It seems, then, that the old adage, “show, don’t tell”, applies to the telling of stories as well as to the writing of them. But the temptation to “tell” is always present:
- What if my audience misses my point?
- What if my audience draws different conclusions?
- What if my audience ignores this story?
I’m using “tell” or “telling” in this post to indicate the presence of language, both verbal and nonverbal, explicit or implicit, which dictates or “tells” people how they should feel about the particular story they’re hearing. This is to be differentiated from “telling” the story, which is simply an arrangement of the events in that story, and I’ll refer to as “showing.” I suppose this might be confusing–and I might need to change the words signifying the ideas later–but I will stick with this definition for now. Later I’ll incorporate the idea of story “showing” versus story ‘telling”.
I think there are a number of motivations for “telling”. Make no mistake: some motivations for “telling” are certainly good and proper and right. We love Jesus and want other people to love Jesus too because we believe Jesus loves them. This leads us to tell other people about Him, which is fine, by itself. This “telling”, however, sometimes includes, especially in formal preaching, arcane historical data or a deconstruction and reconstruction of the underlying text (which, by the way, is not the story). Also, we might add our own emotional interpretation; we tell people how we feel and we imply others should feel as we do. We may illustrate the story with other stories having nothing whatever to do with the original story and thereby imply that there is some perceived correct reaction to the story.
Paul F. Ford describes, in his introductory essay for the Companion to Narnia, why C. S. Lewis thought we should avoid what I’m describing as “telling”:
“Lewis offers much hope to those who would read his stories as to how and why he wrote them. He complains that the heart of any story is often undetected by the most earnest critic thereof. A story is a ’series of imagined events’, ‘a net of successive moments.’ Yet the critic concentrates on style, order, and character delineation, the ‘everything else’ which ought to exist in fantasy for the sake of the story.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction, pg xxviii)
I’ll leave aside the idea of “fantasy” for a moment. Don’t get hung up here because the word means “something made up” or “fiction”. I’ll return to this idea in the next post. For now, I want to concentrate on the idea that the critic of the story misses the heart of the story and why this happens. Lewis complained that in most criticism that the “series of imagined events” or the “net of successive moments” is broken. We are asking people to look not to the heart of the message, where meaning resides, but off to the side, where we think meaning resides or where we desire the meaning to reside. This is not unusual: many times this off-to-the-side type of study does, indeed add to the meaning of the story. But adding to the meaning and the meaning itself are two different things.
I’m not talking here about commentary, explanation or translation. These are types of story “showing” in and of themselves, and although they seem to be off-to-the-side studies, they leave the substance of the story intact. In this type of story showing, the voice and thoughts and feelings of the writer/speaker are left out of the telling.
Within criticism, on the other hand, the voice, thoughts and feelings of either the writer or the speaker are the main point of the exercise. And, in the mind of the reader or the hearer, the message becomes, more or less, a sales pitch, not a story. If a sales pitch, then the story becomes something that can be bought and consumed rather than something that can be contemplated and lived. In other words, the goal of telling is for it to work, to achieve some end determined in advance which may or may not have anything to do with its’ underlying true meaning. This can be effective, but when the buying and consuming is finished, so ends the effectiveness of the story.
The goal of story showing should be not to find something that works but to transform people who hear the story. This transformation happens from within rather than from without. The effect can be and sometimes is permanent.
I guess, the operative question that should be asked by the hearer of any story is this: “Is this story one that can be lived?” If no, then the story should be forgotten. If yes ask, “What would happen if I do live this story?”