Showing And Telling: Cooperation Not Competition
Emma Darwin on "writing which Tells and writing which Shows"
For this week’s The Process, I’m delighted to welcome to the stage,
of .I’ve known Emma for a long time, as we worked together at the
, and I’ve long admired Emma’s precision with words and wonderful gift for explaining difficult aspects of writing craft with flare, panache and grace.I highly recommend you sign up to her Substack,
; her thoughts on writing have been honed for many years as a writer, a mentor, a tutor and someone who has been writing a newsletter since 2007!Show don’t Tell! is something I’ve been told many times when I was starting out as a fledgling writer, and indeed, I say the same thing to other writers that I mentor.
However, as with everything, real life is so much more nuanced. So without further ado, here is Emma to help us, with a brilliant example from one of my favourite novels…
First, can we get get a few things straight?
Writing is not an exact science. It’s not even an exact art.
So it’s impossible to say, ‘Writing X is Telling, writing Y is Showing’, because ‘Telling’ and ‘Showing’ are convenient but over-simplified labels for effects on the reader which are achieved by a complex of means. For more about the basics of Showing and Telling, click here.
I often prefer to think of Telling as ‘informing’ and sometimes ‘explaining’ or ‘summarising’, while it’s often more useful to think of Showing as ‘evoking’, or occasionally ‘presenting’ or ‘dramatising’.
Any text worth reading has writing which Tells, as well as writing which Shows. So you can ignore anyone who declares there’s a ‘rule’ which is ‘Show don’t Tell’.
As soon as you realise how possible it is to make your Telling Show-y, the simple, binary distinction begins to crumble, but that doesn’t mean the terms cease to be useful.
And therefore my response to the worried aspiring writer, bloodied and bowed from their writer’s circle or an editorial report, who asks, ‘How do I get rid of this Telling?’ will be something like, ‘Well, let’s think about whether this is a moment for informing and covering the ground, or for evoking and dramatising.’
This extract, set in a Victorian theatre, is a great example of how the two work together:
I don’t know if it was the people getting up which made the gallery seem to heave about; or the shrieking woman; or the sight of Nancy, lying perfectly pale and still at Bill Sykes’s feet; but I became gripped by an awful terror. I thought we should all be killed. I began to scream, and Flora could not quiet me. And when the woman who had called out put her arms around me and smiled, I screamed louder. Then Flora began to weep – she was only twelve or thirteen, I suppose. She took me home and Mrs Sucksby slapped her.
This is from the beginning of Sarah Waters’ wonderful Fingersmith, and it’s a lovely example of how the crude distinction between Showing and Telling only gets you so far. So let’s unpick it a bit. The narrator is Sue, writing about herself as a small girl.
‘Given a short, punchy Tell, such as “I became gripped by an awful terror", the reader’s mind is offered a space to create its own terror.’
– The gallery seemed to heave about is clearly Show-y: physical, in the moment, very much how it would feel. And here seemed is entirely necessary, not a dispensable piece of filtering.
– heave, shrieking, pale and still, scream, weep, screamed, slapped are all Show-y: physical, specific, vivid. And notice how they’re mostly verbs; because they evoke action, well-chosen verbs arguably make more difference to the vividness of a scene than anything else.
– So what about She took me home? No stumbling through lamplit streets or racing along reeking alleyways here, but this is a perfectly sensible bit of Telling: information telling us what happened next, which any more elaborate evocation would just clutter up.
– Flora could not quiet me, though also information more than evocation, does have the vividness that voice brings to a narrative. The simple grammar and vocabulary suits the fact that this is a memory, and of a child’s experience: older-Sue’s narrative is being coloured by child-Sue’s voice in the technique we call free indirect style. Quiet used as a verb (verbs again!) has the smell of the period, without being overtly olde worlde.
– Then there’s I became gripped by an awful terror. Put that in your story, and many a writer’s circle would cry that it's Telling. Where’s her churning stomach, thumping heart, clammy palms, and metaphorical monster looming over her? Well, sometimes when we tell stories we do explain what’s happening, rather than evoking it, especially when we’re a nineteenth-century girl (albeit one being ventriloquised by a twentieth-century novelist) writing from a world shaped for us by the words of Dickens, Conan Doyle, LeFanu and Poe. But the verb, gripped, is vivid and physical – though it’s used metaphorically – and, crucially, this kind of Telling is often swifter, and so can be punchier, than fleshing the moment out into standard-issue Showing of physical fear-symptoms.
– And the next phrase also has that swift power: narrator-Sue informs us that I thought we should all be killed. Should this whole passage not be Shown, shifting out of narrator-Sue’s understanding into child-Sue's experience in the moment, with real-time thoughts?
Not necessarily. The thing is, we are conscious creatures and so we experience life in two layers: even as we’re involved in what’s going on in the moment, we’re separately aware of that involvement, and apply our knowledge of the wider context in time and space to make sense of what’s happening. The relationship of narrator to viewpoint character embodies this dual consciousness.
In writing, getting to grips with the spectrum of psychic or narrative distance will help you choose how to handle the relationship between the narrator’s storytelling and the viewpoint character’s experience – even when they’re the same character, as they are here. As a reader, I think that having both layers of human experience working together is virtually always more compelling than a single layer because it’s more like real life.
And that, really, is why in any successful narrative Showing and Telling cooperate: it evokes lived life.
One more thought, which you may have had when you read her churning stomach, thumping heart, clammy palms, and metaphorical monster looming over her. The Show-y ways to evoke the viewpoint character feeling fear (or any emotion) are always at risk of becoming signals. They may not quite be clichés, but they’re off-the-peg, second-hand, tired. The reader gets it and moves too swiftly on, before the moment has time to flower in their own consciousness. By contrast, given a short, punchy Tell, such as I became gripped by an awful terror, the reader’s mind is offered a space to create its own terror.
What do you think? How do you find the balance between showing and telling in your own writing?
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Emma Darwin’s debut The Mathematics of Love is probably unique in having been simultaneously nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book and RNA Novel of the Year awards; her second novel, A Secret Alchemy, was a Sunday Times besteller. She is also the author of Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, and her latest book is the memoir This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin. She teaches creative writing at Oxford University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and has given workshops from Auckland to Zurich. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing, and her blog This Itch of Writing is linked to by writing courses around the world.
A version of this post was first published in February 2015
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I like the phrase - showing and telling cooperate. It is really useful to think of writing as a mixture of the two.