When I graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1972, I came away with a number of understandings that have not withstood the test of time. One of them had to do with showing vs. telling: When writing fiction showing is superior to telling, or so the belief went. I came away believing telling is a lesser form of storytelling. (If that's the case, now I wonder why we always use the term "storytelling," and never use the term "story showing.")
Over the last fifty years there's been a reassertion of telling over showing. We're no longer so silly as to believe that one is good and the other is bad; rather, I'd suggest the current belief is that there's a time for telling and a time for showing; we like writing in which both methods live side-by-side peacefully, each one helping the other to operate more effectively.
One undeniable reality: Showing requires more words than telling; thus, in the hands of a fine writer, by telling one can achieve stunning effects in very few words. Think of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
As a Writers' Workshop graduate, I never considered that truth. My blind faith in showing over telling severely hampered my ability to write descriptions: I was under the impression that descriptions at their best should show a reader how someone or something looked or felt, perhaps relying on a metaphor. Looking back on it now, I can see how this orientation led to "arty writing" that now I might consider self-conscious and imprecise. If you had asked me at the time, "Well, how about writing a description that simply tells a reader what she or he should imagine?" I would have probably said, "But that's telling." I would have called it too crass for words, and judged it not sufficiently arty.
In Toni Morrison's Beloved we see plenty of telling descriptions, especially of eyes. Critics call her eye descriptions "a motif" because they appear virtually every time a character appears.
Her descriptions tell us exactly how we should see a character's eyes. It's almost as though Toni Morrison turns the old-fashioned "showing" rules of writing descriptions on their head. With her, it's all about telling. Showing is forbidden.
Here are some examples:
One character has "the glittering iron punched out of her eyes..."
Another character's eyes: "...left two wells that did not reflect firelight."
When Schoolteacher (a character) catches up with another character, "her eyes are so black she looks blind."
After too much conflict with a character, her eyes "turn bright but dead, alert but vacant."
Notice the depth, complexity and ambiguity of that description. (Notice how few words it takes to write a truly complicated, involving description.)
The disturbing thing about another character's eyes was "not that the whites of them were much too white," but that "deep down in those big black eyes there was no expression at all."
When Paid Stamp (a character) recalls his time on the chain gang in Georgia, he remembers that "the eyes had to tell what there was to tell" about what the other prisoners were feeling.
When the schoolteacher comes upon the scene in the shed he decides to turn back for home without claiming any of the survivors (he was a slave bounty hunter) because "he had enough of nigger eyes for now."
Denver thinks of her mother as "one who never looked away, even from pain or death."
Paul D (another character) thinks he is safe from Beloved's (still another character's) advances "...as long as his eyes were locked on the silver of the lard can."
Yet another character thinks it's lovely the way a second character is "pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of Beloved," which I take to mean that Beloved's eyes are observant and attractive but non-judgmental. If there is a tinge of menace in that description (the character being magically pulled closer) it's appropriate. Beloved is a ghost.
When Sethe sees Paul D after many years: "Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes he looked the way he had in Kentucky."
Paul D saw Halle "empty eyed..."
"For a man with an immobile face, it was amazing how ready he was to smile or blaze or be sorry with you. With less than a blink his face seemed to change; underneath it lay the activity."
What I got from reading Beloved was for me a revolutionary, new way to go about writing descriptions; I got a methodology, if you will, for how to go about it (telling rather than showing), and a tremendous number of examples.
If you call that "copying," I suggest it's more rightly called "stealing." I would suggest you read a little book called Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told you about being Creative by Austin Kleon. It's a New York Times bestseller.
It shouldn't be forgotten that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Foremost among the many gifts one gets from reading Beloved are its powerful, succinct descriptions.
For all the "show-don't-tell" die-hards among us: That's telling, don't you agree?
