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and showing (what Forster calls describing from the outside or
else from within). This is a question of viewpoint, about which
I ll have much to say a few lessons from now.At the moment, it s
enough to understand that telling tends to be vague and showing
tends to be vivid.
Here are two examples of telling:
Character 45
Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor
Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner of our district, who became
notorious in his own day (and is still remembered among us)
because of his tragic and mysterious death, which occurred
exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall relate in its proper
place. For the present all I shall say about this landowner (as we
used to call him, though he hardly ever lived on his estate) is that
he was a strange sort of individual&
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translation by
David Magarshack
Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill
House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now
that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-
in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This
was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her
invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse
and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could
not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
In these examples, the character is at a distance.We re aware that
we re being told about someone. The example from Shirley
Jackson is almost the character sketch that I suggested you write
in your conversation with yourself. In the extreme, the lack of
immediacy in this technique can draw attention to itself.
Now here are two examples of showing:
Radclif eyed the boy over the rim of his beer glass, not caring
much for the looks of him. He had his notions of what a real
boy should look like, and this kid somehow offended him. He was
too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was
shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tenderness softened
his eyes, which were brown and very large.
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
46 THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST
Mr. George Smiley was not naturally equipped for hurrying in
the rain, least of all at dead of night . . . Small, podgy, and at best
middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London s meek who
do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait everything
but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet. His over-
coat, which had a hint of widowhood about it, was of that black
loose weave which is designed to retain moisture. Either the
sleeves were too long or his arms were too short, for . . . when he
wore his mackintosh, the cuffs all but concealed the fingers.
John le Carre, Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy
In these two examples, the narrator is more or less invisible.The
characters are presented directly, in a concrete fashion. Each is
shown to us in specific terms.
Because the second set of examples is vivid, it s tempting to
think that showing is the better method. Unfortunately, showing
is also more difficult. It requires painstaking plotting in order to
establish scenes in which general information about a character is
dramatized in specific terms. Go back and look at the Jackson
quote. In a paragraph, she provides information that it would take
considerable pages to establish if Jackson felt obliged only to show
us the character rather than also tell us about her. In practice, a
certain amount of telling is inevitable. Otherwise, a story might
never be completed. But it s useful to know which method you re
using and to steer from telling to showing as soon as possible in
order to provide the immediacy that is more likely to capture a
reader s attention.As we ll see in the lesson about third-person view-
point, this is usually a contrast between the omniscient viewpoint
and the third-person limited.You can shift from telling to showing
(from omniscient to limited), but once you re showing, once you re
in a third-person limited, you will jar the reader if you go back to
an omniscient narrator telling about a character in general terms.
We re not finished with characterization. It s so crucial to story-
telling that the topic will inevitably come up when we discuss
many other aspects of fiction writing: description and dialogue, for
Character 47
example. But at the moment, let s conclude this theoretical discus-
sion with another of Forster s observations. For him, one of the
central appeals of fiction is that
In daily life, we never understand each other, neither complete
clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each
other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well
enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in
a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist
wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.
I enjoy this paradox: We call a fully drawn character lifelike
when in fact we can never know someone in life as well as we
have known that character in fiction. To the degree that we are
privy to a character s thoughts and emotions, the experience is
totally unrealistic, however magical. That is why novels . . . can
solace us, Forster says. They suggest a more comprehensible and
thus a more manageable human race.
LESSON FIVE
The Importance of Research
rite what you know about that s a common rule in
creative writing classes. It sounds like good advice, but
Wwhat does it mean? In the first half of the twentieth
century, American writers were often expected to travel, gain a
wealth of experience, and use that as the basis for their fiction. Jack
London wrote about his adventures in the Klondike gold rush.
Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in
World War I. Steinbeck accompanied the Depression-ravaged
Okies as they left their dust-bowl homes and struggled across
the country toward California and what they hoped would be the
Promised Land. Norman Mailer went to World War II. Jack
Kerouac went on the road. John Dos Passos. Nelsen Algren. A list
of this kind of reportorial author would be extensive.
Not that they were all manly men doing manly things. One of
my favorites, Edith Wharton, is another good example.A member
of the old-money New York Jones family, she shocked her strict
society by divorcing her emotionally unstable, embezzling
husband and establishing permanent residence in France. Earlier,
she shocked old New York even more severely by committing the
ultimate horror of seeming to work for a living (she didn t need
the money) as a writer, an activity she always dreamed about.
Often in her fiction (the best of which, for me, is The Age of
Innocence), she provided a rare eyewitness account of what it was
like to be part of Manhattan s repressive, secretive high society in
the last third of the 1800s.As with the other writers I mentioned,
a major appeal of Wharton s subject is its authenticity of detail, its
report from the trenches: the novelist as social historian describing
50 THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST
the calling cards left at elegant brownstone mansions, the fashion-
able carriages parading along Fifth Avenue, and the female
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