FOLLOW MY NEW BLOG FINEISH

Roger Dean | Teddy Bear Chair | ca. late 1960s

“The ‘Teddy Bear Chair’ was literally just sitting there, demanding its obvious right to exist. I couldn’t resist it.”

Back in January, I did a whole post on when it is appropriate to “tell” something instead of “show” it. I talked about the difference between showing and telling, about how telling actually has in important role, and gave eight reasons you should use telling instead of showing. I touched on the fact that some telling is done better than others and also promised that in a future post I would give some pointers on how to tell well. Today is that future. If you need a refresher of my post on telling, don’t hesitate to give it a glance over. In it, I gave this example of how boring, monotonous, and ineffective telling can be:

They went to their friend’s house to see some cats. They liked them a lot. When they got tired, they called their mom to pick them up, but their mom couldn’t come for two hours. It was cold out, so they went inside and got something warm to eat. Then they drew some pictures before watching t.v.

Ack! Who wants to read a whole story like that? Not me! One of the problems with telling is that it can be too vague and it fails to immerse the reader in the story. But that is an example of truly awful telling. Here are some techniques to make your moments of telling shine by lessening or overcoming some of those cons. One approach is to use showing techniques when you tell.

Appeal to the Senses

Good showing appeals to the senses. Basically, we have to appeal to the senses to really show a story. There is no reason moments of telling can’t appeal to the senses in a similar way. Appealing to sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch can strengthen your telling the same way it strengthens your showing, it’s just that with telling, it’s usually brief, or done in a way that seems “in passing.” Look at this example, which appeals to sight, sound, and touch, to see what I mean. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with arthritic slowness and spoke in thick strangled tongues … At night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the tires whining on the highway outside. - This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

Use Concrete Metaphors and Similes

Some telling doesn’t easily lend itself to the senses very easily, because of the subject matter that needs to be told. In cases like that, you can try tying in a concrete comparison to suggest a sense. Here is an example of my own. Since I’m dealing with an experience that is purely based on minds, I’m forced to do a lot of telling about it, but I try to make it more tangible by comparing it to physical experiences the reader can relate to: At night awake in bed, he’d remember her presence. How their minds had been connected, ethereal like spider webs. How just her being there brought a sense of comfort, like a childhood blanket he hadn’t realized he’d still had.

Sprinkle in Details

Just as you use detail to make your showing great, you can and often should include detail in your passages of telling. Mention a red leather jacket here or a specific cologne there. One way to combat the vagueness that telling often brings is to simply include more details. Again, not as much as you do in showing, but some. Detail makes the telling more realistic. Instead of just saying that your character’s friend was late to brunch, mention in passing that she was late because she got pulled over for an expired license plate. One key to making this work is to pick significant details, or at least details that aren’t cliche. Read about that here. Here is a bit of telling that I wrote: Their mom had stressed the importance of eating dinner as a family, of stir fry nights and cloth napkins on laps; of staying home to care for James, Scott, or Alaina when they were sick, with steaming honey-lemon drinks and movie marathons; and she had spent bedtimes chasing away nightmares with a flashlight in their closets, all for fourteen years, almost like she meant it.

Elevate Your Writing Style

You can make the telling in your story better by making it more literary. Elevate the prose with smart word choices and by paying attention to rhythm and sound. You can also bring in the similes and metaphors, or better yet, extended metaphors that tie together. Basically you are finding a way to make what you are telling particularly pleasing to the ear or mind. You are making it poetic. I hesitate to use the word “poetic” because what a lot of new writers think is poetic is actually purple prose. Take a creative writing poetry class and study some poetry. In “The Love Song,” by J. Alfred Prufrock, we get some great telling about fog. Here is just one stanza: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

But if you aren’t into poem examples, here is another example from the novel Crossed by Ally Condie: In the night, it feels like we’re running fast over the back of some kind of enormous animal, sprinting over its spines and through patches of tall, thin, gold grass that now glimmers like silver fur in the moonlight. The air is desert cold, a sharp, thin cold that tricks you into thinking you aren’t thirsty, because breathing is like drinking in ice.

(Again, see how good telling sounds a lot like showing?)

Bump up the Tone and Voice

But the literary avenue won’t work for everything. If you are writing a comedic passage or an angry one, the poetic approach may (but not always) clash with that for horrible effect. Instead, bump up the strength of the tone. Pull in the narrative voice or let the character’s voice bleed into the narrative at the deepest point of POV penetration. Channel the emotion of the narrator or character and write your telling in ways that reinforce that. To learn how to create, establish, and control tone, read my article that explains how to do just that. To learn about character voice, read my post on that. Here is an example from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak that gives us both a strong voice and good tone: Earlier, kids had been playing hopscotch there, on the street that looked like oil-stained pages. When I arrived, I could still hear the echoes. The feet tapping the road. The children-voices laughing, and the smiles like salt, but decaying fast. Then, bombs. This time everything was too late. The sirens. The cuckoo shrieks on the radio. All too late. Misfortune? Is that what glued them down like that? Of course not. Let’s not be stupid. It probably had more to do with the hurled bombs, thrown down by humans hiding in the clouds.

LUKE QUIFF IS GONE

MICHAEL BLONDE HAIR IS BACK

ASHTON CUT HIS HAIR