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Show, Don't Tell
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Hey Clayton,I think it has a lot to do with the complexity of most sci-fi/fantasy worlds. From what I've found people reading those genre's, myself included, love getting fleshed out descriptions of how things work. While I try to show as much as I can in my own work, sometimes it's just not enough without some paragraphs of description here and there. I also know people who are "dialogue readers" and prefer to learn almost everything through that so I think its very hard to please everyone. Trying to keep a healthy balance seems to be the best bet.
I believe there is a place for it in smaller scale works of scifi/fantasy, where world building isn't crucial to what's happening. In fact I would consider McCarthy's "The Road" a work of Scifi (sub-genre post apocalyptic.) It sounds like he wrote "Blood Meridian" in the same style and it really is brilliant. It works because in that book it doesn't matter how civilization ended, it's just a story of a father & son.
So I'd say in small-scale, character driven books like that it is definitely possible only to tell. In sweeping space operas with multiple characters it would probably be a little tougher to accomplish. That sort of the genre that I write in and there's just so many layers of complexity to building worlds that I think writers don't want to just leave out. And it isn't just Indie. Even in books like "Leviathan Wakes" there was plenty of telling, but only when it was necessary.
There's my stream of thoughts in response :).
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Ever since I've read this I have sat here trying to imagine some books with zero view into the heads of the characters. I think it would an interesting thing to try. I don't know how it would work, but I'm having fun imagining Harry Potter and some others through 3rd person.
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Are you guys talking about psychic distance ie the level of 'emotional closeness' elicited through how a writer brings a character to you? Check out Emma Darwin's excellent blogpost on psychic distance for a better explanation.
I've read the road. It was an interesting read but not a style I admire overall, though it worked very well for that book. For the record I think there is a fair bit of show in that book, done exclusively through the characters' eyes. Tell tends to be much more about a narratorial voice outside the characters, but that had its place too.
Think of it as a wide angle shot in a movie. That one shot with all it's detail sets the scene - half the details the audience doesn't even realise they've picked up until later. Then you move into a mid range shot - the real place of the inciting incident and latterly varying stages of closeness to a character/ actor. This is the 'psychic slide' from PD1 (complete objectivity/omniscience) to PD5 ( inside characters' heads- stream of consciousness).
Right now I've put that out there for people to chew over. Show vs tell. A lot of its a judgement call. Where pacing requires it tell is very useful. Say Agent Z is going to shoot on the run freedom fighter 0. Agent Z waits concealed in the en suite bathroom of 0's motel room for his target to arrive. This is a good time for show - the textures, smells, sights and sounds of the motel - seedy or up-market. Quiet or loud. How does this affect X if at all. If our sympathies are currently with X we should be inside his head. Mid range on the PD scale 3-4 as he's calm, doing his job or maybe he's a rookie. It's his first hit. He's nervous. His finger on the trigger is greasy with sweat. He can taste bile in his throat. His heart is kicking his ribs apart. PD4-5 . This is almost purely show and should be most of the time. Let's say X completed his mission and calls the job in as done - this is most likely to be tell unless he's very conflicted. A micro examination of the agents feelings here would slow the plot down and leave the reader thinking ' why are we all Sylvia Plath about this? Get the hell out of there you inept moron!'
There are no hard and fast rules. Only guidelines. It's a fascinating discussion though and the choice of predominantly tell or show for a character can actually give us a better portrait of the character. Take two killers: the murder from Susak's perfume - almost all show, very sensory and of the moment: immediate: tangible and very close inside the killer's head. Or Jeff Lindsey's Dexter - almost all tell. Clipped, factual descriptions with a hint of amusement and puzzlement give us a killer who is dissociated from the world and only pretending unless he is mid kill , you can do a lot with the techniques when you start spitting them.
I don't think one is better than the other - merely that there is a time and place for everything. What if an essential plot point is your MC having to fill in a spreadsheet? If we really show this as an experience inside the character's head probably 90% of your audience has nodded off or flung the book at the wall. ( unless for some unknown reason we need to really care about that spreadsheet of course...)
2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie not the book, did this. It shows the power of that kind of storytelling, but also its limitations.The bulk of the movie is completely understandable, up until the point where Dave enters the floating monolith in space. From there on you see things strictly form his perspective with no dialog, no context...and it's powerful, but also friggin' confusing (because the main character doesn't know what's going on either!).
If you actually read the book, which was written concurrent to the film, it explains the entire ending and then you can go back to the film and see that it actually does make sense...but it's totally surreal otherwise.
So, it can be done in SF. But it's difficult to do effectively, and you run the risk of alienating the reader. The more complex the world building, the worse/harder it will be.
Most good SF writers tell quite a lot--although getting inside the characters' heads and giving us their thoughts and feelings isn't necessarily always there. But explanatory sections are almost always required in SF to some extent or else the world creation will seem unexplored, or difficult to understand.
Now I'm confused. I thought we were talking about 3rd person objective which is described as being a fly-on-the-wall or camera lens type of view as opposed to 3rd person subjective. Isn't Harry Potter 3rd person subjective?
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Anyone want to write one and let us read the results? :)
Mod
Clayton,I think the problem is this. A reader of Science Fiction/Fantasy must contend with understanding often unfamiliar/complex worlds/situations/ideas. These sort of things attract their focus. They are loud and distracting. Trying to go for the subtlety you are seeking in SFF is like trying to listen to someone whisper softly while drums, whistles and cymbals are playing in the background. I mean you can put it in there, but the reader may not notice, because they are already too distracted by the puzzle of the environment to notice the puzzle of character you want to present. Secondly, the world in which the book is set obviously should impact the mindset of the character, but then the reader needs to understand that interaction.
I don't think what you are suggesting is impossible, but I think you would have to build it on very well worn, familiar tropes so that the average reader would have all the necessary knowledge to follow it. And it would have to be very pared down. The background noise of world building would have to quietened.
Anyway, that's my tuppence.
I really enjoyed the shifting focus of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None". I believe it's written in third person except at the very end. This gives it that air of mystery because you don't learn about any character enough to figure out who the murderer is. I could see this being done in SciFi. It would be more about what is going on, rather than who is setting those wheels in motion. However, in make believe worlds, ones like what SciFi typically gets into, there needs to be some level of description otherwise you don't get the full view of every alien race, every new piece of technology, every fantastical yet science-y thing thag plays into the mix.
As SciFi readers, I believe to some extent, we're hard to impress. We need something over the top to appeal to our ever outrageous minds. We live off the strange anomallies that mix in with our own species.
I think this P.O.V could be used if there were creatures who couldn't be remembered like the Silence in Doctor Who. Otherwise, not describing these phenomenons to a tee might prove difficult.
Note, though, that you can do a lot when you try to show while you tell. I try to make it so that the telling parts also show something about the character who does the telling - a grizzled veteran captain describes a ship differently than a civilian passenger or a structural engineer.That said, I don't really like 3rd person omniscient because I feel it distances the reader from the character. Of course, with 3rd person limited, you run into the issue where people think your character acted foolishly because he didn't know something they knew. First person gets around that nicely but has its own drawbacks.
At the same time, over-exposition or infodumping are definitely problems in this genre. Not every spaceships needs to have its internal layout described in minute detail, and not every alien species needs to have their entire culture and history laid out on first mention. But authors like to worldbuild and want to show off their work, so it is understandable, to a degree. But I feel that sometimes less is more and just showing (hah) how the technology works in practice is enough. Few of us could construct a steam engine, but most of us know what a steam engine does and how it basically works, even if they probably couldn't repair it if it broke down.
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http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitc...
http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitc...
Emma is lovely and an awesome writer. She regularly answers questions too.
I apologize in advance for a series of not fully connected thoughts. A story written like this might then, require a "suspension of disbelief" clause for the reader, where they simply have to accept what they are viewing in their minds, what is being described, without being told what is happening inside. This is something not often done with sci-fi/fantasy, understandably, I absolutely fucking love hearing the inner workings of the gravity cannon/space drive/magic system, and I'm sure most of you do too.
The story would have to use familiar tropes, operate on some pretty basic sci-fi devices that don't need explanation. You could effectively use anything that would make sense to use in a movie. Movies don't have narrators explaining warp drives: it's obvious what is happening when the stars blur and then reappear. This style of writing is equivalent to writing in movie form: you see only the surface. This works well in Blood Meridian, there is no exposition needed to tell the readers what a rock is, or a sunset, or a desert bush, they already know, so McCarthy instead focuses on the visual description.
Harry Potter is a pretty damn good example: much of what she writes is show, not tell. The magic system is explained barely, if at all, words are spoken and things happen; the reader gets to infer the in-between. There is certainly some cut-away into the characters heads, if you will, but mostly she is illustrating with words the occurrences of the narrative. It is like the difference between showing someone a painting, and telling someone what is going on in the painting, what the boat and stream and lilies are all about.
Clayton wrote: "I apologize in advance for a series of not fully connected thoughts. A story written like this might then, require a "suspension of disbelief" clause for the reader, where they simply have to acc..."
I really liked your analogy at the end. :)
Interesting discussion. For me "Show, Don't Tell" isn't about POV. It's about carrying the message in the action. It's the difference between, crudely, "Richard got very angry," and "Richard turned purple with rage."For SpecFic, it's also the avoidance of the Info Dump, the interrupting the story to supply facts on the politics of Fairy or the workings of hyperdrive. A century into Science Fiction, hyperdrive doesn't need to be explained anymore, nor do temporal paradoxes or parallel worlds. Everybody who's seen a few episodes of Star Trek (which is almost everybody who reads Sci Fi) has been introduced. All we need to explain is how particular details of our hyperdrive bear on the story.
They say Hemmingway went through his stories and struck out anything that sounded "poetic." We should be just about as ruthless with anything that sounds "educational."
J. A. wrote: "Ok you need to check out these links if you're a writer. Enjoy ;)http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitc...
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Thanks for the links, I subscribed :)
I'm a member of a few months, but have only lurked so far, and not even a very good lurking at that. I'm currently writing my first novel, a near-future set in a penal colony.
I have something I've been thinking about heavily lately: The writers maxim "Show, Don't Tell." I've been reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (Not scifi or fantasy, or self published, I know) and his writing style has impressed me as the ultimate fulfillment of that axiom. His writing is entirely from a bird-in-the-sky view, there is absolutely 0 view into the character's heads. Characterization is obtained sheerly through a combination of the [infrequent] dialogue and their actions.
The prose is extraordinary, the visuals you glean from his words are stark, epic, bold. He paints incredible scenes with his sentences.
How do you guys feel, as sci-fi and fantasy readers, about the place of this writing style in sci-fi and fantasy? Many of the novels I read have pretty deep introspection spelled out for the reader, occasionally to the point where I feel like I'm just listening to the characters ask inane and rephrased questions in their minds: "Why did he do this...what are her motives...what does this mean for the planet...what is the purpose of the purple flower in the windowsill...", on and on, ad nauseam.
What is the place of this style(Absolute 3rd person, 0 view into the heads of the characters)? What does it achieve? What does it leave out? Is there a place for the style in sci-fi and fantasy? How and where would it work? So there's my rephrased & inane question stream...
Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on the subject.