4 CHAPTER FOUR

The Art of Showing

When I was twenty-four years old I was a graduate student, studying creative writing at Kansas State and I was thrown into the classroom as a teacher for the first time in my life. I was scared. We had mentors who prepped us each week for our classes and the theory behind our composition teaching, or “personal essay writing,” was to move the students from “sight to insight.” Underpinning this school of thought was the principle of “show don’t tell.” Don’t generalize a feeling with a summary sentence or two, put us in the immediacy of the moment, and rely on scenic detail to ground us in the real. Earn your moments.

Thus, the first day of teaching I discussed the five elements of a scene. Obviously, those principles cross over to fiction writing, but they aren’t the only way to write a story. Here are the essential five:

Setting

Whether it’s a rain-slicked city street, a sun-drenched day at the beach, or the bright-lit alleys and clatter of pins at a bowling alley, a sense of place can provide mood and atmosphere, giving a story nuance and the necessary building blocks for world building. How is a story set in a city going to differ from a story set in a small town? How might events unfold differently between two people having a heated conversation in a coffee shop versus in a hospital waiting room? Setting matters. It sets the stage. Two people sitting on a living room couch creates a different vibe from two people sitting on a bench in a museum taking in an Edward Hopper painting. The point is that setting will affect writerly and character choices. Our environments can help define us. Snow for James Joyce in The Dead represents death and a mood of resignation and a sense of loss. I use snow settings in many of my stories and for me it signifies what it did for Joyce but it also signifies nostalgia, idealism and hope. David Lynch, in his films, often plays with setting in contrapuntal ways: a bright sun lit day sets up an idyllic expectation but then Lynch undercuts it with his next shot selection: birds chirping for food in a nest. On closer inspection, the birds aren’t real, but clearly mechanical representations. Lynch’s point: the peaceful contentment of our suburban life is fraught with fraud.

Props, Costumes and Staging

What we see on our fictional stage can define character, and the world we’re building (including the genre we’re in). Phasers, rolling tumbleweed, a fedora places us within the realms of differing genres. Moreover if a character drives a Mercedes as opposed to a rusty Yaris that tells us something about that person’s privilege and status. If another character eats a hamburger with his gloves on we might wonder why he doesn’t want to leave fingerprints anywhere. A woman, while talking to a man, intermittently pulls her cardigan sweater more tightly in on herself, perhaps because she is aware of the tyranny of his gaze and being ogled. She’s uncomfortable. Props and costuming lead to the readers making inferences about the world of your story, and this is a strong component of the contract between you and your audience in the art of showing. Of course you can play with these expectations and thwart them. Peter Falk, as Columbo, works the humility topos card, with his rumpled raincoat, scuffed up shoes, messy hair, and hunched walk. He wants the killer to underestimate him while building his case and then catching the killer flat-footed. Staging allows the reader to understand where the characters are vis-a-vis each other (one is in the kitchen, saying she wants a trial separation, while the other one stands in the living room watching the TV with the sound off) and this provides emotional impact. Car scene, staging A: a husband drives, complaining about their sex life, and the wife looks away, leaning as much as possible into the locked passenger door, head against the glass. Car scene, staging B: a wife drives, the husband shares how much fun it was showering together this morning, “we need to do that more often,” and she smiles when suddenly the sun rises over the curve of the hill. He reaches in the glove box for her sunglasses and places them gently on her face.

Dialogue and the Art of Subtext

How a character speaks and what they speak about defines them in your narrative arc. What do they want? How do they go after it? What are their objectives in the scene? What adjustments to these objectives do they make as the scene unfolds? Objectives can be anything from Character A trying to persuade Character B that they’re right or they need to be understood or forgiven. Scenes between characters often involve tensions, moving between moments of connect and disconnect. Characters in a show-don’t-tell narrative don’t directly reveal what they want. Scene work often relies on inference and the Hemingway iceberg, his belief in revealing only an eighth of what’s at stake and leaving the other seven-eighths submerged for readers to tease out of the story’s dialogue, conflict, and symbols. His “Hills Like White Elephants” is a classic example: Jig and her lover have a heated conversation at a train depot—he wants her to let some “air” in; she wants him to “please please please please please please please stop talking.” The repetition of “please” lets us in on her emotional space (exhausted by and gaining distance from him) and the story’s title and mix of fecund versus dry imagery leads us to underscore what they might be talking about: an abortion. Hemingway never uses that word, but we piece the clues together. After all, just what does the metaphor of a white elephant represent?

Characters

The most fun part of world building is the people you place on your stage. What is their relationship (lovers; father/son; mother/daughter; sisters; teacher/student)? How would you describe the dynamics of power between them (equals; abusive; patronizing; controlling)? Within the given circumstances of your story what do these characters want? Are they “I” characters or “me” characters? Do they act on the world or are they acted upon? Do they have agency or are they victims? Most characters shift about within this continuum, and are not placed strongly on one defining pole. However, in the world of melodrama we do have strong characters, antagonists, irrational villains who do evil/mean/cruel things. But as I mentioned in chapter three, in many literary stories the old-fashioned antagonist has disappeared for a different kind of story, one of counterpoints or foils. What do these two characters pull out of each other? What’s discovered in the hiding spots of identity? What’s emerging here? And of course, for the writer, there’s all kinds of additional micro-detailing of character at your disposal: class, age, belief systems; race; gender; orientation; identity. These components will help define the characters navigating the spaces of your fictional world. One final thought: you may want to jot down a list of three adjectives to define your character before writing a scene: tenacious; passive aggressive; pouty; generous; knit-picky; etc. And don’t forget, we all contain multitudes and are bundles of contradictions: a punk rock guitarist could enjoy polka music or Tchaikovsky. Just saying.

Time and Light

Because showing stories rely so much on immediacy and are grounded in what a character is experiencing they usually take place over a very short period: twenty minutes to an hour. And because this kind of fictional world is highly visible it relies on the spaces between light and dark. Is it night time with a few office lights glowing and steam rising off manhole covers or is it daylight with the sounds of children playing on the structures in a park as two people sit on a bench throwing bits of bread to the pigeons?

The problem with the iceberg theory of writing is that sometimes what’s underneath the surface isn’t a hulking seven-eighths of subtextual richness, a heavy psychological iceberg, but a lack of weight and substance. In other words our iceberg is nothing but thinning ice cubes. What the hell? We readers have to put in this amount of investigative inference to learn that Character A is envious of Character B? Three pages of hints for something I figured out in half-a-page? Is the effort worth the outcome?

Years ago, in a workshop, a fellow student held up a few pages from a story of mine. He had put large X’s on my yarn, and like a detective studying a lie detector printout said I can tell all of this in one paragraph. “Read Cheever.”

I was pissed. Needless to say, I went to the library, found the red paperback of Cheever’s stories and was enthralled by his command of voice and his ability to tell a story.

The Art of Telling

Steven Schwartz, a writer I greatly admire, once told me that every story has an inner and outer story and you as a writer have to figure out what kind of story you’re telling and what kind of writer you are. The inner journey is one of reflection/introspection/backstory and the outer often involves a more present timeline. When I started writing literary stories I’d say I was 80-20 (show versus tell); now, I’m more 60–40). Early in Philip Roth’s career he was much more of a “show” writer (look at Goodbye, Columbus and his short story “The Conversion of the Jews”); by the end of his career he was much more of a discursive writer (compare the short novels Indignation and Nemesis). Your niche will evolve over time and you will find it in the spaces between these two poles.

In my early writing life I relied a lot on the Hemingway model. Frankly it was easier. Raised on films and television, I was used to showing a story, screenplays as fiction, drawing things out from the doubleness inside of dialogue and the power of inference. Moreover, the world was extremely confusing to me and the art of showing didn’t force me to explore in depth how people feel or navigate their thoughts about the world and its complexities. My characters could be in the dark as much as me, the writer, and what they understood could be gleamed in glimpses or dim glimmerings.

But as I grew older and read fiction by legendary authors like Cheever, Bernard Malamud and Alice Munro, I found myself wanting to tell a story as much as show one. One of the advantages of a telling voice is world building. It gives you a much bigger canvas to tell a story; you are no longer in the world of immediacy, three or four scenes, and a timeline that takes place in twenty minutes to an hour. Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro writes long, expansive stories. How does she build her worlds? Munro’s telling voice juggles generations, different timelines, invokes other discourses like a poem from another era; newspaper writings; diary entries, etc. Her narratives rely more on half-scenes or summary scenes and can cover years. Many of her texts are polyvocal, following more than one perspective or “central intelligence.” Finally, most of her stories center around relationships of power: parent/child; boss/employee; teacher/student; husband/wife; Canadian/new immigrant; etc.

Steven Schwartz in his brilliant collection Little Raw Souls balances the bigger canvas of telling with showing us anywhere from 3 to 11 scenes per story.

Expository Directness

Bernard Malamud’s story, “A Choice of Profession,” about a professor’s failings to feel and truly listen, showcases direct exposition at the front of the story’s four section starts. Repeatedly, Malamud gives us a sense of what the character’s thinking and feeling, in particular his aching longing and loneliness, his obsessions and weaknesses. The story is essentially three or four core scenes surrounded by narrative compression. This compression allows Malamud to travel in time and gives the story a repetition with variation model (the student—Mary Lou Miller—confesses something to the professor; he can’t handle it—three times, he fails her.). The story begins: “Cronin after discovering that his wife, Marge, had been two-timing him with a friend, suffered months of crisis. He had loved Marge and jealousy lingered unbearably. He lived through an anguish of degrading emotions, and a few months after his divorce, left a well paying job in Chicago to take up teaching.” No repressed exposition here.

Instead, like Anton Chekhov, Malamud quickly establishes a context for the story, the given circumstances for its lead character. Loneliness pervades. The second section has yet another “summary bridge”: “It took Cronin a surprisingly long time to get over having been let down by Mary Lou. He had built her up in his mind as a woman he might want to spend some time with, and the surprise of her revelation, and his disillusionment, lingered so long he felt unsettled.” The psychological subtext is laid bare for us—it’s not distilled through the subtextual icebergs of action and inference. And having exposition at the front end of each section, moves the story quickly along, compressing the need for a lot of scene work. Recall my discussion of Cheever and the suggestion a student gave me to cut a three-page scene into a paragraph or long sentence.

The Habitual Tense

A language tool in a long story writer’s tool box is the habitual tense, creating a sense of the ongoing, a ritualized routine that gets broken to allow the extraordinary to take place. Here’s another example, from a “Choice of Profession” by my favorite writer, Malamud:

He continued to be interested in her and she occasionally would wait at his desk after class and walk with him in the direction of his office. He often thought she had something personal to say to him, but when she spoke it was usually to say that one or another poem had moved her; her taste, he thought, was a little too inclusive. Mary Lou rarely recited in class. He found her a bit boring when they talked for more than five minutes, but that secretly pleased him because the attraction to her was quite strong and this was a form of insurance. One morning, during a free hour, he went to the registrar’s office on some pretext or other, and looked up her records. Cronin was surprised to discover she was twenty-four and only a first-year student. Because they were so close in age, as well as for other reasons, he decided to ask her out. That same afternoon Mary Lou knocked on his office door and came in to see him about a quiz he had just returned. She had got a low C and it worried her. Cronin lit her cigarette and noticed that she watched him intently, his eyes, mustache, hands, as he explained what she might have written on her paper. They were sitting within a foot of one another, and when she raised both arms to fix her bun, the imprint of her large nipples on her dress caught his attention. It was during this talk in the office that he suggested they go for a drive one evening at the end of the week. Mary Lou agreed, saying maybe they could stop off somewhere for a drink, and Cronin, momentarily hesitating, said he thought they might. All the while they had been talking she was looking at him with some inner place in herself, and he had the feeling he had been appraising her superficially.

This paragraph, about a relationship of power, is amazing. It does so many things well. Up until the move of “one morning,” it is in the “habitual tense,” the actions are ongoing. Note words such as “continued” and “occasionally” in the first sentence; and “often” and “usually” in the second sentence. These are ongoing conversations over a span of time. The transition to “one morning” focuses on a specific day without opting for a scene. Instead, Malamud places us in a summary scene, as he quickly in sequential order informs us of what happened (and here he allows himself to be vague: “some pretext or other” and “as well as for other reasons”); next, the sequential summary moves from “one morning” to “that same afternoon,” and here Malamud, for purposes of economy, eschews direct dialogue for summary dialogue (note how much time is saved by not being specific about what he told her “she might have written on her paper”); like a solid scene however, there is a turning point or deflection (“the imprint of her large nipples on her dress caught his attention”) that affects choices made; and the sequence ends with a wonderfully strange insight that’s told to us: “he had the feeling he had been appraising her superficially.” This is narrative telling at its finest.

Case Study #5: the Art of Juggling the Inner (Telling) and Outer (Showing) in “The Horse Burier”

Steven Schwartz’s “The Horse Burier” does a brilliant job of time juggling, moving constantly between the present time story and a series of past remembrances or retrospective expository flourishes. The story focuses on an estranged father/son relationship and their helping two elderly women bury a beloved horse.

The story begins with a destabilizing condition and expository directness:

The sisters wanted to bury Lulu on their farm, so they called Henry’s son, Landon, to do the job. Landon owned and operated a front-end loader with a backhoe. He mostly worked construction but took side jobs too, including horse burial. He worked nights and weekends to support his ex-wife and two kids. Several years ago he’d gotten into trouble gambling beyond his means—way beyond them—and Henry hoped that after a divorce, bankruptcy, and visits from mirthless men with snake-eyed determination his son’s problems were now behind him.

So much is laid out for us here. This opening doesn’t rely on inference. Instead, an inner story is quickly pushed to the center of our narrative and we suspect hard feelings and disappointments bubbling between father and son.

As the story’s arc plays out, Schwartz constantly moves from present time actions (conversations, and the burying the horse) to narrative backstories (Landon hitting a water main and his insurance premiums skyrocketing; the death of Henry’s wife Meg and her vague final request, “Promise me!”; Henry’s loneliness following her death, walking about an empty house talking to himself; Landon’s wife asking for full custody of her kids; and Landon’s inability to pay for his kids’ soccer registrations).

These inner and outer stories continue to weave together until we reach a brilliant precipice ending. But just prior to that ending, Schwartz’s timeline dynamics jump to a daring flashforward: “Was it wonder, Henry would ask himself when the ground turned hard with the first frost and the sisters died within months of each other and their land was sold off after a contentious probate hearing involving dubious relations who claimed to know them, was it any wonder that he would look up and see the bucket above him ready to deposit its payload.”

Wow. Just between us, this is one of my all-time favorite stories I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of publishing.