HOW TO TELL

You know the old saw by now, eh, authors? Show, don’t tell.

This is probably the most oft-given advice to authors of fiction in any and all genres. Sometimes it’s focused around things like the dreaded info dump, sometimes drilled down to the villainized adverb, but this advice is as common as it is difficult to follow, especially in SF and fantasy, which require often significant additional worldbuilding context to inform why and how characters are moving through a unique imaginary time and place.

But as staunch a believer as I am in show, don’t tell, the fact is we often do have to “tell.” So then how do we do that—more so, how do we walk the often thin line between showing and telling?

For our last post of 2023, let’s look at an example of how to “tell.”

Sometimes—I’d be comfortable saying most of the time—a sort of mini info dump can be triggered by a memory, a moment in the experience of the point of view character. This is not just telling us (your readers) about some aspect of the world or the characters’ place in the world in order to “set the scene” or, worse yet, explain something. Something triggers this thought in that character, at that moment in the story. Look for those triggers, those memories and in-the-moment reactions that tell you when to tell, then keep it short!

To show you what I’m talking about , please read this example, from The Quarry by Iain Banks:

“Tea, Kit?” Pris asks.

“Yes, please. I’ll take the big blue mug there; on the draining rack.”

I have several special mugs; the blue one is the biggest. I have my own special cereal plate and spoon, and dinner plate too. I know this is a bit childish but I don’t see any harm in it and it’s just comforting. I kind of keep Guy’s cutlery and crockery separate too, nowadays, since the diagnosis. Before then I’d happily have shared stuff. I think it’s some deep instinctive thing about being around somebody very ill; you want to set up and maintain certain boundaries. This is the reason I didn’t finish Guy’s eggy mug concoction this morning, even though I like it too (another memory of childhood).

I know Guy’s cancer isn’t contagious; you can’t catch it off him, no matter how close you are physically or genetically, not even if you’re his son. That’s the thing about cancer; it’s all yours—it’s entirely, perfectly personalised. The cause might have come from outside—carcinogens in tobacco smoke or whatever—but that just triggered the runaway reaction in your own cells, and in that sense a fatal cancer is a kind of unwilled suicide, where, initially at least, one small part of the body has taken a decision that will lead to the death of the rest. Cancer feels like betrayal.

I take my big blue mug of tea and head up to the old servants’ rooms…

Something as simple as a mug the POV character prefers for his tea gets him thinking about his father’s end-stage cancer, which is at the heart of the book. This is Kit’s inner dialog, at a story-appropriate time. It, like his description of the disease, is “perfectly personalized.” The heart of show, don’t tell, is this:

Fiction is about the POV character’s personal, lived, emotional life, making any plot point, conflict, or aspect of worldbuilding relevant to that moment, literally that one sentence, in everything we write.

Maybe we should start calling it:

Feel, don’t describe.

Yes?

—Philip Athans

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