Ian is Evil, John is Tortured, Rab is Smitten and I am Fucked

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the course of doing this site I actually made myself walk to the filing cabinet and find all the real people involved in various quotes and anecdotes I use in my blogs.

I discovered, as usual, that all my 'facts' were wrong because I have the most shit memory in human history. Actually, the truth is I don't care enough about who said what to do that exhausting walk to the filing cabinet, but here, finally, for the sake of accuracy, are the facts. I've done the research and now you can damn well read it.

The editor referred to in this blog was actually from Macmillan. She was called Theresa Chris. She also said, for the record, that DANNY was like "an ongoing soap opera, not a novel", read as if it was American, had no sense of place, no sense of story, no sense of where it was going, was like an American angst film (I don't even know what that is , but I like it), was like "a film running in your head, as if you had only written parts of it", and that it was not believable. Still, notably, when she first wrote to me she said, "Several of us have read this and found the writing riveting, but it is rather relentless."

Rather relentless? It's completely relentless. But notice they all read it before they recommended they ban it.

Ain't folk strange ?

Enjoy.

Show don't tell. All the people who are reading this right now who have ever written anything, or read a writer's guide, have either just left this blog or are thinking, Oh goody, I know about this.

Well I'm glad you do, because I don't.

'Show don't tell' is in the same league as alien abduction - you might know someone who has it on the best authority that someone once did, but you've never met anyone who has. I guarantee you that.

Lost you yet? Stick with it and all will be revealed.

No-one - and I will repeat that because it needs emphasising - no-one knows what 'show don't tell' means. Everybody thinks they know, but, trust me, you get half a dozen writers together in a room and not two of them will have the same notion of what it means.

I always took it to mean things of this ilk, "John was a tall man with rugby player's hands. He walked with a slight limp and had a speech impediment that meant he started every sentence with a small hiss. He was 6ft 8, had blue eyes and liked to wear women's clothing. He didn't much like his mother and ate ravioli every Tuesday because he thought it improved his sperm count."

To me that was telling. A long list of details offered up as facts. Bad writing, in short. Easy.

Not so.

When DANNY was first doing the rounds of publishers it was rejected by a well-known senior editor, at either Random House or Transworld (I always forget which). This woman had liked my writing and wanted to encourage me to write something else for them, so she wrote to me and asked me to phone her so we could chat about DANNY and, hopefully, turn me into a more publisher-friendly writer. Now, getting read at all is a feat and getting invited to phone them, personal number and all... well, I was in. Anyway, to cut a long story short, as well as reading "too like a movie" (?) I apparently also needed to learn to show and not tell.

Eek! I was both horrified and baffled. As far as I was concerned I hadn't told anyone anything in my work since I was fourteen, but I was also completely baffled because I, the author, am not in DANNY at all. I was so gobsmacked by this criticism that I didn't ask her for clarification. To this day I still don't know exactly what she meant.

A lot of DANNY is not straightforward, although it looks as if it is, but one of the few things that is certain about it is, I am not in it. There is no narrator's voice, or at least the one that is in there is completely impartial. I exist in the book to make statements like 'It was raining', 'The house smelt of burnt toast'. This is so uniform, in fact, that for the handful of places where I am present I actually swithered over some of them, wondering if they should come out, if I wasn't leading the reader too much. In reality, I so seldom lead the reader that many of them get cross at me for not telling them what to think or showing them where to go.

So, if I'm not in the book how can I tell you anything? And the answer to that one is I don't. Everything there is to learn in DANNY you have to work out for yourself, and the only way you can do that is by concentrating on what the characters tell you, or don't tell you, and then look at what they do (show you), and then reach your own conclusions. Any telling that is done is by them, not me. And if the characters can't tell the readers anything what the fuck are we reading a book for?

That said, the criticism popped up on the web recently, but to make it more interesting the critic gave an example, "Ian is Evil, John is Tortured, Rab is Smitten." These were the things I had told the reader. This was both fascinating and reassuring, as I don't believe the first one at all, the second one is a cautious, 'Mm... he can be' and the last one is a tickled-pink, 'Really? Are you sure? Who by, do you think?'

Very interesting...

In reality, all the things that I had clearly "told the reader" I didn't think at all. So if someone did tell her, it certainly wasn't me.

What our critic has done is make the assumption that because the characters say things, believe things, then I believe them too. And here we are back at conventional novels again.

In your bog standard story the characters are usually clearly marked with black and white hats. In 'better' novels the hats can be grey. But they still have their hats on - they, the authors, are still telling you what to think, if only that it's don't be too rigid about what you think. I never, ever, tell anyone what to think in DANNY. It's up to you to decide who's wearing what hat - if anyone is. Because I never told you they were.

I have to admit though that I am no further forward in working out what it is they are mistaking for 'telling', assuming that they are, and they are not just falling back on that old chestnut because they can't think of any other explanation for DANNY's narrative style. I may never know. Certainly I've never read a clear definition of it. And any 50 novels you pick up in a book shop, ancient or modern, will tell you any amount of things and show you very little. Whereas I tell you very little and show you everything - other than what I don't want you to know of course.

So, if any of you would-be writers are still with me, and reckon you've got the definitive answer to what 'Show don't tell' means, share it, for God's sake, and put us all out our misery.