Showing & Telling

 Oi, what a week. But you know what? NaNoWriMo is finished, and the final update for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla came a week before it was scheduled, so I’ve got that to look forward to completing. And if I keep things going smoothly, I should be able to have 200 books logged before the end of the year!

I thought perhaps that this was something I’ve talked about before, but I looked through the blog and couldn’t find it. So maybe it’s come up in different Notes, but if I have a Note on it’s from over three years ago, and therefore we’ll call it fair game!

Also I didn’t mention Iron Druid in this Note, which surprised me a bit. I thought we’d do that. Which reminds me–I need to continue sporking.

Showing vs. Telling

Alright, this is hardly revolutionary, but this is what’s on my mind right now! So! There is a bit of standard writer advice that you’ll hear wherever you look up writing tips (at least, it used to be): “Show, don’t tell.” This is pretty standard advice, and I’ve rarely seen it contradicted or annotated. The essence of it is that when writing, you shouldn’t tell the reader something when you could show it to them.

This is better illustrated with examples.

My standard “bad book”, which is the level by which I judge all bad books, is Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni. One of the many issues it has (and believe me, there are MANY–one of the villains’ schtick is that she eats penises, NO REALLY) is that it tells us a lot but doesn’t show us that which it tells us. In fact, what we’re shown contradicts a lot of what it tells.

So we’re told very early on that our protagonist, Verlaine, is a skilled hunter of evil angels. His superior tells everyone who will listen that he knows the enemy well, he’s intelligent enough to oversee operations and carry them out, he can catch and bind them like a pro. He’s the best there is at what he does.

Except… he’s not. Verlaine loses every single fight he gets into over the course of the story. He frequently rushes into danger without any sort of plan, by himself, without telling anyone about it. The only reason he doesn’t die is because someone always comes along and saves him. He doesn’t make any major decisions to affect the Plot of Angelopolis, and he doesn’t even have a clue what’s really going on for most of the story. So at the end, when the “heroic” Angelologists declare that he’s the only one who can lead them through the dystopia they’ve found themselves in, well… it comes across as really, really dumb. Because in a cast of dumb characters, he’s one of the dumbest.

In this case, the telling isn’t bad in and of itself, but the problem is that it doesn’t match what we’re shown. If you can say over and over again that the character is this or that way, or any other description, then you better be able to show it as well. If a character is referred to as clever, you’ve got to show this person being clever by solving problems in an intelligent way. If you say that a city is full of crime and corruption, there’s got to be a mugging or bribery. If you have characters talk about how skilled of a fighter another character is, having him or her quickly lose every single fight in the story is not a great way to make me think you know what you’re talking about.

It is possible that you then subvert expectations, but then it should be just as much a surprise for us as the characters, so it’s on purpose that you’re doing it, rather than because you just forgot what you told us.

It’s also very frustrating when the author just doesn’t show us things in order to tell us. One of the things that bothered me about the Witcher books was how often Sapkowski would tell us things after the fact instead of just showing us the events. This gets interesting perspectives and saves space, but it’s also pretty annoying. The final big battle between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms has some scenes, but large chunks of it are told to the reader through scenes in the medical tent. This isn’t bad for the most part, but then we find out that one of the named witchers we’d met was killed in the battle, and the way we learn about it is because his body’s found in the medical tent. One would think a death like that would warrant an actual scene.

Which isn’t to say that every battle needs to be narrated in the story, especially if your main character isn’t there for it. Dresden Files takes place entirely from Harry’s point of view, so he doesn’t see everything happening in the wider world. A lot of those scenes are effectively told to us by people who WERE there for those battles. But most of the really Plot-relevant battles are the ones that he takes part in.

You also have authors who are really good at doing both showing and telling. Terry Pratchett will often give you a (usually witty) character description when introducing someone, but then that character’s actions match up to what you’ve already been told and illustrate the narrator’s point. Sometimes he’ll do both at once, by giving a description that tells you all you need to know about someone in a humorous, roundabout way, but without being a boring piece of prose. Something like, “Nanny Ogg went to bed early. Some nights she went to bed as early as 6 a.m.”

[I hold that Terry Pratchett was one of the greatest prose writers of our time.]

Telling isn’t bad! But if you’re going to do it make sure that you’re also showing! And that what you’re showing matches up with what you’ve told us. If those things don’t match, then you need to rework and revise the story quite a bit.

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