Stein on Writing (17 page)

A simple example most people have been exposed to comes from the fields of psychology and social services, where “interpersonal relationships” is an overblown expression for “relationships,” which means the same thing. The field of medicine is notorious for its jargon. This provides an opportunity for writers, particularly of comedy. For instance, a pretentious health worker might say, “This capsule is suitable for oral administration.” The patient might reply, “You mean I can swallow it?” Jargon is a marker of stuffiness. One must be careful in its use. A touch
is plenty. A surfeit of jargon quickly becomes caricature instead of characterization.

Certain throwaway words and phrases are useful markers. “Actually,” “basically,” “perhaps,” “I dare say,” “I don’t know what to think,” “it occurs to me,” “you see,” “anyway” are all words that can be cut unless you are choosing to use them as verbal tics of a particular character.

Tight or loose wording functions as a marker. “Beat it. Go home” is obviously tight wording. “I would appreciate your leaving now” is loose wording. They each give different signals to the reader about the character speaking.

Run-on sentences can be useful to characterize a nonstop talker:

“The minute I was through the doors of that store I was a fish in a barrel of minnows, my eyes bulging out of my head at the fancy vests, scarves, jumpers, prints, knits, it seemed as if everything was on sale except the clerks, and one of them, the way he came up to me and whispered in my ear, maybe he was too.”

Also sarcasm:

“Anybody who can spend money the way you can must be printing it.”

Or:

“You own the whole country or just this store?”

Poor grammar is an easy marker.

“If you was the last man on earth ...”

Diction refers to the writer’s precise choice of words for their effect. I’ve pointed out that when a policeman uses the word “perpetrator” it comes across as pretentious. When a teacher of young children uses the word “albeit,” that, too, comes across as pretentious. Literary work as distinguished from transient work is marked by a careful choice of words, but when it comes to dialogue all writers must attend to diction. Even the simplest of examples demonstrates how diction can differentiate one character from another. “May I know your name?” comes across as a
polite and perhaps excessively formal marker. “You, what’s your name?” sounds impolite and aggressive.

Spelling out pronunciations (for instance, “Anyone see my seester?” as an attempt to indicate a Latino accent) is almost always a bad choice. I would also like to caution against a use of dialect in which speech is differentiated from the standard language by odd spellings. Though dialect was used quite extensively in earlier periods, today it is seen as a liability for several reasons. Dialect is annoying to the reader. It takes extra effort to derive the meaning of words on the page; that effort deters full involvement in the experience of a story. For example, Cockney, a dialect of British English, is difficult for many English-speaking people to follow in film and TV, and on the printed page. Dialect is offensive to some readers. Moreover, people do not hear their own dialect or regional mode of speaking; only listeners from other communities hear it. That means you are reducing your potential audience by the employment of dialect. As a substitute for dialect use word order, omitted words, and other markers. James Baldwin made a breakthrough in fiction conveying the speech of blacks by word order and rhythm more than by dialect.

For many kinds of ethnic characters, in addition to word order and rhythm, errors in speech, particularly the omission of words, are useful:

“How you get so big?”

In addition, you can use the wrong verb, leave out the articles “the” and “a,” devise incomplete or slightly malformed sentences, use vocabulary oddities, and the occasional foreign word that would be understood in context. Content references can also help; for instance, in
The Best Revenge,
when the ancient Italian Aldo Manucci refers to actresses it is to Gina Lollobrigida and Anna Magnani. Note the construction of his speech:

“You a much big man now,” Manucci said. “In papers all time Ben-neh Riller present, Ben-neh Riller announce, Ben-neh Killer big stars, big shows. You bring Gina Lollobrigida here I kiss her hand. I kiss her anything,” he laughed. “Magnani, you know Magnani, she more my type.”

Manucci’s American-born son might say, “You’re a big man now.” Aldo says
much
big man, using an inappropriate modifier. He pronounces Ben in two syllables,
Ben-neh:

“Know something, don’t give half that much to one party even when I was king around here. Never mind. Nineteen seventy-nine dollar nothing. When you was boy, Ben-neh, five cents buy big ice cream, five dollars get someone off street for good.”

Note the details again. “Know something” would not be used by someone schooled in good English, ethnic or otherwise. Aldo leaves out the subject “Do you.” He doesn’t say “today’s dollar,” he describes it by the year. Aldo uses the wrong verb and leaves the article out. Not “When you were a boy” but “When you was boy.” And so on.

Small changes in speech can make a big difference in characterizing any speaker, but especially ethnic characters.

The addition of a syllable to convey ethnic speech is used effectively by Joe Vitarelli, an actor who has a strong talent for writing fiction. As a mob chieftain in Woody Allen’s film
Bullets Over Broadway,
Vitarelli refers to Shakespeare’s play as “Ham-a-let” and to a steak as a “sir-a-loin.”

Monologue, or direct address to the reader by a character speaking in the first person, uses the same principles as dialogue, though in self-characterization there is a great danger of making a character sound as if he or she were answering a questionnaire instead of talking. Even fine writers like E. L. Doctorow can stumble. The first chapter of
World’s Fair,
headed “Rose,” the name of the Russian immigrant speaking, starts this way:

I was born on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side. I was the next to youngest of six children, two boys, four girls. The two boys, Harry and Willy, were the oldest. My father was a musician, a violinist. He always made a good living. He and my mother had met in Russia and they married there, and then emigrated. My mother came from a family of musicians as well; that is how, in the course of things, she and my father had met. Some of her cousins were very well known in Russia; one, a cellist, had even played for the Czar. My mother was a very beautiful woman, petite, with long golden hair and the palest blue eyes ...

Doctorow’s monologue sounds as if Rose were answering a questionnaire. It doesn’t come to life. Here’s how a monologue by a Russian immigrant sounds when it doesn’t just rattle off biographical facts but reveals character, and has other features of dialogue:

Of course I’m a wanderer! Moses wandered, Columbus wandered, should I have rotted in the old country? Should I have stayed in my
shtetl,
a subject not only of the Czar but of every Cossack who wanted a Jew to beat? You don’t need to be an Einstein to know that nothing plus nothing equals nothing. I got out because in Russia the future is for others. If I’d stayed, would I have met a woman like Zipporah from a big city like Kiev? Would this woman and I have produced an impresario like Ben?

Note that in the above speech by Louie Riller, a character in
The Best Revenge,
the character’s ethnic background is evident not from defects in speech but from the content, including the use of one Yiddish word whose meaning is relatively clear even to people who don’t know it.

The art of dialogue is a vast subject, itself deserving of a book. Before leaving that complex subject, I want to add a word about dialogue of earlier periods for those writing historical novels or stories.

Historical novels placed in the Middle Ages do not use Beowulf’s or Chaucer’s English because both would be unintelligible to the contemporary reader. John Fowles, whose novel
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
takes place in the nineteenth century, points out that writing dialogue for an earlier era involves invention, not just research and mimicry. Fowles, in commenting on his own work
[3]
reinforces the point that dialogue is a
semblance
of speech rather than an attempt to duplicate it:

In the matter of clothes, social manners, historical background, and the rest, writing about 1867 (insofar as it can be heard in books of the time) is far too close to our own to sound convincingly old. It very often fails to agree with our psychological picture of the Victorians—it is not stiff enough, not euphemistic enough, and so on; and here at once I have to start cheating and pick out the more formal and archaic (even for 1867) elements of spoken speech. It is this kind of “cheating,” which is intrinsic to the novel, that takes the time.

In my dialogue classes I have often had some fun with my students by redoing well-known speeches of previous centuries in the argot of today. They not only sound absurd, but often the students cannot guess the original, though the content remains the same. I can convey the idea most
simply with an example from my baptism with the semblance of historical speech. My play
Napoleon
takes place in France during the early nineteenth century. Its cast includes the important figures of the time, Talleyrand, Metternich, and of course Napoleon and Josephine. In a confrontation between Talleyrand, the aristocrat who survived his kings and adversaries, and the upstart Napoleon, Talleyrand provokes the younger man into a flash of anger. Talleyrand couldn’t say “Don’t get so hot under the collar” or “Cool it” in the argot of today. He says, “Save your blood the journey to your face, I meant no harm.” You won’t find anything like that in any of the recorded conversations of the time. It is dialogue invented to suit a period, as John Fowles said, a form of “cheating” in which writers use a newly minted language to simulate an old.

P.S. An often overlooked advantage of dialogue in novels and stories is this simple: it provides white space on the page that makes the reader feel that the story is moving faster because the reader’s eyes move quickly down the page.

How to Show Instead of Tell

I
recall the time Shirl Thomas of the Southern California Chapter of the National Writers Club phoned to say that numerous speakers had advised their members to “show, not tell,” but nobody told them
how
to show. Would I address their group on that subject? That’s what this chapter is about: how to show.

When we’re young, before we can read, we get used to the idea that someone is “telling a story.” A child being read to can experience a story, of course, but the child is also aware of the person reading, whose skill as a reader is a factor, who may read too fast or too slowly, who cannot imitate animals as well as the child’s imagination can, who is in control, who can stop—unreasonably from the child’s perspective—when the child wants to go on. Important also is the fact that the child is hearing what’s happening in a book, as it were. If and when the child becomes an avid reader, when he controls the reading unhampered by a senior outsider, he is more likely to experience a story as an adult does. It is an active experience. It is not about something, it is something.

Growing up, the child hears from others about what has happened elsewhere, stories purportedly true, or gossip embellished by imagination. In school, the child is asked to write about what happened elsewhere, during the summer vacation, or at Christmastime. Stories are relayed rather than consumed as experience.

All of these early exposures to offstage happenings contribute to the belief that stories are
told.
They can be a liability to writers later in life because the writer has to change his mind-set from telling what happened somewhere else to creating an experience for the reader by
showing
what happened.

Twentieth-century readers, transformed by film and television, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience for a twentieth-century
reader is increasingly visual. The story is happening in front of his eyes. This transformation from stories told to stories seen should not be surprising. Who would deny that sight is our primary sense? We prefer to witness an event to hearing about it afterward secondhand. Which is why I urge writers to “show a story” instead of “tell a story.” One of the chief reasons novels are rejected is that the writer, consciously or not, is reporting a story instead of showing it.

The advice “Show, don’t tell” existed well before the age of film and television. Henry James gave that counsel.

The late John Gardner, in his excellent book
On Becoming a Novelist,
insisted that the one danger area for “telling” is what a character feels. That may be the most important, but it’s not the only hazard.

There are three areas in which the writer is particularly vulnerable to telling rather than showing: when he tells what happened before the story began; when he tells what a character looks like; and when he tells what a character senses, that is, what he sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Those are all places where the author’s voice can intrude on the reader’s experience.

What happened before the story began, sometimes called “backstory,” should be shown rather than told about either in narrative summary or in a flashback. What happens offstage can also be brought onstage and shown. This is a large subject, and is treated separately in the next chapter.

What a character sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes can be shown through actions rather than described. And feelings, of course, are best shown through actions.

Here’s the silliest way that “telling” crops up:

“Henry, your son the doctor is at the door.”

One character should never tell another character what the second character already knows—unless it’s an accusation. If this kind of telling intrudes, it is really a dodge for the author to convey information, which can be done subtly. For instance:

“Do you think Henry would look more like a doctor if he grew a beard?”

That is sufficient for the reader to learn that Henry is a doctor and sounds like something that one parent might say to another.

The following is a more common way that writers “tell”:

Helen was a wonderful woman, always concerned about her children, Charlie and Ginny.

There is nothing for the reader to see, therefore the reader feels that he is being told about Helen. Here’s an example of showing the same thing:

When Helen drove her kids to school, instead of dropping them off at the curb, she parked her car and, one hand for each of them, accompanied Charlie and Ginny to the door of the school.

We are shown Helen in action without being told that she’s a mother who is especially concerned about her children.

The reader wants an experience that’s more interesting than his daily life. He enjoys and suffers whatever the characters are living through. If that experience is interrupted in order to convey a character’s background, or anything else that the author seems to be supplying, that’s telling, not showing, a major fault because it intrudes upon the reader’s experience. Put simply, the reader experiences what is happening in front of his eyes. He does not experience what is related to him about offstage events. If his experience is interrupted, he gets antsy. “Telling” starts the reader skipping. Elmore Leonard said he avoids writing the parts that readers skip.

To better understand how to show instead of tell, look at some examples:

He was nervous
tells.

He tapped his fingers on the tabletop
shows.

Sometimes longer is better for showing:

I put a yellow pad in front of me on the desk. I placed a pen on the yellow pad. This is ridiculous, I’ m not going to write anything, just call.

That’s a character about to make an important phone call. The reader isn’t told he’s nervous. The character is given a nervous action. It’s useful to remember that an action can often show how a character feels.

Let’s look at the evolution of telling into showing in the following
examples:

She boiled water
tells.

She put the kettle on the stove
begins to show.

She filled the kettle from the faucet and hummed till the kettle’s whistle cut her humming short
shows.

She boiled water in a lidless pot so she could watch the bubbles perk and dance.

As you can see, we have gone from the general (“She boiled water”) to showing a kettle being put on the stove, which conveys visually to the reader that the character is boiling water. In the third example, the addition of detail makes the visual come alive with more action. Finally, a different approach to the subject matter adds characterization and distinction, bringing us a long way from “She boiled water.” The key to the improvement is particularity, a subject covered in greater depth in a later chapter.

One of the best examples I know of showing instead of telling is in, of all things, the series of television commercials for Taster’s Choice coffee that have become famous for their interest as well as their effectiveness. The commercials consist of extremely short episodes of encounters between two attractive-looking neighbors, a man and a woman about each of whom little if anything is known. The viewer immediately wants them to get together. And the coffee provides the excuse. In one episode, the man shows up at the woman’s door. To his dismay, another man opens the woman’s door. When we learn the other man is her brother, we experience relief (for him, for ourselves). In a later episode, when the neighbors are cohabiting, the woman’s adult son shows up, a surprise. In all of these, the dialogue is minimal and much is left to the reader’s imagination. The commercials are lean in the writing and subtle in the acting, in contrast to most commercials in which the writing is excessive, pushy, adjective-laden, and unbelievable in dialogue. If you get the opportunity, tape the Taster’s Choice commercials so that you can study them. They constitute a short course in subtle showing, in lively dialogue, and dramatic credibility.

In my novel
The Childkeeper,
some important scenes take place in a room that the children of the family call the Bestiary because it contains several large stuffed animals. In the first of these scenes, I wanted to make it evident that one of the children, sixteen-year-old Jeb, bosses the other kids around. I could have told the reader that by saying he was
bossy. That’s telling, now showing. Here’s how I was able to get the idea across by showing:

In the Bestiary, Jeb, sixteen-year-old caliph, lay stretched on an upper-level bunk bed, fingers twined on chest.

“Dorry!” Jeb’s command filled the room.

“Caliph,” which means the head of a Moslem state, conveys the “boss” idea immediately. “Fingers twined on chest” helps the image. And Jeb’s one word of dialogue seals the matter.

If a writer said, “Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool,” he’d be telling, not showing. Information is being conveyed to us. We do not see Polly. But the writer I quote below is John Updike, who shows Polly to us in a writerly way:

With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurtled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.

The author is showing Polly in her “clumsy jubilance,” hurling her body; we hear “the rattling board,” and see Polly surfacing, grinning through “the kelp of her own hair,” the last a marvelously precise image. Note that Updike didn’t say “her hair was like kelp” (a simile), but “the kelp of her own hair” (a metaphor), an excellent example of particularity.

When you stumble upon information in your work that sounds like the author’s intervention, try to come up with a simile or a metaphor that shows what you’re trying to tell.

Let’s look at another evolution from telling to showing:

He took a walk
tells.

He walked four blocks
begins to show.

He walked the four blocks slowly
shows more clearly.

He walked the four blocks as if it were the last
mile shows more by giving the reader a sense of the character’s feelings, which the previous version did not.

He walked as if against an unseen wind, hoping someone would stop him
shows most of all because it gives the reader a sense of what the character desperately wants.

One clue to whether a writer is showing rather than telling is to determine if the passage is visual. In WritePro®, the first of my computer programs for writers, there is a protagonist named Beth Reilly. If a hundred writers characterize Beth Reilly, they’ll produce a hundred different characterizations. The best ones, however, nourish our eyes.

One extraordinarily successful nonfiction writer, who tried her hand at developing a story with Beth Reilly, imagined Beth as the daughter of Irish immigrant parents, who at eighteen was crowned queen of the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day parade, received a scholarship to a fine college and went on to law school, only to have the ill fortune of being seduced by a married neighbor.

As you can see, that is all information passed on in a nonfiction vein. What the writer needed to do was to transform the information into a visual scene for fiction. Here’s the result:

You should have seen the blush on Beth Reilly’s freckled face as the Mayor tried to make the too-small crown stay atop Beth’s full head of hair. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune handed up two hairpins to the Mayor to keep Beth’s crown in place. It seemed as if everyone at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade expelled a breath of relief as good Queen Beth curtsied to the crowd and the crown stayed in place. They applauded as she was handed the certificate that would give her four free years at Boston College as her reward. That day it seemed as if she could want and get anything. What she got was a married man introducing himself by handing her an expensive bottle of wine over a fence and with him, a future she kept secret even from her priest.

That’s not perfect yet, but conveying the information with visual detail (the blush on Beth’s freckled face, the too-small crown, two hairpins) showed the scene to the reader. No longer is the author telling.

Showing need not be complex. Can you show merely by the use of color? One of the students in my advanced fiction seminar, Linda Kelly Alkana, herself a teacher of writing, started her novel this way:

Beyond the Arctic Circle, the color of cold is blue. But deep beneath the Arctic water, the color of cold is black.

That’s an interesting beginning. We see the water. And the change in color is ominous.

As I’ve repeated often, what we as readers want from writing is to experience it. Receiving information from the author doesn’t give us an experience.

Gloria Steinem quotes an Indian saying, “Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.” I’d like to amend that. “Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and you’ll involve me. Involvement is the first step toward understanding.”

If you are concerned about whether in any passage or chapter you are telling rather than showing, there are some questions you can ask yourself:

Are you allowing the reader to
see
what’s going on?

Is the author talking at any point? Can you silence the author by using an action to help the reader understand what a character feels?