Scene or Narrative. Which works best, and when do you use them?
In any fiction-writing class, writers hear these words over and over, “Show, don’t tell.”
We were intrigued last week to see my friend Richard Wheeler, a first-rate novelist, declare that he believes in “Tell, don’t show.” He says it gets more story into fewer words, and cites nineteenth masters like Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad as models of telling.
What do these terms mean anyway? I don’t think most writers, even experienced ones, are quite sure. So we’ll venture a definition. Scenes dramatize what the characters do. Telling summarizes it.
Now, for fun, we’ll show you two short sequences of the same material, one a scene and one narration. The scene is from Meredith’s novel The Hummingbird’s Wizard, and she just now wrote the narrative. Which is better? You decide.
Setting: Wedding reception of the main character, Annie Szabo. Four characters sitting together.
Point of View: Annie’s.
Characters present: Annie. Madame Mina, Annie’s fortune-telling, Gypsy mother-in-law. Capri, Annie’s trapeze artist sister-in-law. Jerry, Annie’s oldest friend, andlike Annie, a gajo—a non-Gypsy. Capri and Jerry meet for the first time.
SCENE (show):
Capri zapped Jerry again with her electric smile. Another 20 IQ points down the drain.
She twirled her car keys around one finger. The decorative plastic was shaped like a bird in flight. Capri turned to Mina. “Ready to go home?”
“No, either are you.”
Madame Mina closed in on Jerry, and this time she meant business. The phony “You’ll come into money and live to be an old man” stuff disappeared. She scrutinized both of his hands. She turned them over and traced the fine, barely visible crease at the base of each thumb. The future tumbled before her.
She looked at her daughter, held Jerry’s hand, and pointed to the middle of his left palm. Mother and daughter argued in a foreign language, and it sounded pretty fierce.
When they got back to speaking English, Capri said to Mina, “You did it again. You skipped straight from page one to the end of a book that hasn’t been written. I hate it when you do that.”
“Big deal. What kind of mother would I be if you didn’t hate me sometimes? I’m telling you, heartache for everyone when you get mixed up in love with a gajo.”
“What happened to Love comes in all kinds of packages?”
“Some packages are wrapped in brown paper and go tick, tick, tick. Those you throw over a bad neighbor’s fence.”
Capri gave her mother a look. A look that all mothers know.
“Okay, okay. Stop it.”
Mina closed her eyes and ran her fingers over Jerry’s head. She lingered over his left ear and repeated the procedure. Her face did a 180-degree turn in attitude, and her wrinkles relaxed.
She tossed her hands up and said, “What can you do? We’re all crazy nuts. You two kids take a walk.” Jerry’s head was like a melon that had been pronounced ripe. It was a strange blessing.
Jerry and Capri disappeared into the shadows of our summer orchard. She turned and tossed Mina the car keys. When the full moon bounced off her sequins, Capri was a pulsing tower of light. Jerry had just fallen for the whole carnival.
NARRATION (tell)
Same setting, same characters as above.
Annie, Mina and Jerry sat together watching the Gypsy dancers. Annie’s new husband had staggered off toward the hose and put his head under the water.
Capri, Annie’s new sister-in-law, joined them. She sat down next to Jerry and asked him to rub her shoulders. She was stunning, and he felt the full effect. Capri moved closer to Jerry, lit a cigarette, and told him she was a trapeze artist, that the bar was heavy and her shoulders were killing her. She slashed her smile at him again. It was clear that he was a goner.
Madame Mina didn’t like what she saw. She and Capri argued about falling in love with a gajo, but Capri wouldn’t have any of it.
Mina sighed. She’d told Jerry’s fortune earlier, but she’d been on auto-pilot. This time she closed her eyes and really honed in on him. Something in the lumps on his head caught her attention, and she repeated the procedure.
She knew when the universe had its wheels in motion—she told Capri and Jerry to get lost and enjoy each other. One moment, when the moon bounced off Capri’s sequined bodysuit, it imaged them as one electric shadow. It looked as if Jerry was entering a new world. One of excitement and danger, both. The future was writing itself as they disappeared into the orchard.
IN THE END: Next week we’ll have plenty to say about these two versions. You may want to make in comments in the blog.
Pick one? Don’t think so—both have their uses. But exactly what uses?
About Meredith and Win Blevins
Dramatizing vs summarizing an entire scene depends (as many writers know) on how important the scene, and the emotions expressed by characters in the scene, are to the story as a whole; whereas an editor’s telling writers “show, don’t tell” usually refers to the short summaries evident in many submissions: “she looked angry,” “he seemed sad,” and so on. “Show don’t tell” is the most frequent comment written on rejected manuscripts, when any comment is even offered. In general, we hope writers will learn to replace such flat statements about an emotion with a brief showing of that character’s body language. This is often accomplished less by dramatization than by a sentence or two of vivid, original description. Among many examples of this technique, in Don’t Sabotage Your Submission I quote two lines by Jane Cleland that effectively convey the mood of a police investigator: “Detective Rowland began to tap his pencil….He was chewing gum as if he wanted to kill it….”
RIGHT ON, Chris!
Further note: If you can write words like “Detective Rowland began to tap his pencil…,” you are already in a scene.
–Win
RIGHT ON, Chris!
Of course, if you can write something like “Detective Rowland began to tap his pencil,” you’re already in a scene.
–Win
The dialogue moves the story forward faster and in a more meaningful way. The second version has its uses, too. I think writers need to decide what the goal at the moment is and then decide which method to employ. What I particularly love about Meredith’s writing is her choice of verbs. Take note: go beyond the thesaurus to write like this!
I think of narration as essential connective material, providing things info, etc., and scenes as the emotional juice. There’s a reason they call it “the obligatory scene,” not “the obligatory narration.”
Win
Howdy, both are used. The ‘show’ is singing a song with movement, expression, deep emotion and with a hint to engage your own senses as you read it. I would use that in my romance, poetry, fiction and any time I want to convey the real feelings in the action or description.
The ‘tell’ is similar to one singing a song but sitting at the table; without the flourish and extrapolation. Perfect for detective, scientific facts, lead ups to intense emotion such as in war, murder, and high intensity descriptions.
In my bio on Liver Eating Johnston, I write about his cohorts spreading the word that Johnston devoured 8 buffalo in one winter by himself, and the bones were tossed with no regard out the side of the dugout.
In fiction, Johnston had such energy, though eyebrows were raised, he took his time on his buffler tongue, hump and back ribs, then spending the evenings repairing his clothes and traps, honing his knife to slice more off his stores hanging in the lean-to by the corral; because he was hungry. Hungry all the time. His mouth would water thinking about it , and stoking the fire, waddle off to cut out more. He sweated his summer through the flowery meadows and(I would go on with how and why and where….but drop hints…)
Dorman —
Absolutely right about how dialogue sings with a flourish. We like the picture of ‘tell’ that you painted, too. Certainly, scientific facts are best in narrative, unless two characters are arguing about what is fact and what is not!
Detective novels are terrific in dialogue. Robert Parker is (was) a master of dialogue that moved the story forward while giving facts. So was Raymond Chandler. Suspense, yes, that’s often better weighted toward the narrative.
Have to say, ‘Liver Eating Johnston’ is a terrific title! Thanks for sharing that with us.
Best to you, and come back soon.
M & W
Let’s look at it more technically for a moment. If you’re in a particular place, at a particular time, seeing and hearing specific characters, that’s a scene. For instance, this scene. “Paul scratched on his paper and scratched his head over and over. The equation had him stumped. ‘To hell with it,’ he said out loud, ‘I’ll wait until Dad gets home.'” Or this narration: “Paul scribbled the equation on sheets of paper and threw them away about a hundred times before he decided to wait and ask Dad for help.”
After being exposed to both of them, each makes the other seem a little incomplete. The “show” reads like a screenplay but the “tell” adds nuances that would otherwise be suggested in the film version. I would guess that the strongest approach (for a writer) would be to combine the best of each. Sturgeon did that pretty well. But then, I love dialog.
Paul Ambrose
Durango, CO
Hi Paul, our almost-neighbor in Durango,
Definitely, the show version here reads/looks like a screenplay. Part of that is our inability to get the spacing correct so that the dialogue scene looks as it did in the book. (We apologize for being impatient with our website, but we sometimes are… We can do better.)
You’re right, both are used best in combination. We can look at the Fletch series written by Gregory McDonald on one end of the spectrum. They’re told in 3rd person. But, so much of each chapter is written in dialogue that you forget it’s third person until the last graph, when the author wraps up the scene.
Then we have some heavyweight writers that eschew dialogue as if it were the plague. (And, sometimes when those writers do dialogue, you really wish they wouldn’t.)
Every writer should play to his strength, but probably the best reads are those, as you point out, that use a good combination of both. (We love dialogue, too. We’ve written screenplays, and that probably points us in that direction.)
Maybe John Irving could be used as terrific example of a well-balanced writer. His strengths are in narrative, but he is also a master of dialogue. Kurt Vonnegut? Terrific dialogue, with slim narrative that stands up and smacks you across the room.
Paul, thank you for joining the conversation. Please do so again!
M & W
Hello, Meredith and Win, xoxoxo,
I would say that both passages are actually a combination of showing and telling (as just about all writing actually is). There’s a time and place for both. But the second passage is much more telling and the first is much more showing. Due to the nature of the scene or passage–its being taken from the middle of the novel–it’s easier to understand the told version–the summary. But in the middle of the novel, the shown version I think would be more satisfying.
Patty, that sounds absolutely right on. (Hello, by the way!)
This can be a problem with narrative–if a writer wants to hurry their story along, a narrative (telling) can feel like a summary. And that’s not very emotionally appealing. But a beautifully written, poignant episode, can sometimes be told with lights blazing in well-written narrative.
We believe dialogue can speak volumes when it comes to learning the interior of characters. Body language, speech patterns, how other characters see each other–these are best handled in scene (show).
And, yep, what we’re all looking for, as readers and as writers, is a satisfying experience.
Please stay in touch with us. Your comments are wonderful.
Best — M & W
Think of movies. Except for voice-overs and crawls (words scrolling down), they’re entirely scene. A camera and microphone can only give us particulars, not summaries. And people love movies. So entirely scenic approaches are possible.
Elmore Leonard’s novels are almost nothing but scene.
On the other hand, nineteenth-century British novelists told their stories mostly in narration.
For big emotional climaxes, I think scene is essential.
Win