[PUBLIC POST] Show and tell?

[ljwrites]

Note: I posted this last week but forgot to make it public. [/doofus] I've updated the date so it would show up in the timeline. Apologies for the mistake!

I'm listening to an audio lecture called Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques. I'm only three lectures in, but it's covering the bases pretty well. The second lecture was about the age-old admonishment of "Show, don't tell," and says that a) yes, showing is generally more evocative and immediate, but b) telling has its place as well. I remember quite a few occasions where editing to show instead of tell made my writing stronger, but I've gone in the other direction as well--simply summarizing an action that wasn't important instead of going into excruciating detail. What's your experience on this front? What are your thoughts on showing vs. telling? Is "show, don't tell" useful advice at all?

Also, I know this comm isn't generally about writing exercises but the end of Lecture 2 had a pretty interesting one if you want to try it: Describe a building, landscape, or object from the point of view of a parent whose child has just died--without mentioning the parent, child, or death.

Comments

[jae]

I've given this question a lot of thought in terms of how it should work for me specifically, actually. And what I've come up with is this: because the kind of fiction I write is aimed at putting the reader as inside the point-of-view character's head as immersively as possible, it always depends on what the character would really tend to be thinking at any given moment. So with a really self-aware character, you'd get a lot more "telling" than you would with someone who is in denial of their emotions and mental states, but even there, "showing" is usually going to be more representative of the inside of someone's head.

-J

[ljwrites]

You know, on the subject of representing the inside of someone's head, the lecture after the one I mentioned in the post made a really interesting point: That we can get to know fictional characters in a way that we only know ourselves in real life, that is by directly accessing someone's thoughts as opposed to what they make known through actions or by report.

The professor then compared different approaches to accessing characters' inner thoughts, from pure stream of consciousness (Mrs. Dalloway) to a more condensed and refined internal monologue made to an audience (The Great Gatsby) to a completely external view that acts like an invisible camera following the characters around (The Maltese Falcon). I think the second approach is the most common, but do you have an idea of what approach might best represent someone's inner life or which you prefer to use?