"Show don't tell" - the writing rule that causes most confusion

My wife, though an author under her own name and a ghost writer with over one million books sold, also does a lot of literary consultancy, editing and story polishing. One day, looking over her shoulder as I brought her one of many morning cups of tea, I saw another editor’s notes that she’d been sent. The editor had been working on a short story and had come across this passage:

Gustav had rather quaint ideas about how a lady should behave. To please him, I took to using an ivory cigarette holder and insisting that my champagne be served in a coupe, not a flute.

The editor seized on this as a failure to “show not tell”, and gave an example of how to expand it into a 250-word scene in which Gustav first presses that cigarette holder on the narrator. And that advice was completely wrong. Because the writer had shown, and very elegantly too in only 35 words. The telling version of that passage would have gone something like this:

Gustav had rather quaint ideas about how a lady should behave. To please him, I began behaving in a more sophisticated way.

"I was very afraid." "I am in love." "He dressed elegantly." That's the kind of writing you expect to find on a post-it on the front of the fridge, not in a novel. But here the writer hadn't told. She'd actually used the real strength of prose, which makes it a more powerful storytelling medium than any other. Turning those 35 words into a scene not only created a distraction that derailed the chapter - no, much worse, it smells fake. We know that one person's influence on another is usually more subtle than that. It doesn't happen in the course of one scene, and storytellers only think in those terms because they are used to movies.

There are two writing rules that often, as here, get confused. “Show don't tell” is a corollary of Forster’s “Only connect!” (the most important rule of all) and it means that the writer shouldn’t just communicate a fact, but must also make us feel it. “The room was very big.” Well, “The room was as big as a cathedral nave” at least evokes a mental image, though possibly, “The room was so big that it made Jeff feel as if he were a child being led into a classroom for the first time” is better because more personal.

The other rule, which I suspect the editor who commented on that short story was thinking of, is “make a scene of it”. This is a lot less of a hard and fast rule. In There Will Be Blood, for example, we might expect a scene of Daniel Plainview dragging himself back to town after breaking his leg in the shaft where he’s just struck oil. Instead, Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer/director, just cuts straight to Plainview on a stretcher watching the men he’s hired tally up his newfound wealth.

You’ve got to be a little bit careful about breaking the “make a scene of it” rule. Audiences can be mistrustful of things that happen off-stage and that they only get to hear about later. It’s safe enough if the scene you’re skipping would only have covered routine details that the reader or viewer can fill in for themselves. For example, at the beginning of Mirabilis #3 (below, fullscreen it to read) we cut straight to Jack standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. You don't need to see him pack a bag in Battersea, go and get his ticket from the Royal Mythological Society, dash down to the south coast and catch a boat – all that is obvious. But if we’d missed out the earlier scene of Gus escaping from Bedlam and just referred to it in a later episode, you’d have wondered if the info was kosher. And quite right too.

Show not tell comes in when, for instance, Jack balks at shaking Gerard’s hand in issue 1. Or later, on the beach at Selsey, when he remembers himself as a child watching his parents go off in a boat. Hopefully you empathized more with Jack then than if he’d simply stated his feelings – though indeed, dialogue can show instead of tell:

"This is it."

"This is what?"

"If I take one more step it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been."

(Frodo gives Sam a pat on the shoulder.)

"Come on, Sam."

The dialogue there is showing. It connects us with Sam even more effectively than a wide aerial shot of the two little fellows slogging across a big field, and certainly more than any factual statement of distance would have done.

My wife, by the way, has a thousand writing tips like these and she explains them a whole lot better. (I know, I know – but I’m a fiction writer. When it comes to talking about the rules of the craft I’m as articulate as Gort the robot.) Anyway, you can read more of Roz’s tips here.

London Calling

My wife Roz, in addition to being a million-selling ghostwriter, runs a thriving blog called Nail Your Novel, where she dispenses advice on the craft of writing. Most of the discussion there is about novels and screenplays, so I thought it might be interesting to see what Roz makes of a comic book. She certainly fits my definition of a casual reader of the medium as, while she might accompany me to the local comics store, she couldn’t find her own way there without a map and she won’t actually cross the threshold unless I drag her inside, preferring to poke around in the dress agency down the road while I’m sorting through the latest Dark Horse and Vertigo titles. Anyway, without further ado or indeed any ado whatsoever, here is what she made of London Calling by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page:

In a London flooded so deeply that nothing below the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is showing, a woman paddles a boat. She tells her three child passengers a story about Charlotte Corday, a French psychic agent who was sent to London on a secret mission. And so we flash back to the meat of the story. It’s the 1950s. Corday is newly arrived in London, waiting for further orders about her mission and avoiding a number of unsavoury folk who seem to know more about why she’s there than she does herself.

Ultimately the mystery is about vampires, which I thought was a pity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find vampires as interesting or original as many of the other ideas that were casually slipped in just for atmosphere.

But the strength of London Calling is not the story. The real fun is the richness of the world, drawn in a boldly inked black and white style with plenty of retro drama.

It seems to have diverged from ours around the Second World War, when Winston Churchill used psychics to tell him what Hitler was thinking before he thought it himself. Walsh and Page have had a lot of fun taking recognisable elements of London - both fictional and factual - and reweaving them into a punkish world of their own. Many ideas are used as throwaway textures in the background - for instance, Quatermass’s alien discovery is fact and Martians stride around central London against recognisable buildings such as the BBC headquarters in Bush House. Charlotte gets some of her orders when a TV puppet called Dennis the Donkey speaks to her from her landlady’s TV set (and, with fairytale humour, tells her switch off and to go to bed).

Charlotte herself is a likable and distinctive guide to this world, alienated by her Frenchness and harbouring a breezy disdain for the foes she meets. Her superiority and plain speaking in the midst of the madness is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Despite the slightly pedestrian vampires, it’s a charming and likable romp. London Calling is published by Time Bomb Comics. Walsh and Page have continued the adventures of agent Charlotte Corday in The Iron Moon published by Print Media Productions.

London Calling doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, but you can buy it direct from Time Bomb Comics. For comics cognoscenti, there's a longer review on the Forbidden Planet blog, and you can find out what artist Keith Page is up to (The Soho Devil with Christopher Fowler - looks intriguing) over on his blog. The Iron Moon is on Amazon (UK only) with the further - or earlier, or parallel - adventures of Charlotte Corday:

Writing 101

We've had posts from time to time about the creative process, so I feel justified in this plug for my wife's book Nail Your Novel, which is available free in PDF format on her blog. (You don't actually have to have an iPhone, she just took those photos to show it's perfectly readable on a small screen.)

If you're planning on writing a book - or a comic, come to that - grab it while you can. Roz sold half a million copies of her own books last year, so her advice is worth getting.