on showing and telling
of showing and telling
due to the unignorable power of two trustworthy people recommending the same book within a week (eternal thanks to amal el-mohtar and angeline rodriguez), i've been reading micaiah johnson's The Space Between Worlds, and it does this thing that I f*cking love: it tells, instead of shows.
"show, don't tell" is one of those folkloric pieces of writing advice so ancient and often-repeated that no one's really sure where it came from or what it means. maybe it was chekov, or maybe hemingway, or maybe the pale ghost of a 10th grade english teacher that haunts the halls of every high school, hissing about split infinitives. but the general idea is that real writers would never stoop to simply telling you what's happening in the story; they should show you, through action and sensation and emotion. the reader is immersed in a set of assumptions and experiences, absorbing the story through their pores rather than, like, their eyes.
which is cool, and totally works! i'm not here to knock a century or so of successful literary convention! but sometimes, especially in speculative fiction, i just want to be told what the actual hell is happening. i want a strong narrative voice to come sweeping across the stage in a grand monologue that explains the whole world to me like i'm five. i want the patronizing clarity of a fairytale or a myth, which strings together a story with a series of and thens and untils. i want a flat southern voice leaning close and saying so what had happened was...
(not incidentally, i think most oral storytelling is about telling, rather than showing, and i harbor certain suspicions about why predominately white elite Western literary traditions might denigrate the narrative stylings of oral storytellers, but i digress.)
anyway, The Space Between Worlds is one of the relatively rare books that deploys an exquisite mix of both showing and telling. it opens with a vivid, granular scene, and then zooms out to give you this absolute banger of a paragraph:
i mean, what efficiency. what a combination of art and clarity. do you know how f*cking hard it is to turn exposition into something searing and compelling, with narrative tension? johnson really did that, because this is a book with so much action that readers can't waste their time figuring out the setting or the rules; we've got places to go.
it's not just pacy thrillers than can pull this off: laini taylor's Strange the Dreamer oscillates between showing and telling for a mythic, dream-like effect that i simply adore. it's so hard to segue between intimate scenes of dialogue and a narrator's distant view, but she does it so slickly you hardly notice.
basically: both of these books make their own rules, specific to the stories they're telling, and honestly aren't those the only writing rules you really have to follow?
news
my next book is out in exactly a month! it has two starred reviews (from Library Journal and Booklist) and Publisher’s Weekly did a long interview and some of the worst reviews so far have called it angry and feminist, an obvious win.
so on THAT note: if you subscribe to this newsletter, you're officially entered in a chance to win one of eight (eight!!) physical copies of The Once and Future Witches. you can also retweet this tweet for another entry. this giveaway is personally sponsored by my wise and generous editor, who is stuck in lockdown with a metric ton of books and wants to mail them to you! (this giveaway is US only; i’ll contact the winners on 9/15).
further reading
the coode street podcast was generous enough to talk with me for an ENTIRE HOUR about my witch book! which, you know, that’s on them.
i would like to formally recognize courtney milan and kj charles, whose books have been single handedly maintaining my mental and emotional health for weeks now. in particular, milan's Unraveled, and charles's Will Darling books. they have exactly the right balance of hotness and hyjinks, and i love them.
in a bid to spend more time writing and less time screaming, i’ve pulled away from the news lately. but i did read Jesmyn Ward's piece in vanity fair (content warnings for covid, sickness, death, grief, depression, everything). it's......not an easy read. but it's the only thing that has felt like it punctured the greasy bubble of anxiety and irony i've been living in and let me feel real grief; it laid out both personal and national horrors, and i cried a lot.