In Praise of Telling

Last Saturday I went to a writer’s workshop on the subject, “Show, Don’t Tell.” I’ll tell you up front that I felt hostile even as I drove there. During the past few years, I’ve been thinking about the importance of telling in fiction and poetry, and I’m tired of being told not to tell.

Beginning writers are instructed to avoid telling. For the most part, it’s good advice. Having been involved in school literary magazines, I’ve read countless poems that go something like this:

Missing you
I cry
all the memories
of time we spent together
too painful
gone forever.

That's crappy. poetry. It’s full of abstract language and the reader doesn’t get a sense of who the speaker is or why he or she cared about the other person. So beginning writers are taught to use concrete details, and show whether the “memories” involve kissing in the autumn sunlight, bowling together, or slouching in front of the TV while eating chips and salsa. When young writers start to use concrete details, their writing becomes more vivid, and they start to develop distinctive voices.

But in all of this, telling got a bad reputation. In the workshop I went to, the speaker kept talking about how to avoid telling, as if telling were always bad. But at this point in my writing life, I know how to use details. Instead of writing “He was angry,” I know to show a character clenching his fist, or kicking the dog. As she spoke, I kept jotting counter-examples in my notebook. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments,” for example. Someone should have told Shakespeare to stop telling! “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Et tu, Elizabeth Bishop? Are these poets hereby unmasked as bad writers, guilty of—gasp!—telling?

I believe that we read literature to get drawn into scenes and into the lives of characters, but we also read to discover an author’s summation of experience, gathered neatly together into words we might not have used. Today, I finished reading Gilead, the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Marilynne Robinson. Towards the end, the narrator says, “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

According to the show-don’t-tell school of thought, that sentence is a failure; it has a weak start (“There are”) and contains not a single concrete detail. And yet at that point in the book, the sentence is beautiful and moving. It’s the sort of sentence I want to copy and post near my desk.

What makes good telling? I wish I could sit down with a group of people and discuss that over coffee. As near as I can puzzle out, good telling uses abstract but original language. When John Donne says, “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,” his direct address to death gives the poem vigor, despite its lack of imagery; the narrator is directly challenging Death’s power. I would also argue that good telling is usually mixed with showing. Gilead contains a lot of telling, but there are also details—fried-egg sandwiches, a woman’s blue dress—that ground the story.

I know it’s not fashionable to talk about telling in writing. But I believe that if writers are to move and enlighten their readers, they have to be brave and creative enough to venture into the world of abstraction.

I’ll leave you with the opening lines of “Field Flowers,” a poem by Louis Gluck, one of my favorite poets. The largely abstract poem drew me in so much that after reading it in The New Yorker in 1992, I went out and bought The Wild Iris, the collection from which it comes. The poem is told from the perspective of flowers, who are addressing a human being standing among them:

What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that?

I love Gluck's poems for their combination of imagery and ideas. She has shown me that literature can be both physical and metaphysical, both showing and telling. The highest art is not one or the other, but both.