Writing: Revisiting Characters - Showing & Telling Even Less: Show Less, Tell Less, Show And Tell Even Less (Part Three Of Three)
This week we’re finally going to wrap up this three part series with a post on Showing and Telling Even Less! And I should apologize, up front, for these posts being a bit didactic. It’s not that I think my opinion is the only one that matters, it’s just that I get passionate when I write about things I believe in. I’ll never demand that you do anything, I’ll just suggest (with gusto ;)
In case you missed any of the preceding parts of this series, they consisted of a post on Telling Even Less, Showing Even Less and an initial post from way back on the importance of Creating Character CV’s.
Basically, what it boils down to, now that we’ve covered showing less than you used to show less and telling less than you used to tell less, is the final bullet point in this series:
3. Showing and Telling Even Less.
This is a really cool concept, and one you may have heard elsewhere in a different voice or from a different perspective, but I’m fairly certain it’s one of the most powerful things you can ever do with your fiction. Showing and telling even less. And what that means, in a nutshell, is that you take your fiction and pare it down to the bare essentials, for a very important reason (which I’ll get to in a bit.)
To start, you want to look at two basic principles that mirror concepts from the last two blog posts on showing even less and telling even less.
a. Determine what’s necessary.
b. Determine what can reasonably assumed.
These two are easy to do, because you’ve already read the last two posts and you know that, in order to show and tell the very least, you just need to be able make sure you get a picture inside a person’s head by (per the points above):
a. Making sure everything necessary to create the proper frame is included in your writing
and
b. Making sure everything that isn’t necessary, or that might be distracting or confusing, isn’t.
Check out the first blog post on telling less than you’re already telling less for a breakdown of using sensations to replace thoughts and feelings in your prose. It fits with this, but it’s too tangential to break into here and is, essentially, the foundation for all of this anyway, because you want the picture that you paint with your words to not only be exact, but also to be as immediate and engaging (and sensory words are the best things in the world for that) as it can be.
Once you’ve nailed down all of those points from the first two posts, you can apply the principles above (pretty much exactly the same points as in the post on showing less than you’re already showing less) and apply them to the world of your story and every character that populates it.
Even though you’ve gone through all the trouble of creating your character CV’s, and really getting to know your characters, the world they populate and the story they’re in, you’re not going to reveal most of that information and, then, only if it’s absolutely necessary.
There are at least two reasons for doing this:
1. You’ll be able to pack a lot more information into a lot smaller space.
That may not seem like a good idea if you’re writing a novel, and it’s certainly a much more helpful tool if you’re writing short fiction, but it’s still a good rule to apply to long fiction. Your story should last as long as it lasts, and be as long as it is long. If you take a 200 page can’t-stop-reading motherfucker of an entertaining novel and pad it out to 350 pages with pointless subplots, flowery language and other fluff and filler, you’ll just end up boring the reader.
I’m not suggesting that you should remove anything that’s necessary in the larger framework of the story (even the MacGuffin has its place, if you decide to use it in an entertaining way to move your plot forward, and don’t just use it because you can’t figure out any other plausible way to move your story ahead, because there should be one or something’s wrong). I’m just saying that you shouldn’t make your story longer just for the sake of making it longer. Entire movies have been made from really well crafted super-short stories. Check out “Smooth Talk (1985),” with Laura Dern and Treat Williams (based on Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”). You can find the story online for free. It’s an extremely short story that made an entertaining 92 minute movie).
I can’t speak for everyone on the planet, but I think that most people would be more satisfied reading a really well-crafted and engaging short novel, than a longer novel that breaks down into a loosely-woven-together patchwork of fun parts and dull parts.
The next thing you’ll be accomplishing is:
2. You’ll be making your story accessible, and even more immediately engaging for, anyone who reads it.
The reason for this is simple. The less blanks you fill in, the more your readers’ minds will have to fill them in for you. This not only makes your writing less laborious to get through, and less heavy to read, but it also frees up your reader to make good use of their imagination while they read your fiction. This may seem like it would be perceived as COST by your reader, but it’s actually welcomed as BENEFIT.
If your character has a limp, for instance, that would be something you’d want to include in your description. But, if there was nothing remarkable about his (or her) walk, you could get away with just noting that lack of distinction in your fiction (or, even better, avoiding drawing any attention to it at all). Your readers will actually thank you inside for doing so, because, then, they can imagine whomever they want as the main character. They won’t be forced to think of a middle aged man in a starched pressed blue suit with a paisley tie set slightly askew and raven black hair that hangs down over his left eye and a nose like an eagle’s beak.
All of those details are great things to include in your work, if they’re necessary, or you’re going to use them for some reason or another (perhaps to offset opposing physical characteristics in your antagonist to slyly put them at odds with each other just by virtue of their descriptions).
But, and I can’t stress this enough (unless I just keep on stressing it some more ;) the more you can leave out, the better.
What town does your story take place in? If a real location, with real places that actually matter, isn’t a factor, just make up a name and put it somewhere on the map. The United States is specific enough if you even want to go into that much detail. The place, wherever it is, is the world of the story. It doesn’t really matter where it is, unless that’s crucial (like, if your story was about the Statue of Liberty, you probably wouldn’t want it set in China. Or maybe you would, if that distance, or difference in culture, between location and subject was part of the theme or conflict).
And the smaller you can make your world, the better. If your story basically takes place, let’s say, in a bar and some guy’s apartment, those are the only two places you really need to flesh out at all. Maybe the surrounding neighborhood in which they both exist, but you can also intimate those things from the descriptions of the two main locations.
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, never describe anything.
And here we come with an example. First of all, the original paragraph:
EX: Bob brushed the auburn hair from his eyes as he sat down on his favorite leather bar stool at Frank’s Bar & Grill. He had a rigid nose and a thin build. His face was gaunt. He wore his hair medium long and liked to dress in bright colours. Some of the people who were already there were dressed in suits and some were dressed in jogging pants. Most of the people there were dressed in dirty blue jeans and denim jackets. The bartender, Frank, was wearing a bow tie and he had a bad attitude. Bob looked around and ordered his drink, which he always did after making sure that the place he was seated at was reasonably clean and that he would be getting his liquor in a pristine shot glass.
I could go on and on with that miserable prose, but I like you all too much to torture you any longer. You’ll notice that a whole lot of the first example is just description, obvious showing, obvious telling and that it lends nothing significant to the story except one or two small details that may or may not be necessary (Bob’s a neat freak. The bartender’s not a people person). In fact, if I were actually writing that story, and it wasn’t about the other people at the bar, or the bar itself, I’d probably never revisit those other folks I just described, and you’d wonder why the whole rest of the story, if you bothered finishing it. Also, I’ve told you exactly how my character looks and the way he acts. So much for your imagination. You also don’t really have any sense of the mood of the story after reading that paragraph and you don’t have a clue where it might take you. And (even though it’s perfectly acceptable), I wrote the example in third person, when it would be much more engaging in first person. Now, let’s get rid of all that and see what we end up with:
EX: Frank’s Bar & Grill was the kind of dive you stumbled into when you were either out of options or you longed for the verbal abuse of a dysfunctional family life. Tonight I was missing the latter. Tonight, I was looking for a beating. Scanning the bar, it looked like half the town was, too. Frank slammed down a dirty shot-glass of bottom shelf liquor in front of me. By the time I got around to giving him a dirty look, he was already gone.
Not super-fantastic, but now you have something that imparts the same basic information, all useful, and you have a better sense of the world of the story, the world of the main character and the mood and theme of the story.
And, perhaps most importantly, your imagination is brought into play immediately. This is crucial, because one of the reasons people still read books, when they can just watch TV or go to the movies, is that reading engages the imagination. It’s a medium that doesn’t necessarily dictate exactly how everything looks and doesn’t instruct you to shut down your brain and just watch as things happen (I love film, so that was a pretty harsh comparison, but I mean it in the best way possible. Lots of things in film can engage your imagination, just not the mundane details. In most decent movies, even the minutiae of the setting is there to create, or add to, the mood). And people love to use their imagination. When was the last day you didn’t space out for a second and daydream when you got bored? I do it at least five or six times a day, if I was going to pretend I actually counted.
And that, for the love of everything good and holy, is the final part of the “Show less, tell less, show and tell even less” trilogy of bullet points!
Engage your reader with as little information as possible. Make sure they know your story. Make sure they know the things they need to know about the people and things in it. Let them take over from there.
It’s still your job to have your character go through some sort of change arc, and the plot needs to develop and be interesting, etc. There’s plenty to do to fill up your pages. But, by showing and telling even less about the things, people and places in your story, you’re actually making your story, or book, even bigger than it is, because it’s going to be a different experience for every single reader.
Everyone who reads your book is going to be reading “their” book. And they want that more than they want you to tell them exactly how everything should be. And, by removing unnecessary information, you’ve made your book accessible to, and more engaging for, pretty much every reader out there.
The people who read your work will all take away something different from it. Sure, you should have a theme, and a message, that you’re getting across, but the learning of that lesson, contained in your story, will be experienced differently by everyone who reads it. And that’s infinitely more satisfying than being told what’s what and given no options to explore.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, if you describe too much, it will almost literally kill any interest in your book that may have existed. And, I’m aware that work by authors like Tom Clancy might seem to contradict this point, but, if you check out their work, you’ll note that, although Tom will write 15 pages about exactly how a submarine works, when it comes to the story and the characters, he still leaves a lot of stuff out, because he knows, as well as anyone, that you want to be the hero of the book you’re reading. Or maybe the villain. It’s up to you.
Plus, once you’ve lost all that dead weight of unnecessary over-explanation, you can just write, and it’ll come straight from your heart, and your unique voice will emerge with even greater strength.
And nothing is more important than your voice. Odds are, whatever your plot is, it’s been done before, and maybe even with the same clever twist, just slightly differently. The one thing that sets your fiction apart from all the rest (assuming it’s polished) is the way “only you” can tell it.
As always, I hope this post has been informative and helpful to you with your writing, and has provided a tool (or two, or three) that you can use (for your writer’s toolbox) again and again.
Best wishes to you in your writing and in your life,
Peace,
Mike