Imagine if Jeannette Walls started The Glass Castle as such:
I am now successful, but my mom is homeless. Even though we live in the same city and I see her sometimes, I don’t help her because I can’t help her. Once, when I was three, I burned myself boiling hotdogs. I went to the hospital, but my dad, being fearful of institutions and the system, busted me out.
It’s almost painful to tell instead of show. Jeannette’s scenes showing these two facets of her life are—sure, longer than a paragraph—but they’re also composed with graceful prose that seduces you into reading the rest of the story. Because she shows and doesn’t tell, you are lured into the story wondering, who are these people? Why are they this way? What happens next?
Or, let’s say Glennon Doyle started Untamed thusly:
We took the kids to the zoo and watched a cheetah demonstration. Seeing the caged animal made me wonder about the wild sides we all have and are forced to suppress.
Instead, she shows the scene. Glennon takes us to the zoo with her, and we watch the cheetah chase the rabbit and we don’t just see but we also feel the pain of an animal that is constantly forced to suppress itself nature, it’s wild…we share the experience of only getting to glimpse our wilds.
Set the Scene to Show Theme & Premise
What makes the above-two referenced memoirs so brilliantly successful is that they use the first scenes to essentially show the reader the theme and the premise. Jeannette Walls’ powerful memoir is about family with the premise of overcoming generational trauma.
Glennon Doyle’s memoir is about living authentically with the premise of resisting social norms to achieve that end. Both of the opening scenes show the theme and the premise.
Your opening scene should clearly ground readers in where they will be for the story. They should get a taste of the narrative voice you’re writing in, and you should show them your theme and premise.
Reveal Characters Through Their Actions & Words
Have you ever met someone who was described to you one way and felt that the description of the person’s personality and character are incongruous with your expectations? This is because you’re only getting the benefit of one person’s perspective. When we’re told who a person is, we are being robbed of the freedom to make our own minds up about who those people are.
Authors, especially memoirists, who want to be perceived a certain way by their audiences, have this tendency. They want you to interpret events the same as they do because that is safe. It takes a lot of verve for an author to write truisms in a way that makes them vulnerable to being hated by their readers or to write about a conflicting person and to find that their audience is not empathetic with them. It’s truly terrifying because it goes against our ego’s need for approval and validation.
That said, author Adam Grant writes, “Personality is how you respond on a typical day. Character is how you show up on your worst day.”
The people you write about in your story—including yourself—are being shown at a moment in time. Our personalities and characters are fluid based on our experiences and our receptiveness toward growth and change. A reasonable audience will understand and respect this if you give your audience the honest truth by showing them what happened and by trusting them to make their own inferences about the characters.
Walls never tells us that her father was a societal rogue nor did she ever say he wasn’t a great dad. She just showed us what happened…he basically abducted his child recovering from major burns from the hospital. He was an alcoholic who dodged the law and proper work. He was a dreamer who consistently broke promises to his children. He was also very intelligent and in his own way, loved his children, as shown through discourse and events in the story.
Just remember the axiom that actions speak louder than words. It’s true in your story as well. While you may just want to say, “My mother was a narcissist who would gaslight us and who triangulated the family,” you have to show it for two reasons:
One is that they may not believe you without evidence
Two is that you’re depriving them (and yourself) of developing feelings of empathy for your character because without reading and experiencing what you endured, they can neither feel nor care for you
Showing is best done with concrete nouns and verbs. Focus on action…what is happening. You never want to tell readers how to feel or what to think.
Stories reflect an unspoken contract between writer and reader in which the writer trusts the reader to understand the story and to make their own judgement. In this way, the reader becomes a participant in the story and thus invests and cares that much more because they see themselves in the story.
When It’s Okay to Tell Instead of Show
That said, there are of course times when it’s better to tell instead of show. Use telling to:
Speed up the story
Give background
Provide context
Not everything needs to be shown.
It’s also okay and even advisable to have lots of exposition in your first draft. I do this; when I am writing a personal essay, I will usually tell rather than show. Often, this is just me organizing the events and the experience in my mind, working out my own feelings.
Once I’m finished, I go back and rewrite the story to show. I use setting, dialogue, action, character, etc. to reveal the story to the reader as to maintain our unspoken contract…the one where I allow them to pass judgement on my story as they see fit…the one where I show them that I respect them by not telling them how to feel.
It’s the one where I allow them to step into my shoes and to experience the story as though they were me, where I demonstrate trust.
If you’re working on a memoir or a work of creative nonfiction, and you’re concerned that you’re not showing, contact me. I can review your manuscript or your essay and provide feedback and insights that can help you know that you show in writing.