A Labor of Love

The subject of rules for fiction writing makes me nervous. I hesitate to offer advice that seems a little too prescriptive. Rules can be broken, after all. And some of my favorite writers do just that in their work. However, one of my readers requested rules to make her a better fiction writer, so here we go.

Beginning writing courses will inevitably discuss the topic of “showing vs. telling” (“Showing” is an active technique–engaging the senses, whereas “telling” is much more passive.). The beginning writer will probably “tell” at times in a story when she/he shouldn’t.

We should resist “telling” our readers how our characters feel. Avoid peppering your prose with lines like “I loved my brother.” Instead, we should “show” readers this love through scenes. The development of the scenes should set up the feeling.

For example, let’s look at a critical moment from J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye:

[My brother Allie’s] dead now. He got leukemia when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence–there was this fence that went all around the course–and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie.

In the above excerpt, Salinger’s narrator, Holden, never “tells” us that he loves his brother. If he did, this would alter our entire understanding of Holden. Instead, we are “shown” this love in Salinger’s prose, and it’s more than just love that gets passed on to readers.

We also feel Holden’s pain and anger throughout this passage, while at the same time, learning more of his character and personality. To him, Allie had represented all that was good in his family.

I don’t want you to leave this post merely believing that too much “telling” results in poor writing. Some things should be told in the interest of time and page space.

Good writing will have a healthy mixture of both.

(However, avoid “telling” your readers about your characters’ feelings.)

Thanks for reading! Until next week, write your heart out.

Photo credit: @superamit / Foter.com / CC BY-NC