Topic: writing advice.
Thesis: “Show, don’t tell” turns out to have a history that’s, let’s say, CIA-adjacent; but that shouldn’t stop us from recognizing its value.
Certain bits of writing advice grow so stale with excessive use that it becomes hard to even bring thoughts to mind when one sees them. Examples:
Write what you know.
Kill your darlings.
Show, don’t tell.
There is a part of me that, hearing the clanging of these phrases, puts its hands to its ears and sways in paroxysms of agony. The pain comes from the voice they possess in my head, the voice of the intellectually retired teacher, the one who believes he has found out that there is nothing to find out. At every moment, thousands such teachers pass these phrases down to young students, like commandments on stone tablets from heaven, and flatten them thereby.
Yet despite the intensity of my reaction, on examination it’s obvious to me that each of these do carry good advice. The sense of badness comes from the finality they seem to carry, a tendency of taking them to the extreme. Sometimes a rephrasing can bring out what is hidden in an often-repeated phrase. Let me attempt to do that here:
Write what you know—Ask yourself, “What is it like [to be this character in this situation]?” If you can’t answer that, write something else.
Kill your darlings—Practice non-attachment to the parts for the sake of the whole. Or: Don’t hold on to a word if leaving it out improves the sentence. Don’t hold on to a sentence if leaving it out improves the flow.
Show, don’t tell—Don’t inform them, pull them in.
This last piece of advice, to show and not tell, recently became much more interesting to me. The reason for this is that it was cited as an example of a CIA psyop.
This caused me to do a double-take. Show don’t tell, that bromide, that truism, a CIA plot? As it turns out, it’s more likely than you think.
The actual course of events, as you might expect, is a little more nuanced than the image that might come to mind: of men in black suits, hunched under glaring white light over a desk where sits a novelist with communist sympathies, the agents trying a hundred iterations of English words in search of the one phrase that will turn this young revolutionary’s ambitions against herself, turn her into an artiste effete and prevent her maturation into the voice of Soviet revolution.
What actually happened, per the research of Eric Bennett [chronicle.com, soft paywall], is that a man named Paul Engle formed the seed of this idea all on his own. He personally loathed communism, not just for the thing itself but also for its guise within the realm of art. Engle saw communist art forms as oppressive, stiflingly ideological, and totalizing. He wanted the art of the free world to push back against this, not simply by reversing the ideological poles of that style, but by becoming anti-ideological.
You might think that there is nothing inherently anti-ideological about “Show, don’t tell”. To a point, this is true: the advice applies the same way to a novel about hunting gophers in rural Saskatchewan as it does to a novel about slave labour in West African cocoa plantations.
For the gophers: don’t tell me how many gophers Nathan shot; show his thought process as he’s doing it. Show the sights and sounds of the hunting and killing.
For the cocoa plantation: don’t tell me this is happening because of capitalism; show the money exchanging hands, follow the flow of the pods to Western markets, paint a mental picture of the parties along the path as they deflect guilt away from themselves. And, of course, show the suffering, the human cost.
However, this has limits. If by “telling” we mean “writing about ideas, instead of experiences“, then writing about social justice messages becomes quite difficult indeed. In the cocoa novel, following the supply chains through the people involved is one thing, but how to explain all these relationships without getting into abstraction, even inside the character’s own heads? The gopher novel, on the other hand, does not have to grapple with this added challenge, assuming that all the author wants to do is relate the experience.
This was, indeed, what Engle was driving at with his Iowa Writers’ Workshop—the institution he founded that would have such a foundational influence on creative writing as an artistic scene and academic field. He wanted writers to focus on sensation and avoid abstraction. If his advice about writing made the cocoa plantation novel difficult to write, maybe that was because it shouldn’t be written—or at least, not written as a critique of capitalism.
Engle’s campaign against abstraction was an aesthetic mission as much as a political one. It was, of course, for the political aspect that it received funding from a front organization of the CIA. His mission was aligned with their Cold War aims of neutralizing art as a vector of socialist indoctrination.
Where does that leave us with the claim that prompted this investigation, that “Show don’t tell” is a CIA psyop? What would be the Snopes verdict? I’d say: “Mostly True”. While it is hard to trace the exact phrase “Show don’t tell” to Engle or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—it seems to be Vox that offhandedly drew this connection in a link roundup [link]—it is clear that Engle and the Workshop played a big role in pushing the general sentiment that the phrase embodies, and they did indeed have help from the CIA in doing so. But does this mean that, to fight off the malign influence of the military-industrial complex, we must reverse the advice and begin telling instead of showing?
When I think of fiction writers who are infamous for favouring telling over showing, I think of Ayn Rand. I can’t think of any other writer of enduring fame who is so committed to propagating a specific ideology in the pages of her novels. John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged is ninety pages long, and for all intents and purposes might as well be the voice of Rand herself. Yet Rand’s non-communist credentials are hardly in doubt.
What’s missed in the opposition to “Show don’t tell” on this basis is the reason it is so successful. When applied moderately, without stripping necessary telling, it naturally produces more impactful writing. Novels that, in service of communicating a thesis, ignore the sensory and emotional world of their characters do so at the expense of those characters. They prematurely end the life those characters would have had in the reader’s mind.
Coming at it from another angle, Cecilia Tan [uncannymagazine.com] writes that “telling” is necessary in fiction that’s set in a world that will be strange to the reader: without context, the senses and emotions of characters won’t make sense. This is an obstacle to sci-fi and fantasy; but it is also, perhaps more poignantly, an obstacle to novels describing the lives of anyone who is culturally remote from the mainstream. For example, a novel about a black drag performer in the 1960s Bronx will naturally benefit from, and at times demand, exposition in order to tell a story that’s faithful to that time and place. “Show don’t tell”, Tan argues, conditions audiences and critics to devalue such works, and thus creates an unjust barrier for them.
Tan is, of course, talking about “telling” in the sense of “providing information in a voice that’s not connected to the life of the mind for any one character”. I agree with her that this is often necessary. I don’t mean “necessary” in the sense of a “necessary evil”; it is simply necessary. A skilled writer will weave such exposition into the story in such a way that the character’s journey through the world also guides the reader’s induction into it, so that the reader is digesting the context and feeling the character’s life within that context at the same time, complementarily. Yet the necessity remains.
“Telling” can also mean “telling the reader what to think”. In my view, this truly is bad creative writing. If it is obvious to the reader that you want them to hate a certain idea, or a certain character, the reader will lose his sense of agency. Reading, too, is a creative process. Ultimately, a novel is a series of collaborations between the writer and each of her readers, the end result of which are interpretations that live on in those readers’ minds. To tell the reader how to interpret one’s novel as he reads it is, put simply, a violation of his boundaries.
In a more workaday sort of way, “Show don’t tell” is an effective razor for writing style. In editing, a writer can always ask: “Can I show this, instead of telling it?” That is: can I build my intended meaning here out of sensed and felt things, rather than out of concepts?
When (and only when!) the answer is yes, it is generally better to do so. Why? Because writing made out of sensed and felt things is more immediate. It draws the reader in by his whole self, not just his mind. Exposition may be necessary to help a reader understand a story, but it is ultimately feeling that will connect him to the story’s world. A reader may be separated from that world by cultural gaps, or by the gap that separates fantasy from reality, but even then it is ultimately a shared capacity to sense and feel that will link him to the fictional person on the other side.
This felt connection is what ultimately allows a creative writer to influence her readers in a way that formal, technical prose can’t. Creative writing has the capacity to sink deep into readers’ minds, and ultimately to change them.
This is what I explore in my book, How to Do Things with Stories. How to Do Things with Stories will be published on September 20. To learn more, including to read the first four chapters, engage the button below.