Show Don't Tell - Or Maybe Not Always

Some book editors - and quite a few literary agents - parrot the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”

You may have noticed that I live on the Left Coast, in a region some might call “Hollywood adjacent.” Understand that, particularly for LA-based writers, the brass rings for commercial success dangle from buyers in the entertainment business. Note the term. They don’t say cultural-arts or literary edification business. Neither of those high-brow terms would suggest carnivals or striptease, but entertainment can and does imply amusement rather than art as its emphasis.

Stop me before I rant again. The misuse of the term entertainment is not the essence of my rant.

I feel strongly that show-don’t-tell advice is and should be a hard-and-fast rule for screenwriters. But novelists can and should safely ignore such preaching. Consider the scene description:

EXT. STRIP CLUB ENTRANCE - NIGHT

MALCOMB, a callow youth (19), gazes at the marquee. He’s never been inside such a place. His mother told him to stay away.

As scene description, only the first sentence is specific enough visually to suggest to the actor, director, and crew how to shoot the scene. The next two sentences might well go in a novel, but have no place in a script. He’s never been inside such a place commits the screenwriter’s sin of coaching the actor. The writer might instead visualize: The character hesitates, scratches his head, or becomes short of breath from a panic attack. The actor will interpret.

There is no way for Malcolm to show in this scene that his mother ever warned him away from such behavior.

So, point taken. Screenwriters should show. Always.

Oops, there is an exception to this rule, one that in recent years filmmakers frowned upon—use of voiceover dialogue to tell the audience what a character is thinking. This practice, like murky inferences in scene descriptions, was thought to be a cheat, betraying the screenwriter’s lack of visualization skill.

The writing coach’s advice instead of VO typically is to bring on another character so the exposition can be given in dialogue. The distressed character is still telling, but at least the audience gets to watch a conversation (or more dramatically, an argument).

However, VO is commonplace these days, particularly by alienated characters who have no friends to confide in or whose thoughts are so dark they dare not utter them.

Literary agents who represent screenwriters aren’t selling literature. In today’s publishing marketplace—except for rare bestsellers—agents make big money not from their percentage of book advances but primarily by selling the movie rights.

They will engage in their show-don’t-tell speeches with the rationale that latter-day readers of novels are more like movie audiences. Readers today, these gurus might advise, want to see it all, even in prose.

To novelists I will say, this is misdirected advice. Agents want stories that are easily adaptable to the screen. This preference and the reasons for it should not be a surprise.

Making all fiction literature read (and be structured) like screenplays impoverishes the range of literary expression. In a novel, the writer should not exclude any useful trick of the trade. What about voiceover (aka interior monologue)? Stendhal introduced it in “modern” fiction—in 1814.

Showing? Yes, please. Blow-by-blow, and in real-time. (Don’t overdo the adverbs, another potentially contentious thou-shalt-not.)

But telling? Don’t give us long descriptions of episodic travel except when the travel itself is the story. Don’t waste pages recounting the passage of time unless whatever happened during those years advances the plot. Novelists can use telling to summarize and condense, to traverse space and compress time.

And then there are the omniscient narrators—be they in the first or the third persons—who enthrall us by using the “storytelling” voice around a campfire on a starlit night:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear…

When I attended a panel discussion at a literary event not long ago, I rose to my feet and dared to ask renowned novelist and screenwriter Michael Tolkin whether a novelist should follow the advice of showing and not telling.

His glaring look told me I was nuts and should sit the f*k back down.

Paul Auster’s family-saga novel 4 3 2 1 is boldly all tell, no show. (Your book coach will advise you not to try this at home.)

But I have better evidence to offer: Consider the novel 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. This lengthy family saga is all telling—a hundred percent. There is not one line of dialogue nor any event described as if the action occurs in the present moment.

So, is 4 3 2 1 a fundamentally flawed work? The judges of the Booker Prize must not have thought so—they short-listed it for the award.

As for Auster, I haven’t read all of his novels, but enough that I know he makes it a rule to break the rules.

Maybe he wrote this one just to flip off some editor who scolded him, “Show! Don’t tell!”

There’s some show, some tell. Show when it’s real-time and exciting. Tell when if you didn’t summarize it would be a snore. Start the story here.