A bit like the writing style version of what TV Tropes call "Seinfeld is Unfunny".
If you were a professor, your ratemyprofessor.com scores would be WILD
On another note:
> 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.)
https://imgur.com/a/sVubf3o
I love this! It’s maddening to deal with editors who have been trained to detect adverbs and telling, and will flag every single occurrence in the manuscript. 🫠
As someone who’s spent decades earning a (maddeningly erratic) living from screenwriting, I write prose specifically for the luxurious joy of telling.
When I read Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward I was surprised by how often the POV hopped from character to character with no obvious (e.g. chapter) breaks in between, something I'd always been taught to avoid. George R.R. Martin would never do that!
IDK, I still think it's usually inelegant; but I still loved The Cancer Ward; and it made me question whether this was another piece of writing advice we could do without.
I haven't read it, but if you found it worked, I'd like to (slightly mis)quote another author: the reason you have rules is so you think before you break them.
It's a bit like with three-act structure, the basic shape of a conventional story. If an amateur breaks the rule because they don't understand it, the results are generally poor. But if someone who knows what they're doing does it deliberately and skillfully, the results can be fantastic. The movie version (can't speak to the book) of No Country For Old Men is a great example of this.
As a generally mediocre writer who occasionally writes things that are a little better than mediocre (when I write at all), my writing is probably better when I try to follow Strunk and White and "show, don't tell." Can we go overboard? Yes, and possibly too often. But for the very large majority of us who will never be great writers and who don't aspire to be, I think those rules work well enough most of the time, even if those of us who overlearn them become jerks about it. (Myself included, occasionally.)
I feel like 90% of writing advice and critique these days is built on the principle of "Your audience doesn't want to read." Which begs the question, "Then why bother giving any advice other than 'don't write at all?'"
Shit, the writing advice I get nowadays comes with an implied word limit: "Be succinct," "Avoid being wordy." It just reads "I'm too many paygrades above you to read whatever you wrote. Why is this in front of me, and how do I get rid of it quickly?"
Listicles!
And its corporate redheaded step-cousin, "Make Everything Bullet Lists!"
If we had to "show" everything and "tell" nothing, novels would be interminable. Literally.
Anyway, Orwell's "dusty old maxims" are generally good advice right now, although they are not and are not intended as Gospel.
In a segment of a course I teach (named writing about attention, a course for first year college students where "attention" is the subject we explore on the way to giving practice in useful genres, skills, and processes), I use the showing and telling dichotomy in the most creative writing-y portion of the course as they write "scenes of attention," short anecdotal narratives that track how their attention moves in a particular situation (e.g. while driving, studying, trying to absorb a lecture, walking to class, playing sports, etc.). While I don't say "show, don't tell" as some kind of general rule, I do require that the first couple of scenes that they write be "all showing" (and I also distinguish two kinds of showing, i.e. scene and summary, which is also a helpful part of understanding what exactly "showing" is).
One reason I do this is because I want students to be able to distinguish between showing and telling, where telling, as I define it, is when the narrator is speaking directly to the audience about what it/the text/the action means and showing is the raw-ish material that become object of focus. My assumption is that one of the difficult parts of writing is giving attention to the object of focus, which in this case, is the way our attention is moving around, in and out, back and forth, as we exist across time and space. And while it is one thing to observe this "object," it is another thing to pull in outside literature and offer an explanatory framework for how we might understand this particular form of attention. (I'd also add that I am also trying to get students to stay with a thing rather than digressing, which in a sense is a kind of exercise in a particular kind of focus, but that is an aside to this discussion...)
I have found that without this admittedly artificial dichotomy that students will drift between the two such that there is not any substantial depth built around the object, where telling is constantly diffusing the solidity of the experience they are describing, adding "normative" elements to the object of focus that ultimately dilute the idea they are trying to demonstrate. As the students write more of these scenes we reintroduce "telling" in the form of making connections between the action/attention in the scene and the readings about attention (which come from a wide range of sources, academic, popular, and literary).
All said, the reason I want my student to distinguish the descriptive from the normative is because I think they are conventionally different and moreover, this distinction is quite useful for social science-y and science-y academic writing where one is gathering "results" in the one hand and discussing why these results matter on the other, e.g. it one thing to read and understand the literature from a given topic but it an entirely other thing to make connections between this literature via themes or some other organizational scheme. I tend to believe that we should separate the two tasks of a) understanding what another is trying to say, and b) discussing why it matters. So as, this dichotomy is something that can be useful across a wide range of registers and genres and is the rare concept that can be seen and used across creative, personal, and academic writing. Of course this distinction is somewhat meaningless in "real" (essayistic or literary) writing where the goal is not to fulfill some kind of formal requirement but to express an idea by any means necessary.
I don't disagree with Freddie on anything he writes here but I'd say the issue is also the (human?) tendency to create generalized rules and concepts that can be applied to all things at all times. In other words, in the context of teaching, if its not "show, don't tell," it would need to be some other generalization that ultimately falls apart. The center cannot hold!
Children's books are the worst offenders. The goat creature is already shown turning up his nose at a plate of green eggs & ham - there is absolutely no need to have him also say "I do not like green eggs and ham."
I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I am.
Those books are meant to be entertaining with predictable word patterns and fairly phonetic.
I love those sentences. From my childhood and reading them with my kids.