Look a Little Harder

I have only the vaguest idea what I'm about to write about. But I have that vague idea so I'll charge ahead and see what happens, okay?

I've never really given much thought to the idea of having an individual style as a writer. I've always concentrated on figuring out what I think will work for whatever book I happen to be writing at the time. The Astrologer is written in a sort of modernized Elizabethan English, very rhythmic and clipped and careful. Cocke & Bull is Colonial American English as informed by the King James Bible, thick and heavy and always rolling forward. The Last Guest was my attempt to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf at the same time, all startling modifiers and jangling description and long stretches of interior worlds. I never cared--and I still don't care--about having an identifiable authorly voice. If nobody ever points to a passage of my prose and says, "That's Bailey; I'd know him anywhere," then I'm still happy enough.

But for the last several years I've had a sort of idea about a type of writing I'd like to be able to do. I've only been able to describe it to myself in an imprecise manner because I didn't know how to do it so I didn't really know what it was. What I've hoped to be able to do was create a narrative that somehow expands to fill the whole physical world, that casts the reader's eye (and imagination) not only to the inmost thoughts of the characters, but also to the physical world around them, both in broad strokes and in finely-observed detail. But I also wanted a unity in all of this. I didn't want layers of description atop the essential actions and themes. I wanted it all to be One, all to interconnect and for all of the narrative elements to be necessary and singing in tune, as it were, as if the novel was a symphony maybe.

I'm certainly not there yet, but a few days ago I got a step closer. I'm writing a scene which is basically a guy sitting in a chair on the patio behind his house, his mind smeary with painkillers as he recovers from knee surgery a day or two earlier. He's home alone, his wife at work and his daughter at school, and he's drifting along under the influence of narcotics. Not much happens. A neighbor drops by and then leaves. He nods off a lot. He forgets where his wife is. He daydreams. This goes on for 5,000 or so words.

Certainly I could've summarized the entire chapter into a paragraph, but of course his daydreams are important and I want them to be vivid. I also wanted the feeling of being outside on a summer afternoon to be vivid. The other thing I wanted was for the boundary between the real physical world of the back patio with the Adirondack chair and the sun umbrella and the flower beds, to be blurred into the character's internal world of daydream and painkiller-induced confusion.

The technique I seem to be using is to think of the scene in terms of the interior action, the confusion and the daydreams, and to sort of pull that scene into bits and fill the gaps with visions of the real world. For example, David (the guy on the patio) halfway remembers that one of his neighbors has dropped by for a few minutes but during his recollection of the visit he's also sort of hallucinating, or he's remembering hallucinations he had when the neighbor was there; he can't tell which is which. What actually happened? What did he say? What did she say? David doesn't know, not really. During this poorly-remembered sequence of events, David looks around and sees the patio. It's sunny, and there are flowers. I wanted the flowers to be vivid and weird, real and surreal, so I describe them as opening their arms in supplication to the sun like virgins offering themselves up for sacrifice to the high priest of some primitive cannibal religion. So you get the reality of the flowers and the sunlight, but you get the weird narcotic effects, too. The bees are buzzing from flower to flower, and David sees them as mechanical beings made of onyx and amber, and the air around the bees seems to change shape and warp as they fly around in the flowerbed. And so on.

The internal action, which is mostly imaginary, is described as realistically as I can, while the external action is described as weirdly and slantwise as I can, to draw it all together into a single unified thing. It's pretty easy when you're making all of the world hallucinatory, I just realized, but in order to use this technqiue of mixing the inner and outer worlds into a single narrative thread while writing a more realistic passage, I'm going to have to work harder. The thing (I just realized) about the chapter I'm writing is that little of the external description has real meaning; it's mostly just setting and extension of David's mental state beyond his head. Maybe that's not enough.

This has been something I've struggled with for years, though. I want my narratives to have an expansive feel, all-encompassing writing that gives the reader The Whole World. I think that I get there in isolated paragraphs once in a while, but I just can't manage to make it a habit, something I can reliably produce. I really don't know what I'm doing in that regard. For now I'm trying to stop during scenes and look around, look some more, look a little harder and see what I see. It's not the best way to accomplish what I'm going for (which, as you've seen, I can't even define very well), but it's what I've got right now.

Maybe what I should've written about today is how reading poetry is making it possible for me to come up with things like the line about flowers being virgins prepared for sacrifice. That might be useful. Well, maybe later this week.

Show, that bully manipulator

I've been in a show don't tell phase lately. The last story I wrote was almost all show, and I've been cutting out a lot of telling from my older work. I don't think there's anything wrong with telling things, especially if you're a good teller, but, like I said, I'm in a show phase lately.

Showing for me has been a way to get readers to pay more attention. If you are showing, the reader has to constantly be picking up clues about the characters. Readers are also more likely to get engrossed with the story that is shown. The details are more engaging on a sensory level. It makes the suspension of disbelief work better.

What I realize about showing a story, however, is that it forces your characters to act a certain way. Or, to be more precise, it forces your characters to ACT. If you are trying to show emotion without telling it, you are forced to make your character reveal the emotion through some action.

This is a problem for me.

See, for the few of you who have read a lot of my work, you may have seen that I'm often fascinated by characters who are frozen by their own fears. They're stuck because they either don't know what to do or they don't know how to do it. With these inactive characters, I had to tell a lot because the external view of them wasn't nearly as interesting as the internal view.

If, however, I start showing all the time, my characters aren't allowed to do nothing anymore. They have to act, otherwise it's 300 pages of a man (or woman) sitting in a chair (or couch). Forcing a character to act sure does make a story more interesting. (Hey, don't panic, but I think there's a plot standing...right...behind you.) On the other hand, I feel like I'm losing those characters that interested me. Or, maybe I'm just not providing as much insight into them as I would have liked. For example, though I wanted to provide insight into my cannibal character, I think a lot of that was lost through my decision to not tell. We'll see what the critics say on that.

Let's face it, a lot of people don't act. A lot of people are on the verge of acting, or wish they could act. I've been trying to capture those people, because I think there's a wealth of emotion bottled up inside of them. And, I wonder if I lose the depth of those characters when I show instead of tell.

So, the question I'm asking all of you is: Does showing (and not telling) force you to write about a certain type of character or a certain type of story?

My answer at the moment is yes, unfortunately.

The Asymptotic Approach To Character Change

A few weeks ago I was working on my novella, Bread, and I mentioned to Michelle and Scott that I only had one more scene to write! (Yay for me!) This scene was close to the end, but it wasn't the climactic scene of the story--I had already written that. Instead, it was a scene describing internal character change, the change that led to the climax.

Although this is a bit of an oversimplification, let's just say that I needed to have my character fall in love. This character had already met the man he was to fall in love with, but the chemistry wasn't quite there yet.

I had them couple go on multiple dates.

The seducer tried his best moves.

Nothing.

Even though more scenes were being added to the story, the scene, the scene of change, wasn't taking place. My character got closer and closer to the change, and then, POOF!, he was on the other side, right at the already-written climax, having made the change already.

I tried to write forwards. I tried to write backwards. But, as close as I got to the change, I never figured out a way to show it.

Wait. What did I just say? Oh yeah, show. I wasn't able to show it. One of the rules I had set for myself with Bread was that I was going to show as much as I possibly could and tell as little as I possibly could. (This was a reaction to my past fiction, and to the work of Virginia Woolf, which has a ton of beautiful telling.)

So, there I am, show-show-showing like a madman, but I couldn't show any character change. Weeks passed. Yes, Michelle, yes, Scott, I still only have one more scene to write, now stop pestering me!

I asked myself, "What does character change look like?"

I can imagine it in a movie. It's that scene where the camera zooms in on a character, let's call her Academy Award nominee Gabourey Sidibe for convenience, and we watch her as absolutely nothing happens. Did you catch it? Did you notice the internal change? No? Oh yeah, it's internal.

So, I'm wondering at you all if it's possible to show character change. Have you ever read or written a scene that actually shows it? Or, could it be that the best we can do is approach the change without actually getting to it? Now, naturally we have alternatives. We can tell. That's a personal favorite of mine. Or, we can have the change manifest in some tangible action that reflects the change. And, maybe that's good enough. But, I found myself ever so frustrated that I couldn't catch the exact moment.

Have you managed to show the time of internal character change? Is the suicidal leap the decision, or is it the action immediately after the decision?

Show So You Don't Have To Tell

Is this cheating? Lately, I've been realizing that a lot of literary fiction uses the show-don't-tell rule to be lazy. What I mean by that is that a character in a fictional story will face some complicated conflict, and as a consequence she, he, or it will do something strange that is somehow supposed to provide insight to the reader.

Example:

Eloise nodded to the coroner to confirm the identity of the body lying in front of her. She hadn't said good bye to her mother, and now she would never have the opportunity. As the coroner zipped the body bag back up, Eloise noticed that she hadn't spit out her gum yet. The flavor was all gone. It felt like a ball of hard rubber in her mouth. She pushed out through the building doors and stepped into the empty parking lot. Dark clouds were starting to move in, and she was sure it would rain soon. She walked to her car. She noticed a paper cup rolling around on the asphalt, caught up in some gust of wind. She picked it up, fingered the soft edges, and then tossed it into the air where it took flight.

I think lately it has become a trend to have a character "reveal" emotion by doing something like throwing a paper cup up into the air. Somehow, it feels satisfying, but I'm not sure it makes any relevant point.

What do you think? Is this technique B.S.?

Lawrence Wrote Confusedly and Hotly

Writers are constantly being told to avoid using adverbs in our prose, and to delete any adverbs we find while editing/revising. We're told that adverbs are "weak writing" and the mark of an amateur and I'm sure that a lot of us follow this advice and use as few adverbs as we can, but I'm not so sure that a lot of us understand why using adverbs is weak writing, and what adverbs actually do to our prose to weaken it.

Although I am officially on a sabbatical from the Literary Lab, I have been reading D. H. Lawrence's novel "Women In Love" and I saw within Lawrence's pages what the problem with adverbs is and I wanted to talk about it so here I am, posting.

I could say any number of things about Lawrence's book (both good and bad), but the thing that struck me most last night when I was reading is that he larded his sentences with adverbs. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that every line of dialogue has a tag containing an adverb. Gudrun replies angrily to Gerald who responds haughtily while Ursula speaks tenuously to Rupert who declines to say anything, walking determinedly by her but at some distance, carefully and thoughtfully. Et cetera. And it goes on like that, honestly, for hundreds of pages. (There are also moments of sheer brilliance and beauty, which mostly balance Lawrence's clunky sentences.)

Anyway, all of this use of the adverb does two things which I think weaken the prose. First, it burdens the reader not only to decide what is meant by "haughtily" or "tenuously" or "determinedly" but also to keep track of these shifting emotional states that fly by and change often. Like most writers who lean heavily on adverbs, Lawrence uses a lot of them and after a while they begin to blur and lose all of their meaning. What is anyone feeling in the example I used above? I have no idea. Which leads to the second way in which adverbs can weaken prose: they are claims, not events.

What I mean by that is the same old "show, don't tell" you've been hearing since you first put pen to paper and wrote your first story. "Gudrun replies angrily" has no emotional weight for either the character or the reader. It doesn't move us and you might as well have not written it for all the good it does you as a story-teller. "I spent the day unhappily" is vague, formless and neutral. It ups your wordcount and does little else.

What adverbs too often do is replace action in stories. Anything that reduces the amount of meaningful dramatized action in a story is bad. Anything that reduces the amount of meaningful dramatized action in a story is bad. Yes, that bore repeating. Do not, therefore, tell us that Gudrun replies angrily. Show us her anger, with her words or her actions. Gudrun can let us know she's angry the same way she lets Gerald know she's angry. She probably does not say "I am speaking to you angrily." So don't you say that either, unless you intend some comic effect.

Sometimes we want to summarize, and adverbs do that for action. "He walked quickly" is shorthand for a description of someone walking in a rapid manner and if you're just hurrying the story along, that's fine. But the quick walking will not have any impact on the reader, so if this is an important moment and you want it to have impact, don't use weak writing. Use your strongest writing, and your strongest writing will be clear and direct and have distinct form and meaning. Strong writing is concrete and tactile, visual and immediate. Even a writer like Proust, who is characterized (mostly by people who've never read him, I think) as having written a lot of dreamy and pointless stuff, used very memorable and concrete images whenever people were acting, and he showed character emotions in a direct way (a man doesn't just lecture his friend "angrily," for example, but instead beats a tophat to bits in a fit).

So anyway, that's why adverbs are weak writing and why you should avoid them most of the time. The fact that D.H. Lawrence wrote some classics of the English language and his prose was clunky and choked with adverbs is not an excuse for your prose to be equally clunky unless you also have Lawrence's particular gifts to balance that clunkiness. I am looking for a closing joke that uses an adverb, but I've got nothing, sadly.

And I am still on sabbatical (because life is very busy right now) and may not have time at all to read/respond to comments. Have a lovely day anyway.

Telling, Not Showing

I begin this post with a bit of bragging: last night I finished revisions for my agent. I so rule. But because I do all my writing and revising longhand, I now have to type up all my changes, which will be several hellish hours of my life I'll never get back. There are worse fates, I'm sure. But I digress from the digression with which I began.

While I was revising, I noticed there are at least a couple of cases in which the old rule of Show, Don't Tell does not apply. I found myself actually deleting passages where I had dramatized the action (showing) and replacing them with summary (telling). So this is sort of a "rules? schmules?" post. Sort of.

The action of my novel comes in three strands, which unravel and intertwine as the book progresses. That's a fancy way of saying that I have a couple of major subplots as well as the main plot, and they more or less all tie together at the end. I also have a first-person narrator, who is involved in all three plots. What this means is that either:

a) my narrator has to be present for every scene in order to know what's going on (and relate it to the reader), or

b) someone has to tell my narrator whenever anything important happens off-screen.

The first option could result in some highly improbable situations, as my protagonist doesn't have access to everything everyone does. The second option could result in lots and lots of conversations like this:

"So, Feng says Amleth is dangerous."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he thinks he's going to attack Horvendil soon. They had a bitter argument last night, while you were talking to Corambis."
"What did they fight about?"
"Amleth claims Horvendil is a fraud. Feng told him he's wrong, but Amleth swears to find the truth."
"That's bad."
"Yep. Say, what did you and Corambis talk about?"
"Well, let me tell you..."

And stuff. As it happens, I found that I did have a lot of that sort of conversation in my book, where A and B have a scene and then A and C discuss that scene out of earshot of B. It made me dizzy in a couple of places, and was entirely unneccesary. What I did instead was, as I say, cut the repetitious dialogue and replaced it with summary:

I met with Fernando and told him of my conversation with Corambis. We agreed that something would have to be done about Horvendil soon.

This is much briefer, far less ridiculous to read, and also gives you a chance to interpret the earlier scenes for the reader if you're into that sort of editorializing from a narrator.

The point of all this, aside from demonstrating how unfocused I am when I've not had any coffee, is that where you find this sort of repetition in your narrative, especially if you find dialogue that repeats previous dialogue or discusses previous action, it might be a good time to tell rather than show. Yes, you have to make sure the right characters all know the requisite facts to move the plot along, but if your reader already knows those facts, don't repeat them all over again.

So my rule is: Show, don't tell, unless you have to.

Telling Details Versus Meaningless Trivia

We all struggle to build realistic, compelling worlds for our readers. We want readers to experience our stories as real life, or an amazing magical simulacrum of real life, anyway. We wish to give our readers a picture of our characters and the places through which they move, and the only way to do that is by describing our characters and settings.

There is a wide range of opinion about how detailed your descriptions should be to accomplish this feat. I'm going to try staying out of that discussion today. What I'd like to ramble about for a while instead is the kind of detail we write into our stories. The worth of those details to our readers, if you will.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "trivia" as trifles, things of little consequence. The OED gives several definitions of "detail," but here's what I consider the most pertinent one: A minute or subordinate part of a building, sculpture, or painting, as distinct from the larger portions or the general conception. I'm going to expand that definition to include people, landscapes, objects or whatever is visible in a scene.

Detail versus trivia

I think that when we lard a scene over with descriptions of every visible object, and list inventorially the contents of every room or the costume of every character and try to "paint a picture," we are usually just giving a lot of trivia to the reader. Which is to say, if you present your reader with a list of fifty household goods or another list of twenty articles of clothing, can you really expect her to remember all of that stuff? Maybe, if the descriptions you give your readers are telling. To resort to the OED again, "telling" is effective, forcible, striking. Your descriptive details must mean something in the context of the story to be memorable, to be useful to the reader.

How do you know the difference? I think that if you can cut a detail and you lose no information about character, theme or story, you've just cut meaningless trivia. On the other hand, if your description points to something beyond itself, it has meaning to the reader.

Imagine a scene between two men. One of them is immaculately dressed in an expensive tailored suit, and the other is wearing older, off-the-rack clothes that are getting a bit tired and threadbare. You can describe the well-dressed fellow from his $100 haircut down to his $400 shoes, and then describe the other fellow in a similar fashion, from his grown-out Supercuts down to his scuffed Payless oxfords. That's a lot of description, and taking that kind of time in your narrative will bring your story to a full stop.

What you can do instead is to show one or two telling details of their clothes. Man One offers to shake hands with Man Two. Man Two notices the fine cut of Man One's suit, then looks down and sees that he's missing a button from the cuff of his own suit coat and pulls his hand away, putting it behind his back in embarrassment. Or something like. The reader has seen Man One's confidence and better dress, as well as Man Two's relative place in society and how he feels about it. Four birds with one stone, as it were.

Another example would be the dinner party in "Little Women." We get just enough about the dresses the girls are wearing to know that, while they are the March's finest dresses, they are also not so fine as the girls could wish. And the bit about Jo's gloves is brilliantly done and reinforces both Jo's and Meg's characters.

One other real problem with long, detailed descriptions is that, once you've dumped all the details on your reader, you can't usually invoke those details later on and impart more meaning to them farther along in your story. The details haven't stood out (weren't telling) when first mentioned, so the opportunity to have them be effective and possibly symbolic has been lost. Be sparing with your descriptions and parcel them out as required, but no more.

So you might take a few minutes and look around your scenes and ask yourself what matters in the way of description. Ask yourself what single detail of character or setting would deepen the meaning of the scene, and which details are merely trivia and set dressing. A few well-placed and thoughtful details are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words.

Show Me Where We're Going

This post is about beginnings, a sort of follow up to my post about starting stories in the middle of the action. Whether you jump directly into the central conflict or not, you still need to create drama for the reader. This means that you have to show things in action.

Character=action
Conflict=action
Drama=action

Put things into motion and keep them in motion. This does not mean that your characters must be running from aliens or leaping volcanoes constantly. It means that the story must move forward, that there must be momentum towards a fixed point (the climax). It means that your characters must be doing things.

What are your characters doing, then? Simply put: they are making decisions and then acting upon them, and then dealing with the consequences of those actions. Your characters want something, and your story is the movement through time of your characters toward that goal, whether they achieve it or not. If your characters don't want anything, then they are not dramatic characters and you should write a different story where people have desires. But I digress.

Put things into motion and keep them in motion. How does the reader know who your characters are? By watching them act. So show them acting. In Homer's Iliad, we know that Achilles is broody and prideful. Do we find this out by reading pages of Achilles brooding, alone in his tent? No; we find this out when he argues publically with Agamemnon or refuses Odysseus' plea to join the battle (both of which are dramatic scenes filled with conflict: a warrior versus his king, and a man versus his friends). In The Lord of the Rings, we don't read pages of Frodo's inner struggle against the evil influence of the One Ring; we see Frodo as he stops heeding Sam and places his trust in Gollum instead, eventually abandoning Sam in Mordor after verbally abusing him. These two examples are both fairly subtle and you might not consider them action at first, but they are: the characters are shown making decisions and acting upon those decisions.

To tie the title of this post into my ramblings, I'll say that in the beginning of a story, you need to let the reader know what the central conflict is, what the story is about: where the characters are going. And you need to show that through action. "Okay, Scott," you say. "We know that. Can you go beyond the basics of 'show don't tell?'" Well, maybe.

Conflict is character. Conflict, for our purposes, means people (or, yes, elves if you must) attempting to achieve specific goals and having to struggle for those achievements. In order for the reader to care about the outcome of this conflict, the reader has to care about the characters. In order to care about the characters, the reader has to know the characters. In order to know the characters, the reader has to see the characters in action. Yes, you can go on for sixty pages about your protagonist's inner thoughts and tell us the whole sad story of his estrangement from his father and his subsequent hatred of all men of a certain age and how that might effect his view of himself as your protagonist becomes the same age as his father when he was disinherited. You might even write it in gorgeous, moving prose. I'd read that. But if that isn't your story--if it's your back-story--you can get the same point across (that your protagonist has "issues" with men of his father's generation) by writing a dramatic scene where your protagonist is cruel or indifferent to an older man. Drama is vivid, memorable and engaging. And, frankly, makes the point better and faster than ruminations.

Can't I stop and think ever? Certainly. Please do. I like thoughtful books, but that's not the way to begin one. Before you have your characters consider the state of their lives, show us your characters within their lives, in action. Even a book like "Pride and Prejudice," which is alleged to be pretty tame and undramatic, begins with 1) a statement of theme (a man with money needs a wife), and 2) the event which kicks off the action of the book (the mansion up the road has been rented by a man with money; we simply must meet him!). That's not as dramatic as jumping a volcano or battling Poseidon, but it's still a dramatized scene that immediately introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and immediately introduces conflict. Which is exactly what we want as readers, and one reason why Austen's book is still in print after all these years.

This post is a bit of a hash, stucturally. It all seemed brilliant on the way to the office, but it might be less focused than I might like. I'll try to clarify things later.

Show Don't Tell: Part II

Okay, so here's where Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf come into play. I happen to admire both of these writers tremendously. But, what happens when we compare the two? McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, is mostly full of showing. (For my formal definitions of showing and telling, check out yesterday's post.) In a few places we get insight into the protagonist's mind, but those moments are rare, and the action does a lot of the work. Without giving too much away, this is the story of a father, the protagonist, and son trying to survive in a harsh world. The threats and conflicts are mostly external: extreme weather, hunger, bad guys with guns. (There is one big internal struggle that I'll get to in a moment.) Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, on the other hand, is mostly telling. In just the first few pages, very little action happens, and yet we get paragraph after paragraph of internal thoughts. We find out what worries the characters, what amuses them, and what they think of the other characters. Here, the conflicts are psychological.

So, who's the stronger writer? McCarthy plays by the Show-Don't-Tell rule, so that's one point for him, right? Well, the answer is that it depends on the subject matter. Virginia Woolf tells because her subject matter, the characters' myriad of thoughts, would be invisible to us in any other way. We see physical signs of thoughts, but if a man, let's call him "The Thinker" is sitting at a bench with his chin in his hand, do we know exactly what he's thinking about? If a little boy is red in the face, do we understand that he's not frustrated because he lost the soccer game but because he understood for the first time that, even when a person tries their very best, sometimes they still fail? If your goal is to illuminate the internal thoughts of multidimensional and complex characters; if, like Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, your character has a thousand thoughts about a thousand things while she is silently altering her son's pants, then chances are, to express those thoughts, you will need to tell. McCarthy's interests in The Road lay externally. He was portraying a changing world and the thin line between good and evil. For the most part, the struggles were so basic that they didn't need to be dissected in detail. So, for him, showing was more valuable because it made us experience the subject matter he was interested in. And, for the one struggle that was internal, McCarthy ended up using many telling lines to convey it. (Sorry for the vagueness, but I don't want to ruin the story for anyone who hasn't read it.)

I think the main reason the Show-Don't-Tell rule came into existence was because it's more engaging for a reader to have to observe physical signs and interpret them to the character's emotions, and being engaging keeps the reader interested in your work. But, if your range of emotions goes beyond simple sadness or anger or fear, then telling can be equally interesting because you are illuminating subtle thoughts and emotions that the reader might never even know existed. So, the key, I think, is to be interesting and to not be so obvious as to be boring. Chances are you will want to show sometimes and tell at other times depending on what you are writing about. It's a matter of choosing the best tool for the job.

Show Don't Tell: Part I (or Cormac McCarthy versus Virginia Woolf)

I've always been told to show and not to tell. Teachers, writer's group members, writing buddies have always mentioned this. Show don't tell! So, that's what I tried to do for a long time. When someone felt embarrassed, I had them turn red. When someone was angry, they crossed their arms or stomped away. Sad? Shed a tear! And then, along came Mary Yukari Waters. She's the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection The Laws Of Evening and her stories were included in The Best American Short Stories anthology two years in a row. I had the chance to take a class with her at UCLA, and she taught us a very different lesson in showing versus telling. It's a long lesson, so I'm going to break it up into two parts. And, to give you a preview, the rule, as I see it, is not "Show Don't Tell," but "When to show, and when to tell." Because, indeed, there is a time and place for both, and Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf will help me to explain in Part II.

First off, let's be clear on what exactly showing and telling are. Most people don't really have a clear view of this. I didn't until just a few months ago, even though I somehow managed to please my reviewers. Telling is different from summarizing. I think that's the biggest misconception. Saying that someone hiked up a mountain isn't telling, it's showing. But, of course, you can show with different amounts of detail. Someone might say the line, "She hiked up a mountain," is telling because we don't experience this character hiking up a mountain. So, we can include the dirt and the trees and the blisters on her feet and the mosquitos. We can include the trickling rivers and the birds and the altitude sickness. We can include the kindly sherpa who is eyeing her in a less-than-wholesome way. That might make someone content, but another reader might ask for more. What did the mosquito sound like? How old was the Sherpa? Description of concrete details can have several iterations, but this is more of a question of degree. And, it all falls under the category of showing. Telling, on the other hand, occurs when a writer includes passages that can't be observed directly. This would include things like sadness, anger, confusion, lust.

So, let's define terms. We'll say that showing details are all those things that can be captured by a video camera or some other analytical device. Sights, smells, textures, sounds, all of that stuff is showing. Telling details are all those things that can't be captured by a machine: feelings and thoughts. "She turned red" is showing. "She was embarrassed" is telling. "He ate the entire pizza," is showing. "He was hungry," is telling. Got it? More tomorrow!