The power of telling and exposition when done right

I saw a great comment on this topic in "wired for Story" it said:
Details are like eggs tossed to the reader. They can only catch so many, when you toss just one more over that, the reader doesn't just drop one egg, but all of them.

Or something pretty close to that, typing from memory atm.

 

Thank you!!!! It had always driven me nuts when people kept telling me that in feedback. And when I ask, "How do you suggest I show that?" all I got are crickets.

 

I guess this is a good place to talk about this. There's a type of description I've been thinking about lately (and that I occasionally use) that's not reliant on any of the senses. I call it functional description, which is not the best name for it, and needs to be expanded. But it describes things by what they do. For instance 'The old furnace chugged and wheezed in the corner.' Ok, that's not really description, is it? It's action, but it's descriptive action, and this is one aspect of breaking free of showing and telling. Or rather another tool to help you navigate writing. Yes, I've been thinking about that constantly, and I think as a first step I had to clear away all my resistance to the idea by listing my disagreements.

I'm noticing a lot of this in Salem's Lot, and of course it was all over in the video I posted last night about various methods of description. But the word functional doesn't really cover it. It's one form, but there are others, and I want to be able to articulate some of them. Otherwise they're floating in limbo and you can't quite pull them out to use it in a story. Though I suppose you don't have to have a name for everything you do in writing.

There are also metaphorical descriptions (sometimes similes)—'The house stood like a monolith atop the cliff.' And one particular form of metaphor is personification. Having a hard time coming up with one randomly at the moment, but I know what I mean. Comparing a car for instance to an old spinster who seems frail and ineffectual, but nothing will stop her from getting to church on Sundays.

I suppose if you had to break this down into showing or telling it's telling, but it's the good telling. Or it bridges the gap between them. And it looks like it's often also action. The house stood, rather than the house was. The car trundled about its duties like an old spinster... Ok, trundled is an overly colorful word, verging on purple. Hey, it's a placeholder I came up with in about two seconds. I would change it to chugged, but that one's already taken.

I plan to copy over some passages from Stephen King and then emulate him. He's absolutely fearless, and many times it works. He uses so many different approaches and techniques that you hardly see in more conventional writers. I'm semi-remembering a technique recommended by @Seven Crowns where you copy passages but you change some of the words, you just keep the sentence structure. I think that's what it was. Going to test my Google-fu and try to dredge it out of the depths of the board. I probably also have it stashed away on my Evernote with many other nuggets of wisdom I've plundered from the board.

• Found it

Oh, actually what I was looking for is a little farther down on the same thread:

• Here

Very similar to the first one, but with some crucial differences.

 

In my writing, I have for the greater part neglected ethnicity, but do come to mention it for characters when there is an issue of ethnicity, from social pressures, coming into the picture. I don't have that generally happening.

 

One episode of the story grid podcasts mentions the same thing. They said it is an effective exercise to hone your ability to write a scene, and recommended rewriting the scene in your own way with three different versions to see what worked best for you. The more I read the debates about showing and telling, and the thread on dialog, the more it seems to me that most of this comes down to the author's style. The descriptive, and dialog styles can help build a fan base.

 

Thanks for quoting that. I completely forgot to do the exercise. Now I want to do it. I even highlighted a couple of paragraphs in the book I wanted to use.

 

As a "new" writer, this topic is of great interest to me. My 'style' irritates grammar police, causes toungue clicks in editors, yet delights casual readers (or so they say). Those are actual comments I've gotten over a couple years on the same chapter. Admittedly, my style has changed some as a result of these comments but I'm still tossed about trying to decide who is correct and the direction I should take.

The other issue I wrestle with is descriptive narrative that folks will understand. Like cursive script, many of the current generations would not understand some of the older references. "The place reeked like a overused outhouse. Even insects seemed to avoid it. Devin had no choice, dive in or die." My grandson asked what an outhouse was. Even my wife googles things while reading on her pad. This would kill most readers and they would stop reading.

I'm going to try the suggestion and find some sample paragraphs to work with. Maybe that will help me get back on track. Right now I'm derailed like an Amtrak.....

 

You can move a story or character forward using telling. It's sort of a big claim that everyone on the Internet has it wrong except you.

I'm not sure I get what you're saying here.

Now is that showing or telling? I don't really give plot points too much thought. I guess that's something that just seems to work out for me.

 

I think ethnicity is an important character aspect to include or hint to in some way. Some people will say they leave it up to the reader to decide, but left to the reader the default ethnicity is white. Of course, if all your characters are white, it probably doesn't matter then.

 

The only thing is that we're discussing elements of the craft that can elevate your writing, improve it, make it better. I don't really see these elements of writing as an author's style. I think a lot of writers like to call something that's not really working part of their style rather than fixing it. And I'm not so sure description and dialog are going to build you a fan base no matter what style you use or what you call it.

 

Is that true though? I'm sure it's true for the average suburban American reader, but as a blanket statement I feel that must be false.

I find sometimes when I read a first person story, it takes some time before we know the gender of the narrator. But it usually feels pretty obvious when the narrator is female or male.

Take this example:

The next phrase reveals the gender. But is it really any mystery?

Spoiler

girl. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Why can't the same be said for ethnicity? Obviously I don't mean every person of an ethnicity is alike, that would be super ignorant. But there are a lot of cultural ties. I bet a skilled author could give an authentic, non-stereotypical representation of, say, a first generation Hmong immigrant that most readers would recognize as non-white and some would recognize as Hmong without explicitly saying so. At the same time, would be much more difficult to do the same with a Korean baby adopted at birth by a Seattle couple.

I'm not advocating not referring to the ethnicity, I'm just not convinced your assertion is accurate.

 

I agree with you @deadrats

The people on the internet who talking about "showing" versus "telling" are not wrong. It's not a mathematical formula. They're using the definitions of showing and telling that are generally accepted among writers, which is why you see more or less the same definitions whenever people mention it. Redefining showing and telling so that they mean something different than what everyone else means when using those terms is pointless.

 

Not necessarily. One could make use of the loosely defined, widely accepted terms for feedback purposes and forum threads they don’t want to sidetrack, while favoring more precise concepts to better assist with their writing and reading.

Outside of writing, I do this with several important yet vague concepts. For example: ‘friend’ and ‘good faith.’

 

I don't see that there's really any discussion. There's only use every tool effectively. Anyone telling you to never use a tool has no idea what that tool is meant for or how to use it, and thus listening to them is wasting time at best and confusing at worst. "Show, don't tell" is a summary, and like all summaries, there's a whole load of uses and definitions that the phrase encompass that people just haven't bothered to try to understand before implementing the advice, resulting in bending themselves into pretzels trying to do it. And like most writing advice, it's aimed at beginners who are prone to too much telling and poor pacing in general. None of the nuanced writing advice can truly be summed up in a single neat little phrase, because the answer is, quite literally, always "It depends."

It depends on your voice. It depends on your genre. It depends on your story. It depends on the scene. It depends on what you're trying to do and why. It depends on reader's expectations. It depends also on your own preferences to a certain extent.

LOTR level world-building details in a thriller would have most readers DNFing left right and centre, but for fantasy readers, LOTR is a lush and indulgent experience that's unforgettable. An ambiguous ending might be welcomed in lit fic but try not giving romance readers closure on the romantic couple's relationship and you're gonna get yourself bombed with 1 stars lol. So much simply depends. Yes, it depends.

But "it depends" isn't what writers wanna hear - certainly not the novice looking for guidance, but often "it depends" is the best advice you can get.

 

Yes, in most of my past writing I did not care if characters were seen as white, though they didn't have to be. It was mostly fantasy writing with other possible worlds maybe being settings. Other creatures might be more of an issue. But I think of working with experiences of people of different ethnicities and it takes me outside of my own experiences, to learn from others. Hinting could be useful too.

 

The best characters are ones the reader can put themselves into. The reader needs to identify with them in some way. If leaving ethnicity to the reader's imagination helps them identify with the character, why take that away from. Them?

 

I think of including suggestion of distinct ethnicities as an experiment in my writing, that could be developed from it, where issues of ethnic differences are. As much of my writing focused on fantasy, other than sometimes having elves or maybe dwarves or gnomes in the stories I was writing having differences shown there were no ethnic differences I had to show among the men and women in those, so in those it could be overlooked except for unique customs that there could be in another world. But still, there could be differences among them from any coming from a different society in that same world.

 

Showing is not about dialog or even necessarily description. It's about the way you tall a story and the words you choose to to that.

Telling: By the time the London fog hit, she was sad.

Showing: By the time the London fog hit, she was crying.

I think this is actually much more simple than people make it out to be.

 

I don’t understand how anyone could view show and tell as a “tone thing.”

 

The sentiment “all writing is telling” strikes me as muddying over the useful concepts of show and tell. And even if it doesn’t, I can’t think of what insight it offers.

 

I can’t see how the sentiment “all writing is telling” informs anyone that show and tell are actually matters of narrative distance. But assuming it does, I would think close versus far narrative distance (show versus tell) would be useful concepts for authors to understand.