4 ms·
Telling is lazy and ruins the immersion, so it should be avoided where practical. That being said, rules are meant to be broken, and one of the marks of a good
by beatgammit 7y ago
Telling is lazy and ruins the immersion, so it should be avoided where practical. That being said, rules are meant to be broken, and one of the marks of a good reader is knowing when to break them.
For the "nervous" example, I think it's far better to make the prose make the reader feel how nervous the character is. It may be more verbose, but it'll leave a bigger impact on the reader if you do it properly.
I really like Cormac McCarthy, and he does a fantastic job of using prose to create a feeling in the reader. When there's an intense action scene, words become simpler, sentences sometimes become longer (I've seen sentences span nearly half a page), and the prose moves along faster. When there's reflection/boredom, the opposite happens, with more complex words and sentence structure and generally slower moving prose. He's a master of using prose to convey emotion.
When I read something like this:
> He was nervous. Not the waiting in line to get your picture taken kind of nervous, but the first day at a new school in a new city kind of nervous. He'd been on dozens of dates, why was this one tying his stomach in knots?
I just think the writer was too lazy to paint a picture of the scene and instead expects me to do that for myself. I would much prefer something like this:
> He glances at his watch. 5 minutes to. He motions for another round. Sir, your table is ready. Thanks ma'am. Right this way. He checks the clock by the front door. 3 minutes. Plenty of time. He starts for his napkin, thinks better of it, then adjusts the vase. 2 minutes. He takes a sip, rolling it around with his tongue, and checks his watch. Still two minutes...
Or something like that. I much prefer to experience a story than read about it.
- watwut 7y agoI strongly strongly prefer the first version, the one you called lazy. The other is dawning the story in too many details that don't matter except for telling me he is nervous. It is the sort of stuff you skip over or stop reading entirely. It also kills joy of story, because the story is hidden behind too many irrelevant details. ------ On that matter, I think that "it is lazy" argument does not make sense and on itself is lazy. I care about how it reads and feels. I honestly don't care whether author worked hard. As far as I am concerned, author could write an hour a day sunbathing the rest if I like the result. Authors don't have to do things the hardest way possible for me. If it was easy to write I am ok with it assuming it is easy to read.
- summerdown2 7y agoTo me, the two versions here don't seem like 'showing' vs 'telling,' but interior monologue vs exterior view. I prefer the first example, and read it as a window into the character's thoughts. It's very much showing to me, but done through character voice and thought.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI agree with 'watwut and strongly prefer the first version. One additional insight: the first version lets me actually imagine the feeling. "Not the waiting in line to get your picture taken kind of nervous, but the first day at a new school in a new city kind of nervous" is something I can relate to. Checking time and shuffling vases? That's not how I usually experience nervousness, and it also gives me less information about what kind of nervousness the protagonist is experiencing.
- cryptonector 7y agoRight, there's that as well. Because we experience nervousness differently, you might as well tell the reader that the character is nervous. Again, I take "tell" to be about characters telling the reader important details by unnecessarily saying them in dialog to other characters.
- cryptonector 7y agoToo much description gets tiresome, sorry. I often think of Borges, how incredibly economical he was with words, yet still able to paint a vivid picture. I want prose to be as economical with words as possible. The reader's (my!) time is valuable, so the author should not take too much of it. Boring the reader, risks losing the reader.