Are Authors "Showing" Too Much?

If you're like me, you've spent most of your early years gleaning the internet of writing articles and feverishly accumulating the knowledge until your brain resembles one of those Play-Doh tools, oozing out a green substance from every pore.

In this event, you would be familiar with the prevailing adage 'show, don't tell'.

However, if you've actually done something else with your life aside from obsessing over writing, this term means to describe the effects in order to explain the result, instead of just blurting the result – like describing a + b to equal c, rather than jumping straight to c.

Did I use something like a math metaphor??? Hoo, something must be wrong with me!

Say, for emotions, you might simply write:

Sadie was angry. So angry she wanted to scream at the bird who'd had the audacity to poop on her shoulder. She scrubbed on the mess with a napkin, but it only smeared against the dark navy color.

But here we can deduce by her actions that she's angry:

Sadie gave a stomp and hurled her empty coffee thermos at the offending mockingbird in the verdant canopy above the park bench. But just as vain as the throw, no amount of napkins could erase the oozy, white substance from the shoulder of her navy blue dress.

With deliberate crafting of the words, you get across the intention without directly stating it. As a lover of words, the opportunity to work with sentences to evoke the most from the imagination excites me. However, a survey of the cultural panorama has prompted a thought-provoking question: are we 'showing' too much?

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to retain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

Eric Metaxas, in an interview with Bodie Thoene (a brilliant author who, alongside her husband, wrote one of my favorite series, The Zion Covenant), talked about a device employed in the John Wayne film The Searchers:

“There's a shot where John Wayne comes into …. the sod house where there's been this massacre. And Martin Scorsese or someone less sophisticated would show you the carnage. Instead, Ford … shows you John Wayne's face as he's taking in what he's looking at. Doesn't need to show you the carnage, shows you in his face what he's looking at.”

Bodie Thoene adds how Wayne reacts similarly to the gunned-down paratroopers in The Longest Day, where the focus is not so much on the gore but on his appalled response.

Yes, even in the movies there is power in obscurity! And this mechanism does not lessen the effect on the reader, or viewer in this case, but rather your own imagination can fill in the blanks to oftentimes staggering depths. That is the way fiction should be.

Books are already imagination driven, so why are we forcing them to be so visual when we can write fewer words and elicit a more meaningful reaction?

The same rule applies in other areas than just graphic gore.

Writers striving for realism go too far in the nitty-gritty details when some things don't need to be added. Does it make for a better story? No. It feels more like a personal tout of how real they can construct the book, when the reader came for fiction, not a complete reality overhaul.

Unless the scene specifically warrants it, why do we need terror-stricken characters to wet themselves or vomit so frequently? Oh, because that level of grossness makes the story more realistic. But is that level of realism necessary?

This includes the indecent overkill in language. There are creative approaches to getting across that your man is one bad hombre without typing out the actual four or so-letter words. You might write instead, 'he cursed/swore'. Or, you can make more illustrative remarks as I love how Frank Peretti humorously does in Prophet, where the character comments on the 'sacredness of manure' and makes other such references to the vulgar.

I appreciate author James Scott Bell’s view on the matter of sex scenes and curse words in fiction and cinema. He writes, “Fiction is stylized reality, and in the hands of a skilled author realism can be realized without curse words.” You can read the interesting examples he uses in the entire post 'Sex Scenes and Curse Words' here.

I couldn't agree more with what Mr. Bell says near the end of the post: "Some of the most fun I have writing is creating workarounds that, if feedback is to be believed, readers enjoy just as much as I do."

Scripture prohibits unclean language (Ephesians 5:4 NIV), and as believers, including obscenities and profanities in our fiction is far from edifying to our minds or glorifying to God. We can convey the natural without outright dirtying our hands with the sordid particulars.

I believe authors have taken and run with show, don't tell beyond its practical limits until everything is spelled out for us on paper – just wildly descriptive rather than with blunt stating.

What do we want, to show the world we Christians are just as down-to-earth as they are? Why, when we are called to be separate from the world and a faithful example of a better way? Not that I am in any way suggesting we sugarcoat or eschew depicting the tragic state of a sinful world, but why does it look like we are wallowing in the mire with enjoyment?

Do you think modern fiction has gone overboard with show, don’t tell? Leave a comment and tell me your thoughts on the subject!

~Alissa