The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’

When I learned “show, don’t tell,” I thought I’d discovered a guide that would never fail me. And sure, it was good for me, in the way training wheels help in learning to ride a bike. The directive countered a school-based tendency toward abstraction and vagueness. I got firmly on board. I had no idea how much damage those three words would do after I’d depended on them for too long. Detail makes the mimesis machine start. Chicken soup and a broken figurine of a ceramic goose—there, they make a second life happen, built on images. And details—pancakes, clenched fists, rainfall—were all I ever wanted, all I ever hoped for as a writer. The details are divine, and we should caress them, as Nabokov instructed. In many ways, the practice of writing is a practice of learning to re-see the world. “Show, don’t tell” isn’t a way of reframing William Carlos Williams’ “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow,” or that brilliant phrase “no ideas but in things” from his poem, “Paterson.” I know the real goal of “show, don’t tell” is to force a discipline that encourages the writer to see subjectivity emerging through those details. But that sentence—that command—doesn’t say that. It’s saying specifically don’t tell. And we need to just stop saying it to another generation of writers. I know that many nonfiction and fiction writers, for good reason, tell their students to “show and tell” rather than to simply “show.” In fiction, internal narration—the telling—creates a world, as Steve Almond beautifully describes in his essay, “Let Us Now Praise Unfamous Men,” about the novel Stoner. He recounts a revelation in reading the book: “What matters is not the quality of a particular life, but the quality of attention paid to that life.” This seems to draw us toward “show, don’t tell,” but Almond stresses that Stoner lured him to resist “our readiness to privilege action over contemplation.” If Stoner is showing, it is showing the inner life, the murky boundary of internal action erased by “show, don’t tell.” I tell my students “Show and tell,” and yet even in 2019 I am disturbed by how often they come into my class, having taking fiction first, telling each other in workshop, “Show, don’t tell.” This is in the water of creative writing pedagogy, and we need to end it, because it leaks between genres and becomes a mantra, the easiest and therefore seemingly the most clear, most unquestionable. * In the real world, watching our action would be akin to constant dissociation. Instead, we feel things, we say things to ourselves, and eventually we come upon subject matter and then to the scenes. I came into writing nonfiction already believing that my thoughts were messy, convoluted, and not worth much. I then learned that the things that happened to me, the things in the scenes, were my only material. I had to watch and re-watch the movie of myself from the outside, doing nothing, in moments of great pain that failed to capture the truth of my experience. I looked for important actions in my life—things like burning down the barn or shaving a dying man or catching a trout and gutting it, man things—and saw nothing. I saw a girl crying a lot....[   ] The post The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ appeared first on NewsCetera.
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