www.inkthinkerblog.com — A few weeks ago, I broke down the difference between showing and telling with some examples from a God-awful YA novel that I wrote a few years ago. One of my many astute readers, Demented M, made the following request:
First person seems to require more ‘telling’ as part of the pov. And I would love to see someone with editing experience (hint, hint) talk about how show don’t tell is different in first person, because I do believe it is different. There’s a lot more internal monologue and exposition, I think than in third or omniscent povs.
Well, Demented M, hope this is kind of what you had in mind.
Before we get down to talking about point of view and how that affects showing vs. telling, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same things. For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to use the following explanations of terms, which I found in the Wikipedia entry on “point of view (literature)” (boldfacing mine, otherwise unedited):
The first-person point of view sacrifices omniscience and omniprescence for a greater intimacy with one character. It allows the reader to see what the focus character is thinking; it also allows that character to be further developed through his or her own style in telling the story. First-person narrations may be told like third person ones; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps even at a given place and time, for a given reason.
A third person omniscient narrator can shift focus from character to character with knowledge of everyone’s thoughts and of events of which no single character would be aware. The third person limited point of view picks one character and follows him or her around for the duration of the book. The narrator may be more observant than the character, but is limited to what that one character could theoretically observe.
And let’s also toss in this clarification from the Wikipedia entry “third person limited omniscient” (also unedited except for boldfacing):
While an omniscient point of view can change viewpoint characters instantly, the limited omniscient point of view narrative limits narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character’s perspective. Thus, the narration is limited in the same way a first person narrative might be, but the text is in third person.
And now that that’s all squared away, let’s get back to the matter at hand: appropriate use of showing vs. telling in first-person narration. Be forewarned, I’m coming up with some random examples here to illustrate my points, and let’s just say that they won’t be Hemingwayesque but will, I hope, get the point across.
The bottom line is that when the narration is in first person the narrator is telling the story.
“I feel this.”
“Jim said that to me.”
“We went somewhere.”
It’s the narrator’s story, so it would be weird if she launched into some creepy detailed description of her reflection or something.
As I pulled on my blue shirt, I caught my own hazel-green eye in the mirror. Something was different about me. It wasn’t my fifty-two facial freckles because they were the same as usual, nor was it my shock of wild, curly brown hair that I had pulled into an expert French twist only moments before pulling on the blue shirt. Ahh, that’s what it was: Moments ago, I wasn’t wearing a blue shirt.
People don’t generally do that. The purpose of first-person POV is to get into the narrator’s head and tell the story from her point of view. If she is oddly introspective and it would be in character for her to think through the observation above, then by all means go for it. If not, for the love of everything writerly, please control yourself. That would be entirely too much showing. Telling is often a good choice for first person in places that it may not be ideal for third-person.
I grabbed my blue tee shirt from where it had landed on the floor last night and pulled it over my head while stumbling toward the door. My hair would have to wait; I was late.
That, on the other hand, is a teeeeeeney bit of showing, but mostly telling, and it works. You don’t need to go show-crazy.
HOWEVER, and yes, that’s a big however, there are times where showing in first person is really, really necessary to avoid underwriting. Let’s say your narrator sees a friend who’s sad.
I rounded the corner and there was Janet. She looked really sad.
Uh-huh, and? In real life, you determine how someone’s feeling based on cues from their body language, facial expression, tone of voice, etc. Your narrator did the same thing, but if you just tell us that the character “looked really sad,” we don’t have any evidence of what the narrator saw to tell us whether that’s an accurate assessment.
I rounded the corner and there was Janet, sitting with her back to the wall and her knees pulled to her chest. When she saw me, she quickly wiped the tears off her cheeks and put on the fakest smile I’ve ever seen, but it was clear that she’d been crying. Her red eyes and ragged breath were a dead giveaway. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Her face crumpled immediately, and she hugged her knees even tighter as the tears started up again.
In the second example, we not only know that Janet is sad, but we also know how the narrator can tell that she’s sad, and now we know we can believe him.
The role of telling is to communicate information to the reader efficiently. The purpose of showing is to communicate information to the reader effectively and interestingly, and to build the narrator’s credibility. In first-person POV, when everything is filtered through a subjective narrator without the benefit of external validation in may cases, showing is critical to establishing the narrator as trustworthy–or as untrustworthy, if that’s what the story needs.
But if you were to show everything the narrator saw, did, thought, and experienced, you’d end up with something the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. And that’s where telling comes in. It’s all about balance, regardless of your POV. I think the stakes are higher in first person, though, because all of the focus is on the narrator, whereas in third person it’s easier for the narrator to blend into the background.
Demented M, how’d I do?
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