Don’t Just Relate. Animate! - A New Spin on "Show Don't Tell"

[Walter Cummins]

Although the mantra “show, don’t tell” have been spoken thousands of times in creative writing classes and workshops, the injunction is essentially meaningless.  

For one thing, it sets up a false opposition, an either-or, as if there is an opposition between showing and telling. But all writing is telling, achieving one overall result because, when a dramatic scene or exchange of dialogue exists, the showing conveys information. That is, it tells. It would be impossible not to.

What “show, don’t tell” is really trying to say is, “don’t tell with flat, dull prose.” Bad imaginative writing happens when telling provides information without an iota of showing. But showing doesn’t have to be dramatic scenes or dialogue exchange. The telling must be alive, animated, not merely related. Unlike, say, reportorial journalism that tells us what happened, imaginative fiction makes us experience what happened. Good writers have found a number of alternatives for accomplishing that animation.

Techniques of animating include: visual details, lively verbs, personal voice, rhythms, attitude toward the telling—e.g., between the lines messages. The central point is a liveliness behind and beneath the informational content of the words. The language should convey a complexity embedded in and inseparable from the words.

Here’s an example of showing while telling in a paragraph from a Lauren Groff story titled “The Wind”:

They were so far out in the country, the bus came for them first, and the ride to town was long. At last it showed itself, yellow as sunrise at the end of the road. Its slowness as it pulled up was agonizing. My mother’s heart began to beat fast. She let her brothers get on before her and told them to sit in the front seats. Mrs. Palmer, the driver, was a stout lady who played the organ at church, and whose voice when she shouted at the naughty boys in the back was high like soprano singing. She looked at my mother as she shut the bus door, then said in her singsong voice, You got yourself a shiner there, Michelle.

The opening sentence is told information, facts about the location of the children’s home—far from town in the country. But the next sentence does not just report that the yellow schoolbus arrived. Instead, it can be seen “yellow as sunrise.” Next, it doesn’t just pull up slowly. It’s emotionally agonizing, and by implication to the narrator’s mother with the anxiety of a beating heart. Stout Mrs. Palmer as church organist reveals something about the community this family lives. Her voice is auditory for the reader. The final sentence is actual showing, integrating action and dialogue. 

This paragraph from Tessa Hadley’s story “Because the Night” is even more visual, just about every told sentence a variation of showing:

Kristen wore the gauzy, flowery, frilly Ossie Clark her mother had been married in, pulled up above her Brownie belt so she didn’t trip on it; Tom would be in his soldier suit, red jacket unbuttoned, his pistol in its holster slung low on his hip. Their gym daps gave them extra silence and speed. Kneeling among the baked-dry leaves on the stone floor of the greenhouse with the well, they made plans. If the weather had been fine, the glass panes would hold in their pocket of heat long into the evening, pungent with the green smell of tomato stalks, even though no tomatoes ever grew in there anymore—only fleshy, tall weeds that spurted up wherever the rain leaked in, then died and parched to ghosts in the dry spells. The greenhouses were built of brick to about waist height; an aisle ran between raised beds of dry earth and shelves of empty flowerpots.

The first two sentences describe what the children are wearing, the third telling about their sport shoes. The next describes their placement on the greenhouse floor. What follows integrates showing of the greenhouse with details of its history, action verbs like “spurted,” “leaked,” “deaded,” and “parched.” Only the final sentence is pure telling.

Clearly, the Groff and Hadley paragraphs don’t merely relate information in a series of dry factual sententence. They bring the information to life by animating it through visual details, evocation of emotional responses, sensory allusions, vivid verbs, and the rhythms of the writing.