Compelling prose is the heartbeat of every fiction writer. We ache to bring the readers into the world we’ve created. Teaching other writers how to do this is tricky at best, for teaching an art form is itself an art form. But staring at eager yet pained faces of students who were trying to piece together meaning from the sentences I was trying my best to simplify made the task all the more daunting. Telling them to “show, not tell,” brought a whole new level of confusion than teachers typically experience in the Western world. Yet, that’s exactly what I experienced as I taught English composition at university in China. Some students had already resigned themselves to copying work from the Internet and running it through Google translate to pass it off as their own, thus negating the need for much effort to be expended on their part. Others showed nervous smiles as they struggled, but they knew they could only try their best and deal with it. It was the rest, the ones that were desperate in their determination to excel, the ones that were stressed to the point of trauma, that were breaking my heart. I needed to find a simple way to explain fictional narrative to English language learners. Their language is so vastly different from any Indo-European language that any text run through on online translator came out as absolute gibberish. I imagined that’s how I sounded to them most of the time, but having to decipher such abstract concepts had to make it just that much worse. Watching others struggle with language that comes naturally to you brings a great deal of clarity.
Feeling pressure to perform and produce when writing becomes our job, it’s very easy to revert to a formulaic approach to writing fiction. It’s probably the method used by the majority of low-budget movie screenwriters. It’s how tropes find a home. And looking out at those faces, I knew I had to bring them into the loop in its most basic form. I took it step by step and found that that is the exact advice they needed. It’s what we all need.
Taking a story step by step is a real-time approach. The storytelling isn’t relaying a list of events. First this happened, then this happened, then this happened. It’s dry and doesn’t make anyone care about it. They’re disconnected from the story when they’re writing to inform of the story. This is telling the story. Rather, they are to be walking in the shoes of the characters. Instead of pulling the reader to the goal of the ending, I told them they need to experience the story. The traditional explanation of “show, don’t tell” often involves telling them to use sensory details and lots of descriptions and indirect language, which often results in a contrived or forced feeling. Instead, I told them to imagine they were there. They were walking through the story step-by-step and reacting to what’s happening. In simpler terms they could understand, I asked them what they notice at each step, what was important to them. Then they were to decide how they reacted to it.
I’ve seen many student writers, both native and non-native English speakers, struggle with forcing themselves to show rather than tell. But if we walk through the story in real time, putting one foot in front of the other and letting their presence develop the story, it fulfills the law of showing not telling.
Even so, I still was given one student’s shining example of fiction that curiously was a word-for-word rendering of The Giving Tree. Really.
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