Category Archives: Technique

Posted on by
Reply

The Show and the Tell

 

All writers balance the Show and the Tell. All writers have been told to “show, don’t tell” more than once.

This morning, I’m reminded of this moldy aphorism because I’m judging for the Royal Palm Literary Awards, and I just wrote it. As beginning writers, all of us lean toward using both a Show (to describe the situation) and a Tell (to nail it down). I think there’s something of human nature in this: the need for control. As a novice writer, I work the words to show the look of astonishment on a character’s face changing to anger when she learns an uncomfortable truth. Not easy to describe, so just in case the reader doesn’t get the picture, I tell them that she’s astonished, then angry.

 

 

 

It takes a bit of writing and getting critique to understand the truth of writing: The picture in the reader’s mind is unique to the reader, a mix of the writer’s words and the reader’s experience. The writer needs to balance the Show and the Tell skillfully to create a vibrant picture in the reader’s mind … accurate, but not exact.

The normal critique group comment is “cut the Tell.” That’s almost always said in the context of dialog. Tell has its place, because Tell is compact, a good way of giving information quickly.

I think the reason we often lean toward the belt and suspenders Show/Tell is that need for the reader to see it our way. (The mental equivalent of the plaintive, “What I meant to say was …”).

I must be maturing; I’m learning from advance readers of Skins and Bone that I sometimes do too little Tell. (advertisement: You, too, can be and advance reader. Punch HERE.)

Rampell’s Rules 5 and 6

Posted on by
1

Last time, I borrowed a column from the Washington Post opinion writer, Catherine Rampell. It was a marvelous, fun, insightful commentary on grammar and writing. In that post, I covered the first four of her six rules. They’re on-point advice on mechanics and process. I said I’d comment on the last two rules in the next post. Then, I wrote, rewrote, trashed, wrote again, and finally came to this:

Rampell’s Rule 5 is: You must be willing to write, say and even be things that are unpopular.

  “Writing well,” she says, “takes moral courage.” Bret Stephens, the New York Times opinion page writer, digs deeply into this idea in a piece called “The Encroachment of the Unsayable” (10/19/20). “Our compromised liberalism has left a generation of writers weighing their words in fear. (…) The result is safer, but also more timid; more correct, but also less interesting. It is simultaneously bad for those who write, and boring for those who read.” Both Rampell and Stephens are commenting on reportage, not fiction. But Stephens’ “boring to those who read” is a knife in the heart of a novelist.

When do a few trenchant words become the rhetorical slap on the sunburned shoulder of a reader’s sensibilities? And when does that matter? What do I do about the fact that I am being told, usually politely, to worry about things that may offend readers? (And why the hell would they be reading a novel if they didn’t agree to risk being offended?)

My first draft of this post was a long response studded with examples of comments made on my writing. It sounded a lot like whining, so I cut it. Currently, I’m using the operating rule that if the criticism requires an assumption about the person writing (as in me, an old, semi-priveleged white male), I ignore it.

So we can pass on to Rampell’s rule 6, which appears like the hope that was last to escape Pandora’s box:

Rule 6: Be kind, even when you don’t need to be.

We could all do well to follow that, couldn’t we?