I’ve written before about “show, don’t tell,” but I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of that axiom today.

Over at 2,500 Movies Challenge, Dave reviewed Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and he brought up the complaint (not his or mine, but some people’s) that “In most cases, narration is considered an ‘easy out’ for filmmakers, a way to tell us what’s going on as opposed to showing us…”

There’s that “show, don’t tell” thing again. In addition to Orson Welles’ pro-narration position (which I talked about in my comment on that review – he had an extensive background in radio, after all), it made me think about Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare’s plays, quite a bit happens offstage and then it’s reported onstage for other characters (and for us). It’s been a few decades since I read the Greeks, but I think this was even more true with them. If I recall correctly, pretty much all of Oedipus consists of characters describing various offstage events to other characters.

And look at Sherlock Holmes. Most of the stories begin with a prospective client showing up and telling Holmes, often at great length, various things about the mystery they want him to solve.

One of the things I appreciated about the narration in Vicky Cristina Barcelona was that there was a pleasant assumption that, yes, all of us have seen a movie or two before, so we don’t need a series of little vignettes showing that Vicki is this way, and then a series of little vignettes showing that Cristina is that way. The narrator simply tells us this and that, and then we can get right on to the interesting stuff.

There’s something similar in the story I’m writing now. There’s been a murder, and there’s already one pretty obvious suspect. Very obvious, in fact, and anybody who’s ever read a mystery before will know that she’s not the killer. So, it’s there, and she’s in a panic about being accused, but I’m not wasting a lot of time on it because savvy readers will know better anyway.

This reminds me also of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I have a friend who tossed it after reading the first hundred pages, because it was “infodump after infodump,” but all the “tell, don’t show” wasn’t the real problem. The real problem there was that so much of the info being dumped was about characters who were never possibly going to be significant.

Larsson was a first-time novelist (and obviously a first-time mystery writer) and he clearly thought that any of the members of the Vanger family might be guilty, but experienced mystery readers knew better.

(Interestingly enough, too, he never wrote another mystery – the other two books in the series were thrillers.)

The problem with “show, don’t tell” is that it’s too easy. In the real world, good writing has some telling and some showing, some active voice and some passive voice, some filter words, and some other things as well. There’s no formula that guarantees success.