JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #53
May 20, 2021
This is Ruminations number 52, which means this will complete one full year of writing these little essays. So, for that occasion, I thought I’d revisit the topic of the first one, the perennial and over-burdened dichotomy of Show and Tell.
With every sentence in our fiction, we’re telling the reader something about the world we’re creating. We might describe a character as wearing a tuxedo, but in order to do so, we have to tell the reader about the character’s clothes. But the other thing we’re doing with that description is showing something untold about the character. The mere fact that he’s wearing a tuxedo in the scene shows a reader how he feels about what he’s doing while wearing it. It shows the kind of effort he took to prepare for what’s happening. It shows his state of mind. We can tell the reader that "he donned his best tuxedo, went down the block to McDonald’s, ordered a cheeseburger, and sat in a corner booth to eat" or "he picked up the tuxedo from the rental place, changed in the back seat of his Ford Taurus, and drove swiftly back to the ballroom," and though in each sentence we’re "telling" the reader something, the reader can infer what we’re also "showing" them.
So, the key to the show/tell dichotomy is everything we tell can leave space for inference and interpretation. In general, I think we want to tell the reader everything they need to know in order to show who the character really is, to allow the reader to understand a character by watching the character in action, seeing what they do and the choices they make. This is, after all, how we come to understand the people we meet in ordinary life. We see people do things and we make snap judgments about who they are and what kind of person they are. The same goes for character, which is the life of fiction.
So, to reuse my example from last year, we don’t need to show the reader that the character’s destination is three blocks away by telling about every step along the journey and forcing the reader to infer how far it was. The advice to "show, don’t tell" isn’t universal. It serves a specific purpose in fiction, and that is to illuminate the story, which by definition is rooted in a character.