![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321As ever, am turning over in my mind those twin sacred cows of fanfic: "show not tell" and "characterisation". Those who've been following my musings on these subjects will know that I don't even know what exactly these two dicta refer to nor if they even exist.
Here's an attempt to grasp the nettle by typing my way through it:
All show and no tell
Karl stood among the grasses of the Mongolian steppe. Dom appeared from behind a yurt. Karl looked at Dom. Dom did not turn his head; he bent down and began fiddling with the yurt pegs. The tassle of his multi-coloured woollen beanie dangled into his face.
Sweat formed on Karl's upper lip, beading in the butter-stiffened tips of his whiskers.
All tell and no show
Karl had been in love with Dom for as long as he could remember. He was worried, however, that this love was not returned. He did not want Dom to know of his secret: this would make Karl diminish in Dom's eyes, for Karl was Chief of the Mongolian Tribes and could ill afford weaknesses that were more fitting for a woman.
What Karl did not know was that Dom loved the fact that Karl loved Dom. Dom did not love Karl himself but he basked in Karl's love, and he basked in the secrecy of Karl's love, and sometimes he basked in it so much that the resulting emotions were not much removed from actual love itself.
Little characterisation
They galloped side by side, sitting astride the elaborately worked leather saddles of their Tartar horses. A lone hawk wheeled above. The scent of yak roasting on camp fires was in their noses.
Lots of characterisation
Karl sat tall upon his horse, loosely controlling the reins in one hand, the other hand clasping his riding crop, but never using it. He did not need to use it. The horse knew him, he knew the horse, a touch of his heel was enough to make it wheel around and to make Karl's lips curl with pleasure.
Dom, by Karl's side, leant forward in his saddle, head bent low, both hands on the mane. His tongue between his lips, better to gauge the speed of the wind and the speed of his horse, he murmured words of encouragement and when his voice grew low and husky, the horse's ears twitched.
Hm. Which just goes to show that no element can be isolated. Invariably, any bit of writing, no matter how short, involves pov, tense, narrative level, subjective and objective narration, description and action... and so forth and so forth. And, not to forget, Williamson Jefferson and Henderson.
Here's an attempt to grasp the nettle by typing my way through it:
All show and no tell
Karl stood among the grasses of the Mongolian steppe. Dom appeared from behind a yurt. Karl looked at Dom. Dom did not turn his head; he bent down and began fiddling with the yurt pegs. The tassle of his multi-coloured woollen beanie dangled into his face.
Sweat formed on Karl's upper lip, beading in the butter-stiffened tips of his whiskers.
All tell and no show
Karl had been in love with Dom for as long as he could remember. He was worried, however, that this love was not returned. He did not want Dom to know of his secret: this would make Karl diminish in Dom's eyes, for Karl was Chief of the Mongolian Tribes and could ill afford weaknesses that were more fitting for a woman.
What Karl did not know was that Dom loved the fact that Karl loved Dom. Dom did not love Karl himself but he basked in Karl's love, and he basked in the secrecy of Karl's love, and sometimes he basked in it so much that the resulting emotions were not much removed from actual love itself.
Little characterisation
They galloped side by side, sitting astride the elaborately worked leather saddles of their Tartar horses. A lone hawk wheeled above. The scent of yak roasting on camp fires was in their noses.
Lots of characterisation
Karl sat tall upon his horse, loosely controlling the reins in one hand, the other hand clasping his riding crop, but never using it. He did not need to use it. The horse knew him, he knew the horse, a touch of his heel was enough to make it wheel around and to make Karl's lips curl with pleasure.
Dom, by Karl's side, leant forward in his saddle, head bent low, both hands on the mane. His tongue between his lips, better to gauge the speed of the wind and the speed of his horse, he murmured words of encouragement and when his voice grew low and husky, the horse's ears twitched.
Hm. Which just goes to show that no element can be isolated. Invariably, any bit of writing, no matter how short, involves pov, tense, narrative level, subjective and objective narration, description and action... and so forth and so forth. And, not to forget, Williamson Jefferson and Henderson.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 11:01 pm (UTC)It wasn't meant to be a lesson! It's just me, figuring out some things I don't know the meaning of.
Thanks for tig!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 08:14 pm (UTC)PS Delighted to finally have an explanation for Dom's Tongue and it's Oddnesses. He's checking the air to find out how fast his horse is going. Right.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 11:05 pm (UTC)Yes, the yurt pegs! I did start out by writing about two guys in a kitchen and suddenly a great big cloak of boredom settled around my brain, my finger approached the delete button and before I knew it, I was in the steppes.
Rps can be a tad limiting. Most popular settings for lotrips:
a) the kitchen
b) the pub
c) the disco
d) the trailer
e) the awards ceremony venue
e1) the toilets at the awards ceremony venue
And that's about it. Now and again we get:
f) the Shed of Orlibean
g) the airplane
h) the beach
But never, ever:
i) the steppes
j) the Houses of Parliament
k) Cornwall
l) a lightbulb factory
m) a sewer
n) the moon
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-04 12:35 pm (UTC)But never, ever:
i) the steppes
j) the Houses of Parliament
k) Cornwall
l) a lightbulb factory
m) a sewer
n) the moon
*salivates*
I smells a challenge!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-04 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 08:24 pm (UTC)not to forget, Williamson Jefferson and Henderson.
OT3.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 11:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 09:05 pm (UTC)Also, am strangely fascinated by mongolian!Karl. I hope he and Dom settle down and eat goats-milk cheese together.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-03 11:07 pm (UTC)And I know, mongolian!Karl! This is the trap of slash: you start out writing some rubbishy nonsense in order to prove a grammatical point and before you know it, you've started to *identify* with your creatures and your setting and spinning out tales of tormented Tartar passion....!!!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-04 01:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-04 01:43 am (UTC)Buwahahahahhahahahhahh!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-06 10:42 pm (UTC)*should / might be / probably isn't (substitute as appropriate)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-15 11:21 am (UTC)It's been so long since I wrote this post that I can't remember what you are replying to here! And I can't be bothered to look it up either, alas, so here's me just *guessing* at some possible meaning... Heh.
I can't remember how I used 'fiddling' but the police reportage is wonderful resource material for fiction as well. Ah, the post-modernness of it all! Having been imprinted at a tender age I just can't relinquish my residual fondness for all that playing around and pastiching of styles. A fic written in a melange of police reportage and science report and first-person emotive epistle and omniscient narration... ah, one day, one day.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-19 12:31 am (UTC)um, i might have learned something about pov too, but that was entirely ancillary.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-19 11:16 am (UTC)Oh, those were the days. I hadn't read that tartar thing in ages; in fact, I'd forgotten it was there until I scrolled through my Writing Memories. And I realised how much love I had for those boys, more than for any fandom since. I read the tartar thing and thought, mm, Dom, mm, Karl, swoon!! They could just be plonked anywhere. How liberating is rps! With SGA, they are always in Atlantis, bore bore. Hm, I remember being very bored with lotrips settings, actually, hence the AU veerage. (Remember the eternal opening night / toilets at opening night / trailer / kitchen with beer scenarios? Oh, and not to forget the Orlibean mud hut. But, you know: yurts!)
One thing, though, I realised upon re-reading: the dreaded tell-not-show? (so hated b y everyone that, of course, I had to dig it out) If it's a pairing you love, then the tell-not-show is wonderful. In fact, everything's wonderful.
Doesn't help with actual plot construction, though. That comes next.
I actually no longer have a Dom or Karl icon. 111 This is the closest I can do.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-20 11:10 pm (UTC)actually, i was going to say, in my novel i realise i'm so bound to mimesis that the idea of breaking out, recklessly, indulgently, into telling, makes me sweat down to the soles of my feet. yet i realise that many authors i love do just that. they TELL STUFF. i am just going to have to break three years of habit and describe something abstractly. you give me hope!!
oh, and old orli/dom icon is so lovely. lookit orli's little screwed-up cheek! bless.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-21 02:46 pm (UTC)But tell! Yes, tell! Join the experimental writing thing and just do it in five minutes straight into the LJ post comment box! Well, you don't have to, of course, but I find that incredibly liberating sometimes. You can also hide it in my comments, for example; that way the world at large doesn't know it's there but I will know because I'm dying to know. :-) Just get a paragraph, one paragraph only, and do a TELL TELL TELL. Go all out. Wallow.
And if you want you can then do another paragraph of pure show, just to make the mavens feel better.
Speaking of mimesis, somewhere once upon a moon I made a post about this but I discovered the mimesis / diegesis oppositon goes back to Aristotle and is only tangentially related to show / tell. Mimesis, according to Aristotle, was presenting action, as in a play, where it's all happening before your eyes in action and speech. Diegesis is story-telling; for him, that was the Homeric epic. Well, actually, Aristotle (as far as I remember) thought that Homer was teh bee's knees because he combined diegesis and mimesis (mimesis in the form of direct speech). So, in the Aristotelian sense, mimesis in a novel or short story (anything which is not a play [or a film, I guess]) can only be direct speech because only direct speech can imitate (mimic) real-life events in that format. So the Henry James kind of 'show' is also an Aristotelian diegesis because it happens in the third person and is narrated.
This is why the mavens who go around squawking 'show, show, not tell' are confusing their concepts. Also, anyone who lays down the law gets on my nerves. Because I always believe them and then have to struggle to get rid of the fetters. A chap called Percy Lubbock invented the whole show-and-tell thing in 1923 in a book where he simplifies Henry James into this neat opposition. I even went to read that book (face your demons!); it is interesting because so much of today's 'Advice to Young Writers-To-Be' is adumbrated there, but it's also fabulously annoying -- and fun, because it's so annoying, and wrongheaded, and prescriptive, and rather modernist. I will dig up my notes on it, if you like. I am using it in my academic book! Because the whole show-and-tell debate falls flat on its face, of course, as soon as you're dealing with stories told by pictures where it's all about telling because all that pictures can do inherently is show (they're very good at that!) so in order to get the pictures to be narrative, you have to force them to 'tell'. I love it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-21 03:33 pm (UTC)am escaping for a bike ride, back later to COGITATE UPON THIS WISDOM.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-21 04:42 pm (UTC)After your bike ride, please write some tell?? *bats eyelashes*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-21 10:04 pm (UTC)Reading Henry James wasn't easy for young Draco Malfoy. It wasn’t just that the long, long, incessant sentences made him drowsy, so he dropped into slow, languorous reveries of that miscreant, that endymion Potter… Potter’s shoulders, Potter’s wrists, the little waft of pure stenchy adolescent that sometimes arose from the top of Potter’s head when Draco leaned over him on his way out of Potions class, so that Draco left the room intoxicated with noxious fumes from magic and luscious fumes from that boy—that boy who peculiarly squirmed something in Draco’s deepest heart, in exactly the same area of his heart as where he hid his deepest shame; but James’ deft touch at depicting the vaguaries of the human spirit, and particularly the small spiteful acts of the ego under duress (Draco was half-way through ‘Roderick Hudson’ and just about to murder the eponymous artist, out of sheer revulsion at what he had to concede, were fallibilities which, as much as he despised in Hudson, he had to recognise in himself), this sureness of touch and economy of phrase which James flaunted so deliciously reminded Draco, he unhappily admitted to himself, a little, but irrefutably, of his own intimidating father. And having Lucius and Potter in one sentence was more than poor Draco’s heart could take.
...so, mimesis and diegesis are actually not discrete things in prose? they're just two tools, which could act in concord within the one narrative economy, not betraying a fatal inconsistency and dithering in the author? mimesis for all direct representation of action, and diegesis for anything else -- does that include descriptions of actions? as in, '"Don't be ridiculous, I'm not wearing that harness," said Blaise, giving Theodore Nott the other end of his cloak to hold'?
And there's a third thing, isn't there -- god, I really must read Aristotle -- mimesis and diegesis and... and....
I personally like show-not-tell in fiction generally because I like understatement and the poetry of caesurae. I like something that's totally stripped back, for the grace of it. I think I mentioned to you Alan Garner's Red Shift? which is almost entirely -- yes, I'd say entirely, mimesis, to the point of being mostly direct speech, without even attributives. And SO powerful. The negative space around those words is packed full of meaning. It took him eight years to write it, too, to pull it back so much.
I find I like the lee given to the reader, the trust shown in her intelligence, when things are shown, but not explained. That said, I'm realising in my novel that it's simply too laborious to present background information through mimesis (having to have people have conversations about everything, for example) and I shall simply HAVE to find ways of imparting information. I wrote 2000 words today having a go.
Oh Lobe, I'm going to enjoy discussing this with you! How lucky am I, to know a narratology enthusiast. You'll have to talk slowly, though, because I'm not very up on the subject. Still! I'll be in the second round of writing exercises, fer shoor.
Oh my lord, PHEW. *exhales*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-22 01:46 pm (UTC)I am so excited. I think I have to get myself a biscuit before I start reading it. Hang on.
*gets biscuit*
Well, I got a Kinderschokolade but close enough. *scrolls up to read*
Oh, I've read it! I am so excited that you jumped on board? Can I tell
What I thought was interesting was that you said you were writing a tell-not-show paragraph but you did other things in this paragraph as well. Such as the run-on sentence, and the lofty-language. Also, hah, your sentences frequently spilled into show despite themselves, perhaps, or because this is your natural veering? I like to think of it as proof that, as you say, these two modes are intertwined and it is very difficult to prise them apart. This, for example:
so that Draco left the room intoxicated with noxious fumes from magic and luscious fumes from that boy—that boy who peculiarly squirmed something in Draco’s deepest heart, in exactly the same area of his heart as where he hid his deepest shame;
Draco leaving the room: show
intoxicated with luscious fumes from that boy: See, I don't even know what to call this. It is a different register. It is not really show (the noxious fumes of magic are show but the luscious fumes aren't even real) and it's not really tell -- or is it? It is metaphor, and to me the whole imagery-thing is another ingredient in the mix that I think about a lot and find tricky to integrate, sometimes.
Draco's deepest heart where he hid his deepest shame: okay, this is tell now; but it is also heavily metaphorised because we're not talking ventricles here
And I liked the structural symmetry, like a rhyme: short sentence, looong sentence, short sentence. Are you actually reading Henry James at the moment?
And there's a third thing, isn't there Oh, damn, there is? I also must re-read. Poesis, perhaps??
diegesis for anything else -- does that include descriptions of actions? As far as I remember, yes. Mimesis is, strictly speaking, that which does not tell but shows, and this can only be done in theatre. Prose narrative automatically always tells; it can't show. But it can get close to showing (to mimicking, to imitating) in dialogue. The description of action is diegesis: it is story-telling. (There is no such word as story-showing although it could be a nice neologism but perhaps also a daggy one.)
I think you pimped Red Shift to me before but I'm still ploughing through bloody Fabiola which I made myself read cover to cover (turgid mid-19th C. novel about Christians). I also like stripped-down prose a lot. I love those fic writers who pull it off well, and I, too, have written fic which is stripped down to the bone. There is a certain headiness to that, saying things all in between the lines, but I found it can also be a) constricting and b) self-indulgent. It can become a manner (for me, anyway, but perhaps I'm just not very good at it).
Otoh, I also like baroque, lush prose, and I do self-indulge in bloomy metaphor. I am dead impressed by published writers who do imagery well (David Mitchell, Ann-Marie McCaffrey); when I do it, I love it but it often seems artificial or too OTT. I've felt in the past I should battle my tendency to OTTness but now I"m thinking maybe it's a case of choosing a particular mode and style. E.g., it was great fun writing Viggo (whom I hated) because it gave me licence to let fly with the arty-farty metaphors.
I think this is why I'm experimenting so much at the moment because I'd sort of lost my writer's voice. So now I'm trying on all these different garments.
when things are shown, but not explained.
I think telling a story is not the same as explaining a story. I agree, too much explanation gets away from the story; explaining is for non-fiction (how to repair a motorbike).
You'll have to talk slowly, though, because I'm not very up on the subject.
*laughs* Type slowly?? But you have written an entire book! Longfic! I am so in awe.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-21 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-19 11:25 am (UTC)