I think Misha's argument is perhaps more semantic that anything else. Yeah, maybe conceptual vs. concrete is a better way to word the distinction than telling vs. showing--but that doesn't deny that there is a difference between the two modes, and that describing how the anger manifested itself can be more vivid than just saying the character was angry.
That said, I agree with the central point that I think you're making. The distinction between showing and telling is often given an exaggerated importance.
I once had an editor who was a stickler for showing and defined telling so broadly that his advice was often straightjacketing. For example, he insisted that showing was always in real time, so that any word like when or then had to be avoided. Instead of transitional phrases related to time, he wanted scene breaks--in one case, to cover a thirty-second walk down a driveway to get in a car. Sigh! He also wanted to take events happening simultaneously in a fight sequence and string them out into several consecutive actions. Neither of these approaches really addressed how the human mind perceives time.
One doesn't have to look far to find examples of successful authors using telling, at least part of the time. And there are some situations in which readers need to know something to understand what's going on, but they don't need a full paragraph of description to get it. Sometimes, a concise summary of something that happens is better in the context than a more elaborate approach.
Even in visual mediums, one often sees telling. Consider the opening of the Ready Player One movie, in which we see scenes of what society is like, but they are accompanied by an MC voiceover explaining what society is like. And that's not from some hack but from Stephen Spielberg.
That editor sounds like a joy to work with, lol. Anyway…
I think one big problem that contemporary literature has is that they’ve lost the art of “telling” because of the dominance of visual media (though as you’ve pointed out, even they do “telling” - another example I can think of is comic books with their ‘square bubbles’). As a result, a lot of books feel like transcribed movies (Jurassic Park, though I love the book, comes to mind).
But older books, because they weren’t written with movie adaptations in mind, don’t have this issue. And a lot of times, the book ended up having much more depth than the movie. I think of Ben-Hur. In the (1959) movie, Ben-Hur’s mother is just that… Ben-Hur’s mother. But in the book, there's more to her than that (the fact that she was a widower who has to raise two kids, including the titular character, isn’t really emphasized in the movie for understandable reasons). That’s just one example. I can go on.
Funnily enough, the novel’s opening is also an example how “showing” can go wrong. It began with a picturesque description of the desert, and I found it so boring that I quit right out of the gate the first time I tried reading the novel. Now to be fair, it’s been a while since I read ‘that’ part of the book, so I might have go back to it again to see if my view of it would change. But I think it would have been better if Lew Wallace would just get on with it and start with the Three Wise Men (which was the point of that opening chapter).
It’s certainly true that visual media has had an impact on literature, and often, a negative one.
It hasn’t all been bad, though. The issue you cite with the opening of Ben Hur is one that applies to a lot of literature from the same era—a descriptive opening too long for modern taste. Visual media, of course, can address the visuals in a relatively short take and get right to the action. We see a lot of this, especially on TV. If it’s a murder mystery, the body drops before the first commercial. The same if it’s a crime drama or police procedural—some kind of crime drops before the first commercial. Or depending on the genre, someone gets gored by a troll, drained by a vampire, or chopped up by alien lasers, all before the first commercial.
Most of the contemporary novels do something similar. Even the slow builds ones tend to do an adrenaline injection up front. I think all of that is probably better pacing.
It’s also true, as you point out, that movies don’t do justice to the kind of background detail that can give depth to a book. As that effect spreads to literature, it’s a definite downer.
The problem with the people who worship show as opposed to tell is that they produce highly non-concise prose that ends up neither telling nor showing as much. If one reads the fiction of the early 20th century, where people had to tell entire stories in 6000 words, the sort people now sometimes drag out for 400 pages, scene setting needed to do a lot of telling. This allowed them to get into the action, excitement, adventure, and general things happening much faster. And in the serials, you had to tell in your recap at minimum, or anyone entering the serial for the first time would be quite confused.
"Show, don't tell" leads to dead wordy prose unable to follow the basic advice of Strunk and White. Make every word count.
So true. One reason why 'show don't tell' never really sit right with me is because I like reading older stuff and they definitely do a lot of tell (they also do show too, why is it have to be one or the other? lol).
I agree with Misha’s analysis. “Show, don’t tell” is an oversimplification of a more complex issue. These are narrative tools, and can be used either expertly or poorly. The literary critics of the early Twentieth Century tended to blame the tool and not the craftsman and the contemporary authors of how-to books have followed suit. If you go to view an exhibit at an art gallery, and you think the paintings all suck, do you blame the artist or the paint brushes he used?
The third (or first) person narrator gives the novelist a tremendous advantage over the filmmaker. While the narrator can use summary as a tool of compression, the filmmaker can’t do that and so has to compensate with jump cuts and expository dialogue. I’ve seen television adaptations of novels where the screenwriter had to add a second character to the scene so he could convey in dialogue what the narrator conveyed in the book.
I think the reason so many people dogpile on “telling” is that those tools are particularly susceptible to misuse by amateurs. But that doesn’t mean you should toss them out of your toolbox.
I think Misha's argument is perhaps more semantic that anything else. Yeah, maybe conceptual vs. concrete is a better way to word the distinction than telling vs. showing--but that doesn't deny that there is a difference between the two modes, and that describing how the anger manifested itself can be more vivid than just saying the character was angry.
That said, I agree with the central point that I think you're making. The distinction between showing and telling is often given an exaggerated importance.
I once had an editor who was a stickler for showing and defined telling so broadly that his advice was often straightjacketing. For example, he insisted that showing was always in real time, so that any word like when or then had to be avoided. Instead of transitional phrases related to time, he wanted scene breaks--in one case, to cover a thirty-second walk down a driveway to get in a car. Sigh! He also wanted to take events happening simultaneously in a fight sequence and string them out into several consecutive actions. Neither of these approaches really addressed how the human mind perceives time.
One doesn't have to look far to find examples of successful authors using telling, at least part of the time. And there are some situations in which readers need to know something to understand what's going on, but they don't need a full paragraph of description to get it. Sometimes, a concise summary of something that happens is better in the context than a more elaborate approach.
Even in visual mediums, one often sees telling. Consider the opening of the Ready Player One movie, in which we see scenes of what society is like, but they are accompanied by an MC voiceover explaining what society is like. And that's not from some hack but from Stephen Spielberg.
That editor sounds like a joy to work with, lol. Anyway…
I think one big problem that contemporary literature has is that they’ve lost the art of “telling” because of the dominance of visual media (though as you’ve pointed out, even they do “telling” - another example I can think of is comic books with their ‘square bubbles’). As a result, a lot of books feel like transcribed movies (Jurassic Park, though I love the book, comes to mind).
But older books, because they weren’t written with movie adaptations in mind, don’t have this issue. And a lot of times, the book ended up having much more depth than the movie. I think of Ben-Hur. In the (1959) movie, Ben-Hur’s mother is just that… Ben-Hur’s mother. But in the book, there's more to her than that (the fact that she was a widower who has to raise two kids, including the titular character, isn’t really emphasized in the movie for understandable reasons). That’s just one example. I can go on.
Funnily enough, the novel’s opening is also an example how “showing” can go wrong. It began with a picturesque description of the desert, and I found it so boring that I quit right out of the gate the first time I tried reading the novel. Now to be fair, it’s been a while since I read ‘that’ part of the book, so I might have go back to it again to see if my view of it would change. But I think it would have been better if Lew Wallace would just get on with it and start with the Three Wise Men (which was the point of that opening chapter).
It’s certainly true that visual media has had an impact on literature, and often, a negative one.
It hasn’t all been bad, though. The issue you cite with the opening of Ben Hur is one that applies to a lot of literature from the same era—a descriptive opening too long for modern taste. Visual media, of course, can address the visuals in a relatively short take and get right to the action. We see a lot of this, especially on TV. If it’s a murder mystery, the body drops before the first commercial. The same if it’s a crime drama or police procedural—some kind of crime drops before the first commercial. Or depending on the genre, someone gets gored by a troll, drained by a vampire, or chopped up by alien lasers, all before the first commercial.
Most of the contemporary novels do something similar. Even the slow builds ones tend to do an adrenaline injection up front. I think all of that is probably better pacing.
It’s also true, as you point out, that movies don’t do justice to the kind of background detail that can give depth to a book. As that effect spreads to literature, it’s a definite downer.
Definitely on the side of tell, don't show.
The problem with the people who worship show as opposed to tell is that they produce highly non-concise prose that ends up neither telling nor showing as much. If one reads the fiction of the early 20th century, where people had to tell entire stories in 6000 words, the sort people now sometimes drag out for 400 pages, scene setting needed to do a lot of telling. This allowed them to get into the action, excitement, adventure, and general things happening much faster. And in the serials, you had to tell in your recap at minimum, or anyone entering the serial for the first time would be quite confused.
"Show, don't tell" leads to dead wordy prose unable to follow the basic advice of Strunk and White. Make every word count.
So true. One reason why 'show don't tell' never really sit right with me is because I like reading older stuff and they definitely do a lot of tell (they also do show too, why is it have to be one or the other? lol).
I agree with Misha’s analysis. “Show, don’t tell” is an oversimplification of a more complex issue. These are narrative tools, and can be used either expertly or poorly. The literary critics of the early Twentieth Century tended to blame the tool and not the craftsman and the contemporary authors of how-to books have followed suit. If you go to view an exhibit at an art gallery, and you think the paintings all suck, do you blame the artist or the paint brushes he used?
The third (or first) person narrator gives the novelist a tremendous advantage over the filmmaker. While the narrator can use summary as a tool of compression, the filmmaker can’t do that and so has to compensate with jump cuts and expository dialogue. I’ve seen television adaptations of novels where the screenwriter had to add a second character to the scene so he could convey in dialogue what the narrator conveyed in the book.
I think the reason so many people dogpile on “telling” is that those tools are particularly susceptible to misuse by amateurs. But that doesn’t mean you should toss them out of your toolbox.