Role of narrator in “Don’t Tell. Show.” ?

Thomas Vail said:

That was how I read it too, but where I was differing was I think the issue is more basic than 'not trusting the reader.' In the contexts where I most often encounter something I want to say, 'show, don't tell,' it's because the writer wants to frontload whatever exceptional traits they're trying to get across. Not because there's any lack of trust in the reader, but because they've got an image in their mind they want to convey and the 'telling' route seems to lay it out there up front.

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This is where I think about job applications. A CV might list all sorts of skills, but I want to see evidence. "Timmy is an expert at [something]." All right, Timmy, my lad, lets see you do that [something] to back up your talk.

To me, "show, don't tell" is a pithy way of saying, "use words to create a strong image for your reader, and that can be an 'image' of sounds and emotion and sensation as much as of sight". In other words, don't just tell me a person is angry or sad. Make me, the reader, feel it and believe it. And this doesn't have to be done through a lot of words and/or description. A few well-chosen words can do wonders. (The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, as Twain said.)

And you know what really does the hefty work for this? Verbs. Choosing the right verbs, in my experience, does WONDERS.

So I might take Patty's example in a different direction. Instead of "He got into the car", I might say, "He flung himself into the driver's seat." Or, "He scrambled into his car as fast as he could." Or, "He was crying as he flopped into the driver's seat."

Then again, sometimes you just need "him" to get into the damn car. In which case, "He got into the car" might be exactly what you want.

I'm not entirely sure what the OP is asking, but there seems to be an issue of filtering there. A character doesn't need to be nattering to themselves for us to get their thoughts, either in first or third person POV. Just give us their thoughts, and there's really no need to say, "he thought" or "she thought". Simply show the world through the lens of that character.

Pencrafter said:

tc boyle frequently writes things like:

“He loved her. He did.”

Boyle is a decent writer...

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seconding a lot of what's already been said, but there's a couple things here to consider:

1. "show, don't tell" is a guideline, and for very specific reasons. "Sam hated her. Sam hated all women. Sam was a misogynist. Sam felt they should all be sex objects." even that can work, especially if it was someone else giving their relatively terse evaluation of sam, but 400 pages like that would read hollow, and clumsy, like a novel-length version of a Dick and Jane story. Especially if that was supposed to be sam's POV....do you think anyone thinks of themselves in such simplistic and negative terms? Someone writing about Sam FROM HIS POV might say something like "The woman was fit, slim, and she would have looked perfect on top of him, hips rocking and tits heaving, impaled, doing about the only thing ANY woman was useful for in the first place. She was pretty. But she was also close to forty." the bit in blue tells you everything the bit in green does, and arguably more, about how Sam views women. He's not a nice guy. But specifics give you more insight into his reptile-brain, too.

So one reason for show, don't tell is to avoid an entire novel of boring-ass spoon-feeding. Or, as it is often used in talking about descriptive writing, to keep things from becoming boring as shit while you cover all possible bases.

2. there's also the issue of what Boyle, even there, said and why, which is hard to evaluate in a vacuum. Was it to break momentum? All tell (see above and descriptions, for example) can become extremely long, monotonous, and tedious. So sometimes you need various tools to break rhythm in writing, and ONE of those tools can be a simple line of telling.

3. Like I said, that line was in a vacuum. It could have been written about: a man pillow-smothering his own mother ant trying to convince himself it's about her cancer, and not the estate that long-term treatment stands to rob him of. The same guy, GENUINELY upset. A man staring at his new bride. Frank, from Shameless, trying to justify any number of shitty things he'd done to his daughters. In a lot of those cases, one might argue the line isn't telling at all, so much as actually showing, reflecting the character's motivations obliquely by saying something directly opposed to their actual actions to show their conflict, delusion, etc...

there's a lot of reasons one might choose to show. about the only one that's safely wrong is "well, so-and-so did it, so I can too" without any understanding of context. The "rules" are more guideposts, they are certainly not unbreakable, but they are also there for a solid reason....or reasons. Understand the why and you will, probably, find yourself wanting to follow them most of the time anyway. But there will also be lots of instances where you find yourself having good, real reasons to break them.

Pencrafter said:

Wanted to get back to this thread. I checked out Neil Gaiman’s Coraline from the library, partly because he’s a writer I admire and I wanted to see how he handles this very thing, and because the story has a cat who has a talking part in the “other world” in the story.

Quoting merely one line from the story: This is more like it, thought Coraline

Two things occur to me after reading this example:

1) That the author, whether s/he is the obvious narrator of the story or not, is the one telling the story, and is therefore the foremost expert witness to what the characters are doing and thinking. Whether we’re consciously aware of this fact or not, we trust that if the author says it, it’s true and reliable, such as with the givens in geometry proof problem. noooo. read Lolita. Yup, the Nabokov one. He's a deeply romantic, caring child-groomer, always putting her needs above his own......except he isn't.

He's a pedophile making excuses as he moves closer and closer. Only in his own head is he the hero, and you can absolutely see it in the writing. But the book is written in first-person. So Humbert-Humbert is not an expert witness at all, he's actually what is referred to as an unreliable narrator. If you don't want to read Lolita, Joker features an unreliable narrator--he is his own hero, but you never know for certain if everything he sees is happening as he sees it....or if it is happening at all. Since you want to write, you might seek out other unreliable narrator stories for more examples.

2) “Show, don’t tell” can actually be a problem if adhered to beyond a point. I think one example of its indispensability could be:

Elizabeth told off Robert, but good.

Versus:

Elizabeth, with a stormy look on her face, focused a sharp gaze right at Robert, and spat out, “listen here you termite...”

It’s the bits where you actually can show something. It could get tedious attempting to show everything, whether it lends itself to showing or not, and the story would drag and die a gurgling death.

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your second point is correct....like others have said you might break the show, don't tell rule for many reasons including changing up the rhythm of a story.

Some things that appear to be a tell are actually a thought from the viewpoint character.

Context matters.

What's helped me, and I'm not claiming that I do this well--(but I haven't been accused of telling for many months now so i think I'm on the right track)--is to tie the narrative into voice. And voice is judgment from the viewpoint character.

Men were such pigs.
Women were good for one thing only.

In the right context, those are showing. If a snatch feels like a thought from the viewpoint character, it's 'showy.' What makes it feel like a thought is the narrative surrounding it.

I think getting a handle on 'voice' (which I'm still working on) is an effective way to figure out show-don't-tell.

To my mind, "show, don't tell" just means you have to earn your story. If you tell me he loved her, I need to have a reason to believe you (or to understand the subtext, if that's what it's about).

I don't think line-by-line assessment is very helpful, honestly. Like, let's say you have your narrator state: "Tomorrow weighed heavily on her." How does it fit into the overall story or character? Have you earned it by revealing this about your character already? Are you just restating something we should already know from the rest of the story?

Why is she thinking about tomorrow? Do we know she hates her job, or has surgery booked in, or has to corral some chickens, or fly a biplane, or whatever? Do we know she's no good at confrontation, has trauma from past surgery, a chicken phobia, a fear of heights? Has the reader already seen her experiencing or talking/thinking about this stuff? When you then say, "she was gripped with fear about the next morning", are you telling the reader something they don't already know about her, instead of earning it through storytelling?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The only point of "Don't Tell, Show" is to illustrate to you that your writing should arouse feelings as when you are truly experiencing something. A decent writer wrote that stupid phrase and aroused feelings in you, that's why it's some sort of important truth. But just write in whatever way makes you feel like you are reading a good author. Then go back, see that it sucks (or doesn't), and edit the f out of it until you hit the bottom again. Keep doing this until you feel that you are showing more than telling. The rule doesn't necessarily prohibit you from any specific kind of sentence, just do what feels right and keep asking for opinions.

Pencrafter said:

Unless a character says, “I am thinking about what the morrow will bring,” we can’t know what she is thinking. She provides first-hand testimony as to her thoughts if she says what her thoughts are.

Can a story’s “narrator” do this job? Can the narrative say, “She looked contemplative as though thinking about the next day” without violating “Don’t Tell. Show” ?

When characters are alone and aren’t nattering to themselves, what tools do we have to tell the reader that they’re thinking about something, and what it might be?

thank you!

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Showing and telling exists on a continuum, and how much of each you are using in any situation will vary. n a nutshell, "showing" is describing a character's thoughts, actions and experiences as a scene rather than simply summarizing them. i.e. describing an expression as you just did is more "showing" than simply saying, "she looked thoughtful." There's no violation of any rule in describing a person's expression as you have, though it may depend on the narrative viewpoint you are using for the story.

Who your narrator is, how they tell the story, and which information they disclose is going to depend on narrative viewpoint. There are a bunch of books and sources that explain narrative viewpoint and the different ways it can be used to tell a story. It's important to have a grasp of this, because inconsistencies in narration can make it hard for readers to follow your story and/or relate to characters.

To answer your question briefly, yes, it is possible to do what you described. The so-called omniscient narrative (most often paired with third person) can do this. There is, in essence, an external narrator who has access to all the information within a story, including different character's thoughts, perceptions and emotions. When and how they share this information depends on the needs of the story, though there are certain styles and techniques that work better than others.

It's also possible to narrate a story in first person, where a character is telling their own story, either from a distance, or in a more immediate manner.

It is also common to have a limited (or subjective) third person narrator, who follows most of the same rules as first person (only sharing what one character knows, thinks, and feels, and even using that character's voice to do so). I liken third person limited to a sort of magic monkey riding around on a given character's shoulder, reading their mind and seeing and experiencing everything they do and relating that to the reader.

There are other ways to approach narrative. When you are reading a book you enjoy, pay attention to the approach used by the author.

A good, relatively concise source to explain the basics of narrative viewpoint can be found here:

https://theeditorsblog.net/2012/07/26/point-of-view-the-full-story-introduction/

https://theeditorsblog.net/2012/07/26/point-of-view-part-two/

https://theeditorsblog.net/2012/07/26/point-of-view-part-three/

https://theeditorsblog.net/2011/11/16/deep-pov-whats-so-deep-about-it/

Pencrafter said:

Unless a character says, “I am thinking about what the morrow will bring,” we can’t know what she is thinking. She provides first-hand testimony as to her thoughts if she says what her thoughts are.

Can a story’s “narrator” do this job? Can the narrative say, “She looked contemplative as though thinking about the next day” without violating “Don’t Tell. Show” ?

When characters are alone and aren’t nattering to themselves, what tools do we have to tell the reader that they’re thinking about something, and what it might be?

thank you!

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There are many different kinds of third person narrators. 3rd person omniscient narrators know everything that's going on and can explain what's going on in everyone's head. 3rd person limited only know the character they're with at the moment. It all depends on how you want to tell your story, but you still have to show the characters taking action, not just thinking about it, just like you do in first person. There's nothing wrong with the character having thoughts though.