An Argument for Telling, Not Showing.
A writing question, answered.
I am writing my first novel in first-person, present tense. I’ve sent my first few chapters around to family, friends, and two other aspiring authors. Everybody says they love it, so far! But one of the writers constantly telling me, “More show, not tell.”
But I like the way it is written!
I’m not saying there aren’t scenes where my novel could use more show, but I don’t think it belongs in every single scene.
Alle sez:
A great observation about your writing practice. Let me take my responses to your thoughts one at a time:
“Show, Don’t Tell”:
A primary pitfall of telling what is going on rather than showing it through scene is that the pages risk coming across like sketches of ideas for the book rather than a series of interlocking, escalating scenes that create a chapter leading to the following, higher-stakes chapter of interlocking, escalating scenes.
Telling is a grocery list. Showing imbues the writing with every expectation of the meal: physical, emotional, and spiritual
There is a place for telling over showing. For example: condensing long years with very little difference between them into a paragraph or two.
Also, “scene” does not have to resign itself to dialogue. Michael Chabon comes to mind as a writer with long, long descriptions involving no dialogue where he nevertheless uses the machinations of plot to develop characters, convey motivations, and further the story.
However
If you are jammin’ through your drafts, then more power to you! Any book’s first draft is called, alternatively, “The Barf Draft” or “The Crappy First Draft.” (I will spare you a graphic.) The goal is just to get it down. Until you have a draft, you can’t do anything: you can’t find an agent, you can’t self-publish.
My advice is: don’t show anyone your draft until you have gone through it at least three times; crappy first draft plus twice more. You will give your readers something thick and juicy to critique, and you will know your book well enough to understand how to maximize that critique. Feedback on a few chapters often leads to writing toward that feedback rather than toward the vision behind your book.
First-person, present tense
There is an immediacy to present tense that is compelling; though when you pair first-person with present tense, you are locked into what is happening to a single character at that very moment. There is little opportunity to build a narrator who knows more than that character does.
Shifting to past tense — even if you choose to stay in the first person — allows for a narrator with more experience than the MC to guide the reader from a seasoned vantage.
The past tense allows the author to lead the reader through difficult situations, and into unlikable characters who, left to the first person present, might drive a reader screaming way.
You can read Carlie at her worst — for free — in a chapter of As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back that published as a short story; wherein we find seventeen-year-old Carlie, hungover, desperate for love and care, deeply suspicious that none exists, and furious about that fact.
