Despite that I don't think of actions as cliche, I will say this: you don't want to nod and smile and such too much because it interrupts the flow of dialog. Also, while a smile can mean you're happy, it doesn't always. the same thing with crying. It can mean you're sad or it can mean you're happy or in pain or whatever. I know sometimes I use too many physical actions, but I just can't help myself.
Anyway, let me boil down the whole "show vs. tell" thing real simple. Basically, don't say, "I feel sad." (Or happy or angry or whatever emotion.) You have to cleverly disguise it through a combination of dialog/internal thought or physical actions.
So let's say my characters are having an argument and the man says he wants to break up. You wouldn't want your girl to say, "That makes me sad." because that sounds really lame. You don't want her to think that either.
Instead you can have her cry (Ooh, wait, crying's a cliche! We should invent some new physical reaction for sadness! Maybe she farts when she gets sad.) and say, "Why are you doing this? Don't you know I love you?" Or you could have her think that, like, Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know I love him?
See, I didn't say "I feel sad" but I expressed the character's sadness. That's all it boils down to. Chances are you're already doing that without being conscious of it. And really, don't listen to those people who think "showing" means going on for two pages about the fog-shrouded moors and crap like that because when it comes time to have characters interact that advice isn't very helpful. Though when it's time to describe things, the same principle applies. Instead of telling us "the chair was red" you're supposed to show us by saying, "The chair was upholstered in silk the auburn hue of a maple leaf in the last days of autumn." Pretty fancy, schmancy there. But still, the chair is red.
This even applies to queries, which is where a lot of us fuck it up. Instead of saying, "Sally is sad when Bobby dumps her" you say something like, "After Bobby dumps her, Sally spends two weeks locked in her room, crying into her pillow." Again, it's a fancy way of saying, "Sally is sad."
Because really the whole point of "show vs. tell" is to indirectly say these things by disguising them as things that sound more artistic. It's the difference between a love scene by Shakespeare and one by Peter Griffin.
I can't find this clip in English, so enjoy it in German!
They basically say the same thing, but would you rather hear that you're as beautiful as a summer's day or, "Wow, you got really hot boobs!" Though it's ironic that editors and agents then tell you to eliminate extra words and stuff. I could really cut down on my word count if I just said, "The chair is red" or "Sally is sad."
Incidentally I think the reason first-person has become so popular is that it's easier to do like in the example above in first person. In third person, especially omniscient, it's easy to just say, "Sally felt sad that Bobby wanted to break up with her." First person helps keep you honest about that.
Really though I don't know why agents, editors, and other writers make this so difficult for people to understand. Instead of saying, "show, don't tell" someone should have just said, "Don't say a character feels this way or that way." But then they wouldn't have all that fodder for blog entries and how-to books and lectures I guess.
Yeah yeah yeah.
ReplyDeleteTelling vs. showing is not why people aren't getting published. It is why people suck at writing. But you can suck at writing and still get published with the Big Six. You just need to be one of the people that they like.
And you're right...the $10 gift card thing I'm giving away won't get you a Big Six book, but I'd rather people spent it on indy books anyway (like yours).
First, I went and read your Thanksgiving post, too, and loved it. Very highbrow, except when it was lowbrow.
ReplyDeleteI think you've hit the thing with "showing vs. telling" right on the head. But people can take the "telling" too far, too -- your description of the chair, for example. In most cases, I only need that description if it's important to the story in some way, but a lot of writers go on about the stuff around the people for no reason whatsoever.
My biggest problem as a writer is that I've spent most of my life as a painter. With paint, all you can do is describe the surface of things, how they look. Sometimes my writing is just too darn wordy....
ReplyDeleteI Remember the first time I was exposed to the whole 'show don't tell' school of writing. My initial thought was, but I'm TELLING a story, not showing one. Nobody seemed to find it ironic but me.
ReplyDeleteAnd it took me a long time to figure out what that advice was supposed to mean. I wonder what LoTR would have been like is someone shared this info with Tolkien.
Show vs Tell gets so much lip service because it actually doesn't mean anything. Not anything concrete at any rate. That makes it an easy thing to point to to explain "failure" and to make you feel better over said failure.
ReplyDeleteI think the real meaning of this is to be active rather than passive in your writing, which is a bit more concrete since there are objective standards to what is writing in passive tense as opposed to active tense. But people don't want to have specidic flaws pointed out, so we don't talk about active vs passive. We'd rather keep everything nicely vague by talking about Show & Tell.