| Author | Message | ||
| Mariah Wilson
Intermediate Member Username: mariahwilson43 Post Number: 832 Registered: 11-2007 |
Okay...I know showy is better than telly...but is telly EVER okay?????? Just want your thoughts on this..... www.lostandlonelypoets.yuku.com | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30815 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dear Mariah -- yes, sometimes telly is necessary. The pros do it all the time. But it's always better to put lots of showy around the telly. Remember -- guidelines are simply that. And rules were meant to be broken. However, it's always better to break them once you know what they are and how they work. Then breaking them looks intentional. Love, M | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30816 Registered: 11-1998 |
From The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell: "Tell by Showing": An Exercise Against Technique by Roger Mitchell "One of the basic teachings of twentieth century is the famous maxim, "Show, don't tell." I had been dutifully telling my students that for decades, until one day a few years ago I realized that I was robbing them of one of the basic pleasures of writing. When it's been repeated to you a few dozen times, "Show, don't tell" sounds like "Don't ever tell" or "Telling is bad." The truth is we all want to tell. It is natural to want to tell. Why else write except to tell? Have we ever read anything of value that didn't tell us, that didn't want to tell us, that didn't have telling as its primary purpose? How did we paint ourselves into this corner? The maxim "Show, don't tell" comes to us from the late nineteenth century. Henry James' chief advice to writers was to use the "dramatic method." It was devised in reaction to the cumbersomely didactic literature of that century. It informed the thinking of the "art for art's sake" movement. We hear it announced by Pound in the early twentieth century: "Go in fear of abstractions." To be sure, it was a necessary antidote then. Now, however, we live in a time when, having been told it so often and so automatically, we are apt to think that thinking, propounding, generalizing, telling, and the like are crimes against art. In other words, we are still legatees of the Aesthetic movement a hundred years or so after its demise, poets whose work is apt to be sensuous rather than visionary, better at showing than telling, embarrassed by, if not nearly incapable of thinking. I don't think James, Pound, or even Walter Pater would object to reframing their advice. "Tell by showing" is probably what they meant anyway. It is still an exhortation to "show." I hope to encourage you to speak on issues that matter to you, to come right out and tell if you have to. You can go back and find images for your urgencies and vision later. "Show, don't tell" is excellent advice for someone who already has the impulse to tell and who knows the value and necessity of it, but many young writers today don't have that impulse or have it but think it needs to be weeded out of their minds." | ||
| Mariah Wilson
Intermediate Member Username: mariahwilson43 Post Number: 835 Registered: 11-2007 |
THANKS! www.lostandlonelypoets.yuku.com | ||
| Lazarus
Senior Member Username: lazarus Post Number: 3629 Registered: 10-2005 |
"Tell by showing" Love it. love it. Thanks for posting this article, M'dear. -Laz | ||
| Judy Thompson
Advanced Member Username: judyt54 Post Number: 1233 Registered: 11-2007 |
I think the big danger is when it becomes a meander, drifting this way and that, with no real substance. And there are times when only telling will do. As long as it's done well, and works, then who cares? | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 4224 Registered: 05-2006 |
I am reading All's Well That Ends Well and there is this scene in Act IV, Scene 1, where Parolles (the Count's' companion} is shown to be a coward. This is far more entertaining than saying, "Parolles is a yellow-bellied fool," however, it takes a good deal longer. If everything is shown, the word count can burgeon, as every late afternoon becomes "the hour of long shadows" and the "time when the children lay down their skateboards and come in for dinner." Sometimes, it's better to say 6:30, especially when some other element in the story or poem is more worthy of our attention. In a thriller, the exact hour may be far less important than the ominous fact of the car with the tinted windows sitting across the street from the house where the woman in the witness protection program lives. Fred |
