By Jeff Gerke
If you’re around fiction instructors very long, you’ll encounter the phrase “Show, don’t tell.” Telling is when a novelist simply spoon-feeds the reader information: “Jim was a lying twerp who cheated on his taxes.”
Showing, by contrast, is when the novelist reveals clues that bring the reader to the same conclusion. So, for example, a scene might show Jim at the front door of his house talking to some Girl Scouts. We see a wad of $100 bills behind his back, but when the girls ask if he’d like to buy some Thin Mints, he says he’s broke. Then he slams the door and sits down at his desk, shoves aside stacks of cash like in ransom movies, opens a dog-eared copy of Never Pay Taxes Again! and resumes filling out his IRS 1040—with lots of zeroes.
The Problem with Telling
Personally, I dislike telling in all its guises. I don’t like telling as exposition, telling as backstory, or telling to explain everyone’s motivations. I don’t like flashbacks because they’re usually just telling, and I don’t like long “Oh, glad you asked” conversations, which I call “telling in quotation marks.”
Telling is bad because it stops the story and forces the reader to receive information she doesn’t care about. But even I won’t say that telling is always evil. Indeed, in my Operation: Firebrand novels I invariably have a briefing scene in which someone tells the characters, and thus the reader, what’s going on and what has to happen. Isn’t that telling?
No, and here’s why: Telling stops the story and forces unwanted information on the reader. When the briefing scene comes in the Firebrand novels the story doesn’t stop—it can’t actually go forward without it. And the reader is interested in what’s going to be covered. Your reader will tolerate telling to the degree that she is interested in what is being told and to the degree that the story can’t advance without the information.
Let’s say you’ve got a character who plays pro football. You’ve gotten us interested in his life and challenges. But then you launch into the story of his childhood. This doesn’t work because we don’t care about his childhood. So it’s telling because you’re stopping the story to tell us things we don’t care about and without which the story could proceed quite nicely.
But what if our player had been injured just before the big game and you have the doctor come in and tell us what the prognosis and treatment plan is. Is that telling?
It’s not telling because the reader wants to know and the story can’t go on until we learn this information. Your reader will tolerate exactly the amount of telling as interest in the topic you’ve built up in said reader.
Think of it as a bank account. If you give us zero deposits into our “interest account” on a topic and then try to make a massive withdrawal (by making us listen to exposition on a topic about which we have zero interest), you’ll be instantly overdrawn and you’ll get nasty letters from your banker, or in this case, you’ll get the disinterest of your reader.
Ah, but if you’ve made numerous deposits into that interest account and now you want to tell us a little about it (but be sure it’s something we must know to advance the story), then go ahead and make that withdrawal. But be careful: you might have deposited three units of interest into that account, but if you try to withdraw an amount of telling that requires four or more, you’ll be overdrawn again. You can blow the whole amount you’ve built up simply by lingering too long in telling mode.
When Exposition Works
A good example of this formula done right is in Star Wars: Episode I. We’ve had lots of action and adventure in the movie before we ever have a long exposition scene. We finally get one when Anakin has taken Qui-Gon and Jar-Jar and Padme to his house so Mom can make Jawa Bean Salad.
If you watch that scene carefully, you’ll notice that they’re basically talking about what needs to happen, what they’re going to do, and why they can’t do it in other ways. It’s a talky-talky scene, which might’ve come across as a momentum killer. But it plays out fine and we get our bearings about what’s going to happen for the next hour of the movie.
There are a number of reasons why this works. First, it’s fairly interesting to watch. Qui-Gon catching Jar-Jar’s tongue is a classic moment. There are also interesting interpersonal dynamics going on, like Anakin trying to get his mom to let him race again and Qui-Gon starting to put his Jedi moves on Anakin’s mom. So it’s not just pure exposition.
Second, we’re interested. How are our heroes going to get off this planet? How is this pure-hearted boy who loves his mom ever going to become Darth Vader? Why do we think Padme is more than she seems? The writer has built up enough interest in this moment that we can bear hearing a bit of jabber (the Hutt).
Third, the story simply can’t proceed without this information. The characters are stuck. But in this scene they come up with a plan for how to move forward.
Fourth, this scene comes pretty deeply into the story. The writer didn’t try to give it to us within the first ten minutes of the movie. We’re fully engaged in the story before it comes. Lots of aspiring novelists I work with like to explain everything within the first 20 pages, feeling, perhaps, that once all that’s out of the way they can get on with the story.
But the Star Wars scene works. The formula is honored and the exposition is successfully communicated.
How is it in your story? Are you asking your reader to stomach large (or even small) quantities of telling about something in which she has zero interest? And I mean story interest here. A reader might be inherently interested in the inner workings of the internal combustion engine—but she might not be. You can’t assume your reader will automatically be interested in something just because you put it in a book. You have to make the reader interested in the subject by making it important and interesting inside your story.
Chances are, the six people who enjoyed Operation: Firebrand—Crusade were not, before they read my book, terribly interested in the plight of persecuted Christians in Sudan. But it was my job as a novelist to get the reader to invest in a character there so she would begin to care. When the time came for the briefing, the reader’s interest was high.
This is how technothrillers work, incidentally. And historicals. They educate as they entertain. But the education can’t start until the entertainment is in high gear.
You can give backstory information (i.e., telling) to exactly the same degree as you’ve built up reader interest in the topic and as the reader must know this information for the story to proceed.
Excerpted from The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction by Jeff Gerke. Jeff is a veteran editor and novelist who has been working in the Christian publishing industry since 1994. He is publisher of the small indie publishing house Marcher Lord Press and writes fiction under the pen name Jefferson Scott.
Flickr photos: whatmegsaid/ pagedooley
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