One of my favorite bloggers, Jennifer@Conversion Diary, recently emailed to share an insight she’d had regarding the “show don’t tell” rule we writers hear so much about. I’m happy to step aside this Writing Wednesday to make way for Jennifer’s revelation.
Jennifer Fulwiler, blogger/writer
Bringing stories to life with information-rich sentences:
A lesson in showing, not telling
A few weeks ago I had a crisis: I knew that the writing in my book was too simple, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
When my agent saw the first few chapters of the initial draft of my memoir, one of the observations he had was that it seemed too stripped down. I’d need to put some flesh on the bones of the story, he explained, in order for it to really sing. When I recently sat down to start the second draft, I figured it’d be easy to bring more life to it. I was wrong.
I knew that I needed to follow the age-old rules of “show, don’t tell” and “use powerful words,” yet all my attempts at implementing this advice either resulted in a bunch of flowery phrases that bogged down the story or sounded awkward or pretentious. Clearly, I was missing something.
Then, last week, I was reading Mary Karr’s famous memoir, The Liar’s Club, and I came across a line that led me to a major “ah-hah!” moment and made it all clear. Before I tell you what it said, let me first tell you how I would have written it. Karr is introducing a story about her mother, and in the opening line wants to convey that her mother was headed out to visit her own mother in west Texas, but never made it. Here’s what I would have written:
Grandma was surprised when she heard that Mother wasn’t coming home.
Here’s what Karr wrote:
Out in Lubbock, Grandma was rolling a cobbler crust for Mother’s homecoming dinner when the call came that she had been detained in Leechfield.
What blew me away about comparing my writing to Karr’s was when I made a mental list of what a reader would learn from our respective sentences. Let’s take a look:
What a reader learns from my sentence:
– Grandma was surprised that Mother wasn’t coming home.
What a reader learns from Karr’s sentence:
– Grandma had been excited about Mother coming home (since she’d been planning a dinner and homemade dessert).
– Grandma was probably a native Southerner (since she was making cobbler for dessert).
– Grandma was probably a homemaker (since dinner and homemade dessert were how she chose to celebrate her daughter’s homecoming).
– Grandma was probably a good cook (since she was making the crust from scratch).
– Grandma lived in Lubbock.
– Mother stayed in Leechfield.
Wow! I was amazed at just how much Karr was able to tell us about her world in one simple sentence. It wasn’t until I saw it this way that I fully internalized the importance of showing instead of telling and using powerful words. I think I had misunderstood the concepts as aimed at simply describing individual things as well as possible; now I understand that they involve so much more, giving the writer an opportunity to pack each sentence full of information that will give life to the world she’s trying to create. Now as I go through my draft, I ask myself: “Is there any way I could enrich this sentence with more information?” It’s just a different way of stating the same age-old advice that I’ve heard a thousand times before, yet it really helped me to understand how to create vivid writing.
Awesome illustration of how to apply this principle, Jennifer. Thanks for sharing.
Have any of you had any “show don’t tell” light-bulb moments lately? If so, please, do tell — or show!
For more wisdom from Jennifer, visit Conversion Diary.
Ah, yes, I know this well. And yet it is so hard to keep on top of it, especially when you’re in the thick of it. This is why the revision process is so critical and yet always the hardest part. We can allow ourselves to just write to get it out, but only if we promise to accept the fact that we might just have to throw it all out and start all over again in the revision stage.
Wow, Roxane and Jennifer, I LOVE this post. It’s perfect timing for me as I’m about to finish my rough draft and head into editing mode.
My first drafts have a lot of “white page”. Very sparse, which is strange since my blog is flowery and descriptive! 🙂 But I find it’s helpful to flesh out as I go as well. Then, like you Jennifer, when I edit, I tend to go overboard with TOO much flower.
“Packed with information” is much better than flowery. Thanks for this timely reminder!
Great post ladies! Thanks for the inspiration!
Thanks so much for letting me do a guest post, Roxane! I’m honored.
Also, just this morning I came across this great quote about showing and not telling over at Advice to Writers. Loved it:
“You can’t tell or show everything within the compass of a book. If you try to tell or show everything, your reader will die of boredom before the end of the first page. You must, therefore, ask yourself what is the core of the matter you wish to communicate to your reader? Having decided on the core of the matter, all that you tell him must relate to it and illustrate it more and more vividly.” – MORRIS L. WEST
Jennifer, one of my readers of my WIP kept bringing me back to this. Wish I had heard it at the outset, although I think I needed my first drafts to be more sprawling. It’s all about chipping away at the excess after that though, and this piece of advice by West is crucial during revision. I think I’ll paste it to my computer desk!
What a great post, Jennifer, and writing wednesdays is a timely topic for me, Roxanne. I am an aspiring author working on little things through a creative writing class right now. So, this particular post is something I will put into practice! Thanks!
Excellent illustration! Sometimes I feel that the screen confines of the internet (short paragraphs, extra use of white space, click-away rates) have stripped much of the narrative from my writing.
I love it. I need SO much work in this area!
p.s. I laughed when you wrote on your blog, “in which I can no longer stop myself from blogging about writing.” I get it.
Wonderful post, ladies. Jen, you picked such a great example of the power of showing and not telling. If only I could harness that power… I’m in a bit of a writing rut, so I can use any inspiration and tips I can get, so thanks for this.
I’m going to remember this word: enrichment, when I write.
I agree with Meredith above that the blogging medium channels inspiration into short sentences geared toward skimmers. As the author, I have so much I want to say and am constantly publishing posts with nary a revision process in sight. *sigh* This is a good challenge to try to comb through my text better to provide more information-rich sentences. (Even if my skimmers never read them!)
Thank you, Jen — Katie @ Kitchen Stewardship
Am I right that you will now have both blogged about writing and written about blogging? That is quite a coup.
I love this post, even though it makes me want cobbler.
Sheesh! I struggle finding the balance between pithy clarity and keeping the reader engaged. I tend toward pithy, but at a cost.
Good writing looks so effortless but takes SOOOOO much work. I suppose, though, that’s why I do it. Maybe, one day, I’ll come close to Karr’s magnificent richness.
One day.
WOW!! thanks for sharing that. One of my dreams is to write a book, but I am waaaaaay out of my league there. 🙂 But who knows, with God nothing is impossible.
Thank you so much for sharing. I actually had to write on two different essays this week about being specific with language and the importance of a large vocabulary to effectively be able to convey feelings and emotions.
Your post couldn’t have been timed better. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Great lesson in writing – one I will take to heart!
I love God’s timing! I’ve always struggled with ‘showing not telling’; I tend to write myself into corners and lose spontaneity. Still no aha moment, but you’ve given me something to watch for, and strive toward. Thank you.
Thanks for the great post. I always feel like I write too simple, so this was very helpful:)