Alberta Review: Show Don't Tell
Talking down isn't just ineffective, it is bad storytelling
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A core tenet of good writing is show, don’t tell. When I first started writing for online magazines, this was the first (and far too consistent) bit of advice my editor gave me, but every writer has heard it at some point. It is the only way for a writer to forcefully make his point, and the subtly is the power; by merely telling, a reader gets bored, or annoyed, or feels like they’re being lectured to. Showing, not telling, allows a reader to engage with a text, making the writer’s argument stickier. This goes for both fiction and non-fiction. It’s why in 4H, we have the motto “learn to do by doing,” and we all implicitly understand it because all of us know we internalize lessons when we’ve made a mistake and learn from it rather than be told by our parents what not to do. The latter is, in fact, an invitation to just try the thing to prove them wrong.
Recently, I’ve binged two very different things that highlight just how important the maxim is and how an obsession with being political in our current age means ignoring the rule. At the behest of my lovely wife, we went through about 16 (there are 21 seasons now) of Grey’s Anatomy. It is a classic hospital drama with a soap opera soul and loveable (and annoying) characters. The writing is bonkers but compelling for the first half of the series. But then there is a clear sense that the writing style has changed. We’ll no longer show that there are inequities in America’s health care system. We’re not going to tell a story about racial inequalities; we’re going to forcefully ensure the viewer understands what they’re supposed to think. And the show suffers for it. Sympathy for the characters lecturing declines, and the storylines become flat. In the early years, there’s a storyline where a racist paramedic refuses to be operated on by the black doctors at the hospital. They struggle between their Hippocratic oaths and their anger at the bigotry. It is an interesting episode, and you know clearly who the bad guys are, but not because anyone told you so.
Later on, in the post-George Floyd seasons, the discussion around race in the show is approached with a hammer. The storylines aren’t storylines; they are lectures. The message becomes annoying, the argument is not compelling, and the show suffers from it.
As we were working our way through Grey’s, I was also reading the sci-fi series The Expanse (it is also an Amazon Prime show, but I haven’t watched it yet). It is a great contrast to the last few seasons of Grey’s because it is a masterclass of showing, not telling. The core message is that you can put humanity in space, and you can have physiology change due to lack of gravity, but the fundamentals of human nature never change. In the last book, there’s an exchange as the universe looks its most bleak that sums up the entire series’ lesson:
“I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”
I don’t know if there’s a better piece of dialogue illustrating the problem with humanity. But the books also do a fabulous job of showing the good. When our hero is giving up his life for humanity—the ultimate enemy is a tyrant who believes the only way for humanity to survive is to stop being human (I’m trying really hard here to explain things without giving away any plot points)—as part of a much larger dialogue he says why it is so important to protect individual freedom:
“I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “all the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but…”
Showing, not telling, can make or break a show. Unfortunately, telling is becoming the norm in writing as everyone, and everything becomes more political. The first Trump Administration accelerated this trend. Who knows how bad fiction will get in the second.
Which brings me to the reason for this little diatribe on showing, not telling. It’s not an original thought. There are countless pieces about the decline of good fiction because too many writers think readers are so stupid they can’t simply imply a lesson; it must be clear. It is that contempt for the audience that is hurting literature—and that same contempt is hurting political campaigns. Again, I don’t have time here to do a full dissection of the respective Trump and Harris campaigns, but what has become clear from some American punditry, exit polling, casual observance, and just a general sense of the “vibes,” the failure of the Harris campaign to actually argue for its positions was clear. Fundamentally, campaigns require two questions to be successfully answered if they are to appeal to voters. Are you ok, and can I help. People of good faith can disagree over whether the Trump campaign answered them satisfactorily, truthfully, or honestly, but they asked and provided answers. The Harris campaign tried to tell voters why they were ok. They told, they didn’t show. President Trump may have shown some things that were incorrect or straight-up falsehoods, but they showed the voters why they weren’t ok and how he could help.
Literature matters for a lot of reasons. Literature can be as simple as “a group of beautiful sentences that provide a universal observation about human nature.” But if politics is downstream of culture, the failures of literature will eventually find themselves into politics, which have a much more profound effect on us all.
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