Back by popular demand for the third time! Seth Fischer’s Show & Tell seminar is coming up on Sunday, January 31, and there are a few spots left. We asked him some questions about the seminar, and you can see for yourself below that it’s going to rock. Email us at @[email protected] to enroll.
—We hear writers talk about showing and telling all the time. What do they usually mean?
This is precisely the problem at the heart of this seminar: I'm not sure if anyone really knows what "show don't tell" means. It means so many different things. Some seem to mean that showing is synonymous with specificity. Some seem to understand that you should write everything in scene. Some seem to mean that nothing should be explained and that everything should be inferred. Most of this advice is good in moderation; taken to its extreme, this advice will result in something very long and hard to read.
Imagine how bored we would be with a detailed account of Sherlock Holmes's nose hairs. Imagine Philip Marlowe if we had to go into the bathroom with him every time he brushed his teeth (which might, admittedly, have been rarely). Imagine Joan Didion recounting the loss of her husband without once "telling" us how he died. Summary and scene are more precise categories, providing us with a way of thinking about writing that we can actually use. One of the great challenges of writing is navigating time and detail with precision while not confusing anyone—thinking in terms of summary and scene is a great way to go about learning how to do that.
—Do you have an example of excellent scene? Masterful summary? A combination of both?
James Baldwin is really the master of this, and I'll give lots of examples in the seminar. In fact, I'll actually chart it out for you, so you can see it, and then we'll apply that to other pieces of writing, including your own.
But for the sake of this question, to give you a taste, let me start with the beginning of the classic short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor, because it does both so well.
"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy."
All this is summary. Some might call it "telling." Should a creative writing teacher have reprimanded Flannery O'Connor for "telling?" Maybe, but better to think of it as summary. And good summary, at that. It's precise. It captures the voice. It gives us the information we need so that we can know where the tension is and who the characters are. Then it moves into scene:
"He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal."
Notice here we are in a specific time and place and direct action is happening, which means we are now in a scene. We live our lives in a specific time and place, so scenes help us feel immersed, just as if we are there. And because of the summary, we have tension in the place where we are immersed. We have a sense something bad is going to happen. Then it continues:
"'Now look here, Bailey,' she said, see here, read this, and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. 'Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida ...'"
There. In just five and a half sentences, half of which are scene and half of which are summary, O'Connor has managed to set up the entire story. We know what's going to happen. Maybe not how, but we know what, and we want to read more to find out how. It's in the pacing of the summary and scene, of the way she deftly handles giving us information, allowing us to infer some things but to know others, and immersing us in a time and place. It's a trickier juggling act than you'd think.
—Is this seminar appropriate for both fiction and nonfiction writers?
Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster, Zora Neale Hurston—it's hard to find a master writer who doesn't write in both genres. That's because while there are different conventions in fiction and nonfiction, they take from the same toolkit. One of those tools is being able to write strong scene and summary. I'll use examples from both nonfiction and fiction, and you'll see that when it comes to scene and summary, nonfiction and fiction really aren't all that different.
Seth Fischer is a current contributor and former editor at The Rumpus, and his work has also appeared in PANK, Guernica, Best Sex Writing, and other journals and anthologies. His essay “Notes from a Unicorn” was also selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2013, and he has attended residencies at Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, and elsewhere. He is also a professional developmental editor of novels and memoirs. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where he also teaches.
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