Show vs. Tell

So you use this technique now? It is an interesting way....like good interesting. I never heard of it. It is a good suggestion.

 

Wrong way to look at it. They deal with the insane, therefore they understand it enough to do so.

What you're suggesting is that you can tell someone about their home more so than they can about their home...and that's based on you just looking in, not living it.

So someone can tell you how you are and how to react because they are watching and know better than you who are living it. That's what you're stating

You agreeing or not doesn't matter. Right now I think you're disagreeing to look "cool" more than because you have a point.

What you're stating about editing in the title is the same thing someone can say about your post. Just because you say you know, doesn't mean you do.

Good. You need it.

I do not. I don't know it all. Just because I know you're wrong, doesn't mean I know it all.

If I meant that I would have said choir somewhere.

And some of the worst lessons come from amateurs trying to sound smart.

I've been on many forums. Philosophizing might have sounded great in front of pillars and those who were listening wore robes, but when you're dealing with real life and those that have dealt in the writing world for ages and watch...it doesn't work so well.

It is not a standard. It is the way to write to keep people entertained. If one were to write like you want them too then Psycho would have been really boring with showing the killer was in the restroom before seeing the shadow and then show the knife stabbing her instead of how they did it.

I don't think you get what show don't tell means. I've read your post and I've yet to see where you get it right.

You missed the point because you're trying too hard to be somewhere I wasn't even going.

And some should do more listening than talking.

 

Would it be ok to say that there are several different degrees of showing and telling, and that "He got angry" is telling, "What the hell is she doing? he thought" is a little more showing, and "What the hell is she doing? he said" is even more showing?

(Technically speaking, I would like to say that "What the hell is she doing? he thought" is both telling and showing - it's telling what the character's thinking, but showing that he's angry through those thoughts.)

 

I'm saying you can't ever 'show' someone's thoughts directly. The best you can show is actions related to those thoughts. The problem occurs when writers forsake all telling, try to only show, and have trouble building empathy because the reader is always kept outside the character, since you can't really show the inside.

Dialog and actions are often different from what someone is thinking or feeling, whether it's a character or person. To only get one aspect--the externally shown--often leads to imbalanced prose and a lack of empathy.

 

Thought is pretty much dialogue in somebody's head, especially in the manner you posted. And dialogue is a form of showing.

 

That "pretty much" in there could be argued back and forth like a tennis match. I vote no one pick up on that and get into a side debate - the showing/telling one is complicated enough.

 

I agree - I'm only claiming the anger is shown. The thoughts are being told.

In real life, we empathise with people even though we only see their physical actions and dialogue. I think it can be done in writing too, and often is done, although it's harder and takes more text. Sometimes it's worth the trouble, sometimes it's not. (Even emotions which are the opposite to what the character is pretending to feel can be shown - just like you can look through someone's pretense in real life.)

 

Actually, it's both. Going over and sitting down is showing (and "down" does help -- one can "sit up" too!) Saying he was obviously tired is telling the same thing.[/QUOTE]

 

I have a feeling we are using two very different definitions of "telling vs. showing".

The first definiition seems to be that physical descriptions are showing, while everything else, like thoughts and emotions, is telling.

The second definition is that you're telling when saying something explicitly, and showing when you let the reader read between the lines.

Am I the only one who's using the second definition?

 

That's the one I'm going with.

 

Absolutely right. The technical term is that showing and telling are on a "cline", which means that there are countless gradations and its usually only meaningful to say that one phrasing is more "showing" than another, one phrasing tends to "tell" and so on.

Technically speaking you're right, but it's not very helpful because all showing is also telling. "She stopped chopping the vegetables and gripped the knife so tightly he knuckles turned white. 'Don't you ever dare say anything like that again,' she said, through gritted teeth" shows you that she was angry but also tells you that she stopped chopping the vegetables, that she gripped the knife so tightly he knuckles turned white, that she said 'Don't you ever dare say anything like that again' and that she did so through gritted teeth.

 

I'm pretty confident that it's the second definition that Flannery O'Connor meant when she made the original quote about writing being more showing than telling. Physical description can be "telling" too -- think of a science lab report!

 

Interesting. I see your distinction, but have never quite seen someone define showing and telling this way. In it's typical form it's already so variable, but by this definition it seems far to vague to be useless.

Fiction often has a ton of subtext. Everything can be read into, and has lines between which to read. So by this definition I would then argue anything in fiction is then shown, due to a readers natural inclination to always read between the lines, even when there's nothing really to read into.

Again, a problem with the whole show/tell thing is there isn't a working definition of the terms, because they aren't literary terms. They're writerly terms, and vary from writer to writer.

People can't really differ much in their definitions of pov or tense. Even things like theme that are more ambiguous have general, working definitions.

But what do you do with terms that don't have remotely consensus in their definitions? How do you instruct when someone's definition may be different than yours? This is always my frustration with the terms. It becomes a semantics argument, or a huge display of people just trying to establish what the terms mean to them, and meanwhile useful instruction and advice can't really be given or taken.

Take this thread. Some asks about advice on showing/telling, and it becomes a discussion over the terms. "This is what showing means to me" isn't advice, and isn't really instructive. "This is an example of showing" also really isn't, because then other people just argue it isn't. Meanwhile, what advice has actually been given?

 

I think she meant that creative writing is actually far more visual than in the past, and expectations were becoming even more so. In poetry, it's all about creating imagery, and I've never once heard a poet refer to anything related to showing/telling, because clear, vivid imagery can be created in a multitude of ways, and arguing about what to call those ways is usually counter productive to learning to do them yourself.

Though, oddly enough, when dealing with imagery in poetry I hear the same things as I advise in fiction: be specific, relevant, clear, concise. Things like that. If you do that, then it won't matter if you're showing or telling, because you'll have done things that lead directly to clear, specific, relevant, concise imagery, whether it's there literally in the poem to be shown or not.

 

I'm actually in a position to be at least a bit definitive on this, because I did a research project on the subject at university using quantitative stylistics. I took a whole pile of examples which writing pundits had identified as "showing" or "telling" in a whole variety of books and workshops. I analysed the relative frequencies of verb categories using Halliday's Systemic Functional Analysis, found some significant differences, and identified a statistical test to distinguish between them. I applied the test to a pile of sample data I'd held back, and the test categories the sample data correctly to better than 99% confidence. I also applied the test to samples from the fiction and news sections of British National Corpus. Fiction came out of the test somewhere between showing and telling, suggesting that it was pretty much a mix; news also came out in-between, but more towards the telling.

The main differences are that, compared to telling, showing has more material and verbal processes and fewer mental and relational processes (there wasn't enough data to say anything useful about behavioural or existential processes). The biggest differences were in relational and verbal processes. In the particular case of character's thoughts (mental processes), in telling about 25% of the processes were mental, and in showing about 13% were mental. Mental processes clearly lean towards telling rather than showing, but they don't settle the matter; showing can have mental processes too.

The measurable statistical difference between "showing" and "telling" means that the writing pundits do mean something reasonably consistent by the terms, and the fact that mental processes were not the biggest discriminator between them means that they don't mean perceivable rather than non-perceivable. Whatever definitions you might use in other places, when writing pundits say "show, don't tell", they're pretty definitely using the second definition.

 

It is repetitive.

Sit is DOWN when you are already UP.

No it's not. Obviously isn't needed.

 

None of our writing is "needed". If you're writing a technical report then you're only concerned with the pure function of the language. In creative writing other things matter. "Sat down" was fine in the original sentence; I much prefer it to your suggestion of "sat".

 

Sat is to the point.

Sat down is too many words.

You may be stubborn and stick to it, but that is how it'll be edited when the story is edited by an editor.

Find your favorite book and look for where (not in dialog) the author wrote sit down.

 

I'm not arguing, at this point, for "show, don't tell." That's a different argument. I'm arguing for the usefulness of the terms--both terms.

But so can all the other terms ("first person", "verb", etc.) None of those terms are inherently judgemental, but it's still important to understand what they mean.

Of course, "noun" and "verb" are much more fundamental and unambiguous terms than "show" and "tell". There's a large difference there, but to me, it's not enough of a difference to make the terms valueless. If I grant you that "show" and "tell" are equally good, I _still_ argue that you need a way to understand and discuss them. I think that it's useful for a writer to be able to immediately understand:

Show, don't tell: "You've told the reader that Jane is hurt by her mother's advice. That statement of fact falls flat for me, and it's essential to the story; I think that you'd get more emotional impact if you showed it instead."

or

Tell, don't show: "You've spent a page and a half showing the reader that John's house is very cluttered. You're losing the message in a sea of detail, and you're slowing down the plot; I think that you'd get better pace in your story if you just told them instead of showing them, and moved on with the action."

This leads to the definition dispute that I see in later posts. You seem to demand that the information be accessible to at least one of the five senses of someone in the story, in order to be "show". And I don't.

I suppose that my definition of "show" is writing that gives the reader evidence and allows them to form their own conclusion, while "tell" is writing that hands them the conclusion. (Do we need different words then? I say not necessarily--I say it's "show"ing evidence versus "tell"ing the reader the conclusion.) And I don't demand that that evidence be accessible to the senses of the characters in the story.

So I'm in favor of the "second definition."

For what it's worth, Wikipedia (yes, not exactly a definitive source, I know) says: "Show, don't tell is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character's action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator's exposition, summarization, and description." (Emphasis mine.)

Another example:

Tell: John's house was cluttered, and he liked it that way.
Show: John picked his way past the stacks of newspapers, stepped over a mountain of used chip bags, and fell into his recliner. Ahhhh. Cozy.

In these two, "house was cluttered" and "stacks...chip bags..." are pretty conventional "tell" versus "show". But I'd argue that "and he liked it that way" is "tell", and "Ahhh. Cozy." is "show", even though the second is John's thought and therefore not accessible to anyone's senses.

And, come to think of it, if you exclude thoughts from "show", I can see why you dislike "show" as isolating the reader from the character. I absolutely do _not_ exclude explicit thoughts, so to me, "show" brings the reader closer to the character.

ChickenFreak

 

I've done more than that. I've run concordancing software on a corpus of about a million words of contemporary published fiction. The word "sat" appeared 444 times. Of those, 128 referred to the act of sitting down (rather than the state of being seated or figurative uses like "sat on the information"). Of those, 110 were "Sat down" and 18 were just "Sat" (none were in dialogue -- I expect some would have been had I searched for "sit"). I'd have a word with your editor if I were you.

 

You could be searching terrible works, who knows.

Sat was right to search since that is the right tense.

I wouldn't.

Within context of the scene it was already known he's up. Stating he's going down with sit is not only redundant, it's saying the reader is stupid.

 

To stress the point I've already made.

 

They were works that made it past that editor who you said wouldn't let it pass.

I've checked a couple of my favourite authors at Project Gutenberg. F Scott Fitzgerald consistently uses "sat down", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle consistently uses "sat down", Lord Dunsany consistently used "sat down", P G Wodehouse consistently used "sat down". So that's classics using "sat down" and modern fiction using "sat down". What is your great literature that just uses "sat"?

Or that the reader likes elegant rather than minimalist language, or is more interested in reading standard English than in working out whether English is logical (it isn't).

 

It's not minimalists. It's not more interesting to be redundant. Classics have cluttered language as well.

All those authors are old. Editors now would let you do that? Do you have recent works showing you right in that regard?

Hopefully you're not ignoring what I quoted.

 

Well, somebody had better tell F Scott Fitzgerald that Suzie Yakowicz thinks his writing is sloppy. Although I have checked Susie Yakowicz at Amazon, and she only has non-fiction listed. The advice makes more sense in the context of non-fiction.