Writing Lessons from A CHRISTMAS CAROL: Show Me, Too

 

This week’s reprint is from 12/14/2015.

Writing Lessons from A Christmas Carol: Show Me, Too

Charles Dicken’s wrote A Christmas Carol during the earlier part of his career and, like any serious writer, he got better after that. Although it isn’t his best work, it’s a great story because it seduces me each time I read it. This desire to read a book over and over is the very definition of a classic.

What keeps drawing me in? Partly, it’s the style the narrator uses to tell the story—as we discussed in the last post. But another big plus is Dicken’s ability to show me what happens rather than just telling me.

At first, it doesn’t carry that promise. How do we discover that Scrooge is a miser? Dickens tells us.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and on his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

It’s fun to read this passage, with its rhythm and picture language, but I’m not ready to take the narrator’s word for Scrooge’s character. Dickens must have understood that, because he went on to prove his reliability by showing me how Scrooge acts.

First, he shows Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, trying to keep warm by the embers of one dying coal because Bob is afraid of being fired if he asks for another. Dicken’s shows Scrooge’s attitude toward charity when two men come seeking subscriptions for the poor and Scrooge says he does enough by supporting prisons and workhouses with his taxes. Dickens also shows Scrooge’s attitude toward Christmas in other ways: in a conversation with his nephew and his reaction to a caroler. After all that, we are finally convinced that Scrooge is a miser, and we either pity him or are angry with him for being so cold-hearted.

Dickens produces a different type of emotion when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes Scrooge to Bob Cratchit’s house just after Tiny Tim has died. He shows us the effect on Bob, who is walking a little slower but tries to stay positive for his family, and on his family, who are trying to cheer up their father while dealing with their own sorrow. I know the ending, and I still get tears in my eyes because Dickens does such a good job of showing the family’s grief. He does it without using clichéd actions such as wailing. His evidences of grief are more subtle: a mother setting down her sewing because she can’t see the stiches, two young children laying their cheeks against their father’s own, and a father kissing his dead child’s face.

That’s lesson two from A Christmas Carol. Usually, the lesson is described as “show, don’t tell.” Here, Dickens does both, and it works because he put a lot of thought into his telling passage. But the tell would not have been convincing without the show. So the lesson here is not quite “show, don’t tell.” I’d phrase it this way. “Tell if you have a purpose in doing so. But if you want to make your point, show me, too.”

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The picture at the top of this post shows Scrooge refusing to give a subscription to the two gentlemen who called at his office. The illustration was created by Sol Eytinge for 1867 and 1868 editions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The image is in the public domain because of its age. 

Flavor-Added Telling

I recently discovered a new author or, more accurately, an old author who is new to me. Her name is Elizabeth Cadell, and the first book I read was The Fledgling.

In some ways, I’m surprised that I liked the book. It begins with an omniscient narrator and long passages of “telling” rather than showing. Omniscient narrators have gone out of style because it is hard to do them correctly, and most sound like failed efforts at third-person point-of-view. Fortunately, Cadell gets it right.

She also manages to succeed with her “telling.” The longest passages come at the beginning of The Fledgling and soon give way to mostly showing. But the telling in the early passages did not bother me, probably for the same reason that I don’t mind the telling that often begins books by classic authors such as George Eliot and Charles Dickens. It’s what I call flavor-added telling because it is seasoned with salt and pepper and other spices.

The Fledgling is the story of a ten-year-old girl who was living in Portugal and is now being sent to school in England. Illness keeps her original travelling companions at home, so an acquaintance of Tory’s father is substituted at the last minute. Here are some examples of the flavor-added telling that Cadell uses to introduce her protagonist.

Tory, sent down before dinner to be presented to [Mr. Darlan], disliked him on sight, and resented being spoken to as though she was six instead of ten. But she had long ago perfected the art of concealing her feelings, and reminded herself that if he had not offered to travel with her, she might have been sent by air in the care of a TAP hostess, thus missing the novel experience of two nights on a train. After the exchange of a few polite sentences, she was permitted to retire, and Mr. Darlan, having no powers of divination, filed her as a mousey, well-mannered little thing, not pretty and certainly no conversationalist; one of those tongue-tied children out of whom monosyllables had to be dragged.

* * *

Young as [Tory] was, every servant in the house knew her discretion to be absolute; their secrets were as safe with her as hers were locked within herself.

* * *

[Tory] sat motionless but relaxed, her expression serious and attentive, her mind elsewhere, lending as always a dutiful eye and a deaf ear. She never fidgeted, never interrupted; she had never been heard to contradict. She agreed with everything that was planned for her, and made her own arrangements later, for she had discovered that the easiest way through life was to set out obediently upon the appointed path and then slip away down a side turning.

Cadell could have said, “Tory was a quiet child who kept her thoughts to herself.” That is pure telling, and it’s boring. Or the author could have shown Tory acting compliant in public but doing something contrary in private, but that would have taken more time. So she uses flavor-added telling to draw the reader in. Cadell announces Tory’s personality, as in pure telling, but also gives us examples that help us see her as a person rather than a description. And this element of “sight” nudges the passage closer to the showing line.

I believe in showing rather than telling most of the time.

But flavor-added telling has its own charm.

The Greatest Show on Earth

Did you know that it snows in the desert? Well it does. In some deserts, anyway.

When writing Desert Jewels, I wanted my readers to understand the environment—including the climate—where my characters were confined. So I added a scene showing their reaction when it snowed in the Utah desert.

I asked several middle grade students to comment on the manuscript, and a fourth grader said the book “kind of jumped around.” Unfortunately, I had to agree with her. I was trying to cover too much, and at times that desire took the story on a tangent. So when I edited the manuscript to respond to beta reader comments, that snow scene had to go.

But I still wanted my readers to know that the Japanese Americans at Topaz had to deal with snow out there in the desert. My solution? Tell, don’t show.

When I was done, I ended up with this:

December brought cold and frost and snow. But the snow melted quickly and turned the dusty streets to gooey mud that tried to suck the shoes off Emi’s feet.

Even so, I’m still a big fan of the admonition to “show, don’t tell.”

That’s why I’m reprinting a September 4, 2013 post I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog.

The Greatest Show on Earth

Why could Barnum and Bailey bill their circus as “The Greatest Show on Earth?” Because it was a feast for the eyes. They let the performers show the world what they could do. If Barnum and Bailey had turned it into a radio show, their fame would have been fleeting at best.

That’s also the difference between showing and telling when reading or writing fiction. Although the words are on a page rather than in a ring or on a stage, the reader still wants to “see” the action in his or her mind’s eye, not merely “hear” it with the reader’s inner ears. Or, as writers phrase it, “Show, don’t tell.”

Actually, this is a good technique for all writing. But it’s essential in fiction and creative non-fiction.

In Revision & Self-Editing, James Scott Bell describes the distinction this way.

Showing is like watching a scene in a movie. All you have is what’s on the screen before you. What the characters do or say reveals who they are and what they’re feeling.

Telling, on the other hand, is just like you’re recounting the movie to a friend.

Here’s an example. Let’s assume you are writing a children’s story about two boys who start out as enemies but later become friends. It’s near the beginning of the book, and the two boys get into a fight. You could write it this way:

Brian was angry at Jason and beat him up.

Or you could write it this way:

Brian rushed at Jason, knocked him down, and repeatedly punched him in the face. By the time a teacher separated the two boys, Jason’s nose was bleeding and his left eye was swollen shut.

In the second example, I didn’t tell you that Brian was angry at Jason. Nor did I tell you that Brian beat Jason up. But you knew it because you saw it.

Which is more interesting? I’m willing to bet that you preferred the second.

Of course, every writer needs to tell at times. Otherwise, novels would be longer than the Great Wall of China.

So how do you know what to show and what to tell?

If a scene is important to either plot or characterization, you should show it. To quote James Scott Bell again, “the more intense the moment, the more showing you do.”

Telling usually works better for transitions between scenes. As readers, we may need to know that your protagonist left her office and went home. But you don’t usually need to show her walking out the door, waiting for the bus, climbing into the bus, watching for her street, getting off the bus, and walking in the door. “Jean left the office and went home” is telling, but it gets her from one place to another without boring the reader along the way.

Don’t get fanatical about the distinction, however. Even most showing scenes include some telling. In the example above, why do you know that a teacher separated the boys? Because I told you. Another option would have been to say “a teacher pulled Brian away,” and we could spend years debating whether that phrase is showing or telling. There is nothing wrong with telling something in the middle of your scene if the reader needs to know it but it isn’t otherwise important to the story.

Ron Rozelle’s book Description and Setting explains the purpose of showing as “to let your reader experience things rather than to be told about them, to feel them rather than have them reported to him.”

That’s why Life of Pi is one of my favorite books. As I was reading it, my mind saw the violence of the wind and the waves on stormy days and the brightness of the sun on calm ones. But it went even deeper. The stormy days also had me hearing the roar of the wind, tasting the salt spray as the ocean pummeled the boat, and trembling as the small craft rose to the crest of each towering wave and dropped into the seemingly bottomless trough between them. And the calm days had me sweltering in the heat and smelling fish rotting in the sun. That’s what your writing should do.

Too much telling can make a good story boring, and knowing how and when to show can make a mediocre story great.

So go out and write the greatest show on earth.

* * * * *

The picture at the top of this post is a painting by Italian artist Gaetano Lodi, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886.