One thing must be understood. The more you rely on the narrator’s voice to carry the story instead of the events themselves, the better your writing has to be. Because when the audience’s attention is drawn away from the story, it goes somewhere. They’re staring at your style close up, and if your voice happens not to be very entertaining, you’ve lost them.

  Another way of putting it is this: In a good representational story, the audience will forgive a certain clumsiness of writing because they care so much about the characters and events. In a good presentational story, the audience will forgive a certain shallowness of story because they so enjoy the writer’s style and attitude. So you not only have to know what’s good for your story, you also have to know what type of story your particular talents are best suited for.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DRAMATIC VS. NARRATIVE

  You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Show, don’t tell.” Under some circumstances, that advice is good; under others, it’s exactly wrong. Storytellers constantly have to choose between showing, telling, and ignoring.

  Of these, showing is what you do least often; but since showing is also what takes up the most space, it deceives many critics into saying “The good writers show much more than they tell.” Critics say this because they examine only the text; we writers know better, because we deal with the story.

  The very terms are misleading. How can you show anything in fiction? The story always has a narrator. On the other hand, in theater and movies you show almost everything. That’s because plays and films are dramatic in form. The action unfolds in “real time” while the audience watches. Fiction has a narrator, a storyteller. Instead of the audience seeing events directly, they are unavoidably filtered through the perceptions of the narrator.

  Yet film is not completely dramatic — it only seems that way to the audience. In fact the screenwriter carefully chooses which information to present as a scene, and which information to have someone on-screen tell about, as an off-screen event. If you think about it, films would be deadly if they showed everything.

  Take Three Days of the Condor, a Robert Redford vehicle in the 1970s. (The book was Six Days of the Condor — they started compressing right from the start.) If the filmmakers actually showed us everything, it would take three days to see the film. They left out a lot of stuff. We didn’t need to see every bite he ate, every time he went to the bathroom, every step he took. To suggest a journey, they only had to show him starting out and then arriving. To suggest a night’s sleep, they only had to show him going to bed in darkness. If we then see him walking around in daylight, we assume it’s the next day. We fill in the trivial information. We don’t need to be told it, because it has nothing important to do with the story. This is the stuff that gets ignored — and fiction writers make the same kinds of choices all the time.

  A lot of information that is important to the story is still not important enough to be worth a whole scene. For instance, if characters are searching for vital information, and it takes a day of poring over files and books, we need only a montage of short clips of mountains of books, armloads of files, weary-looking actors getting bleary-eyed from reading — thirty seconds of film time. This is the filmic equivalent of “telling.” In fiction, you would have covered the events of the search even more economically, by saying, “They went through nineteen file drawers, paper by paper. They cracked open books that had ten years of dust on them. Even after all that searching, they almost missed the answer when they found it.” There it is — a day compressed into three sentences.

  It would be ridiculous to show all that searching instead of telling it. While the fact that they worked hard to get the information is important to the story, it isn’t important that the reader actually experience it. Instead, the storyteller gives them enough information to let them know that the search happened, that it wasn’t easy. Then the storyteller relies on the audience’s memory of similar hard research in their lives or their imagination of how hard it must be or how boring it would be to do all that reading. In this case, the right advice is “Tell, don’ t show.” That is the narrative technique, to tell what happened without taking much time.

  The important scenes, the ones that must be presented dramatically, are relatively rare — but they end up taking the bulk of the screen or stage time because “showing” is so terribly time-consuming. What you show as a scene will stick in the audience’s memory far more than things that are only told about. To the audience, what seems to happen in a film is all the neat scenes, all the tense moments. But the storyteller knows that most things that happen in a film are only told about, hinted at, glossed over, just as most things that happen in fiction are given in brief narrative form.

  What is the difference between dramatic and narrative, between showing and telling in fiction?

  For sixteen years I put up with his constant whining. His students were stupid. He was never given any good courses to teach. They always assigned him the most worthless graduate students to advise. He was sure they would never renew his contract. When they renewed it, he was equally sure they’d never give him tenure. By the time the decision was made, I was praying he was right.

  Unfortunately, he got tenure — and a raise every year, his own personal computer, and several good convention trips a year, and all the time I had to listen to his whining in faculty meetings, the faculty lounge, the corridors; even in my office I could hear him whining clear down the hall. It was too much to hope that another university would hire him, though I praised him to every department chairman I met, hoping they’d try to lure him away.

  I began to dream of ways he might die. A fall in the snow. Getting run over by a truck. His bookshelves tumbling over on him. Accidentally taking an overdose of Serutan. I imagined him arriving at the emergency room, whimpering at the doctors and saying, “I know you’re just going to let me die.” I imagined the doctors saying, “Damn straight.”

  But I didn’t kill him.

  He came into my office without knocking, something even my wife doesn’t do. “I don’t know why I put up with this,” he said.

  Oddly enough, exactly the same sentence was running through my mind.

  “This new rule about doing our own photocopying is obviously aimed at me,” he said. “They’re trying to harass me into leaving.”

  “If you’d have your students buy textbooks instead of copying entire books for them — ”

  “There is no single book that is suited to my classes. But I should have guessed you’d act like this. You probably suggested that they cut off my photocopying privileges.”

  “There’s a cutback. We lost two student aides. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “So you’re one of them. Fine. I don’t need you. I can get a job anywhere.”

  If I had thought there was a chance he’d actually quit his job, I would have said something snide. However, I knew perfectly well that his whining would eventually lead the chairman or the dean or somebody to assign a student aide to him personally, just to do his photocopying — and if I said anything nasty to him in the process, he’d whine about that, too, and I’d end up sitting through meetings with the dean about my inability to be supportive of other faculty members.

  So I didn’t say anything. I just looked him in the eye and smiled, hoping all the while that he would die. It was a deep, sincere desire, one that I had often felt before. But I didn’t kill him.

  The same two characters; pretty much the same information. We learn that there is tension between them, and the narrator believes that the conflict arises entirely from the other teacher’s whining. But the first version is merely told, not shown.

  What difference does it make? Notice that the second version, the scene, takes longer, though it gets through far less overall information and covers far less time than the narrative version.

  At the same time, the pure narrative seems like a mere prelude. It is leading up to the story. We expect it to be followed by a scene. After reading the narrative paragraph, we still feel that nothing has yet happened. But at the end of the scene, we feel that something has happened.

  The scene makes the tension between characters more immediate and real. But the narrative makes it seem as if it has gone on longer, so that the annoyance isn’t triggered by a single incident, but rather by a cumulative list of offenses.

  Which one of these is the “right” choice? Either one could be right; either could be wrong. Factors like rhythm, pace, and tone come into play — these are outside the scope of this book. However, if the author wanted the reader to get a feel for the murder victim, to remember him as a character instead of simply getting the narrator’ s attitude toward him, this or some other scene would be essential. Characters are made more real through scenes than through narrative.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE

  When you use a first-person narrator, you are almost required to tell the story in someone else’s voice — the voice of the character telling the tale. A careless writer will have all her first-person narrator s talk amazingly like herself, but if you take characterization seriously, the use of first person will lead you to discover a new voice for each story told by a different narrator.

  One mistake many writers have made — particularly nineteenth-century humorists like Artemus Ward — is to make the first-person narrator’s voice so eccentric or heavily accented that the story becomes almost unreadable. In fairness, I should point out that in Ward’s own time, stories tended to be read aloud; the heavily accented writing did not slow down the pace, since reading aloud is already slow; and it also provided the reader with a guide to pronouncing the comical accents.

  But by and large you should attempt to create the narrator’s voice through his attitude and implied past, letting the speech reflect his educational level and regional accent only in syntax and word choice, not in odd spellings or endless pronunciation guides. Nothing is more deadly than trying to read sentence after sentence written like this: “Ah niver did figgah out whah in hivven’s nam e a good of boah lahk ‘at wen’ crazy an’ stahted in killin’ folks.” Furthermore, the narrator doesn’t hear his own accent anyway, and so would never write it that way. The narrator would write: “I never did figure out why in heaven’s name a good old boy like that went crazy and started in killing folks.” That’ s what he thinks he said, and it’s only because you have a different accent that you think his words should be spelled another way.

  Cheapest of all is when writers try to show someone is uneducated by using apostrophes willy-nilly: “I’m goin’ t’ th’ store, Nell. We’re runnin’ out o’ beer.” In the first place, most people, even educated people, drop letters in normal informal speech. Anyone who never does is a hopeless prig. In the second place, the dropped g in ing endings is actually older than the pronounced g, and therefore is arguably more correct; certainly it is a natural survival of the ancient spoken tongue, and doesn’t really denote an uneducated person — except to someone who is uneducated. It almost invariably comes across as a way for the author to show that he sneers at the person who speaks that way, and only rarely is this the conclusion you’ll want the audience to reach about your first-person narrator.

  WHICH PERSON IS FIRST?

  The main limitation on the first-person narrative is that your narrator has to be present at the key scenes. A first-person narrator who merely hears about the major events of the story is no good to you at all. So you have to work your narrator into the action so tightly that he is present whenever you need him to observe something.

  The easiest way is to make the narrator the protagonist (or vice versa — make your protagonist the narrator). The trouble here is that the protagonist is the character with whom the audience sympathizes. She is likely to do interesting and important things during the course of the story, or suffer terrible loss or pain; how well will her voice serve to tell about these things?

  For instance, if one of the key events is the death of the protagonist’s beloved child, how coherently is she going to be able to write about the events leading up to it? If she is too emotional, it will become melodramatic; if too graphic, it will become unbearably intense. Yet if you retreat, and her narration becomes clear and cool, you run the risk of having the audience regard her as cold and heartless. This is not to say it can’t be done — it just requires a careful balance.

  The timid writer, of course, will decide not to show that key event at all, or will use telling rather than showing:

  We finally got Johnny into a decent school, Bill’s job was settling clown, and I could forget about those people and their terrible phone calls for hours at a time. I thought everything was going to be all right, until I heard someone screaming and pounding on my door one day. I knew at once that those people hadn’t forgotten me, that they had done something terrible, just like they said. I opened the door. It was my neighbor, Rainie. “He just drove off!” she cried. “Matt’s calling the ambulance — ”

  There’s no point in me telling you about the next few days. If you have a child of your own, you already know; if you don’t, you can’t possibly understand. They didn’t try to contact me until we got home from Johnny’s burial. Maybe it was a sense of decency — presumably they have children, too. More likely they were waiting until they thought I was calmed down enough to be rational. To listen.

  I listened. I still had a husband and two other children.

  The narrator isn’t out on the street watching when her child is killed. No horrifying moment as she realizes that the truck is going to jump the side-walk and hit her son. No descriptions of a crumpled body on the street. For a first-person narrator to describe such things at all might seem ghoulish. To adequately express the emotions might be impossible. To describe it all coldly would be too clinical. Yet to skip over the events, as in the example, is rather coy.

  Choose one. Maybe coyness is in character; maybe the character is clinical. Maybe you’re a good enough writer to tell the immediate feelings of a mother who watched her child die — without getting maudlin or grotesque. These choices are all available.

  But there are several other choices to keep in mind. You can decide to use a different narrator. Why not the neighbor woman, Rainie? Make her the protagonist’s close confidante, so she can be closely involved in this woman’s struggle. She can actually see the accident with the less passionate horror of a bystander, avoiding the much stronger emotions of a parent. She has enough distance to be a clear, direct narrator; enough closeness to witness everything.

  Or you can use a third-person narrator — with all the drawbacks and benefits that entails. We’ll discuss those later.

  Arthur Conan Doyle chose well in deciding not to have Sherlock Holmes narrate his own stories. Using Watson as narrator allowed Doyle to withhold information from the audience without being unfair. Holmes knew certain information, but Watson didn’t, so Watson could tell us all that he knew in the order he found it out, without spoiling the surprise. Since Watson never knows as much as Holmes, neither do we.

  There is another benefit, though. Imagine if we had to listen to Holmes’s intellectual, arrogant tone through every word of the story. Instead of admiring his godlike mind from below, we would find him insufferably conceited. He might even be ridiculous. This is the choice Agatha Christie made with Hercule Poirot — but Poirot was never worshipped as audiences have worshipped Sherlock Holmes.

  The narrator’ s voice is your greatest asset — and your greatest drawback. Your first-person narrator can’t be a bore, or your story will be boring. She can’t describe herself performing noble acts, or she will seem vain for having told the tale at all.

  Yet you can tell us much about your narrator by showing him do a brave, heroic act without him giving us a sign that he realizes the act was heroic at all. Or he can do something terrible, all the while explaining exactly why his crime was not a crime at all, but a necessary act — while we listen in horror.

  She wouldn’t be quiet, even when I tried to tell her how important it was for her not to say those things. There’s some things a man just doesn’t have to put up with from a woman. You listen to them blab on all the time about their girlfriends and going shopping and what the kids did, and you figure that’s just what women’s heads are full of. But when she starts getting down on a man for doing what men do, well, that’s over the line, that’s more than a man has to put up with. What she’s really doing, she’s just trying to get you to prove to her that you really are a man, maybe sometimes just because you’ve been too tired sometimes, or too nice about it in bed, so you hear her talking like that, you don’t put your hands in your pockets. You knock her around, you let her know that you still got the power in your arm, you still got the strength to be the man she needs you to be. It hurts her, of course, but it hurts her sweet, that’s what my dad always said, she gets a bloody lip but it tastes sweet to her because she knows she’s got a real man. Only this time she just wouldn’t quiet down, she just kept yelling at me and saying crap that I don’t have to put up with, and then she kept trying to go out onto the street and spread all our family business all over the neighborhood, and I couldn’t let her do that, could I? You wouldn’t either, man, and don’t tell me you never hit your woman a little bit harder than you meant to, what with her mouthing off.

  We may not love this character, but we know him better from hearing his version of his actions than we ever would by hearing them described by someone else. This passage ostensibly defends the narrator’s mistreatment of his wife, but in fact it reveals very clearly his monstrous misconception of the way other people think and feel. That’s one of the best reasons to use first person — to let us live for a while in a strange or twisted world, to see the world as someone else sees it. Yet because the narrator is not the author, but rather a character, the readers know that the author doesn’t necessarily agree with the narrator. In fact, in this passage, if I handled the irony properly, it should be clear to a late-twentieth-century reader that the author is completely out of sympathy with the narrator.