Style Fascism in Creative Writing Courses, and Taste in General about Writing in this Century
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.[1]
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs[2].
What I mean here is that lovely dictum we’ve all been hearing for a number of years now: Show, Don’t Tell!
I’ve been having a bit of a fit of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century novels lately. I get faddy. I’ve been re-reading eighteenth century bits I read for my dissertation; not the whole of them (Time! Time! Woe!), but segments. And Jane Austen has been having regular visitations from me, as has George Eliot, and Charles Dickens.
I have always found the ‘Show, don’t Tell’ dictum annoying. It assumes that all the big fat epic novels of the past did nothing but tell, and never showed. It also assumes that the telling voice must have been so blisteringly boring or annoying that you will be done with narrators’ altogether. It implies we will have no more of middle men, those narrators coming over here, stealing our stories and telling them to us, when we could equally envision them for ourselves (were we only given the words)! Pish! This sounds all very good. Full of independence. Nice pioneering spirit, hmm?
But how about the idea that it also plays into the laziness of our age, our generation? The fact we all spend so much time in front of the TV, or out at films (less so, but still a nice popcorny treat when you can…). The fact that unless we can see something, have it right in front of us, it just can’t seem to be processed? People seem to give very little thought to the fact that when watching anything, they are watching a process of careful construction. Somebody picked the images, the lighting, the composition, the mood music over the top. The editor alone, had a huge impact on what you see, that looks at once so artless, but is obviously very artful.
Film and TV are obviously visual mediums. The reading of fiction is also visual, but in a very different way. The words relate and tangle with the images the writer gives you, the sense of an atmosphere. These create your own interpreted vision in your head, of what the writer said. (This is why we get annoyed if we see a dramatisation of a book we like but the hero or heroine look wrong, not how we imagined). Peter Shaffer[3] rightly said, in his play Amadeus, that when twenty characters talk at the same time in a book or a play, its noise; but in music it’s the most beautiful harmony. If someone makes an adaptation of a book you like, to film or TV, and it’s not as you envisioned at all, then its noise to your mind. The weaving together of your imagination, the visual descriptions of the author, and the words they used are the ingredients that give you your scrumptious cake of reading.
Now, I did several Open University writing courses, and all were excellent, and helped me a lot. (One taught me to love the Edit and not fear it; another taught me to love the Critic, for he too has his place, for example.) But one spent far too much time telling me how much drama had to teach the writing person[4]. ‘Course, drama has loads to teach the writing person – many techniques are useful: pacing and plot arc-ing etc, to just name two. But there was such an emphasis on visual description of every aspect of the story, and this was mirrored in lots of otherwise helpful writing books I read in conjunction with the course, that I began to feel annoyed.
For example, if your character cries, don’t describe why she is crying, or even the tears on her face. Describe by her actions alone, why she is crying. If your hero is triumphant after previous desolating circumstances, don’t tell us why, don’t even tell us how…just show us his joy in his actions, convey it to us like a camera, moving over the scene, make visual links that tell us the story that way. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very exciting way to tell a story: so that it is all immediately visible in the mind, as clear pictures.
But it isn’t the only way, and it’s certainly not the best way, alone. It’s just a style, a good style, but a style fad like any other style fad. I say, LOUDLY, take from it what you want, use it when it suits you, and mix it up with other ways of story telling. That’s my opinion, and it’s how I write. DO NOT let anyone tell you how you should be writing, and that one way is Best! I say Fiffle, to that.
I know lots of people who still enjoy those rolling thumping epics of the nineteenth century, like Middlemarch (the mythically wondrous George Eliot), to pick a great fat one at random. Or even the monstrously rambling and quite idiosyncratic doorstops of the eighteenth century, like Tom Jones (Henry Fielding), or Tristram Shandy (Lawrence Sterne) or Clarissa (Samuel Richardson). The people I have spoken to (my own small sample, yes, it won’t stand up as a sociological survey, I’m quite aware) have said what they love about these enormous tomes are the love of words the authors display, and the Narrative Voice.
People forget how fun it is – and how common it was, in the days before mass literacy – to be read to, to be spoken to – to be included; drawn close and talked to as a confidante. Here, the absolutely awful (really) villain, Lovelace, from Clarissa, is writing a letter to his best friend, defending his dread plans of raping (yes, isn’t it graphic subject matter for the 18th century?) the poor Clarissa, and describes his life playfully:
Who knows but in her time, poor goody Moore may have met with a Lovelace, or a Belford, or some such vile fellow? – My little harum-scarum beauty knows not what strange histories every woman living, who has had the least independence of will, could tell her, were such to be as communicative as she is– But here’s the thing–I have given her cause enough of offence; but not enough to make her hold her tongue[5].
Now what’s this I hear you say? That that isn’t a narratorial voice, but a character voice? That’s more or less the point. Those enormous tomes were filled with character voices. They were as direct as direct could be. They played with form, they played with voice. After the rape (yes, Lovelace was very dastardly indeed, I spent the whole book sighing and getting cross and shaking my head – it was a bloody good read), poor Clarissa writes various letters to people, trying to get them to believe what has happened to her. Lovelace has cleverly separated her from her family and friends, so she is alone. She has a bit of a breakdown, loses her sense of self for a while. Here, in one of her little fragments, she tries on Lovelace’s thoughts, blames herself for what he did to her:
A LADY took a great fancy to a young lion, or a bear, I forget which […] She fed it with her own hand; she nursed up the wicked cub with great tenderness […] so that like a lap-dog, it would follow her all over the house. But mind what followed. At last, somehow, having […] disobliged it on some occasion, it resumed its nature; and on a sudden fell upon her, and tore her in pieces–And who was most to blame, I pray? The brute, or the lady? The lady, surely! – For what she did, was out of nature, out of character at least: what it did, was in its own nature[6].
Isn’t that chillingly persuasive? Relevant? (We still have arguments about rape today: this justification falls into the ever disgusting and puerile ‘she asked for it’ category.) But see how it’s written? There’s no images as such here. Yet you see it, in flashes, you hear it in your mind, you hear the male voice overlaying the female. You are there, in the story. And the thing about Richardson and some of his eighteenth century compatriots, was that all the voices are the narrator, really – all the novels were a big soup of their own ideas on morals and how life should be lived: it was ALL narrator, when you got down to it.
Some of the best novels of the nineteenth century made great fun with the whole concept of narrator. In the Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins, the female protagonist is menaced through most of the book by another marvellous villain. She tells the story. Then (SPOILER ALERT!!!) at a brilliant and vital moment of the story, he abducts her. The next entry you read is by him! The complete change of tone and the shock of realising what has happened and the intimacy of suddenly hearing and feeling this dread character speak himself is wonderful! (I gave a great gasp and had to get up and go and tell Alias Troubadour, who I was with at the time. The cat was disinterested; so was Troubadour, but still. I found it genuinely thrilling.)
The great argument FOR the showing and not telling, is that it is very immediate, it places you right in the centre of the action, and doesn’t tell what to think about it. It lets you make your own mind up. That is very true of the good examples. But what its made for in reality, is a lot of very lazy shorthand writing (and film, tsk tsk), and a lot of telegraphed emotion. The whole point about writing is that it’s a lot more subtle and penetrating than dramatic techniques alone. You can be in someone’s head – or everyone’s head, good old omniscient narrator, so much slagged today – or just one. Or no one’s; you’re just an essence of the time, the area, a spirit of place. The other point is that you will make your own mind up as to what to think anyway. You aren’t stupid. You’ll figure out that the narrator is Of Their Time, and bear that in mind when listening to the moral pronouncements especially.
Moving to the present day (as most of the famous omniscient and semi-omniscient narrators are behind us), you’ll find some of the most loved works of now, tell as well as show. The hugely successful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (Susanna Clarke), was a marvellous throwback to the past ways of writing, spliced with writing more Nowishly, an obvious example. Or…
Hear this:
Dear God,
Nettie here with us. She run away from home. She say she hate to leave our stepma, but she had to git out, maybe fine help for the other little ones. The boys be alright, she say. They can stay out his way. When they git big they gon fight him.
Maybe kill, I say[7].
Do you feel that? In my opinion, that’s the only way to dispense with a omniscient narratorial voice. A very powerful ‘I’ voice. That was the scarily strong and moving voice of Celie in The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker. You can’t be more there than a direct hearing of a story. You close your eyes and see it from the feeling of it. Not just any images given.
Even in more popular women’s fiction – lets be rude and call it chicklit, as is so often done in that derogatory way – you’ll hear particularly in early Jane Green, and the mistress Lisa Jewell right until now, a fair bit of telling going on with the showing. It’s mixed up – and very readable for it. They haven’t thrown the baby out with the bath water. Neither have brilliant current literary writers like, say, Sarah Waters (Fingersmith, Affinity, Tipping the Velvet etc).
I think maybe you’ll be saying to me: but you’re confusing omniscient narrators with character voice, altogether. I say nope – the people who argue the Telling Vs. Showing case, they are the ones confused. What they forget is that George Eliot and her summations, Charles Dickens and his pronouncements; they WERE characters. All those overblown narrators, sailing over the main story, apparently robbing you of the right to think for yourself: they were characters in their own rights, albeit without a name, often. They set a tone, they held the atmosphere, and sometimes they controlled the pace. But they were just as valid as any other character. Use them if you want. Just because they are out of fashion doesn’t yet make them obsolete.
Novels are about hearing voices, as much as about seeing images.
I have to go and eat lunch and do the hoovering (just to pointlessly narrate myself here), but I’ll leave you with the original Miss Chicklit herself, and don’t you love the sound of her youthful voice, here loving to play with the idea of omniscient narrator:
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition were all equally against her[8].
In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland’s personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks’ residence in Bath, it may be stated, for the reader’s more certain information, lest the following pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is meant to be; that her heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind – her manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and, when in good looks, pretty – and her mind about as ignorant and unformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is[9].
Well, don’t you love it?
[1] George Eliot, Middlemarch, London: Penguin (1994; 2003), p.7. Opening lines of the book.
[2] Ibid, p.838. The closing lines of the novel, the summation.
[3] Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, London: Penguin (2007) – I refuse to give the page ref – read the whole thing! And if you get a mo, do read his Equus as well. It’s what the word Fabulous was overenthused for. He is always Very Thought Provoking. (And shocking, so be prepared, specially with Equus.)
[4] This course will remain nameless, but anyone who has done it will recognise it immediately. It also had the other major flaw of using one short story by one of the course authors, all the way through, as an example of various types of style and re-writing techniques. I feel like being a bit cutting about that, but I won’t. I will just say: more varied examples would probably have been a lot more helpful.
[5] Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, London and Bath: Penguin (1985), p.790.
[6] Ibid, p.891.
[7] Alice Walker, The Colour Purple, London: The Woman’s Press (1983; 1992), p.17.
[8] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998 edn.), p.1.
[9] Ibid, p.5.
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