Show Don't Tell But Not Like That
they're teaching it wrong
One thing I’ve learned from completing a writing MFA and teaching creative writing classes is that teachers love to tell students “show don’t tell.” But teachers rarely explain why writers should employ this strategy, and they never break down what this phrase actually means.
A “show don’t tell” approach to writing isn’t about painting a picture—painting a picture is for painting a picture.
Show don’t tell is about making a reader experience a text.
Our brains are hard-wired to experience the world of a narrator. 21st century developments in neuroscience have proven what artists and writers have always known: we can experience real feelings through fictional works.
Essentially, suspension of disbelief is confirmed. When enjoying a fictional narrative, we can suspend our disbelief and experience real feelings. These real feelings are often the real feelings we’d feel as if we had experienced the experience ourselves.
This is a hard lesson we learned when we cried watching The Land Before Time, or like me at my first grade birthday party when (spoiler alert) dog cop Hooch died in the buddy cop movie Turner & Hooch.
We know movies and books make us feel real emotions. We also know when a syringe is on screen or a rusty razor blade is slowly dragged across a character’s cheek in a horror movie we can feel the character’s pain in our body.
It isn’t just our emotions that are stimulated—our senses are at play.
We can extend this idea to consider how all of our senses are stimulated by narratives. Yeah, we can feel, but can we hear or taste what we read?
During a podcast class in grad school, I wondered aloud how I might share smell through sound. I thought it was a pretty interesting idea. I wanted people to smell my podcast. My instructor looked at me like I was an idiot.
He acted like this was an absurd idea, that you can’t stimulate smells with sound—sound stimulates a different sense. Without even referencing synesthesia, I was not convinced that the lines between senses couldn’t be traversed.
Luckily—or unluckily depending on your perspective—I had taken a class on a psychoanalytical approach to film theory in which we explored embodied experience and the haptic ramifications of film. I was introduced to the work of Laura Marks, who explores how we can “experience cinema as a physical and multi-sensory embodiment of culture.”
Laura Marks elaborates on the power of film to not just offer visual representation of experience, but rather transmit embodied experience through multi-sensory stimulation. Though, she does warn about the pitfalls of intersubjectivity. When the distance between viewer and viewed is collapsed, the viewer become prone to the writing of social codes. She offers The Passion of Christ as film that makes viewers feel the suffering of Christ this viewer and become susceptible to “anti-semitic codes.”
Apparently, such a phenomenological approach to media was absurd to my instructor and my fiction and nonfiction classmates. Yet the poets in my class got it.
The poets understand the capacity of language to transmit experience not just ideas. Maybe poetry is a privileged realm.
Poetry has always explored the distance between representation and represented. By considering that all language and all art is metaphor, we understand that drawing the line between representations is incidental.
If all representations are not what they represent anyway, why must visuals represent visual experiences? Why can’t visuals represent smell? Or smell represent visuals?
We could get extreme and think like old philosophers and consider everything a mere representation, since everything is mediated by our consciousness anyways. Each object in the world simply points towards what it represents.
All novels, words, images are metaphors—they never can be what they represent. Our reactions to visual stimuli, whether film images or words on a page, are mental and physiological responses.
It seemed common sense to me—and to the poets (and probably anyone who has done psychoactive drugs)—that a text could cause our brain to react as it would from physical stimuli: although smell involves physical particles, these physical elements trigger mental processes. This is showing.
We show our reader so that the reader experiences the world of the narrator. Show don’t tell is just about painting pictures. Painting pictures and visual imagery have little to do with real showing, and in fact do a disservice to real showing.
If you’re my reader and I show you what a character sees but not how this character sees what they’re seeing, you see how you see and miss the point of reading.
I can say that my character sees the Mona Lisa and describe the painting in precise detail, but then you’re seeing the Mona Lisa. But if I show you how the character sees the painting, what this character notices, where their eyes wander, you can see this painting as the character see this painting.
I have nothing against telling. Telling is crucial. Most of this essay is telling. But when we teach writing, we need to define showing.
Though, maybe you simply want to paint a picture. Maybe you want something stale or neutral, distant and benign, without the nuances of human experience. Then why write? Use AI—it’s much more efficient.
When I show, I want my reader to experience something new, something outside their experience. When I read, I want them to be estranged from daily existence. So when I teach show don’t tell, I make sure that students think about why they’re showing before we get into how, because otherwise we aren’t leveraging the power of art. And what’s the point of writing fiction if we’re not creating new experiences for our readers.