To Tell or Not to Tell…

How explicit are you as a writer? I don’t mean in the salacious way. I mean: How much do you flat-out explain to your readers, say about what your characters are thinking, about what something in the story means? And whether you explain/analyze/editorialize or not – because explanation isn’t the same thing as clearness – how much inclarity do you tolerate in a novel or a film, as author or reader/viewer? There are a million contingencies that bear on this issue – for instance, the matter of what’s intriguingly ambiguous, and what’s just vague; and, of course, personal taste. But the question stands.

My head-shaking evergreen – the thing that I find myself scrawling in easily more than half the books I read, books in which we are asked to believe in a pair of spouses or lovers – is: What ever brought these people together? What ever attracted X to Y? The story wants – needs – us to take their love as a given, but so often the connection feels unearned. The most recent example I have from my own reading is Port and Kit Moresby from Paul Bowles’s “The Sheltering Sky.” They’re young; they only married recently, but perhaps unrecently enough for the feeling to have curdled; it’s a different time, when different considerations may have obtained and continue to; but what brought these people together in the first place, when the going was good? You may disagree with the necessity of this question (ultimately, I was persuaded by Bowles’s disregard for it, because of some other moves he makes in the novel), but it’s worthwhile to ask how you answer your version of it.

I discussed this issue with a writer friend recently, as it concerned the TV series Fleishman Is In Trouble on Hulu. Some of the show felt very engrossing to me, but other parts – such as why in the world Claire Danes’s Rachel ever wanted Jesse Eisenberg’s Toby – left me distracted, distrustful of the story, and ultimately, less interested.

My friend disagreed: “As for why she would be interested in Toby? A stable, sweet gentle doctor for her to control and push against? Made sense to me. I’ve known so many people like that, people who are striving and ambitious and desperately restless and who anchor themselves to their very opposites, safe harbors from whence they can go off and find their chaos. Only to return to when the world becomes too cruel (a mirror, in fact, of our narrator’s life).”

This was both articulate and persuasive. My retort was that the show’s writers, at least to my perhaps limited viewing mind, had never suggested any of this. What if a viewer hadn’t “known so many people like that”?

Friend: The ‘some of us don’t know the type’ argument is a really dangerous one. Some detail/character/motivation/whatever will always be unfamiliar/inexplicable to some reader/viewer, right? I think the argument is dangerous because it leads to bland overly explained storytelling which requires generic ‘likability’ and ‘relatability.’

Boris: My contention is that it has to make sense in SOME way, on SOME wavelength. Maybe there is some middle ground where it’s not exactly unpersuasive, and merely mysterious, and you roll with it. I hardly need ‘overly explained storytelling which requires generic ‘likability’ and ‘relatability.’ (Which are two separate notions, I’d say, by the way.) I don’t think you have to be explicit or likable. I find that as flat as you do. But there has to be some thread (for me).

Though my tolerance for lack of substantiation is low – I work hard to make the implications, suggestions, and possibilities of my novels as clear as they can be – it’s equally important to me to never provide a definite answer to the story’s most fundamental questions, so my readers can provide their own. But that’s only my solution. I have another friend who regularly teaches from The Best American Short Stories anthology, and we often marvel at how often the authors of those lauded pieces simply explain to the reader the meaning and significance of what’s taking place in the story.

Again, explicitness vs. implicitness and clarity vs. inclarity are two different issues. But there’s overlap because at least in theory explicitness will clarify, if potentially at the cost of impoverishing a reader’s experience. In the scene class I taught recently as part of these workshops, we talked about the different ways of conveying information in a scene, for instance via analysis vs. summary. (Which are both, of course, forms of telling, so there’s showing, too.) Because distinguishing one from the other can be difficult for starting writers, I wanted to share with you an excellent example of each (unlabeled!) below, from the Bowles. But distinguishing is critical. As we discussed in the scene class, the consequences of these three forms of information conveyance (in fiction or nonfiction) are enormous:

1. Showing through action or dialogue – slowest, most space-consuming, makes the most room for the reader’s own imagination

2. Summary – faster, less immediate for the reader, often unavoidable

3. Analysis – deadly. Pushes the reader out completely. An evil that’s almost never that necessary, whether in fiction or nonfiction.

Before I share the Bowles, here were the examples I shared in the scene class:

a. Dialogue/action: 

The screen door slammed on its broken spring, letting in the humid night air.

“You said you’d fix it,” Cassandra said. She pulled on her cigarette and scratched at some old food on the oilcloth over the table.

“How about I have a beer,” Rick said.

b. Summary: 

When Rick walked in, the screen door slammed. He’d forgotten to fix the spring, and Cassandra was unhappy, judging by the way she pulled on her cigarette. He just wanted a beer.

c. Analysis:

Cassandra looked for things to complain about, and Rick for ways to forget to do what he’d promised.

And now, here’s the Bowles. Which is which?

Tanner was the sort of person to whom it would occur only with difficulty that he might be being used. Because he was accustomed to imposing his well without meeting opposition, he had a highly developed and very male vanity which endeared him, strangely enough, to almost everyone. Doubtless the principal reason why he had been so eager to accompany Port and Kit on this trip was that with them as with no one else he felt a definite resistance to his unceasing attempts at moral domination, at which he was forced, when with them, to work much harder; this unconsciously he was giving his personality the exercise it required… Tanher himself was an essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp. Contenting himself with not quite being able to seize an idea was a habit he had acquired in adolescence, and it operated in him now with still greater force. If he could get on all sides of a thought, he concluded that it was an inferior one; there had to be an inaccessible part of it for his interest to be aroused. His attention, however, did not spur him to additional thought. (p. 67)

As commander of the military post of Bou Noura, Lieutenant d’Armagnac found life there full if someone unvaried. At first there had been the novelty of his house; his books and furniture had been sent down from Bordeaux by his family, and he had experienced the pleasure of seeing them in new and unlikely surroundings. Then there had been the natives. The lieutenant was intelligent enough to insist on allowing himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population. His overt attitude toward the people of Bou Noura was that they were an accessible part of a great, mysterious tribe from whom the French could learn a great deal if they only would take the trouble. And since he was an educated man, the other soldiers at the post, who would have enjoyed seeing all the natives put behind barbed wire and left there to rot in the sun… did not hold his insanely benevolent attitude against him, contenting themselves by saying to one another that some day he would come to his senses and realize what worthless scum they really were. (p. 147)