As you know Bob, show don't tell: Srsly (7 shows, no tells!)
#1 of Srsly
As you know Bob, show don't tell: Srsly (7 shows, no tells!)
You will hear this time and time again and it is very important you understand this; show, don't tell. If you tell you are clearly...
7. Leaning on the narrator, the worst thing that people have done continually since the dawn of storytelling. Over and over again. Because it works.
We used to tell stories like this: Once upon a time there was Jack. Jack had blue hair, from an unfortunate boating accident in a novelty children's lake when he was seven. It left him scarred and bitter.
Then we started telling stories like this: Jack sighed. He flipped back his wild shock of blue hair. "Before you ask, yes. It was an accident. Who in their right mind would do this to their hair?"
Except all those helpful people who tell you to show and not to tell are doing something wierd They're telling you. Because they're trying to get information across. Which is a very difficult art that humanity have been working pretty hard on ever since Thog whacked Thog over the head with a tree branch and henceafter became 'Thog, that cockface with the stick' while 'Thog, with the bleeding head' went off to try and explain to people that they should really get some sticks of their own.
Narrators were - and are - a preferred option because they closely mimic the way people actually tell stories in conversation. This is useful, but text is not the voice. The idea that narration has ever been a preferred written form is, honestly, something I consider rather dodgy - the written form as you and I understand it, the novel, is horribly new. It's still wide-open to experimentation. Novel actually means 'the new thing'.
The novel has gradually evolved to various new and different perspectives, many of which make having a narrator in the classical old style look rather odd. For example, in something written in the first person, whenever your viewpoint character tells the audience something that he doesn't know at that point in the narrative - 'She'd taken an umbrella that day, and I told her she'd been foolish. Of course I was the fool, she'd always known which days it would rain, it was just her little gift. Never wrong before, and not wrong on that day when I set off confidently in the sunshine.' - you do a funny little something which informs your reader, subtly, that your viewpoint character is talking from a long, long way away from these events. Is that really something you want to do in a novel where you wish to try and make your readers paranoid about whether or not the character comes out of the events a whole man?
In a novel where you're writing in what is now a popular viewpoint - close third person - you are trying to write from your character's shoulder. "John walked down the street, hating every step. He kicked a can from his path, hurt his foot and ignored it. Damn cans, laying out in the road like that. Some kid would cut themselves and get tetanus." In that I'm using narrative techniques as soon as I start going on about 'Damn cans' and 'Some kid'. The difference is the narrator is, it would appear, John himself.
If I wrote it like this - 'John walked down the street, hating every step. He kicked a can from his path, hurt his foot and ignored it. John had always hated cans laying openly in the street. He always feared that some poor kid from the neighbourhood would cut themselves open while playing with it and perhaps get tetanus' - I would be doing what is generally understood as 'telling, not showing', or rather using an inappropriate voice and mechanism to give the reader information.
The classical example of inappropriate ways to get information across is 'As you know, Bob.' Lets say in your story you need to explain something that everybody knows, but you've been listening to these people who say 'Show, don't tell'. You will then write a conversation like this, because it fits your story's style of writing - '"As you know, Bob, since we've been friends of John for years and years, he's always hated cans littering the streets. He's afraid the nieghbourhood children might hurt themselves." "Yes. Tetanus, that sort of thing." "Exactly."'
You're not breaking your writing style like this, but you are breaking the bounds of believability that anyone would assume to address Bob - a longtime friend of John - in that fashion.
You have information you need to get across to your reader. You want to do it as invisibly as possible. Sometimes that means telling your reader outright after leading your character into a quiet, expositionary moment - as if the character is trying to explain it to themselves to make sense of it all. Sometimes it means having your narrator directly address the audience, sometimes it means having a son walk into his estranged father's apartment, pick up a cigarette carton, a lung X-ray, and start weeping.
There are a lot of techniques. You are not looking to show or tell. You just want your reader to be struck by the same inspiration from nowhere you were while writing, to magically know every damn detail. Barring mysterious psychic mind transfers, however, your best bet is to experiment with your writing and find a way of addressing your readers without breaking the flow or style of what you've written.
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That means you can do whatever the hell you want with Srsly, from ripping it off entirely to 'quoting' it in your own guide to rewriting it. Please feel free and encouraged to make copies for your writing newsletter, blog, or anything at all. If you would like to link back to me, which is nice and polite but by no means compulsory, please use 'http://www.furaffinity.net/user/foozzzball/' or my e-mail address, [email protected]'.