Show Don't Tell: A (Tragic) Love Story

Perhaps the most well known advice in the creative writing world is “show don’t tell,” that reminder that the reader needs to viscerally experience your story in order to feel engaged and connected.

This is similar to how I talk about writing place: using concrete details, tapping into the senses, describing embodied sensations.

But as I wrote about recently, too much description can be… too much. Writers have to be intentional about the details they include and the descriptions they sketch. Concrete details and sensory description makes for deeper characters and a deeper sense of place, but all showing all the time does not make a better story. That requires balance.

Often in my creative writing classes, I’ll encounter a student who takes the “Show Don’t Tell” quite literally. Everything is written in scene. Every detail is revealed but I don’t really understand what is happening. Or why.

Steve Almond addresses this issue in his an article he wrote for Writer’s Digest, titled “Why “Show Don’t Tell” Is Sometimes a Crock.” His advice: “Tell the reader just enough that they can feel what they’re being shown.”

I agree with this approach. We need the details. We need the showing. But we also need the telling.

“Telling” is important because it provides context that might take too long or be too complicated to show on the page, it helps us move around in time easily without confusion, and it provides interiority, which helps deepen our characters.

Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett is an entire novel about a woman telling a story. Lara, who is home during the pandemic on her cherry farm in Michigan with her three adult daughters, tells the story of a youthful romance with a now famous actor. Though we come back and forth to the present-day, most of the book revolves around this youthful romance from years past. So the very structure Patchett chooses, a retrospective narrator, requires the write to fill in a lot of gaps for the reader.

Telling can help us provide the reader with important context about what is happening. It also helps us jump back and forth through time, allowing us to cover vasts swaths of time quickly.

Another fantastic example of the benefits of telling is the Napoli series by Elena Ferrante, a four book saga that shows the intertwined friendship of Elena and Lila throughout their life.

My Brilliant Friend, the first in the quartet, won #1 Best Book of the 21st Century: The New York Times Book Review and guess what? This book is loaded with narrator-heavy telling. After a brief prologue that shows Elena and Lila in their sixties, Ferrante starts the first book with the characters in childhood, ascending the stairs to a neighbor’s house:

“My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille’s apartment.”

Those there is some description, what really propels us through this quartet is the use of interiority, as aspect of telling.

Ferrante tells us what the characters are feeling and thinking with such saw honesty and intensity, it becomes intoxicating.

“She thought that what we were doing was just and necessary; I had forgotten every good reason, and certainly was there only because she was. We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terror of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

At the fourth flight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. The gesture changed everything between us forever.”

Ferrante breaks all of the rules and I am there for it the entire time. But that can be intimating to do.

Sometimes writers become so committed to showing instead of telling they struggle to find ways to show what it is they want to say instead of just saying it. While we can’t all be Elena Ferrantes, we can use telling as a viable way to provide context, move back and forth in time, and build interiority.

I think “show don’t tell” has endured for so long because it contains a real truth: readers want to be immersed in a story. But immersion can come through reflection, compression, confession, interpretation. The best writing understands that showing and telling are not opposing forces, but techniques we should learn how and when to use well.