Show, Don't Tell

One of the first things a student gets told in an American style workshop, whether fiction or poetry, is Show, Don't Tell. That is, exposition is to be avoided. Instead, it is the task of the writer to "show" the concrete reality, through descriptions, narration of actions and settings and what not. It is the specificity of those descriptions that will inform the reader what he or she needs to be "told." For example, don't just tell the reader that a character is angry. Show that anger. Show how the character, for instance, might move her hands, when she is angry. Let your writing go to that place where your descriptions of those gestures will let the reader know that the character is angry, and not your use of the word "angry." But if you're trying to be a fiction writer, and trying to survive within the American scenario, this maxim will come to haunt you. At least, that's what happened to me. Honestly, I have been resistant to the idea somewhat.

Even if I am going to "show" in my writing, it's going to be a form of "telling," since my medium is writing, and not a form of visual art. I argued to myself. This, and the attendant demand that a writer construct a story through scenes and not exposition, is an off-shoot of the American over-dependence on the visuals. The Hollywood script. The mainstream-film mode of narration where tangible action, built in recognizable scenes, that's what is considered to be the foundation of a story. Yes, write the story in scenes, so that it can be easily developed into a Hollywood screenplay, I grumbled. Also, it was fascinating to see how many of my short-fiction instructors actually would use television-soaps and Hollywood films to demonstrate this and that about a successful story or a scene in a story. Often I wanted to scream, but look at Kieslowski's Red, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Ritwick Ghatak's Komal Gandhar, Sembene Ousmane's Borom Seret, Ferdinando Solanas' El Viaje. I mean, what's going on here? It's not that even if we're thinking of films, it's just the Hollywood mode of narration that's out there. There are other forms of storytelling. There are numerous ways of showing. Even within US. I mean, let's just think of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep or Julie Dash's Daughter of Dust. There's no way we can comprehend these films if we go by action as the smallest unit alone.

In short, what I am trying to say, modes of narration, like the content of the story itself, is cultural. And political. Thus, there is no one way of telling a story. It all depends on who is doing the "telling" and from what location. Yet, inside a standard American short-fiction workshop, this is hardly recognized. The students are also fairly racially and culturally homogenous to never bring it up. But even if one leaves aside the fact that Anglo-America is not the entire planet, one feels like asking, okay so what about Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or George Eliot or ELizabeth Gaskell or Louisa May Alcott? What makes countless readers go back to them? Or Leo Tolstoy? I mean, whatever other claims one make, there is no way one can suggest that these nineteenth century giants are devoid of "telling." Of course, it's also true that the nineteenth century realisms depended on this idea of an omniscent narrator, who could get inside (penetrate?) inside every character's head and see, feel and suspect things. Omniscent narrators are not in style right now, in American literary fiction market, I've been told. So, another point in my favor. Modes of telling a story are determined by history as they are by culture or geographic and social location.

Then, why should I write trapped by a convention, which seems so nebulous anyway?

But then, at some point, probably because everyone was giving me the same feedback (develop what you're saying here in scenes, Nandini!), that I began to try out the much talked about scenes. Writing things in scenes compelled me to explore the characters' voice, the physical postures and gestures, the way they would interact with other characters. In other words, it's when I got to writing concrete scenes that I had to "penetrate" much more into my characters' lives. In a way, it made me feel strangely close to the methodology of the nineteenth century realists! And in a weird kind of a way, it forced me to move deeper into the realities I was trying to explore. Is it at all plausible for this character to talk and dress and act in this way? If not, then how would this person behave? I had to ask myself again and again. So yes, there's something to this showing business! I had to admit. But at the same time, showing can never satisfy me completely.

What I was doing through my exploration of scenes could have been done by a screenplay writer and a movie-camera. So, where do I stand as a fiction-writer? I kept asking myself! And my answer was, in the capacity of my form to explore the interiority of the characters. The fact that their actions and their thoughts might not always correspond very smoothly to each other! The fact that a certain character can do something, while thinking something very very different during that same precise moment. In a way, "telling" and nothing but telling or exposition, so to say, would give me a chance to explore that dialectics,that weird interaction between the exterior and the interior of a character!

So, now what? Well, I guess, for me the answer is, no fiction writer can throw away the "telling" part. Rather, the most compelling kinds of fiction are written through a combination and synthesis of showing and telling, rather than "show, don't tell!"

And while these are things I have been reflecting on for a while, what gives me the courage to finally write down this post is the fact, that I have finally succeeded to revise a short story that had been sitting on my desktop for a while, and yes, it included writing lots of one-line tellings in scenes!