To tell a great tale, sometimes you have to leave out details

“My romance with Paris begins, as one says of earthquakes, at an epicentre — surrounded by tall, turn-of-the-century buildings, a small empty park, and silent avenues.

This is how I always pictured Paris as an adolescent, before ever seeing it. A marchand de tabacs (tobacco merchant) who would sell me cigarettes without asking questions; a pâpeterie (stationery shop) where I could buy a longed-for Pelikan pen; the smile of girls outside a vaguely imagined lycée (high school); a secret rendezvous at the cinema”.

This is one of literature’s loveliest passages from André Aciman’s short story, The Last Time I Saw Paris. Aciman employs a style of writing known as “show, don’t tell” — after reading the passage, one can close his eyes and see how he imagined Paris.

One of the best definitions is by one critic who wrote: “Show, don’t tell is a technique often employed to enable the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses and feelings rather than through the author’s exposition, summarisation and description”.

EPICENTRE?

Instead of writing that “my dream of Paris was very strong and intense”, he uses the word ‘epicentre’ and the reader is left to imagine for themselves how strong that is.

When one writes, “Sam was very angry”, that is “telling” and not “showing”. It doesn’t paint a picture of what Sam did to ‘show’ his anger. However, if one writes, “Sam gnashed his teeth and smashed the television set with his bare fists”, the reader will know that Sam was angry. Writers should remember that readers are not dumb!

Therefore, sometimes they should be nuanced. Let readers join the dots. They can infer and make their own conclusions from what they read. 

The writer can hint and omit some things that are too obvious. This is called the law of omission, or what Ernest Hemingway called “the Iceberg Theory” in his treatise, “Death in the Afternoon”, where he writes, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader (if the writer is writing truly enough), will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

The creative works I have enjoyed most are the ones that use nuances and leave some things ambiguous or unsaid.

Then my mind extrapolates those things. In the earlier passage by Aciman, I have imagined Paris and have heard in my mind’s ear the imagined sound of Paris blending with the perpetual noises in my Nairobi neighbourhood. I have come up with my own version of an “imagined Paris”, a Paris very different from Aciman’s or even the physical Paris in France.

One critic agrees with this assertion, of letting the reader develop their own ‘reality’ apart from the text: “The ‘dignity’ Hemingway speaks of proposes a form of respect for the reader, who should be trusted to develop a feeling for the meaning behind the action without having the point painfully laid out for him or her”.

No wonder, to get the richness of a text, the solution is not to ask the author of the book what he meant as my friend and writer Ken Walibora keeps on being asked about his novels. Having read and published some of his works, he also “shows” and lets readers draw their own conclusions. Whenever this happens, a stronger bond develops between readers and characters in the story and the book becomes truly ‘un-put-down-able’.

Sometimes, readers see themselves in a work of fiction. Again, some readers have wondered if Ken Walibora projected his life in the main character of his novel, Siku Njema. He was probably so devastatingly effective in his ‘show, don’t tell’ that his main character feels like a real person. Some readers still think that main character is Ken Walibora (he has since denied his novel is autobiographical).

When the writer ‘shows and not just tells’, the characters and scenes become vivid and real.

The writer is the chief executive of Phoenix Publishers. [email protected]