"Show, don't tell" is sexist · 4:09am Mar 20th, 2017
My regular readers probably know by now that I am hardly the first person to cry “patriarchy!” However--and this seems incredible to me, owing to the popularity of the subject within the very den of third-wave feminism, English Literature departments--my Google-fu finds no other discussion of the issue, so it seems I am about to be just that:
“Show, don’t tell” is sexist.
(The irony is that any such claim is itself inherently sexist, as it must argue that the socially-accepted behavior is inherently more appealing to one sex than the other, and must therefore assert inherent differences in preferences between women and men. I’ll do that, too. So don't worry--I'm still sexist.)
As part of my ongoing attempt to learn something about romance novels, I picked up Vows of the Heart, a Harlequin Romance by Susan Fox, in a freebies bin at Pennsic. It’s full of paragraphs like this:
Veronica was seated before the dresser mirror brushing out tangles as he crossed the room and stood behind her. Their eyes met in the glass with an impact that brought a rush of excitement into her system. Even now that she was sure her stay was limited only to a few more days, she couldn’t help the secret longing she felt--a longing more than just to stay.
Yet that longing was as futile as it was unwelcome. She had looked at Jackie’s picture only the day before and had been reminded of what a beautiful woman she had been. After being married to someone like Jackie, Cole would never be content with anyone less, and certainly not his former stepsister. Although the past had been virtually resolved between them, Veronica felt herself no match for the sweet memories Cole would certainly have of the mother of his only child--a child who resented Veronica’s presence…
“Well?” she prompted, uncomfortable with the way his eyes were starting to stray over her reflection. The obvious preoccupation he seems to have with the way her light robe was draped over her small breasts signaled her to beware. Had her earlier fears been correct? Had Cole been without a woman for so long that he’d developed an interest in her because she was convenient?
-- p. 95
The novel doesn’t lack showing, but it’s full of internal dialogue in which the characters rapidly ponder different theories about each other’s feelings and motivations--far more than could be communicated by showing. Sometimes, though, the telling and the resulting head-hopping seem gratuitous:
Inexperienced though she was, Veronica suddenly knew exactly what Cole was asking and she went rigid in his arms. To discourage the resistance he sensed, Cole’s lips found hers again. -- p. 63
So how about good romances? Say, some Jane Austen?
To this question his daughter replied only with a laugh; and as it had been asked without the least suspicion, she was not distressed by his repeating it. Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried. Her father had most cruelly mortified her, by what he said of Mr. Darcy's indifference, and she could do nothing but wonder at such a want of penetration, or fear that perhaps, instead of his seeing too little, she might have fancied too much.
Austen’s novels are packed with dense telly paragraphs about who said what about whom and why they did so and how they felt at the time. Her version of showing is either to show us two people telling each other things, or to tell us summaries of what was shown:
It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet animation to her face, as made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped her turn was coming soon. Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent or speak her approbation in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings, though she talked to Bingley of nothing else for half an hour; and when Mr. Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly shewed how really happy he was. -- chapter 13
Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable. -- chapter 16
All right; how about Gone with the Wind? It starts off with some dialogue that tells a lot, but also shows Scarlett O’Hara’s character and priorities:
“If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war,’ unless it’s ’secession.’ Pa talks war morning, noon and night, and all the gentlemen who come to see him shout about Fort Sumter and States’ Rights and Abe Lincoln till I get so bored could scream! And that’s all the boys talk about, too, that and their old Troop. There hasn’t been any fun at any party this spring because the boys can’t talk about anything else. I’m mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it seceded or it would have ruined the Christmas parties, too. If you say ‘war’ again, I’ll go in the house.”
Then it dives into a mostly-telling passage to interpret for us what it just showed:
She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be, and they hastened to apologize for boring her. They thought none the less of her for her lack of interest. Indeed, they thought more. War was men’s business, not ladies’, and they took her attitude as evidence of her femininity.
There is plenty of showing in the novel, but it seems mostly to be of things that provide color and flavor rather than information, things that merely supplement what is told:
“We were in luck last night. Just before we got home that new stallion Ma got in Kentucky last month was brought in, and the place was in a stew. The big brute—he’s a grand horse, Scarlett; you must tell your pa to come over and see him right away—he’d already bitten a hunk out of his groom on the way down here and he’d trampled two of Ma’s darkies who met the train at Jonesboro. And just before we got home, he’d about kicked the stable down and half-killed Strawberry, Ma’s old stallion. When we got home, Ma was out in the stable with a sackful of sugar smoothing him down and doing it mighty well, too. The darkies were hanging from the rafters, popeyed, they were so scared, but Ma was talking to the horse like he was folks and he was eating out of her hand. There ain’t nobody like Ma with a horse. And when she saw us she said: ‘In Heaven’s name, what are you four doing home again? You’re worse than the plagues of Egypt!’ And then the horse began snorting and rearing and she said: ‘Get out of here! Can’t you see he’s nervous, the big darling? I’ll tend to you four in the morning!’ So we went to bed, and this morning we got away before she could catch us and left Boyd to handle her.”
…
Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms.
It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: “Be careful! Becareful! We had you once. We can take you back again.”
This is beautiful description, but does nothing at all to move the story forward. When the first plot point happens, it’s shown and told--and the telling gets about 4 times as many words:
Scarlett’s face did not change but her lips went white—like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened. So still was her face as she stared at Stuart that he, never analytic, took it for granted that she was merely surprised and very interested.
The passage goes on that way, just showing things that are there to set the mood, while everything relevant to what Scarlett feels and thinks gets shown, and is then followed by a big expository chunk of telling to make sure we understand.
“Miss Pitty told us they hadn’t intended announcing it till next year, because Miss Melly hasn’t been very well; but with all the war talk going around, everybody in both families thought it would be better to get married soon. So it’s to be announced tomorrow night at the supper intermission. Now, Scarlett, we’ve told you the secret, so you’ve got to promise to eat supper with us.”
“Of course I will,” Scarlett said automatically.
“And all the waltzes?”
“All.”
“You’re sweet! I’ll bet the other boys will be hopping mad.”
“Let ’em be mad,” said Brent. “We two can handle ’em. Look, Scarlett. Sit with us at the barbecue in the morning.”
“What?”
Stuart repeated his request.
“Of course.”
The twins looked at each other jubilantly but with some surprise. Although they considered themselves Scarlett’s favored suitors, they had never before gained tokens of this favor so easily. Usually she made them beg and plead, while she put them off, refusing to give a Yes or No answer, laughing if they sulked, growing cool if they became angry. And here she had practically promised them the whole of tomorrow—seats by her at the barbecue, all the waltzes (and they’d see to it that the dances were all waltzes!) and the supper intermission. This was worth getting expelled from the university.
Filled with new enthusiasm by their success, they lingered on, talking about the barbecue and the ball and Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton, interrupting each other, making jokes and laughing at them, hinting broadly for invitations to supper. Some time had passed before they realized that Scarlett was having very little to say. The atmosphere had somehow changed. Just how, the twins did not know, but the fine glow had gone out of the afternoon. Scarlett seemed to be paying little attention to what they said, although she made the correct answers. Sensing something they could not understand, baffled and annoyed by it, the twins struggled along for a while, and then rose reluctantly, looking at their watches.
This is almost immediately followed by an entire page of the twins trying to figure out why Scarlett suddenly seemed unhappy, spelling it out to the reader while they obliviously fail to understand. It's a more-artful way of telling, but it's still telling.
It’s hard not to be reminded of stereotypes of the conversational styles of men and women: Women talk to each other at an abstract level, about their feelings, their relationships, and other people’s relationships. Men don’t talk; they act. Or, if they do talk, they give instructions or talk about concrete events: where the fish are biting or what were the best plays in the game last night. When women try to talk to men about their problems, men try to solve them. Women want men to tell them that they love them; men think that’s just asking to be lied to, and women should judge their actions instead of their words. Men don't want to talk about how they feel. Women want to hear opinions; men want to work things out for themselves. Women are verbal; men are visual. Women ask for directions; men just keep driving until they figure out where they are.
Who’s the undisputed 20th-century master of show, don’t tell? Ernest Hemingway. And who’s the most-macho writer in English of the 20th century? Ernest effing Hemingway.
Meanwhile, in the other corner, who’s the greatest pioneer of telly stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue? Virginia Woolf.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. -- To the Lighthouse, page 1
The contest for patron saint of internal dialogue that shows without actually telling you much is a tie between James Joyce:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there... -- the start of Ulysses's final sentence
... and William Faulkner:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. -- The Sound and the Fury, page 1
Who’s the most testosterone-soaked, most-patriarchal writer of all time? Homer and the writers of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon would be high on my list. They wrote like this:
Now, my king, the Achaeans are bent on making you a disgrace in the eyes of every man alive. Yes, they fail to fulfill their promise sworn that day they sailed here from the stallion-land of Argos: that not until you had razed the rugged walls of Troy would they sail home again. But look at them now, like green, defenseless boys or widowed women whimpering to each other, wailing to journey back. True, they've labored long-they're desperate for home. Any fighter, cut off from his wife for one month, would chafe at the benches, moaning in his ship, pinned down by gales and heavy, raging seas. A month--but look at us. This is the ninth year come round, the ninth we've hung on here. Who could blame the Achaeans for chafing, bridling beside the beaked ships?
This is summary, mind you, which is the telliest part of The Iliad, yet the speaker fills it with images.
But maybe my examples work out that way just because women are more likely to write romances, in which what people think and feel matters a lot, while men are more likely to write action novels (like the Iliad), in which what matters most is the action.
So what? Would that make "show, don't tell" less sexist, or more?
There’s a twist to this story, though. There’s a stretch of perhaps 600 years, from the High Middle Ages through Shakespeare, in which “tell, don’t show” was generally the rule. Think medieval allegories and “To be, or not to be.” Writers in the High Middle Ages spelled out everything for their readers or listeners, the better to bang them over the head with morals. Shakespeare… was Shakespeare.
That same time period did not have quite the same notions of masculinity and femininity as we do. From about 1300-1600, wealthy men wore clothing just as elaborate as, and more seductive than, that worn by women. Romances were the most-popular kind of poetry, and were written by and for men. Men expressed affection and love for each other openly, the way women did in the early 20th century. Uncontrolled emotion and weeping in public were considered manly (Huizinga, chapter 1). Hunting was usually forbidden to lower-class men, but for a medieval noblewomen to hunt was considered unremarkable, and may have been common (do a Google image search for medieval women hunting). And homosexuality or bisexuality was not considered a big deal in Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England.
So, are these “male conversational patterns” innate, or cultural, or just wrong? I don’t know, and at the moment, it doesn't matter much. Whether they're true or not, when people believe them, “show, don’t tell” sounds a lot like “think like a man.”
Johan Huizinga 1949. The Waning of the Middle Ages.
So.
Having fun with the clickbait?
Why don't you "show don't tell" us your tits though
4463812
Hush, you. This is about ethics in comparative literary studies.
I'll just say I've considered this before and came to the same conclusion, without as much research to back it up.
I'll also note that my early writing style was very tell-y, and I grew up on mostly female novelists. It wasn't until I came here and started interacting with the (largely male) writing community that I ever considered it seriously. I've definitely improved since I came here, but I've improved in a lot of different ways, so it's hard to say how much that one "helped."
4463829
Yeah, I think this is good (and interesting) analysis, but I'm not quite sure where to file it away personally, since I find that "show, don't tell" papers over a wealth of cases where the writer is really best served by matching the showiness/telliness to their particular narrative needs at that moment.
4463824
Should we really be giving people ideas like this?
The literary community is bad enough already. :\
Interesting analysis. I'm a huge fan of the genre of paranormal romance, which is pretty much the most "written by women for women" genre out there, and I've been trying to write a shipfic in the same style as the novels in that genre. One thing I struggle with is showing rather than telling, because the more I try to show over tell, the more it feels like I'm deviating from the norms of my chosen genre. It's nice to know I'm not going crazy or a bad writer (or at least, not because of this).
Hm, interesting.
So it's sexist to call something sexist. Makes sense.
4463829
Is it about the gender of the writers, though, or is it because female writers and male writers tend to write for different genres?
I read a lot of fantasy stuff. Just picking some stuff off my shelf, Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood and Anne McCaffery's The Weyrs of Pern seemed pretty showy when I flipped to some random pages. Glancing through a Harry Potter book (The Prisoner of Azkaban), it also seemed pretty focused on showing. Those are all female writers.
Conversely, Terry Pratchett was pretty telly, as was Douglas Adams - but they were writing comedic novels (something I have little experience with outside of those two, I'm afraid).
My bookshelf is biased, obviously, but I have to wonder if maybe we're looking at it from the wrong angle.
It may well be a bias which exists... but it may also be something of an artifact of genre. Female writers have become a lot more prevalent over time, but their distribution between genres is very uneven. It could be because of showing vs telling... or it could just be that what we're seeing are genre conventions. Women dominate romance novels, so we think that's feminine writing - but if we go over to FIMFiction, stuff like Twilight's List spends a lot of time talking about the emotions of the characters, and they're written by (and are popular among) guys.
Do professional male romance writers write differently than female ones?
I haven't read a whole lot of mystery novels, but I seem to recall Sherlock Holmes stories (which were written by a man) being fairly "telly". That's a female-dominated genre today, but it wasn't historically, and men wrote lots of mystery novels.
4463899
There are a lot of variables at play. Genre is obviously one, as is time period and what publishers will buy from what authors. Another is probably subject matter, which similar to genre tends to divide along gender lines on its own in professional publishing. Stories about relationships, even in literary fiction or fantasy, are likely to be more tell-y, whether because they tend to be written by women, because they draw from conventions of traditionally tell-y genres, or because it's harder to show the complexities of relationships.
Actually, the latter reminds me of helping a very, very good writer around here with a ship fic, which he wasn't used to writing. One of the things I had to do was convince him to make the emotions involved more explicit. He naturally tended toward very show-y subtlety in that kind of story, and a good deal of my editorial time was spent convincing him that if you were writing a story about how two characters feel about each other, the changing emotions should be more textual than subtextual. There's only so much about that you can show.
4463918
It might also be a trait of the viewpoint character as such. Like you just said, some things about a character cannot be shown in a reasonable time. If the character is predominantly interested in those things, any story with them holding the viewpoint will, by necessity, be more telly.
And what the character is interested in is affected by genre and the time period.
So basically... it's just a cultural aspect. There is a gender separation in that now, but there has not always been, and there may not always be.
Of course, that does mean that in our current culture, being too tell-y will make you either outdated, ahead of your time, or a woman
More than anything, this post makes me want to read selections from Hemingway's Harlequin Romance years.
4463899 I'd disagree. Pratchett is not "telly". He's a master at showing things in a very few words. A good example is the scene at the end of Reaper Man, where the landscape of Death's domain becomes a literal expression of Death's feelings - inasmuch as he never really had any real feelings before, and so never had any real landscape.
On a similar level there's Tom Holt. Urban fantasy comedy. There's a line from his book, Paint Your Dragon, that has become dreadfully familiar to me in these days: "Night lay over Birmingham like a lead duvet." It brings across every god damn thing about this city. It could easily be replaced with "George thought Birmingham was a horrible place, especially at night, when the rain was falling and the yobs were getting rowdy on the street corner, and another siren was wailing in the distance, and was that a fucking gunshot? Oh god someone got shot again, all I want is a kebab, why can't I just go back home instead of living in this god-forsaken blight on the earth?" Instead we get a a lead duvet and a whole boatload of feeling.
The question: Is that show, or is that tell? Which is which? The latter re-write superficially looks like telling and a lot of people would say it is as a result.
A lot of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of show vs tell, in my experience. The superficial understanding is that to show is to talk around the thing, and to tell is to talk about the thing; or, that to tell is to simply describe things that would be hidden or have characters just state them out loud, whereas to show is to use circumstance and movement and mood and character interactions reveal those things to the reader.
So when someone sees dialogue or descriptive prose that superficially appears telly, they call it telling. Yet with the careful placement of a few words in that dialogue, a good author can reveal far more than the dialogue superficially appears to reveal at first glance. That is something of which Pratchett was an absolute master.
So, assuming this isn't an example of Poe's Law in action, "show for a contemporary male audience, tell for a contemporary female audience". That is, unless you subscribe to Blank Slate-ism, in which case "now you have two problems".
I'm going to go off on a limb and say that the split you're seeing is more "let people interpret vs specify interpretation" and less "show vs tell".
Romances exist primarily in the characters' minds. They're less about the things people do and more about the way people interpret one another's actions, statements, etc. If that weren't true, then everyone one would have romantic inclinations towards the same set of people for the same reasons, and that seems to contradict reality. It should follow that you can't convey a romance without making it clear how to interpret character actions, statements, etc. I'm sure it's possible in a lot of cases to show-not-tell, meaning show enough about a character's background to let the reader figure out how that character would interpret another's behavior, but... Well, I still stand by my statement that romances are more about getting the reader to fall in love and less about depicting an actual romance; and you can't get the reader to fall in love just by getting the reader to believe that some other character would have fallen in love.
As far as the relation to gender roles goes, I don't have an explanation for that. I'm on the fence on whether or not those are just coincidences.
I'm not sure what to think of all this. And I'm REALLY not sure Harlequin Romances are good examples of anything literary :/
This game is easy to win.
Is something sexist?
Was it said by a man? Yes.
Was it said by a man to a woman? Double-yes.
Everyone loses. :C
4464040
I agree with this in large part.
I don't agree that the "show don't tell" advice is any less important for romance novels. It's just a different writing style, and you're focusing on the elements in the writing style where "show" doesn't make much sense.
For another example, my Twilight's Secret Journal (didn't add weblink out of last shred of remaining decency in petrified heart) is telly as hell, but that's because it's supposed to be telly: the meaning of the story is deeply imbedded in what's going on inside Twilight's head. It's about her perspective and how her mind toggles one way and then the other. That doesn't mean that descriptions of the things she witnesses need to be telly (although sometimes that happens too when her judgment of a situation is more important than the strength of the descriptives).
4464084
your mom is sexist
4463801
Having fun with the vote-bait comment?
4463833
I think this is actually a valid argument. (I'm not being sarcastic. Well, not in this paragraph anyway.)
4463824
(Apart from say whatever the buck you want and use whatever "evidence" you like to "confirm" your own theory.)
I was not aware that there were any ethics in comparative literature.
4463918
I agree with this, but more generally I think there's an important overarching point (one highlighted by my snarky comment above): it is very difficult to draw reasonable conclusions about nebulous topics like gender from literary review. I don't presume bookplayer agrees with me on this, but I'm a scientist, and I am highly skeptical of any conclusions drawn from comparative lit. In large part this is because most of the arguments rely on face validity, which is complete garbage. One reason I know a lot about this is we do the same bucking thing in psychology, and as a result there's a lot of crap psych "studies" that pass peer review.
Even when you can do a reasonable interpretation from comparative lit, it's almost always quasi-experimental, because you're exploring text that has already been read by a lot of people. It is actually possible to do scientific, fully-experimental studies, but you'd need to control a lot of variables (use new text that subjects have not previously seen and do not have good familiarity with the text's genre, large control group(s), random assignment) and as far as I ken, not much of this sort of research has been done in a rigorous fashion.
It would assume that despite my lack of intel, good scientific lit research probably has been done to death. But I think it's somewhat possible it hasn't, because most people who train in the soft sciences have no background in hard sciences. If it hasn't, there are likely ripe areas for research hidden in there.
4463899
There are a couple sentences about that in the post that may not have been there when you read it:
Point being that if you say, "The best writing is that which is most suited to writing those things men like," that's still sexist.
4463899 Gotta agree with 4464001 Pratchett is definitely not overly 'telly'. Yes there are parts where he does do that, mostly to set up jokes, same as with Douglas Adams, but when it comes to the actual story, and even better the characters, he really does do far more simply showing them in action then telling. But as noted, a lot of that is done via dialog so it might seem 'telling' but the word choices, what is said, what is not said, are all carefully crafted so it's showing us far more about what is going on then is being just told.
But do agree that yeah, this seems more like a genre convention issue then anything else.
My own style of writing is very "feminine" in that manner. I tend to describe characters internal emotional states a lot, and even their internal thoughts regarding the emotional states of other characters.
There is also the point that this is hardest to maintain in speculative fiction. If one is writing about a very limited and familiar social environment, then one need not explain social customs. If it takes place on Earth today, then one need not explain the physical environment too much. But if you are writing a story set on Alpha Centauri 3 in the 27th century then one must tell rather a lot about both, or the reader will not understand what is going on.
I think that the doctrine of "show don't tell" is one of those things the literary establishment imposed upon writers in the 20th century which is best ignored.
4464160 The idea is incredibly sound and, that vast majority of the time, is the right thing to do. Take your example, yes you could tell this stuff, just have several pages of exposition as it's discussed, but it's far better to show it, to let the readers learn about these customs and ideas, simply by seeing the character go through them, it makes things far more immersive and engaging.
Now yes, this is a guideline, not a hard and fast rule, and there are times when, yeah it's better to tell, just be direct, where trying to show can just cause things to be muddled, or confused, or drag out. The key is to understand why Show don't Tell is a maxim, to understand the times when it really shouldn't apply.
I have nothing relevant to add to the discussion, but I do enjoy reading the debate.
I feel like journal articles and dissertations could benefit from a comment section.
4464172 They used to have a comment section! Back in the 17th & 18th centuries, people carried on debates in journals that would sometimes last years. Nowadays, the journal editors will sometimes print a comment or two, if it is about something published in the previous issue, or will seek someone with an opposed position for a counter-argument. But the convention today is that things that happened a year ago should be forgotten. You often see that the comment section on web articles is closed after a few months, which IMHO is proof of willful stupidity.
I posted a reply once on a website to someone who wrote that American blacks should get repayments for the slavery of 150 years ago, and he replied by saying he wasn't interested anymore in something that had been talked about a month ago.
4464065
They are more interesting than most mainstream literary fiction.
4464176
Of course, by that logic, why should anyone care about the slavery of a century and a half ago? I do believe a century and a half is a longer stretch of time than a month ...
4464168
It depends how alien is the society and environment and how important it is to the story that the reader understand something important about it right now.
Try to understand Pride and Prejudice without grasping the basic concept of "entailed" property, and why this means that the Bennett sisters are potentially in trouble down the line. Jane Austen doesn't bother to explain it at any point: she was writing contemporary fiction and assumed her readers knew how the real society of "to-day" worked.
Now imagine that the culture of 27th century Alpha Centauri 3 includes routine personality backups so that nobody ever dies save by deliberate and extensive murder (wiping all the copies), the fabrication of material objects out of energy (with complex economic effects based on the kind of matter desired and the complexity of the objects produced) and four-person marriages as the standard, including a male, a female, an aint (artificial intelligence) and a bioroid (with different presumed personality and sexual roles).
You're gonna have some 'splainin' to do, or no reader will grasp what's going on.
I think it really comes down to interplay between culture and tradition and personal preference of the writer, and the particular type of story that they're telling.
Robert Holdstock tends to write a lot of tell-y internal monologue. His Ryhope Wood books are fantasy as an inner journey though the most primitive and fundamental aspects of human nature and culture. Likewise David Lindsey's Voyage to Arcturus is heavy on internal exploration, and the main character tends to spend a good deal of time describing his feelings.
By contrast, Pat Cadigan's Synners, a cyberpunk commentary on the point where humans and technology appear to merge; and Anne McCaffrey's low fantasy Pern books show a whole lot of action.
I think it's a lot more to do with fashions in literature and the overarching culture. Romance novels serve a particular cultural niche, a moderate-sized but consistent market; whereas Tom Clancy-style action novels serve a much wider market. In American culture right now, the general trend is strongly away from introspection and examination of feelings and desires; and far more toward outward action and physical conflict. Such trends have shifted back and forth many times in the past, and will continue to do so into the future.
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Exposition of thought is extremely important for establishing character motivations and opinions. Unless one's characters are very stereotypical, the reader may not understand why a character does wht she does unless we know her background, beliefs, and thoughts regarding the other characters, events and features of her environment.
Mainstream literary fiction avoids this necessity by extreme stereotyping. The setting is always either upper middle class to upper-class America / Europe, or a very condescending and limited version of some other society which conforms to upper middle class to upper-class First World prejudices regarding its nature. Only a limited set of opinions are allowed to be seen as authentic and at all reasonable. The writer assumes his audience shares these prejudices, and there is extreme hostility toward readers who don't.
That's why mainstream literary fiction is a dying genre.
It's also why "literary" science fiction and fantasy does so poorly. It is impossble for the writers to step outside here and now and imagine societies with different politicial, social and cultural concerns, as alien to ours as the quarrels between Guelphs and Ghibbilines in Medieval Europe are to us today.
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Here's a simpler lost convention in Austen's novels: The name "Miss Bennett" always refers to the eldest unmarried Bennett sister. Younger sisters must be referred to by name. There are scenes in her novels where you can't tell who's talking or who's being talked about unless you know that convention.
4464205 Yeah, I have the uncomfortable suspicion that the advice "Science fiction and fantasy are always really about humans," which is given in every SF&F writing course and book, is to justify the idea that either your aliens and medieval lords must have upper-middle-class Yankee values, or else the novel must be about how awful things would be if we encountered aliens who didn't (e.g., Xenocide, The Sparrow).
4464190 Not really, for most of those, I point to Schlock Mercenary, a webcomic set in the 30th.. well now 31st century. Most of the stuff about how things happens is both shown and told, we see stuff happening, see just how different things are, while also having occasional author notes on strips that expand on the details more. It takes a mix of the two, the key is knowing when to show, and when to just tell.
Oddly enough, it has that whole personality backup thing.. though that was actually something we see develop as the story unfolds, leading to a rather interesting idea, the Laz Scale, a scale of just how 'dead' you are. Laz 1, just regular clinical, no heart/brain function, dead. Easy to be revived from, no lasting effects. Laz 2, damage to the brain itself, locally restored from the RED nannies, some short term memory loss from just before the incident possible. Laz 3, total cranial destruction, local RED Nanies can still restore, but total short term memory loss, as well as some possible other minor gaps. Laz 4, total destruction of the body to the extent local copies are irrecoverable, can only be restored from backups. Loss of everything since the last backup. And Laz 5, Total body destruction, as well as corruption or loss of all backups. They are gone and never coming back.
I bring this up because of how the story introduces this concept, with a character waking up from having been Laz 3, this being the first time we've actually seen this in action, with the stuff setting it up having been established in the previous arcs, but we are shown the character having no memory of what happened, having it explained to her, the Laz protocols are brought up, we see this in action, and then get an author's note for the strip giving the more telly details, but only after having shown us this in action. (And yes, 'Laz" is short for "Lazarus")
*Also, it has other stuff you brought up, not quite "Matter from energy" style star trek replicators, but 'Fabbers" can make pretty much anything needed so long as they get base raw material. The only major material choke point the causes resource issues is the creation of PTU's (Post Trans-Uranic Elements) which are needed for the production of the Annie Plants that power everything. The marraige thing, well it's a big galaxy, and it does have AI's.. so likely somwhere. (Did have one race where mating required three people of three different sexes. Male, Female, and "Mufti", the male and female do their thing normally, but the mufti is the one that actually carries the child to term.)
Who is Tangles? Her cat? And how does she manage to brush him while he crosses the room, let alone while he stands right behind her?
She's double-jointed. That's got to be it. First time I've heard of a romance novel with a double-jointed heroine...
So.
Um.
Is this book on Amazon? Just...just idly curious, you understand...
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Unit Sales by Category, 2015 (in thousands)
Suspense/Thrillers 21,783
Action Adventure 2,285
Romance 28,031
That is according to Nielsen BookScan.
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Sci-Fi/Fantasy is effectively always ultimately about humans, because that's all we know. We can speculate, but for any alien being to be even remotely comprehensible, there has to be some point of reference, some similarity. When the alien is truly, incomprehensibly alien, such as the titular planet in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, the story isn't really about the alien, but about how the humans in the story react to it, what it tells us about ourselves.
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Looking at the raw numbers can be misleading if you don't understand the markets. The Romance market demographic is smaller, but sells substantially more units per individual buyer; helped by the fact that the books are typically significantly shorter, and priced lower. Readers are often as obsessive about collecting particular authors and styles as any comic book or sci-fi nerd. They even have their own conventions.
Oh, and Clancy tends to get classified as "Thriller", not "Action Adventure".
Historically 'Boy' could be used to refer to both male and females. Pink was masculine, and blue was feminine.
What does that have to do with this blog? Nothing, and everything.
The way I look at "show, don't tell" (should be "Show, rather than tell) is that Show and Tell are different tools in writing. They each have their uses and their places. Romance and, really, anything with a lot of internal characterisation, emotional conflict, and the like are naturally more suited to the tell side of the spectrum, whilst external events, actions, scene setting, and situations fit better in the show side.
Which you choose to use affects the flow and direction of the story, and in some cases one can be used more effectively than the other to get the desired meaning across. You can totally just mix and match them in different ratios to see what happens.
Great interesting blog, BdH!
this reminded me of a stylistic difference in comics, possibly related:
I'm too lazy to scan the accompanying illustrations, but it's the closest thing to show/tell that I can think of in comics storytelling. Not the stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue like in your examples, but removing physical information in exchange for abstract expressionism. Being less subtle and telling the reader directly how these characters are feeling.
luckily for this whole topic here, boys' romance comics exist in Japan too! in general, my impression is they don't go for this level of expressionism. I found some exceptions that do use it, but not nearly as much.
since some female authors write for male audiences and vice-versa, it's probably just cultural; they're conforming their style to what each market has grown to expect. the only famous example of crossover I can think of is CLAMP, a group that did both girls and boys romance in seperate titles. their style became noticably less expressionist when writing for boys.... but there's still more present than most boys comics, so IDK
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I always thought that idea was more about anthropomorphism or the pathetic fallacy. humans will see themselves in just about anything, no matter how alien or abstract or inanimate.
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That makes the assumption that the genres men prefer are objectively better than those that women prefer. I'm not sure that this is true. Even if there was a difference in average quality, it would be hard to prove that's a result of the male genres being "objectively better" and not be a result of the same phenomenon that makes girls shows worse on average (less investment in quality on the assumption that quality is irrelevant - and/or the fact that once enough of a quality investment is made, stuff ceases to have a primarily female audience, as men will start consuming it).
I don't think that the general public even has a good idea of which genres are preferred by men and women; I'd wager that if you polled the American populace, most people would assume that mystery novels were primarily read by men, not women. I'd imagine only the people who actually read modern mystery novels en masse would guess that they are primarily targeted at women. Heck, even amongst people who watch TV shows, I never would have guessed that Law & Order has a more female audience than Extreme Makeover Home Edition.
4464110 Honestly, yeah.
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Look at the excerpt from Good Omens I posted ( 4463810 ). That's almost entirely telling. Adams and Pratchett engage very heavily in this sort of thing. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also involves lots of telling; think of the whale scene, or Arthur Dent trying to get a handle on what the world being destroyed from an emotional standpoint, or the description of the Babel Fish, or a lot of the random humorous excerpts.
"Show, don't tell" is a first order approximation of a much more complicated rule which is much more difficult to verbalize. Telling isn't intrinsically bad, but it is easy to write bad telling.
Something like "They hung in the air in the way that bricks don't" is showing, not telling, even though the description is very whimsical.
Obviously, Pratchett and Adams use both showing and telling in their books. But that doesn't mean that they don't use a lot of telling.
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TBH I think a lot of that has to do with the false consensus effect; people are generally very bad at empathy, and are terrible at it towards things which are very different from themselves.
If your goal is to write highly marketable material, describing someone who is very alien is apt to sail right over peoples' heads.
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We know the behavior of many different animals and insects, and we can imagine and comprehend other kinds of behaviors. Yet sci-fi and fantasy consistently fail to produce aliens who are even as alien as the present-day Japanese, or as Trump voters.
Aliens will not be as alien as the "incomprehensible alien" trope. They will be self-replicating life forms that need an external energy gradient and an internal energy store; that have instincts based on self-preservation and replication; that perceive some aspects of reality accurately and have memory stores based on attractor dynamics (which were independently discovered by evolution and by computer scientists), which will recreate in them the same basic categories we use in observing the same wordly phenomena (which are independently recreated by computer programs); that will have the same understanding of logic, computation, mathematics, physics, and chemistry as us; whose societies and economic structures (whatever they are) will fit within evolutionary theory--which rules out most of the societies people have imagined in the past. They may differ from us in their size scale and time scale. The exact manner of inheritance of genetic material will determine much of their behavior, but we understand how quite well--or at least, we would, if people would listen to E. O. Wilson instead of denouncing his work as politically unsound.
They're actually fairly tight constraints. Aliens will be less alien to us than the Marxist vision of communism or the Christian vision of human society--or at least, those visions are ruled out by the few constraints we have. Aliens will very possibly resemble us more than our beliefs about ourselves do.
I would say that sci-fi and fantasy should try to imagine other ways of living, even though they might fail--but our writers are taught not even to try. They're taught that such things aren't interesting. It's a sign that SF has been taken over by people hostile to SF.
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I can't figure out why you think that. I may misunderstand what "That" refers to.
We have a clear and correct idea that action stories are more popular with men, and romance is more popular with women. That is the only relevant information; those two genres accounts for most fiction sold, and probably an even higher fraction of movie revenue. They would carry the argument even if preferences in all other genres contradicted them.
The exception proves the rule. It's not a show about makeovers.
4463885 Warning to the reader: There's an apparent contradiction between that, and what I said at the end of the post. I may address it in another post, about defining sexism and racism.