WRITING: Showing and Telling

I've always believed in showing and not telling when writing: let the characters act, and let the reader think about it their own way. That's the beauty of writing, isn't it? To share with the reader an abstract idea, and let them think about what you wrote. Like a movie, right?

I can't help but notice that my most recent works are almost all action, with very little summary. I would get a certain pleasure and satisfaction from writing a solid scene, where the characters just acted naturally, and I simply wrote down what they were doing. I used summary (or "telling") as a way of glossing over something, or as a means to get the next scene rolling. When I wrote out the actual action instead, the story evolved organically. In writing in action-mode-only, sometimes that scene I wanted to happen, the one I planned for, couldn't, and thus the resulting plot felt far more realistic. I was using summary as a crux, and not using it properly.

We learned in class this week that it's not always so cut and dry. That the summary, the telling, is almost as important as the showing. This was a breath of fresh air for me!

You want to summarize when your characters are doing something habitual, or something that isn't happening presently. We looked at "This is Happy" by Camila Gibb to see what this means.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-laps photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

In the above passage, that's all "telling." An interesting anecdote about people.

This next one blends telling and showing:

We were too young to understand what was happening. My father came over a year in advance to find a job and a place for us to live. I cried when this strange man lifted me up at the airport. Three months after our arrival, a package arrived from my paternal grandmother. She was a great maker of fudge and had sent us a box of it. I remember the sense of anticipation as my moher peeled back the lid and the collective disappointment as the contents were revealed: green and furry, having spent six weeks on a ship. I understood, somehow, that something between here and there had been broken.

Camila effortlessly does this throughout the excerpt we read, the strategic use of showing and telling in the same paragraph. She very broadly introduces a concept and inserts specific instances to back it up, to show us what she means. It's quite a treat to read.

If I can bring up one final example, it will be from what I'm currently reading, "Before They are Hanged" by Joe Abercrombie:

'Merchants,' grunted Harker. All the merchants in the world, it looks like. They crowded round stalls laden with produce, great scales for the weighing of materials, blackboards with chalked-in goods and prices. They bellowed, borrowed and bartered in a multitude of different languages, threw up their hands in strange gestures, shoved and tugged and pointed at one another. They sniffed at boxes of spice and sticks of incense, fingered at bolts of cloth and planks of rare wood, squeezed at fruits, bit at coins, peered through eye-glasses at flashing gemstones. Here and there a native porter stumbled through the crowds, stooped under a massive load.

In this scene, Glotka is walking towards the seat of power in Dagoska, and taking in the sights as he walks by. It's an excellent way to describe the city to the reader, with Glotka being a fish-out-of-water, this is as new to us as it is him. That being said, the merchants are quite well animated here, and I imagine each of their gestures and actions being incredibly important to them. How would Glotka know, though? So all we get is this summary.

"Telling" is a lot like essay writing. It's what textbooks do. It's what I'm doing right now. But it's no less important than "showing." I'm glad I finally learned that, and I hope I can practice it soon.