Fiction Writing 101: Showing and Telling

Telling is selling very well these days.  What I mean is: fiction that tells more than it shows is making a lot of money, so the old-fashioned rule of "show don't tell" really doesn't matter when it comes to selling books, especially ebooks, these days.  However, no matter how much moolah is being made, telling is a tedious way to transmit information to your readers.  Put another way:  it's a boring and mindless way to divulge info to your readers.  But it also happens to be quicker and easier for many writers to tell instead of show, and since some fiction writers feel compelled to write a novel a month, this is a way to reach that, uh, lofty goal.

What is telling?  Oh, you've read it, and you've definitely seen it in movies and on television shows.  It's all that boring exposition that does a heck of a lot of explaining.  When the writer feels it's necessary to give the reader pieces of information but doesn't quite know how to show it, that info gets blurted out, and it often feels like that.  Splat.  Okay.  That super duper important info is out there.  Now I can show something, hopefully.  It's not very literary to tell, tell, tell, but many readers find anything called "literary" to be snobbish.  Instead, writers nowadays are supposed to write fiction that can be easily plunked into any genre except the one called literary.  But I digress.

Super duper important information brings me to the topic of significant detail.  Significant means of consequence.  Yep, the details conveyed in fiction must be significant, and that means the details are essential to the story.  Here's the unfortunate news, my friends: discerning what is significant and insignificant is not something that can be taught.  The good news: it can be edited.  Of course, if a story is filled with insignificant detail it won't make it to an editor's desk.

A good writer instinctively knows which details are significant and which aren't. You're either born with this ability or not.  But please remember what I said in my previous post: when most of us blather on about something that happened to us yesterday, we include many insignificant details which slow down our stories and put our listeners to sleep or make them regret they got into this conversation, which is hardly a conversation but more like a monologue.

I have no tidy way of ending this significant post that tells more than it shows, so I will end with this Ernest Hemingway quote: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar, and all great writers have had it.”  

Fiction Writing 101: Telling Stories

After conducting a most unscientific survey of the inhabitants of the United States-- yes, all of them, even infants and illiterates-- the results are in:  Almost everyone in the United States wants to write fiction!  So in this post and in a few more future posts, I’ll be blogging about writing fiction.  In case you weren’t aware, there is a finite number of things that can be said about the art and craft of fiction writing.  But before I start, I want to say that it is, indeed, a human characteristic to feel compelled to tell a story and that this story telling compulsion is universal among the human animal, inherent in all of us.  However, I’m not so sure most humans can write fiction though they may have a whole lot of fun telling stories to their friends, co-workers, and families.

So I have a desire to nurture some of these millions of souls who feel the urge to write fiction.  But one more thing before I begin.  You may be wondering what kind of authority I have to blog about writing fiction. That’s good wondering because I have no authority whatsoever.  For those who are into credentials, I graduated from an MFA program in Creative Writing (here), but academia usually produces hideously awful fiction writers. I’ve been writing stories since I was seven but apparently so have zillions of people.  A few strangers have told me I’m a talented fiction writer, but see my previous post (here) about F. Scott Fitzgerald and what he thinks about having talent.  (Spoiler: talent means very little.)  So now I begin.

Earlier in this post, I alluded to a difference between telling stories to friends, co-workers, neighbors, family members, politicians, government employees, insurance agents etc and writing fiction. Some people spend lots of time telling stories to their friends about what happened at work in the break room or what happened while on vacation in Paris or what happened at grandma’s funeral, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can also write fiction. Let’s examine story telling more closely.

Here’s a husband telling a story to his wife:

“You’ll never believe what happened,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“I got a ticket,” he said.

“What happened?” she said.

“I made an illegal right hand turn.”

“Where?”

“Corner of PCH and Catalina, but the sign is new.  I always made a right there.”

“Are you going to fight it?”

“No.”

“Online traffic school?”

“Yeah.”

“Bummer.”

End of story.  He told his story, and that’s that.  It really wasn’t much of a story, but we tell these kind of stories all the time in order to vent, share experiences, communicate information, and to entertain.  And some of these can be transformed into stories, and that’s where the art and craft of fiction writing enters.  But before I get to that.  Here’s another aspect of human story telling.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who’s telling you something crucial to her life, but you have no idea what she’s really talking about? Do you ever get confused about what went on in her story, or you wonder what her point is?  Uh huh.  We’ve all had those experiences, and we usually interrupt the story teller and say, “Who said that?” or “What does that have to do with anything?” or “Remind me who that person is” etc.  When we tell stories to our friends, we know what we mean, but sometimes we forget important pieces of info or we jump around so much that we lose track of what’s going on or we fail to actually make a point.  Hopefully, our listeners will ask for clarification, but when we write fiction, the reader can’t ask questions, and if the reader needs to ask those questions, she usually stops reading.

Though we all feel the need to tell stories, writing fiction requires more than telling our stories.  Confused?  Please stay tuned for more about the art and craft of fiction writing in my next post!


P.S.  It might be a good idea to keep in mind something that Lillian Hellman said:  “They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers.  If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”