Nightmares and Realities: Showing vs. Telling, Guest Post by Sevastian Winters
Nightmares and Realities: Showing vs. Telling,
Guest Post by Sevastian Winters
“I’m not sure what crawled up your ass and died,” I said. “But whatever it is, figure it out, because I’m certainly not putting up with your attitude all day. I’ve got better shit to do.”
Sometimes, when you’re married to a redhead, it helps to poke her with a stick, if you want to get to the bottom of something fast, instead of spending three hours trying to sort out the nature of her malfunction-of-the-morning. Or maybe I’m just a jerk.
She spun on her heels and locked her blue eyes with mine. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Seriously,” I said. “I’ve been awake for thirty minutes. You’ve snapped at me twice, the kid once, thrown the cat, and threatened the dog for daring to say ‘good morning’. The whole world didn’t wake up wrong this morning. So maybe it’s you. What’s eating you?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked away. “You’ll just think it’s stupid,” she said.
I was pretty sure she was right, but having been married three times, with no real desire to look for number four, just yet, I knew better than to say so.
“I’m not going to spend the day doing this. Just tell me what’s bugging you.”
She turned her gaze back to mine, clearly about to share, and then. “Nothing. It’s dumb.”
I lowered my voice, to a near whisper, and adjusted my face to pretend I cared. “What?”
She took a deep breath and then exhaled it slowly. “I had a dream last night that you were secretly a serial killer…and you tried to kill me with a knife.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing.
Her face flushed and she jutted out her freckled chin. Her eyes shot fire. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry” I said, laughing, “but this whole thing is ridicu____.”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?”
I stopped. “Woah.. woah… woah… woah….Fuck that!” I felt the temperature in my face skyrocket. “I get a right to laugh. You’re being an idiot. It was just a dream, and I’m not about to spend the day paying for it!” (Yeah… I know what a ridiculous proclamation that was. But I made it)
She opened her mouth, as if to speak and then stopped. She looked to the floor. “I know… I just…. it was a really bad dream… and I guess…. as stupid as it sounds, I just need you to assure me that you’re never going to gut me like a fish.”
The laughter returned to my eyes, though I knew better than to allow it to escape my lips. “Darlin’ that’s ridiculous,” I said. “I would never gut you like a fish.” Her face relaxed. I should have left it at that. It would have been so much easier. In hindsight, I might have drawn on what little wisdom I’ve gained in my forty years of life, but this past Sunday morning, when this really happened, I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Instead, I spoke again. “A fish is an entirely different sort of animal! You gut humans like a pig!”
And so began my Sunday!
I tell you that (true) story to say this:
As writers, we are simultaneously blessed and cursed with the privilege and the responsibility of creating alternate realities so visceral as to affect a reader’s psyche.
We’re the reason people check behind a shower curtain before they turn their back to it. We’re the reason, husbands spend their lives in trouble for failing to live up to the romantic fictional characters our wives are falling in love with.
The muscles in my back have never glistened in the moonlight as I made passionate love, and the only reason women might find that disappointing is that a writer once showed them it was possible. Passionate sex in the hot tub came from the mind of a writer creating an alternate reality…and anyone that has ever tried it knows exactly what I mean. And don’t even get me started about the perils of being naked on the beach.
We create dream worlds. That’s our job. Ours is not to judge the characters in the dream, but to reveal them. Ours is not to explain the characters, but to show them, unadulterated, just as they are in the reality we create.
Why is it so important that we show instead of tell? Because we aren’t providing information. We’re creating a waking dream. We’re taking readers out of this reality and enveloping them in ours.
I recently read an author who stopped the story to tell me “Madison could never see herself allowing a relationship to come between her and the job.” I don’t care! I don’t glean insight into character from what an author tells me about the character. I glean insight from the character from what the character does, what the character says, and in very limited doses, what the character thinks.
Imagine that you were watching a movie, and every so often, in the midst of the action, the narrator broke in to tell you some tidbit about the character that the writer found important? How soon would you turn that movie off? Even movies that have narrators use them sparingly and only to move the story forward.
Don’t tell me that the character is sad. Show me the tears as they trickle down her face. Don’t tell me the character is angry. As soon as he slams his fist through a wall, I’ll figure it out. I’m a pretty smart guy. Don’t tell me the character is more married to the job than to the idea of a relationship. Put her in a situation where she has to choose, and show me what she does.
Showing vs. telling is one of the very first lessons we are admonished with when first we learn to write. But just because we’ve heard it, doesn’t mean we’ve always understood it.
We are cameras, not commentators, microphones, not narrators and journalists, not judges. Ours is never to filter the things that our characters say and do through the precepts of our own morality or upbringing, but to chronicle them wholly, good, bad, ugly, immoral, heroic and villainous, in an effort to create the dream state that will so affect a reader that they will carry the emotional baggage created in the dream world (both good and bad) with them, from that world into this one.
A woman reading a fiction story about an abusive husband should find herself distant from her own, and if she should happen to read a story about a regular Joe that turns out to be the greatest guy in the world… well, that should affect her too.
Our job is to create new realities so visceral that they break the bonds of their pages and make the leap from their reality to ours. We do that when we show the readers what happens, leaving everything else behind. May your writing reflect a respect for craft that understands the awesome privilege and power we have when we sit down to build a dream world.
Thank you for reading.
(P.S. If you get a chance, check out my newest two books:
How I are Becomed a Very Much Gooder Author
and my new novel, Wolf’s Rise 