Tell, Don’t Just Show

The importance of fiction that goes beyond physical detail.

The standard advice teachers give students in Fiction 101 is “show, don’t tell.” This might seem like odd advice, since we typically think of telling stories, not showing them, but this writing rule, along with many similar constructs, came from a preference for the concrete over the abstract, and a wish to engage the reader’s senses.

Showing us a character is sad through concrete description is always better than simply telling us the character is sad, according to this sacred rule. Likewise, it’s not satisfying to be told that Jill loathes Tyler. We want to see Jill’s loathing acted out subtly, humanly, through action, word, and unreliably narrated inner monologue. This is what separates fiction from the essay—its ability to evoke a concrete sensory world into which we can step. It’s also the medium that allows an unfiltered avenue into human consciousness. Fiction presents qualia—the experiential texture of life—in a way that perhaps no other medium can.

So the dictum to show instead of telling might be a safe rule for the writer to live by for the most part. Writers must pay visceral attention to physical detail. It matters the way a character scratches the side of her nose every time she gets nervous or tells a white lie to escape an awkward confrontation. It matters that the local bum plays the harmonica every time he gets tipsy, and that the rifle above the mantel is a little off-kilter at the beginning of the story, slanting downward towards the partygoers in ominous foreshadowing.

Physical detail is the lifeblood of good fiction. It’s largely what separates fiction from other mediums. One of the worst things a writer can do, then, is directly tell the reader what’s happening in a story or offer direct insight into the book’s deeper themes. Ultimately, “show, don’t tell” is wrapped up with another holy dictate: “Don’t moralize!” Telling readers how to think and feel is a violation of the literary contract.

I was a disciple of this rule when I started reading some older books for my classes at Wheaton College, most notably The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We read this book, fittingly, for Existentialism class. And I soon noticed that Dostoevsky, the knucklehead, appeared to break the rule.

The Russian novelist’s magnum opus is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, if not the greatest. It follows the intertwined lives of three brothers, Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri, who each approach the world differently and yet are bound together by their namesake. “I too am a Karamazov.”

It's a terrific, provocative book about morality, free will, and the question of God, and while it’s clearly a narrative with plenty of physical description, drama, and plot, I eventually put the book down and sort of frowned to myself, thinking, Hmm. There seems to be an awful lot of “telling” happening in the world’s greatest novel. And I kind of like those parts.

Father Zossima, a monk at the monastery where the young Alyosha resides, pontificates for pages about God’s love, the sacredness of the world, and how the mystery of life must be fully embraced. Basically, Zossima sermonizes. Take, for instance, this passage from the third chapter of Book Six, titled “Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima”:

“Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things” (p. 293).

We obviously live in a different world than Dostoevsky. In his time, Christianity still enjoyed cultural consensus about its place and influence, despite the incoming tides of materialism, atheism, and Marxism. He could take for granted that Zossima’s words would be better received in his own day, while we in contemporary America no longer have a cultural consensus about moral truth. But that doesn’t mean we no longer need the moral wisdom of Father Zossima. If stories just show and never tell, or are too subtle in the revelation of their themes, they miss out on some of the medium’s possibilities.

And, for all the talk about showing instead of telling, contemporary fiction isn’t immune from sermonizing, and doesn’t usually manage to weave the “telling” and the “showing” as powerfully as Dostoevsky did. There is such a thing as propaganda disguised as fiction, and it shows in the many modern novels that are merely perches for some ideological perspective. Polemicists might be persuasive and effective writers, but, despite what the postmodern framework and its ivory tower defenders tell us, literature can’t always be boiled down to power struggles. Literature is not the same thing as activism. Although Leo Tolstoy’s moral vision inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in their calls for social justice and peaceful protest, Anna Karenina doesn’t read like a campaign pamphlet. It demonstrates the complexity of human character, garners our empathy, and makes way for genuine understanding.

The emphasis on showing over telling may well have emerged as a reaction against more didactic and moralistic writing, but—to take a cue from the Russians—authors still need a compelling moral vision to write enduring work. In the end, there’s no escaping worldview—it’s going to bleed into the stories we write no matter what we believe, and, in time, those stories will help create and cement the worldview of the culture. The question is, do today’s writers have anything greater than politics to ground them? And, if we no longer have a transcendent moral order to draw from, to what does fiction ultimately point?

Anton Chekhov said that the artist’s main task is not to answer the question but to ask it. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky leave us with many questions to ponder, and we all have to reach our own conclusions. Sure, they show us characters in action, describe scenery, and bring the world of the senses to life. But they also show us the world behind the visible one—the complex, ever-present world of morality and choice—and they bid us enter it with an open and receptive mind.