Showing vs Telling

[Bebop3]

Hi!

I try to do something different with every story I write. Sadly, I often fail and the stories aren't as distinct as I'd like.

I want to try to write a story where the admonition against telling instead of showing is ignored and see if I can write something that can be successful where it is almost entirely 'telling'.

Have you ever seen that work?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Not in anything I can think of. I think "Show, don't tell" is almost a universal rule for fiction because it's sound advice. "Telling" almost entirely everything would leave little room for the reader to engage - it would read like an instruction manual, I'd have thought.

 

[Kantarii]

Show them your poker face, don’t tell them you’re bluffingKant

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't know why one would want to try this. "Show, don't tell" is, as EB says above, one of the very best pieces of advice you can give a writer. Showing puts the reader into the scene in a way that telling, by itself, never can.

That doesn't mean you can never tell. But I don't see the point of not showing.

 

[Jada59]

I don't know why one would want to try this. "Show, don't tell" is, as EB says above, one of the very best pieces of advice you can give a writer. Showing puts the reader into the scene in a way that telling, by itself, never can.

That doesn't mean you can never tell. But I don't see the point of not showing.

Me either.

 

[Paul_Chance]

Telling can frequently "work" as first person narration, where the author is deliberately "telling" a story.

Another type of story where I have seen it work is a story where the action is the telling.

Go ahead and give it a try.

With writing, first learn the rules, then break them.

 

[KeithD]

If you have an urge to try it, Literotica would be a good place to give it a go.

 

[NotWise]

I don't think I could draw a clean line between showing and telling.

 

[LoquiSordidaAdMe]

I'm all in favor of experimenting. I don't recall ever seeing this before, but it might work if you contrived the story as being told by a bad narrator whose audience has to keep asking questions.

 

[KindofHere]

.............

 

[ChloeTzang]

If you have an urge to try it, Literotica would be a good place to give it a go.

There's a lot of "telling" type stories on Literotica but it's mostly coz the writers don't know how to write. It's very bad narration. Now if you handled it well, it would work here as long as it was hot.

And how about a lot of Tolkeins unpublished works that've been published. A lot of those were largely narrative. Like The Silmarillion.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I want to try to write a story where the admonition against telling instead of showing is ignored and see if I can write something that can be successful where it is almost entirely 'telling'.

Have you ever seen that work?

Depends how we interpret "show, don't tell", and in particular whether we take them to be mutually exclusive.

I interpret the advice as meaning: rather than tell your reader the exact facts that you want them to understand, give them evidence that will let them arrive at those facts for themselves. For instance, rather than "Bob was a jerk", tell the reader about the time Bob stole money from a charity collector and let them figure out that he's a jerk.

IMHO it's a good default for storytelling. It helps get the reader engaged. But it's not always the best choice. Sometimes it takes too long, sometimes the necessary information isn't amenable to "show". And when we do "show", we're doing it by "telling" something else.

Several of the most famous books in literature are explicitly about storytelling. "Canterbury Tales", "1001 Nights", "Decameron" - each of those is about a bunch of people telling stories to pass the time. ("1001 Nights" has one main narrator, but often gets into several levels of story-within-a-story narrative.) So, yes, "telling" can be very effective.

This style of story often uses a character's storytelling to say something about the storyteller. The Wife of Bath tells a story about a knight who learns that women like to make their own choices... which is very much in keeping with the Wife's approach to the world.

Some stories present conflicting versions of the truth, which is often done by having different participants tell their own version of events (cf. mystery stories). That seems like an approach that could work well in erotica: two people remember the same encounter in different ways.

 

[NotWise]

Several of the most famous books in literature are explicitly about storytelling. "Canterbury Tales", "1001 Nights", "Decameron" - each of those is about a bunch of people telling stories to pass the time. ("1001 Nights" has one main narrator, but often gets into several levels of story-within-a-story narrative.) So, yes, "telling" can be very effective.

I wouldn't equate "telling" in the sense of "show, don't tell" with storytelling. Even traditional storytellers can use many tools available to a writer.

 

[KeithD]

For instance, rather than "Bob was a jerk", tell the reader about the time Bob stole money from a charity collector and let them figure out that he's a jerk.

Well, in a way that's telling too. If the reader sees Bob steal money from the charity collector in a scene because it's part of the scene, that's showing. You can even exhibit behavior by Bob that doesn't have him actually stealing the money but leads the reader to think, "Yeah, I know that character; he would steal money from a charity collector." That's showing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Well, in a way that's telling too. If the reader sees Bob steal money from the charity collector in a scene because it's part of the scene, that's showing. You can even exhibit behavior by Bob that doesn't have him actually stealing the money but leads the reader to think, "Yeah, I know that character; he would steal money from a charity collector." That's showing.

That was my point - you describe behaviour that convey's the character's personality, rather than directly stating their personality. But however you do it, you still end up "telling" about something.

 

[SamScribble]

Just a thought, but it seems to me that 'show don't tell' is one of the most misunderstood pieces of writing advice. Many (usually inexperienced) writers use it as justification for 'painting background'. To my mind, the late Elmore Leonard's advice - 'Leave out the bits your reader is likely to skip' - is far more useful.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I wouldn't equate "telling" in the sense of "show, don't tell" with storytelling. Even traditional storytellers can use many tools available to a writer.

How would you define "telling"?

 

[KeithD]

That was my point - you describe behaviour that convey's the character's personality, rather than directly stating their personality. But however you do it, you still end up "telling" about something.

Describe is a "tell" word. If you want to show, you don't describe behavior, you record behavior. The action and dialogue you write reflects the behavior so that the reader doesn't "hear" what it is from you; they see/discern it for themselves.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Describe is a "tell" word. If you want to show, you don't describe behavior, you record behavior. The action and dialogue you write reflects the behavior so that the reader doesn't "hear" what it is from you; they see/discern it for themselves.

I'm still not clear on how this differs from the example I was describing above: I want to convey that Bob is a jerk, but rather than writing "Bob is a jerk", I show an example of his actions that nudges readers towards the conclusion that Bob is a jerk.

 

[Oblimo]

Harlan Ellison’s famous I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is almost entirely telling. I’ve never understood what makes it so compelling, but it is anyway.

 

[NotWise]

How would you define "telling"?

Like I said in my first post on this thread, I can't draw a clean line between showing and telling. The distinction you provided was,

"rather than tell your reader the exact facts that you want them to understand, give them evidence that will let them arrive at those facts for themselves."

And that seems as good to me as anything else. I differ with you when you equate "telling" and storytelling.

With your definition, maybe another way to say "show, don't tell," would be, "Convey ideas with action and imagery."

 

[Bramblethorn]

I differ with you when you equate "telling" and storytelling.

Ah, fair enough. I think many of the stories I mentioned are doing a lot of "telling", as a way of showing other things, but I get your point that storytelling isn't ipso facto "telling" in the sense of that motto.

 

[SimonDoom]

How would you define "telling"?

I don't think the line between telling and showing always is clearcut, but I would characterize telling as the use of nonspecific, nonsensory adjectives and nouns to describe a person or a thing. I think of showing as relating specific actions or describing the specific features of something that appeal to the senses as a form of showing, because the reader can get a specific image in his or her mind about the scene.

"He was a loner" is telling.

"He had no friends" is more specific and is more like showing, although it's still vague.

Going into detail about the person's daily habits and how he never interacted with anyone is showing.

Telling is fine in a pinch to get a point across without taking up a lot of words, but good writing usually requires a lot of showing to pull the reader into the story.

 

[NotWise]

We often see "show, don't tell" given as advice, so I enjoyed this description of that advice.

To my mind, the phrase “Show, don’t tell” is a wink and a nod, an implicit compact between a lazy teacher and a lazy student when the writer needs to dig deeper to figure out what isn’t working in his story.

The quote came from an article by Joshua Henkin in Writer's Digest. I think Mr. Henkin's view may run parallel to Mr. Scribble's opinion from earlier in this thread.

 

[KindofHere]

............