Showing versus Telling - Emotion and body language · 2:19am Jan 10th, 2014
Taking a page from Bad Horse's last few blog entries, I thought I'd chip in a little bit.
The following are excerpts from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a book that sold so many copies it makes one's head spin. The first excerpt is from the very beginning of the book - the very first chapter, The Riddle House - and is the very beginning of the book. The second excerpt is from the third chapter.
I'm using the same labelling scheme as Bad Horse, with some additions:
Adverbs and adverbial phrases in red.
Similes and metaphors in green.
Non-literal descriptions in blue.
Body language in lavender.
Using a word in place of "said" or using a said bookism in orange.
Telling us how characters are feeling in bold.
While I won't comment too extensively on the use of said-bookisms and synonyms for said, it was something I noticed while I was reading the passages here and I felt like it was worth highlighting - Rowling uses them quite frequently.
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, some of its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied.
The Little Hagletons all agreed that the old house was “creepy.” Half a century ago, something strange and horrible had happened there, something that the older inhabitants of the village still liked to discuss when topics for gossip were scarce. The story had been picked over so many times, and had been embroidered in so many places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth was anymore. Every version of the tale, however, started in the same place: Fifty years before, at daybreak on a fine summer’s morning when the Riddle House had still been well kept and impressive, a maid had entered the drawing room to find all three Riddles dead.
The maid had run screaming down the hill into the village and roused as many people as she could.
“Lying there with their eyes wide open! Cold as ice! Still in their dinner things!”
The police were summoned, and the whole of Little Hangleton had seethed with shocked curiosity and ill-disguised excitement. Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse. All the villagers cared about was the identity of their murderer — for plainly, three apparently healthy people did not all drop dead of natural causes on the same night.
The Hanged Man, the village pub, did a roaring trade that night; the whole village seemed to have turned out to discuss the murders. They were rewarded for leaving their firesides when the Riddles’ cook arrived dramatically in their midst and announced to the suddenly silent pub that a man called Frank Bryce had just been arrested.
“Frank!” cried several people. “Never!”
Frank Bryce was the Riddles’ gardener. He lived alone in a run-down cottage on the grounds of the Riddle House. Frank had come back from the war with a very stiff leg and a great dislike of crowds and loud noises, and had been working for the Riddles ever since.
There was a rush to buy the cook drinks and hear more details.
“Always thought he was odd,” she told the eagerly listening villagers, after her fourth sherry. “Unfriendly, like. I’m sure if I’ve offered him a cuppa once, I’ve offered it a hundred times. Never wanted to mix, he didn’t.”
“Ah, now,” said a woman at the bar, “he had a hard war, Frank. He likes the quiet life. That’s no reason to —”
“Who else had a key to the back door, then?” barked the cook. “There’s been a spare key hanging in the gardener’s cottage far back as I can remember! Nobody forced the door last night! No broken windows! All Frank had to do was creep up to the big house while we was all sleeping…”
The villagers exchanged dark looks.
“I always thought that he had a nasty look about him, right enough,” grunted a man at the bar.
“War turned him funny, if you ask me,” said the landlord.
“Told you I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of Frank, didn’t I, Dot?” said an excited woman in the corner.
“Horrible temper,” said Dot, nodding fervently. “I remember, when he was a kid…”
By the following morning, hardly anyone in Little Hangleton doubted that Frank Bryce had killed the Riddles. But over in the neighboring town of Great Hangleton, in the dark and dingy police station, Frank was stubbornly repeating, again and again, that he was innocent, and that the only person he had seen near the house on the day of the Riddles’ deaths had been a teenage boy, a stranger, dark-haired and pale. Nobody else in the village had seen any such boy, and the police were quite sure Frank had invented him.
Then, just when things were looking very serious for Frank, the report on the Riddles’ bodies came back and changed everything. The police had never read an odder report. A team of doctors had examined the bodies and had concluded that none of the Riddles had been poisoned, stabbed, shot, strangles, suffocated, or (as far as they could tell) harmed at all. In fact (the report continued, in a tone of unmistakable bewilderment), the Riddles all appeared to be in perfect health — apart from the fact that they were all dead. The doctors did note (as though determined to find something wrong with the bodies) that each of the Riddles had a look of terror upon his or her face — but as the frustrated police said, whoever heard of three people being frightened to death?
As there was no proof that the Riddles had been murdered at all, the police were forced to let Frank go. The Riddles were buried in the Little Hangleton churchyard, and their graves remained objects of curiosity for a while. To everyone’s surprise, and amid a cloud of suspicion, Frank Bryce returned to his cottage on the grounds of the Riddle House.
“As far as I’m concerned, he killed them, and I don’t care what the police say,” said Dot in the Hanged Man. “And if he had any decency, he’d leave here, knowing as how we knows he did it.”
But Frank did not leave. He stayed to tend the garden for the next family who lived in the Riddle House, and then the next — for neither family stayed long.
Said count: 6 +1
Non-said count: 4 + 2 (cried, told, barked, grunted + announced, repeating)
The + represents points at which characters said things outside of dialogue, where we were simply told what they said (or announced or repeated).
In this section, there is very little body language; it is almost entirely about telling us how people felt, rather than showing us, even where the people are involved. The whole thing is, indeed, very telly, though it is not terribly surprising - it is backstory after all. Two of the bits of "body language" are "dark looks" and "look of terror", both of which are very telly - while we might imagine how such things look, these are telling us how the characters felt pretty directly. The only other thing we really get was a character nodding.
The telliness of this section is not terribly surprising - it is an introduction, so we would (and should) expect a lot of telling, to get us into the swing of things.
But, well, what about a more normal section of dialogue, from chapter three?
Uncle Vernon finished reading, put his hand back into his breast pocket, and drew out something else.
“Look at this,” he growled.
He held up the envelope in which Mrs. Weasley’s letter had come, and Harry had to fight down a laugh. Every bit of it was covered in stamps except for a square inch on the front, into which Mrs. Weasley had squeezed the Dursleys’ address in minute writing.
“She did put enough stamps on, then,” said Harry, trying to sound as though Mrs. Weasley’s was a mistake anyone could make. His uncle’s eyes flashed.
“The postman noticed,” he said through gritted teeth. “Very interested to know where this letter came from, he was. That’s why he rang the doorbell. Seemed to think it was funny.”
Harry didn’t say anything. Other people might not understand why Uncle Vernon was making a fuss about too many stamps, but Harry had lived with the Dursleys too long not to know how touchy they were about anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Their worst fear was that someone would find out that they were connected (however distantly) with people like Mrs. Weasley.
Uncle Vernon was still glaring at Harry, who tried to keep his expression neutral. If he didn’t do or say anything stupid, he might just be in for the treat of a lifetime. He waited for Uncle Vernon to say something, but he merely continued to glare.
Harry decided to break the silence.
“So - can I go then?” he asked.
A slight spasm crossed Uncle Vernon’s large purple face. The mustache bristled. Harry thought he knew what was going on behind the mustache: a furious battle as two of Uncle Vernon’s most fundamental instincts came into conflict. Allowing Harry to go would make Harry happy, something Uncle Vernon had struggled against for thirteen years. On the other hand, allowing Harry to disappear to the Weasleys’ for the rest of the summer would get rid of him two weeks earlier than anyone could have hoped, and Uncle Vernon hated having Harry in the house. To give himself thinking time, it seemed, he looked down at Mrs. Weasley’s letter again.
“Who is this woman?” he said, staring at the signature with distaste.
“You’ve seen her,” said Harry. “She’s my friend Ron’s mother, she was meeting him off the Hog - off the school train at the end of last term.”
He had almost said “Hogwarts Express,” and that was a sure way to get his uncle’s temper up. Nobody ever mentioned the name of Harry’s school aloud in the Dursley household.
Uncle Vernon screwed up his enormous face as though trying to remember something very unpleasant.
“Dumpy sort of woman?” he growled finally. “Load of children with red hair?”
Harry frowned. He thought it was a bit rich of Uncle Vernon to call anyone “dumpy,” when his own son, Dudley, had finally achieved what he’d been threatening to do since the age of three, and become wider than he was tall. Uncle Vernon was perusing the letter again.
“Quidditch,” he muttered under his breath. “Quidditch - what is this rubbish?”
Harry felt a second stab of annoyance.
“It’s a sport,” he said shortly. “Played on broom- “
“All right, all right!” said Uncle Vernon loudly. Harry saw, with some satisfaction, that his uncle looked vaguely panicky. Apparently his nerves couldn’t stand the sound of the word “broomsticks” in his living room. He took refuge in perusing the letter again. Harry saw his lips form the words “send us your answer… in the normal way.” He scowled.
“What does she mean, ‘the normal way’?” he spat.
“Normal for us,” said Harry, and before his uncle could stop him, he added, “you know, owl post. That’s what’s normal for wizards.”
Uncle Vernon looked as outraged as if Harry had just uttered a disgusting swearword. Shaking with anger, he shot a nervous look through the window, as though expecting to see some of the neighbors with their ears pressed against the glass.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to mention that unnaturalness under my roof?” he hissed, his face now a rich plum color. “You stand there, in the clothes Petunia and I have put on your ungrateful back -”
“Only after Dudley finished with them,” said Harry coldly, and indeed, he was dressed in a sweatshirt so large for him that he had had to roll back the sleeves five times so as to be able to use his hands, and which fell past the knees of his extremely baggy jeans.
“I will not be spoken to like that!” said Uncle Vernon, trembling with rage.
But Harry wasn’t going to stand for this. Gone were the days when he had been forced to take every single one of the Dursleys’ stupid rules. He wasn’t following Dudley’s diet, and he wasn’t going to let Uncle Vernon stop him from going to the Quidditch World Cup, not if he could help it. Harry took a deep, steadying breath and then said, “Okay, I can’t see the World Cup. Can I go now, then? Only I’ve got a letter to Sirius I want to finish. You know - my godfather.”
He had done it, he had said the magic words. Now he watched the purple recede blotchily from Uncle Vernon’s face, making it look like badly mixed black currant ice cream.
“You’re - you’re writing to him, are you?” said Uncle Vernon, in a would-be calm voice - but Harry had seen the pupils of his tiny eyes contract with sudden fear.
“Well - yeah,” said Harry, casually. “It’s been a while since he heard from me, and, you know, if he doesn’t he might start thinking something’s wrong.”
He stopped there to enjoy the effect of these words. He could almost see the cogs working under Uncle Vernon’s thick, dark, neatly parted hair. If he tried to stop Harry writing to Sirius, Sirius would think Harry was being mistreated. If he told Harry he couldn’t go to the Quidditch World Cup, Harry would write and tell Sirius, who would know Harry was being mistreated. There was only one thing for Uncle Vernon to do. Harry could see the conclusion forming in his uncle’s mind as though the great mustached face were transparent. Harry tried not to smile, to keep his own face as blank as possible. And then –
“Well, all right then. You can go to this ruddy… this stupid… this World Cup thing. You write and tell these - these Weasleys they’re to pick you up, mind. I haven’t got time to go dropping you off all over the country. And you can spend the rest of the summer there. And you can tell your - your godfather… tell him… tell him you’re going.”
“Okay then,” said Harry brightly.
He turned and walked toward the living room door, fighting the urge to jump into the air and whoop. He was going… he was going to the Weasleys’, he was going to watch the Quidditch World Cup! Outside in the hall he nearly ran into Dudley, who had been lurking behind the door, clearly hoping to overhear Harry being told off. He looked shocked to see the broad grin on Harry’s face.
“That was an excellent breakfast, wasn’t it?” said Harry. “I feel really full, don’t you?”
Laughing at the astonished look on Dudley’s face, Harry took the stairs three at a time, and hurled himself back into his bedroom.
The first thing he saw was that Hedwig was back. She was sitting in her cage, staring at Harry with her enormous amber eyes, and clicking her beak in the way that meant she was annoyed about something. Exactly what was annoying her became apparent almost at once.
“OUCH!” said Harry as what appeared to be a small, gray, feathery tennis ball collided with the side of his head. Harry massaged the spot furiously, looking up to see what had hit him, and saw a minute owl, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand, whizzing excitedly around the room like a loose firework. Harry then realized that the owl had dropped a letter at his feet. Harry bent down, recognized Ron’s handwriting, then tore open the envelope. Inside was a hastily scribbled note.
Harry - DAD GOT THE TICKETS - Ireland versus Bulgaria, Monday night. Mum’s writing to the Muggles to ask you to stay. They might already have the letter, I don’t know how fast Muggle post is. Thought I’d send this with Pig anyway.
Harry stared at the word “Pig,” then looked up at the tiny owl now zooming around the light fixture on the ceiling. He had never seen anything that looked less like a pig. Maybe he couldn’t read Ron’s writing. He went back to the letter:
We’re coming for you whether the Muggles like it or not, you can’t miss the World Cup, only Mum and Dad reckon it’s better if we pretend to ask their permission first. If they say yes, send Pig back with your answer pronto, and we’ll come and get you at five o’clock on Sunday. If they say no, send Pig back pronto and we’ll come and get you at five o’clock on Sunday anyway.
Hermione’s arriving this afternoon. Percy’s started work - the Department of International Magical Cooperation. Don’t mention anything about Abroad while you’re here unless you want the pants bored off you.
See you soon –
Ron“Calm down!” Harry said as the small owl flew low over his head, twittering madly with what Harry could only assume was pride at having delivered the letter to the right person. “Come here, I need you to take my answer back!”
The owl fluttered down on top of Hedwig’s cage. Hedwig looked coldly up at it, as though daring it to try and come any closer.
Harry seized his eagle-feather quill once more, grabbed a fresh piece of parchment, and wrote:
Ron, it’s all okay, the Muggles say I can come. See you five o’clock tomorrow. Can’t wait.
HarryHe folded this note up very small, and with immense difficulty, tied it to the tiny owl’s leg as it hopped on the spot with excitement. The moment the note was secure, the owl was off again; it zoomed out of the window and out of sight.
Harry turned to Hedwig.
“Feeling up to a long journey?” he asked her.
Hedwig hooted in a dignified sort of a way.
“Can you take this to Sirius for me?” he said, picking up his letter. “Hang on… I just want to finish it.”
He unfolded the parchment and hastily added a postscript.
If you want to contact me, I’ll be at my friend Ron Weasley’s for the rest of the summer. His dad’s got us tickets for the Quidditch World Cup!
The letter finished, he tied it to Hedwig’s leg; she kept unusually still, as though determined to show him how a real post owl should behave.
“I’ll be at Ron’s when you get back, all right?” Harry told her.
She nipped his finger affectionately, then, with a soft swooshing noise, spread her enormous wings and soared out of the open window. Harry watched her (fly)* out of sight, then crawled under his bed, wrenched up the loose floorboard, and pulled out a large chunk of birthday cake. He sat there on the floor eating it, savoring the happiness that was flooding through him. He had cake, and Dudley had nothing but grapefruit; it was a bright summer’s day, he would be leaving Privet Drive tomorrow, his scar felt perfectly normal again, and he was going to watch the Quidditch World Cup. It was hard, just now, to feel worried about anything - even Lord Voldemort.
Said non-bookisms: 13 + 1 instance of "said" which was referring to something which was NOT said.
Said bookisms: 5: shortly, loudly, coldly, casually, brightly
Not-said count non-bookisms: 7: Growled, asked (twice), muttered, spat, added, hissed
Not-said bookisms: 1: Growled finally (independent of the growled above)
Despite the much greater amount of dialogue and the higher density of it, we still see a similar ratio to what we saw in the introduction, which is to say, there is a fair bit of "saids", but there's also a lot of non-standard saids, either in the form of bookisms or synonyms (growled, in fact, was used twice here). Indeed, counting both together, there are as many of those as there are of just plain old "saids", and even many of those are strung into other things. It is certainly true that including too many of these in too small a space can be problematic... but here, it worked quite well, and the fact that Uncle Vernon was growling, muttering, spitting out words, and hissing really gives you an idea of what kind of person he is, as well as making you perceive him more as Harry does - as being a very unpleasant and unkind person. Harry says, asks, and adds things; the evil Uncle Vernon does not. The use of them was very pointed, though - Uncle Vernon is being presented as being a bad guy, whereas Harry was the good guy by standing up to him, and the various unusual terms (said bookisms and synonyms) being applied reinforce these, with Harry getting mostly more positive ones, (save for "coldly," which relates to his flaw - his temper), and Vernon getting only negative ones.
You can see vast amounts of telling in her writing, even in a scene which, in theory, should be more show than tell; not only are characters' emotions outright stated in many cases, but all sorts of other details are told to us directly rather than shown. Uncle Vernon's motivation is just outright told to us, and whether that actually counts as an emotion or not, that whole section is pretty telly... but that doesn't mean that it isn't worthy of inclusion. Is it a bit handholdy? Maybe, but on the other hand I'm sure it helped readers better understand both Harry and Uncle Vernon's situation - Harry had deliberately set up this dilemma for his uncle, and was using it, along with Vernon's fear and actual mistreatment of him, to get what he wanted.
Indeed, at the very end, after all that, we're told exactly how Harry is feeling, outright; there's no showing, no mystery, nothing - we're told exactly what he is feeling and exactly why he is feeling it. We could derive it from the text, but it is still quite deliberately stuck in there to make it absolutely clear to the reader exactly how Harry is feeling and why.
Despite all the telling, there is STILL tons of body language as well, both in the form of actual body language, and in the form of body language which is just basically saying "someone looked whatever". There is also a fair bit of hybridization, such as trembling with rage, hopping with excitement, and pupils contracting with fear. Just because JK Rowling uses a lot of telling doesn't mean she isn't showing as well, and frequently in the very same sentence.
Another interesting feature is redundant descriptions; for instance, "Uncle Vernon screwed up his enormous face as though trying to remember something very unpleasant." He could have just screwed up his face, but Rowling added in the "as though trying to remember something very unpleasant" for a reason - not only does it add a bit more nuance to the expression, but it also ensures that we know exactly how the very unpleasant Uncle Vernon thinks of things, even though the story is being told from a point of view very close to Harry. Indeed, it is taking something which is showy (screwed up his enormous face) and adding a major telly aspect to it which is redundant, something which I suspect many would see in a piece of writing and want cut out - and yet, it works here. Why? Because it adds to the characterization of Uncle Vernon, as well as reinforcing the idea that he is a cruel and unpleasant man.
An example of this same phenomenon, while it is neither really body language or something that tells us how someone is feeling, was "trying to sound as though Mrs. Weasley's was a mistake anyone could make." This is incredibly telly, and unnecessarily so in the sense that "casually" could have been used instead (and indeed, was later on). But by being telly, she actually added to the tone of the text - even though the tone of voice was identical, it added a bit of flavor to things, and better explained how Harry was behaving and his purpose in doing so.
Comparing this to the Last Unicorn excerpt that Bad Horse posted, you can see that the Last Unicorn is vastly more complicated from the standpoint of writing - The Last Unicorn is thick with simile and metaphor and non-literal text, whereas Harry Potter is much more straightforward, simple, and hand-holdy, outright explaining many things. The Last Unicorn has far more beautiful writing, whereas Harry Potter has much more plain and utilitarian text - and yet, each has its own nature to it. The Last Unicorn's writing reinforces the feeling of magic in that text, whereas Harry Potter's more utilitarian language more represents a 14 year old boy with anger issues. Harry Potter is about Harry's view of the world around him, how Harry feels and how Harry perceives things, and the purpose of much of the telling is to help reinforce that world view. The Last Unicorn isn't about that - it is about invoking a sense of wonder at the events, and feeling like a fairy tale. The choices made reinforce the text.
Or perhaps the choices weren't made at all. It may well be that JK Rowling simply writes in such a way that works well for Harry Potter, and that is why Harry Potter is her magnum opus and her crime drama novel published under another name went largely unread, because her writing style was well-suited for telling the story of a boy growing into a teenager being thrust into a confusing and often-hostile world, and presenting him against the world around him, but was poorly-suited for other things. I have not read her other work, so I cannot tell you for certain.
But if we are to make sense of writing, we need to understand why it is that Harry Potter "got away" with being so telly. Or rather, got away with telling like this. The simplest rule, after all, is to show the really important parts, and to tell the parts which are between the shows - basically, keeping the story focused more on the parts which need focus, and allowing us more latitude in how to communicate information in a timely and concise fashion. Telling us that someone is just so, and then going through the story and showing how they change from that to another state is all very well and good, and something that is very frequently done and is an obvious way of doing things. It is the next step up from "show, don't tell". But I don't think it is, indeed, the rule - or rather, it is a rule, but perhaps only for certain sorts of things.
What is interesting about Harry Potter is how the telling is so integrated into the showing scene - in a book like Good Omens, there certainly are sections which are very telly, but they tend not to be intermingled in quite the same way. With Harry Potter, the two are blended continuously - showing and telling takes place not only in the same paragraphs, but often in the same sentences, and there is no real demarcation between the two. Showing and telling both happen simultaneously, and the shifts between the two - as seen in the first excerpt - can be quite sudden, even where we have dialogue summarized, followed by actual dialogue from the same conversation. The scene between Uncle Vernon and Harry is much more "showy" in the sense that the events happen and are shown rather than are told to us, and yet in the showing there is an immense amount of telling.
And yet despite all the telling that JK Rowling is doing, she is still putting in a ton of body language, even of the non-telly sort - and not only body language, but all sorts of "showy" things. Telling is not done instead of showing, but in addition to it - and so the scene still involves us, even though we are being fed a lot of information fairly forcibly by the author.
Clearly, not everyone should write like JK Rowling does. But it is equally clear that writing like JK Rowling does isn't wrong, either. The choice of writing in this fashion changes the tone and texture of the writing, and likely is a big part of what makes the Harry Potter books so easy to read, and yet, it does lose something - some feeling of depth that The Last Unicorn has. But it is gaining something as well, and I think that is something worthy of being looked into.
* "Watched her (fly) out of sight" is a typo in the book; the word fly is missing from that sentence. Even after being looked over by likely more than one editor, this error still managed to make it into the printed version of the work.
Tell with reason. Show with reason. Do nothing without reason.
Clever! He's more unlikable (to us nerdy book-readers) because thinking causes him physical pain. Good catch.
Nice analysis.