The Writing Life: Playing Show and Tell

Feb 21, 2008 - 09:30 AM PST

My most important piece of advice to all of you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts that readers skip. ~Elmore Leonard

Great advice. But what to leave out? Everything but the dialogue?

Here’s a hint: readers tend to skip excessive narrative. Narrative is “telling.”

Imagine your manuscript is a movie. We see the main character pacing in his living room, while the off-screen voice of a narrator says, “Kelsey was mad. His wife had done it again.” Write the same thing in a manuscript, and that’s “telling.”

Or you could describe Kelsey doing something that lets us know he’s mad. “Kelsey grabbed their wedding portrait and smashed it against the stone corner of the mantelpiece.” That’s showing. Showing means eliminating the unseen narrator.

Showing engages the reader. When you’re shown something, you have to figure it out. (Hmm….Kelsey must be really pissed off at his wife. Wonder what she did?)

Ever snooze off during a lecture? Aren’t you more likely to stay awake if there’s a possibility that the teacher will ask you a question? The likelihood that you’ll have to figure something out keeps you on your toes.

As Anton Chekhov explained, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Sometimes narrative summary is unavoidable. For example, in the second Harry Potter book, The Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling had to catch people up on the story. So she wrote, “Harry Potter wasn’t a normal boy. As a matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be.” That’s the narrator speaking, in order to convey necessary information quickly.

Narrative summary is also important when making transitions between scenes. “Helen waited for ten years.” Showing how she’d waited for ten years could bog the story down. But that’s always the temptation of telling; it’s easier. Try to avoid temptation.

As with most “rules” about writing, once you know them, you can break them if you do it well. Isabel Allende is a master of descriptive narrative. For example, in Portrait in Sepia, to explain why a man was about to have an affair, she wrote, “He had the soul of a pirate, and the idea of playing with fire seduced him as much as La Lowell’s incomparable buttocks.” Which demonstrates that good story telling can still be good storytelling.

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