College applications season is finally coming to an end, causing
some more panic than others. I’ve learned a lot—that I cannot write a short
essay in an hour, that my friends leave many many comments, and how to meet
word counts ranging from 100 to 650 words. And I’ve seen the comment “Show not
tell” too many times.
Saying “show not tell” is often prefaced with an apology, like,
“Sorry for saying this, but you need to show not tell”. It’s a little strange
that people do this; as one of my friends said to me, “Why does everyone
apologize? They’re right.”
I personally hate the phrase “show not tell”. I hate using and I
detest being on the receiving end. You might say that that’s just because I
don’t like being criticized in general, which is fair, but I actually think I’m
justified. Though everyone from my second grade English teacher to my friend
and temporary editor has used it, it’s actually a terrible piece of advice.
When you say “show not tell” you are literally violating the principle of “show
not tell” by telling them what they’re doing wrong instead of showing them.
In other words, this is the most hypocritical piece of advice
ever.
And I would argue that it’s even more important to show someone
what they’re doing wrong than show in a piece of writing. One, it lets them see
what exactly is going wrong (the difference between “Your grammar is wrong
here” and “Dropping that comma made the sentence confusing to read for me”) and
two, it mitigates the sting of the criticism. That’s one of the number one rules
of critiquing: instead of just saying “You’re doing this wrong”, say “I think
doing it this way is ineffective because ___” so they’ll be more receptive to
your criticism.
And it’s not even just that. People emphasize, “Always remember
to show not tell”, but really, what does that even mean? In the end, we ‘tell a
story’, ‘not show a story’—that would be a movie. And even movies will include
‘telling’, in the form of a narrator telling us the circumstances. Some details
are always going to just be told. “My mother always hated the old TV.” “The
journey took weeks, passing over mountains and deserts.” “We were bitterly
cold.” These could all be shown—describe how the mother hated the television,
elaborate on the journey, have the narrator’s teeth chatter—but for certain
effects, they shouldn’t be. It would really clog down writing if everything had
to be ‘shown’, broken down into observations such as “the sky was green”. Besides,
we wouldn’t necessarily want to. By distilling this piece of advice into three
bare words, the importance of pacing, of structure, of tone is glossed over,
basically forgotten.
“Show not tell” isn’t
wrong. People don’t want to be “told” things. Storytelling is about drawing
people into the story, transporting them to another body, another life, another
experience. An extremely detailed plot summary of Harry Potter is not a substitute for reading it. Details—and
pacing, and structure, and tone—are important for engaging the reader and
activating various parts of the brain and all that. Whatever it is you want to
convey, you want a way to make the reader feel
that, whether that be tension or a theme. But just saying “show not tell” is
the equivalent of “your writing is bad”.
Despite all that, I do occasionally tell people, “show not tell”.
It gets the message across quickly, since everyone has had it said to them, and
they can start examining their work themselves. I then try to figure out what
exactly it is that prompted my response, but I don’t always succeed. And they’d
be totally justified in saying to me, “Please show not tell.”
To which I’d probably respond, “Shut up.”
