Show, don’t describe

If I’d studied writing or literature I might have come to this realisation about creative description a little bit earlier in my erstwhile career as a novelist, but it was writing Falling that finally bought it home for me.

You might have heard it described as ‘show, don’t tell’. I’ve also come to think of it more specifically as ‘describe a feeling, not a visual’.

On the surface those two sentiments seems contradictory. Don’t you want to show things visually in a story instead of explaining them? Well, yes and no. You don’t have visuals in fiction, you only have words and phrases, and the trick is to use them evocatively to generate visuals in a reader’s imagination.

How did I learn that? By describing the New Sydney Harbour Bridge, the one that’s rebuilt after the one we know tragically collapses. Sometime after I’d written the first draft of Falling way back in the early to mid 90s, I was (as any writer should be) fascinated with the settings, characters, topics and artefacts therein.

Of particular interest was what the new bridge looked like, and because I had experience as a graphic designer and access to all the relevant software, I drew it just the way I’d imagined. The design further informed the bridge in situ in the story, which in turn affected the design in a fairly consistent spiral of cause and effect.

So when it came time to brief the digital illustrator on the image I wanted to depict the New Sydney Harbour Bridge for the book (below), I knew exactly how I wanted it to look;

I’d thought about it, described it, sketched it and refined it until I knew it inside and out, down to every rivet.

The downside of all that was that when it came time to actually describe the bridge in the story, I fell into a trap. I was so in love with what I’d come up with I wanted to impart it to you in as much detail as I myself already knew.

But it was a fool’s errand. The result was a sequence that went on for about three pages, a very dry, step-by-step checklist describing each element from the ground up… and an utterly incorrect way to go about it for several reasons.

The first one was because when I decided to commission artwork on the new bridge, describing it down to such fine detail was kind of redundant. Every time you feel like it you can just go back and look.

But the second, deeper reason is because when you think about all the fiction you’ve read, it’s where something is described with a mood or a feeling – even a metaphor – that it sticks with you. Describing something so comprehensively is a waste of space. You’re not going to have a mental picture that’s anything like mine anyway, and you’ll have forgotten the elements I started with by the time you get to the end.

You can see the cheat a hundred times in books where a character just happens to pass a mirror and take themselves in. The author and reader both know it’s only a Deus Ex Machina to describe the character’s physical appearance, but does that ever really work?

If someone looks appreciably at their own hourglass figure, sultry eyes, smouldering countenance and blonde hair does that give you a memorable picture in your head, or is it better when a supporting character says (amidst something relevant to the plot) ‘The kidnapper says when he saw you through the window when you were on the phone to the police you looked like Marilyn Monroe’?

Describing the pylons of the new bridge – as I ended up doing – as being rocket shaped and coloured red and orange might not give you exactly the picture I have, but it will give you some sort of picture, which is after all a novelist’s job.