Showing and Telling: Reflections on The Rhetoric of Fiction

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is a hefty tome, full of close analysis and careful considerations, all leading the reader toward being an intentional, considerate reader and writer of fiction. I’ve chosen just a couple of topics from the book to reflect on here, and they are so intertwined that in the end, they’re the same topic: telling and showing and the use of reliable commentary.
In his chapter on telling and showing, Booth somewhat addresses the fact that for the modern writer this notion has become a sticking point, a dogma that infects individual writers and entire programs. I think he gets at an important truth when in his discussion of Boccaccio he argues that his “artistry lied not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing” (16). I was glad to read this section that both acknowledges showing as a superior form of narration and the place of telling in elevating the whole. I’ve grown tired of writers who react in a knee-jerk, non-specific way to lines that “tell”. It was the section on the use of reliable commentary that moved this for me from a notion to a specific idea about just what I love about a certain amount of telling, and why I need to keep working on refining that balance.
Booth suggests that commentary must be intentional and provides some reasons why the writer might choose to comment on her story, such as providing facts, manipulating mood, molding beliefs, and some more. Some questions I came up with for myself after reading this section include: Does the reader have to know it now? If so, what is the best way to get it across? Can you explain why commentary here enhances the work as a whole? The last and most important question seemed to me to be: who decides? My answer for my own work? I do. I’m happy to have this insight as I move into this next revision of my novel, that I know is full of lines that tell when they should show. The task for me will be to keep asking myself those questions. It would be an affront to my own style and vision of the story to simple hack it all away. It’s fascinating to me how this question of good writing doesn’t necessarily translate when the writer moves from short story to novel, as I did.
For many years, I wrote only short stories, always keeping this notion of showing in mind, and for the most part, writing stories that showed more often than they told and told at the right time. There were times even when I was criticized for not telling enough, leaving the story too raw. As I began to write novels, something interesting happened. I wrote good scenes of showing, but was inclined to stitch them together with too much telling of information. This is true in the current draft of my novel. You see, I was so terrified that I wouldn’t get to the end, that I’d get lost somewhere along the way, that I kept checking in with the story. Because of this, what I ended up with is something sketchy, something that I now need to go back to the beginning of and add more detail and color to. After reading these sections, I’m beginning to see this question of telling and showing as something different than before, or maybe just as I’ve always seen it, but was not able to articulate or assert with confidence. Showing is supreme art, but commentary that is intentional is like the perfect mat and frame for the portrait.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.