On Telling, Not Showing

I recently received a rejection from a literary agent for Her Undying Thirst. It was by no means my first; I’ve gotten lots of them. But this one was unusual in that the agent gave detailed feedback! This agent noted that the literary field is highly subjective (of course), and that part of the problem is that she doesn’t prefer works written in first person perspective, but that if a work really grabs her from the start – if she feels like she’s really there – she can overlook her general preference. However, since my book is written as if it were a memoir, there’s a lot of “telling” vs. “showing” in the first few chapters, so it just didn’t do it for her.

I can certainly see where she’s coming from (and, as I urged in my last post, we should let people not enjoy things), but when it comes to this question of “showing” vs. “telling,” I have a few thoughts.

First, there are specific reasons for my “telling” vs. “showing” at the beginning of HUT: for one thing, as I mentioned above, it’s written as a memoir. It’s also based on a work originally published in 1872, when “telling” wasn’t so demonized. And the background information that I “tell” comes into play in very important (and, I think, satisfying) ways at the end; it’s needed to contextualize the action, but I don’t want to get bogged down in “showing” every moment from the narrator’s life that’s needed to understand what happens in the climax.

So, for this particular work, my choice to do more “telling” than usual was intentional (and don’t worry, there is plenty of “showing” once the conflict begins in earnest). But even in general, I wonder if our general avoidance of “telling” might be going too far.

Just a few days after I received this rejection, Writer’s Digest online published an article titled “The Fallacy of ‘Show, Don’t Tell.’” What a neat coincidence, I thought! Imagine how disappointed I was to find that this article was not suggesting that the axiom itself is a fallacy, but rather seeking to redefine the terms “show” vs. “tell” as “dramatize” vs. “explain.” In fact, the article unintentionally gave a great example of an instance when the “show, don’t tell” rule (sorry, the “dramatize, don’t explain” rule) goes a little bit overboard:

“Explain: Sue was really, really pissed.

Dramatization: Sue felt her body tremble like a volcano on the edge of erupting. Her eyes narrowed, her nose quivered, she felt her face fill with blushing blood, her fingers curled into a fist so tight nails dug into her palm.”

I don’t mind the dramatization, but sometimes “Sue was really, really pissed” just gets the point across, you know? The book is going to be way too long if you “dramatize” all the time without the occasional quick explanation.

The good news is that I’m not alone in my reluctance to follow the rule unwaveringly. In this article, Jeff Somers explains, “As usual, the problem with Show Don’t Tell isn’t that it’s inherently bad advice—it’s that people understand it to mean you can never tell the reader anything, and that’s simply not true.” And in this article, Steve Almond says that writers who adhere strictly to the axiom “are continually leaping into scenes without providing the reader enough context to understand, and thus feel the full impact, of that scene.”

What do you think, dear readers? Are there any works dear to you that walk this tightrope particularly successfully? Do you agree with my sentiment that sometimes it’s ok to just tell things to your audience? Feel free to comment below!

In Proximum, Regina Vestra