In your first book or seminar on writing, you probably heard the admonition: Show, don’t tell. Storytellers tell stories, don’t they? How can they show their stories? The distinction lies in how we tell our stories. Obviously, telling is necessary. The goal is to make our audience see what happens as if they were part of the event, the point-of-view character in the scene.
In his book Let There Be Light, Joe Giovanelli describes what his life as a blind person is like. The style is telling. Let’s look at how we might show what happened.
Here’s a great paragraph by Joe Giovanelli:
The one really pet peeve I have runs like this: I’m in a restaurant with a friend. The server takes my friend’s order and asks: “What does he want?” A lot of my friends know to tell the server words to the effect: “I don’t know what he wants. You’ll have to ask him.” I used to get really irritated but now I kinda laugh to myself.
Here’s how we might do more showing instead of telling:
In a restaurant, the server took my friend’s order. Silence. And then she said, “What does he want?”
Why did she ask him? Did my lack of eyesight prove I had no ears or mouth? In fairness, maybe she wanted to say to me, What do you want? but then she thought I couldn’t know I was looking at her. She didn’t know how well I see her. By the difference in the direction of the sound of her voice, I would have known she was talking to me.
My friend said, “I don’t know what he wants. You’ll have to ask him.” Good job. He said the right thing.
I wanted to laugh, but I smiled instead. And then I told the server what I wanted.
Here are some reasons for improvement:
- The original paragraph generalizes with a “pet peeve.” In showing, we want to avoid generalization and focus on a specific event.
- Saying someone was peeved doesn’t deliver the feeling of being peeved. By showing the experience, readers understand what happened and can feel a little peeved.
- What happened in the moment after the waitress took the friend’s order? To show how the blind man was seeing the conversation with his ears, we need to add the word “silence” to show an awkward pause where the waitress is trying to figure out how to address a blind man.
- In telling, the audience has to figure out the subtext. What was everyone thinking? In the blind man’s deep point of view, we can have a picture of what he was thinking and have a suggestion on what was going on in the minds of the others.
- For dialog that isn’t spoken, as in What do you want? we want to use italics rather than quotation marks.
- What is a “kinda laugh”? To show his emotion, we should write that he wanted to laugh but just smiled. So now we know how the man feels, something the waitress never saw.
