Personal Musings: Show vs. Tell

 “‘Are the young women to be veiled or unveiled?’

     ‘Need you ask?’ said the King with one of his great laughs, jerking his thumb in my direction.  ‘Do you think I want my queen frightened out of her senses?  Veils of course.  And good think veils too.’  One of the other girls tittered, and I think that was the first time I clearly understood that I am ugly.

     This made me more afraid of the Stepmother than ever.”¹

Wait… wait a moment!  Is… is this… no… is this… telling!?!  I see some nice, strong verbs like “jerking” and “tittering,” but what about that ending?  Where is the showing of “ugly” and “afraid?”  And, a few paragraphs later, the same thing happens again!  So writes the author, “I know now that the face I saw was beautiful, but I did not think of that then.  All I saw was that she was frightened, more frightened than I-- indeed terrified.”¹  What is meant by such a vague word as “beautiful” or “terrified”?  These are telling words!  Who is this?  Who is this author who dared to tell instead of show?  Who dared to use such mental words as “frightened” rather than describe what “frightened” looks like?  Who would do such an elementary mistake as telling instead of showing?  Who… what?  C. S. Lewis?  What?  No.  There must be some mistake.  In what book would Lewis, the C. S. Lewis, have possibly done something so… Till We Have Faces?  You mean C. S. Lewis’s final piece of fiction?  The work he thought his best novel?  My favorite novel?  That Till We Have Faces?

Yes.  That Till We Have Faces.

To any of you who have taken a course or read a book on creative writing, how often have you come across the phrase “show don’t tell?”  I cannot describe how frustrated I am with this myth of writing.  Yes, I call it a myth, for, like a myth, it contains some truth, but can, and seems often does, lead into false beliefs.  Many times have I encountered on blogs, in classrooms, and in books on writing the mantra of “show don’t tell” as if it were one of the foundations of literature.  In all truth, the foundations of story are character, plot, and words, not images.  

Within that last category of words, we have abstract words, words that exist only in the mind such as beautiful, happy, scared, ugly, etc., and we have concrete words or phrases, ones we can perceive through out senses like golden hair, dimpled cheeks, tear-stained face, and warty nose.  To give another example, authors give concreteness, through story, to abstract concepts and world views: God’s forgiveness in the parable of the prodigal son, the dangers of greed in The Hobbit,² and the destructive nature of twisted love in Till We Have Faces, to name a few.  The difference in literature from most other creative mediums is that it uses words to do so.  Mediums like paintings, graphic novels, movies, and video games all use pictures to tell their stories and messages.  They are the epitome of “show, don’t tell” because they are visual mediums.  Literature uses words.  And what do these words do then?  They tell a story.  Literature records words, a medium of communication that requires someone to hear you, which makes novels, short stories, etc., in reality, an auditory medium.  We don’t watch a book.  We listen to or read (mentally listen to) them.  You could watch a movie that’s just a bunch of images, but a book isn’t considered literature if you just list a bunch of really detailed descriptions.  To repeat the mantra“Show, don’t tell” is to say, often unintentionally, something like “make your book a movie.”

Now, before someone drops accusations of the fallacy of equivocation on me, let me say that the type of telling I’m described above is not exactly what is meant in the saying “show, don’t tell.”  My point in the previous paragraph is simply to say that, much as music’s power comes from the arrangement of notes and movie’s power often stems from its arrangement of visuals, the power of novels originates more from the usage of words than on detailed images.  Do I mean by this that we don’t need detailed images in stories?  By no means!  I would never think Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene better without such gruesome and terrifying a description of the dragon.  What I mean is to say that the most powerful image imaginable (pun intended) cannot carry a book as can the most simplistic of “telling” sentences.

So what is meant by “show, don’t tell”?  I hardly need answer that question.  “Show, don’t tell” means don’t “tell” your audience something when you can “show” it, such as replacing descriptions like “she was frightened ” with sentences like  “she trembled, clutching the smooth cloth of her wedding dress till it wrinkled”.  (Ironically, this second example, that of showing, requires less imagination on part of the audience as the author does all the imaging for them.)  Now, I do not intend to say teachers and writers who promote “showing” are entirely wrong.  Most writing does benefit from detailed descriptions and stronger, more exact word choice, as I mentioned above by referencing The Faerie Queene.  Even Snow White is described as having skin white as snow, hair black as ebony, and lips red as blood rather than just as “beautiful.”  However, I know from experience of two issues with the mantra “show, don’t tell.”  Firstly, new authors, and sometimes even experienced ones, most often end up describing too much all over the place.  When students are told not to use such words as “delicious” or “happy,” works tend to get bogged down in over-description.  Secondly, authors, under the spell of “show, don’t tell,” end up showing all the wrong things.

For, in reality, sometimes telling is more powerful than showing.  What do I mean?  Let’s return to Till We Have Faces.

First off, I wish to quickly illustrate one power of using telling instead of showing through the example of using “frightened” and “terrified” instead of showing them.  During this section of the story, Orual, our first person narrator, was a little girl, and her young mind’s first reaction was to compare her own fear to this other girl’s, which is a very human thought process.  How often do you, when first meeting someone, begin reading them to discern the person's emotional state?  And what if it was someone you feared but, to your surprise, appeared to be afraid as well?  And then, when recounting memories from childhood, do you often give exact details from those readings you did as a young child in that surprising first meeting where you saw mutual emotion from someone you feared?  By using telling sentences like “she was frightened-- indeed terrified,” it’s more natural, adding to the believability of the story.

The other example I wish to use is when Orual calls herself “ugly.”  Though I have read the story three times so far, I cannot recall one detail of Orual’s appearance besides her brown hair and that she is “ugly,” both of which are mentioned in the first chapter.  After that, the only physical descriptions we really get of her are about her clothes, and the only “showing” we see is how no one is romantically attracted to her so long as her face is visible.  Why would Lewis do this?  Why would something so essential to the story as Orual’s appearance be so neglected?  You would think that something like this, the source of the rejection by people around her and of her low self-esteem, would be dwelt upon more, wouldn’t you?  But it’s precisely the lack of “showing” that makes the statement and its effect so powerful.  Is Orual actually physically ugly?  Or is she perhaps just less feminine?  By only telling us she is ugly, Lewis forbids our knowing and therefore our objections.  We cannot say anything to counter the claim because we have nothing to counter.  We can only accept what Orual has accepted already: her physical ugliness.  Furthermore, by giving less detail about Orual’s physical ugliness, Lewis draws attention the ugliness of her heart.  Orual knows she is physically ugly, but she does not understand how ugly and twisted her heart becomes, too.  Meanwhile, the reader sees Orual’s ugly heart without seeing the face Orual dwells upon.  Finally, and this is perhaps my favorite idea, I find it fascinating how, right from the start of the story, Orual has no face.  Till We Have Faces was not the original title of the story, but it is a main theme, the idea of approaching God face-to-face rather than hiding behind a veil.  Halfway through the story, Orual begins wearing a veil, but to the reader, her face has been veiled from the beginning.  Perhaps it was not Lewis’s intention to make it so, but even if it were not, I think it is a powerful image brought about by the lack of imaging (lack of “showing”) employed by Lewis.

Till We Have Faces is full of examples like these two just mentioned, instances of “telling” rather than “showing” that add power to the story rather than detract.  You see, when it comes to showing and telling, it is up to the author to decide which to use based upon which is more effective.  For instance, consider two descriptions of a man walking through a desolate place.  If I wanted to write a “show” description, I might do something like: 

“As he walked, the toe of his boot suddenly caught an unseen stone, and he crashed to the ground.  With a groan he stood and stepped forth again.  The rocks, however, threatened with every step to trip him or twist his ankle.  More than once a stone slipped out from under him, and he tumbled down onto rough and jagged rock.  Before long, hasty bandages wrapped around his knees and hands where rock has pierce or gashed, but still he continued.  Presently, he came to a wall of rock, thrice the size of his height, and his heart sank.  With shaking fingers, he gripped the wall and began to climb; however, his hand soon slipped, and he fell to the hard earth.  Blinking back tears, he clenched his teeth to stop the sobs forming in his throat."  

By contrast, a “telling” description might be, “And on he walked, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And as he walked, his baggages became more a burden, and his heart more a baggage.”

Each of these examples provides a different effect.  For the first, we are “in the moment” with the character, experiencing the difficulties of this land.  We witness his pain and struggle, and that influences the tone.  The second example, on the other hand, feels much more desolate.  We are distant, and our only experience with the character is the length and weight of time and distance.  As we read the repeated words, we can feel some of the burden, though we are not “shown” anything specific.  The emphasis in the second example is the drawn out nature of the tiring journey.  We see no moments in time, only that it goes “on and on and on.”  Either one of these descriptions can be powerful.  It all depends upon the context (of both the scene and the story itself) and what the author wishes to convey.

And so, I implore you, stop this false dichotomy.  Don’t use a pithy saying like “show, don’t tell” when it’s so misleading.  If, after saying such a phrase, you must unpack it and describe exceptions or proper use because it’s so easily misunderstood, then it has failed as a truism.  Rather, carefully consider which is more impactful for each instance because really, it is not a matter of show or tell, but instead of show and tell.  For is that not what written stories do?  Come, let me show you truth by telling a story. 


¹Lewis, C. S.  Till We Have Faces.  New York: Houghton Harcourt Publishing Company, 1984.  
       Print.


²Ward, Michael.  "A Thief in the Night: The Christian Ethic at the Heart of The Hobbit."  CRI.  The 
     Christian Research Institute, n. d.  Web.  1 Dec. 2014.  <http://www.equip.org/articles/thief-night-
     christian-ethic-heart-hobbit/#christian-books-3>