JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #61
July 22, 2021
Let’s talk about Show and Tell again. You can read through many of the old Ruminations to see some of my other thoughts on this dichotomy, but for now I’ll define it like this: in fiction, we tell the reader all the important details, and the accumulation of these details shows the reader something about the fictional situation. Showing, in the writing of fiction, is to guide a reader’s inferences, to provide what is necessary that the reader understands what you’re implying without saying it.
So, although our job as writers is to guide the reader, ultimately, the advice to "show, don’t tell" puts the onus of understanding onto the reader. This creates an obvious difficulty. We can predict that some readers will "get it" with very little effort, while others might need a bit more information before they notice what we’re trying to show. And then there are some readers who will never get it, for whom nothing short of spelling it out will suffice. Readers will even shift categories depending on what we’re trying to show. One reader who is a savant about sniffing out the hidden motivations in a workplace power dynamic might be blind to the implications of one partner’s subtle barb in a domestic spat. A relatively astute reader might miss a detail because the cat distracted her momentarily and completely miss the underlying dynamics in a pivotal scene. And some readers are just plain obtuse in everything except the one kind of thing they enjoy reading--and they should probably stick to that.
It’s simply impossible to write a story so that everyone will get it, even when your workshop insists you’d better Show, don’t Tell. So the good news is that you can ignore a lot of that advice. Sometimes it’s counterproductive to worry so much about what you’re showing. Tell us all the important details that have the potential of showing us who the character really is, and don’t worry so much about the specifics of what you might be showing us. Sometimes it’s better to be a but murky rather than specific in this way, since human beings have, as a general rule, complex and conflicted psychologies. No one is a single thing, and neither is any character, and the only thing we can really show the reader with any reliability is that this character is the kind of person who would do the things I’m telling you she is doing. We can’t actually choose to show anything specific about the character: we can only gesture at who the character is with concrete and specific details that describe vivid action. Everything else is up to the reader.