When "Show, Don't Tell" Doesn't Work
A reflection on concreteness versus abstraction, with an excerpt from the junked first version of Quibble.
Every writer’s heard it, usually in their first workshop, and virtually every introductory craft book advises it: “Show, don’t tell.”
The wisdom of favoring concreteness over abstraction is advice so fundamental to good writing that, in advanced workshops, people are often apologetic about giving it. “I know you’ve heard this before,” they begin, worried they’ll offend the writer who certainly has heard it before, “but it bears repeating…”
As a young would-be poet, I was enthralled by abstraction, by the lofty language and profound statements I found in many poems I admired. I wanted to emulate them, but I didn’t yet understand that such pronouncements are earned — and one way a poem earns them is by first giving the reader a wealth of concrete, descriptive details. “See just what careful attention I’m giving to this thing, what pains I’m taking to get you to see what I’ve noticed?” the poet implies. “Reader, you can trust what I have to say.”
Two examples of earned profundity and abstraction often cited for beginning poets are Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” — these pair especially well because Wright seems to be in dialogue with Rilke. “You must change your life,” Rilke enjoins us after describing the statue of Apollo in vivid language culminating in breathtaking images and a startling revelation:
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you.
Lazing in his hammock, Wright is more laconic: he keeps his sentences short, simple, as he describes things just as simply — a bronze butterfly on a tree’s black trunk, the sound of cowbells fading into distance, horse droppings which “blaze up into golden stones,” a chicken hawk’s flight. Wright’s method, which poets call the deep image, is to transport the reader into a setting and experience by means of immersive imagery. Wright’s syntax is so spare and his register so low that his final profundity springs on you out of nowhere: “I have wasted my life.”
Rilke’s poem, building ideas in sentences that read like dependent clauses, prods us to wonder what internal transformation an object of transcendent beauty may require of us, the viewers. Wright’s poem — where each sentence is discrete, where each image is beautiful by itself and only joins a greater whole by association, where the only idea is the one ending the poem — makes us reconsider what it means to waste time. Both poets set out for lofty territory and get the reader there mostly by showing what they observe in sharp, crisp detail. Their routes seem different, but either way — whether as a writer you favor hypotaxis or parataxis, and whether you’re describing a classical statue or horse dung — the lesson’s the same.
Focus on showing. Draw your readers in and get them invested in sensory experiences by making the writing “pop” with arresting visuals. If you do it well, your readers will follow you where you want to lead them. You’ve earned their trust in your writing and thus the right to “tell” them things. Perhaps, then, once you’ve learned to do this, you can reformulate the rule of thumb about concreteness and abstraction:
Show in order to tell.
If you’ve read the first few chapters of Quibble, you may be smirking now. I’ve broken the rule “show, don’t tell” all over the place, haven’t I?
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