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Why “Telling” is Sometimes More Powerful than “Showing”

For too many years, one of my biggest problems with writing was “getting in over my head” to the point I rarely finished my stories.

I especially struggled with personal narratives. Once I began writing my story I would discover it contained many other stories. I would uncover one, and then, inside it, another, and another, and so on. They were like an infinity of Russian nesting dolls.

To describe my first encounter with bipolar disorder in high school, I thought I needed to fully describe my first depression. For honesty, I thought I had to tell the reader every nonsensical thing I was thinking while manic. I obsessed over the need to make my disordered thoughts make sense to the reader and, because the task was too daunting, I would throw down my pen in frustration.

Because of everything I thought I had to include, my stories were always spiraling out of my control.

As ambitious as it may seem to include “everything” in a story, it is not practical or realistic. In theory, I could trace any story about myself all the way back to my birth and even further to the origins of the universe. Just as a painter needs the edges of the canvas to contain his image, a writer must consciously decide where the story will begin and end, in addition to which details will be included or excluded.

But a writer must go even further; in story writing there is an unpopular middle ground between including and excluding, a technique which gets little respect in the writing world and is not mentioned much. It is called “exposition.”

Exposition is telling rather than showing, a reversal of the advice given to beginning writing students, which is to always “show and not tell.” However, in some instances, it is okay and even desirable to generalize. In the example of my writing about my manic episode in high school, I finally did succeed; in my narrative, I did mention my adolescent depression but I only touched on it, reducing it to a couple of sentences. I could have said more but I chose not to. I had to say, this is interesting, but it is not what I want to emphasize right now. However, including a couple of sentences of exposition about my early years added background that shed light on what happened later.

I did something similar with a recent fiction story in which I wrote about a man who moves to Mars. I knew a trip to Mars in a space ship would be a momentous event in itself, so my first thought was that I had to include it. I began to panic as I envisioned all the research I would need to do in order to make the trip plausible, and all the action I would need to make it dramatic and suspenseful.

But I stopped myself. That was not the story I wanted to tell. It did not support my theme and would derail my original story. The main action was meant to take place on the surface of Mars, and a short story has no room for digressions. I solved my problem by calling upon the pariah of the writing world: exposition; that is, I covered the trip to Mars in a couple of general statements. The exposition was not award-winning writing, nor was it meant to be; its purpose was to make an almost invisible transition to the next scene in which my character appears on Mars so that my main action could take the full spotlight.

When I had shaky writing skills, if I needed to move a character from a hospital to her house, I would feel I had to write a scene showing her in a car riding home since that would be the next logical step in real life. But the goal of story writing is not to replicate life as it really is but to create an illusion. The next logical step is in real life is not always the next logical step for moving the story forward.

Believing I had to include a tiresome car scene to honor reality, I would lose control of my story. My car scene would drag along as my characters made purposeless small talk. I would become frustrated with the lackluster writing and feel stuck when what I really needed to do was to move to the next important scene.

Usually, the important scenes were the ones I had vividly imagined. They may not have been full of gun fights and car chases, but they were where the “passion” was. They were the memorable scenes, the ones that seemed to “jump off the page,” the ones that had made me want to write the story in the first place. I learned to skip straight to those scenes, even if it meant temporarily skipping over details needed to make the narrative logical.

I could always go back and add transitional scenes or exposition to bridge any gaps between my vividly imagined scenes. To eliminate my boring car scene, I could have simply said, “After Kim got home…” There is nothing impressive-sounding about that phrase, but it does an important job. My short line of exposition restores control to me as a writer while keeping my story logical. Thus, the emphasis remains where it belongs: on whatever happens when Kim returns home.

However, when you use exposition, you are doing what many professional writers and writing teachers advise against: telling, rather than showing. There are good reasons why showing is almost always advised. For important scenes, showing is a far more effective way to pin the reader to the story action, evoke sympathy, and create emotion.

But telling is useful in tying the major scenes together. Because telling – when done skillfully – is so subtle, it is not celebrated the way showing is. Telling is not sexy. It fades into the background. It is the invisible hand of the writer guiding a story by selecting what to de-emphasize so that the important content can shine.

Like showing, telling is an artistic necessity, allowing the writer to consciously reduce emphasis to necessary details that threaten to distract from the main drama if they are given the spotlight. Exposition is the dim grey background that, by contrast, brings the main action into colorful, lucid, and radiant focus.


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