Say More with Less: The Myth of “Show, Don’t Tell”
Writing Advice Remix with WATERLINE author Aram Mrjoian
Welcome back to Writing Advice Remix, the interview series where we take common writing advice and remix it for practical application. Today, we’re tackling what might be the most common writing advice of all—show, don’t tell. Joining us today is Michigan Quarterly Review’s managing editor, Aram Mrjoian. His debut novel, Waterline1, follows the story of an Armenian American family grappling with a recent death. Waterline explores the complex beauty of diaspora, the weight of inherited trauma, and the echoes of the Genocide on contemporary Armenian life.
I first met Aram when he was the managing editor of TriQuarterly and picked up my short story, “Breathe for Them Both,” for publication. Aram is a brilliant editor who has worked for outlets like the Chicago Review of Books, the Southeast Review, the Southern Review of Books, and The Rumpus. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, Pacific Lutheran University, and Florida State University, where he earned his PhD in creative writing. He’s an expert at contextualizing craft advice for practical use, and I’m so excited to share our conversation.
Before we begin, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful to you and your writing life and leave everything that’s not behind.
1. What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? What problem is it supposed to solve? And why is this advice actually unproductive?
This is perhaps an evasive start to this answer, but I feel like over the years I’ve received way more bad publishing advice than bad writing advice. When I was starting out, I definitely remember several questionable recommendations about submitting my work, entering contests, trying to get published, and being part of the literary community, but with writing advice—whether in a workshop, peer review, or from an acquaintance in passing—I’ve always found most comments were well-intentioned, even if perhaps not always aligned with my creative goals.
This is to say that in the past I’ve found the writing advice I tend to ignore is convenient or regurgitated rather than inherently good or bad. In graduate school, for example, I often found that students repeated phrasing or observations they thought professors wanted to hear. The one that stands out is essentially a more targeted version of show, don’t tell, which is “why don’t you put this in-scene?” This piece of advice is so dependent on the specific situation that it doesn’t really have a positive or negative value on its own—it demands context—but when the suggestion to put something in-scene is being used as the go-to way to condition prose to consistently “show” it can lose some of its intended value or even be downright unhelpful.
For example, if we automatically recommend putting everything in-scene, a story or essay can really balloon in scope, flag in pacing, end up with boring sections of mundane activity and stock dialogue, or lose its variations in narrative momentum, narrative distance, and line-level magic. I’ve done a lot of editorial work over the past decade and there are plenty of short stories and essays that perfunctorily execute on scene work but are otherwise boring and stagnant. Not every scene is going to be interesting or stand on its own. (I hope they don’t take away my MFA and PhD for this).
2. Now that you’ve written, revised, and published your book, how would you reframe that advice into something that’s actually helpful for writers?
Quickly, I do want to reiterate that this advice can be helpful in certain instances. I worry that it’s easy for emerging writers to look at craft ideas as axiomatic, but for the most part they are contextual. You’re building the puzzle and solving it—the pieces aren’t necessarily rigid.
With that caveat, rather than ask “why don’t you put this in-scene?” I’d argue the better question is “what do you want this paragraph or section to accomplish?” As a reader, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at a chunk of prose and feel that it’s flat or not working or missing something but rendering it in-scene isn’t necessarily a catchall fix. A paragraph might instead provide exposition, summarize events worth glossing over, or give the writer an opportunity to play on the sentence level. Maybe the section is superfluous and needs to be cut altogether rather than expanded.
In my mind, this framing is more practical because it allows the writer to take agency over their work, convey their intentions, and consider different possibilities. It also acknowledges the reality that there can be parts of the work that aren’t necessarily “showing” but still have utility. When I’m writing, I can make a lot of different cases for why I might not put something in-scene, especially if it’s just boring filler, but if I can’t make a compelling case for why the section is there at all, that’s more telling (pun intended).
3. What are three concrete steps a writer can take to incorporate this revised advice into their writing process?
I love this question!
Reverse outline. I do a lot of revision exercises in class with my students. When we reverse outline, I have them go through a draft of a story or essay paragraph by paragraph and summarize how each one is functioning in their mind. This can be as simple as “advancing plot,” “character development,” or “lyrical rant for fun.” The point is to see how the work is put together and how it’s moving. I’ve had students complete this and say things like, “I marked every paragraph in the first three pages as ‘exposition.’” Once that sort of trend is marked on the page, it’s way easier to decide what you want to do with it.
Try cutting the work by 10, 20, or 50 percent. Sometimes, the idea of putting something in-scene stems from having extra material that feels out of place or unfinished. Doing a “save as” and then granting yourself the freedom to delete anything that you find nonessential to the work can be useful in cleaning up the stuff that often gets tacked on in a workshop. For example, if a person in workshop were to comment on “needing a scene with a character’s parents,” I might ask myself what role the parents play in the story at all. If it’s only a passing sentence or two, it might make more sense to cut them from the story instead of giving them more screen time.
This one’s a little trickier and subjective, but practice being honest with yourself when a scene is boring, and tinker with where you cut in and out of scene. If you’re writing through a bunch of mundane logistical details to get from one place to the next, consider more efficient solutions on the page. If the dialogue is mostly to convey information to the reader, is there the possibility of the narrator reporting those details directly? Another revision exercise I do with my students involves narrative mapping (we do a lot of drawing on the blackboard), and I like breaking up stories from beginning to end. For example, if we’re discussing a 15-page story and the first eight pages are dedicated to two characters talking in a café, drawing that out and thinking about what happens in those eight pages can benefit how the writer thinks about the balance and organization of the narrative and the story’s movements. We come back to that question of “what do you want to accomplish in these eight pages?” and from there can ask more direct questions about craft.
4. Let’s talk about Waterline. How did you integrate this advice into your own writing process?
I’m condensing this from the jacket copy, but Waterline is a searing portrait of an Armenian-American family finding the perseverance to rise above their collective grief.
A concrete example of “what do I want this section to accomplish?” comes from the middle of the novel. When I started writing Waterline, I was particularly intentional about how much of the deep past I wanted to put in-scene. I did not want to dedicate a lot of time and space (on the page or in my imagination) to the violence and mass atrocities of the Armenian Genocide. I set a limit for the percentage of space it could occupy within the novel. In other words, I did not want to gratuitously reenact historical trauma.
There’s an interlude in the middle of the novel that includes one of the historical sections. In early drafts, the section was brief, only a couple thousand words, but followed an Armenian woman’s journey through genocidal violence, the loss of her family, displacement, and U.S. assimilation. The more I read it, the more it felt contrived, like it was trying to hold too much emotional weight or do too much showing. I could never get it right, but since it was one of the few scenes set in the deep past, I thought I had to keep it that way.
What I eventually realized (very late in revisions) is that for my contemporary characters this part of their history would be an extremely fragmented and distant family memory, so I cut it way down and changed it from scene to being reported as summary. It went from a couple thousand words to a few hundred. From my perspective, this section actually ended up way more powerful by being condensed down and now it feels much more structurally and emotionally powerful with how it lands in the novel.
5. Looking beyond this specific piece of advice, what's the most important lesson you've learned about craft?
You can’t expect any one solution to work all the time. An example I use a lot is that early in my MFA days a mentor told me in passing to “keep an eye on my adverbs.” I went home after workshop and systematically deleted all the adverbs from three short stories. Next week, I was in a different class and we read a well-anthologized short story that had five expertly placed adverbs in the first paragraph (I wish I could remember what story it was). Craft is nearly always contextual. Prose can start to look formulaic and uninspired super fast if you’re worried about following every rule and thinking about whether it’s publishable. The craft part is important, but writing is also an art, so there has to be more to it than rote technical proficiency.
Aram Mrjoian is the managing editor of Michigan Quarterly Review and a 2022 Creative Armenia-AGBU Fellow. He is also the editor of the anthology We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Runner’s World, Literary Hub, Catapult, West Branch, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Boulevard, Joyland, Longreads, and many other publications. He lives in Michigan.
Where to Find Aram Mrjoian
So, what’s your take? When is it useful to put something in-scene? When is summary a better option? What does “show, don’t tell” mean for you? How does it help (or hinder!) your own writing process?
Let’s chat in the comments:
Until next time,
Kat
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Thank you for this interview! "Show don't tell" has always given me so much trouble as an author and it's good to hear that other people struggle with it as well. I've often felt like pieces of my story needed to be "told" because of their function in the greater piece as well as the natural flow of style and voice that I tend to fall into. It's refreshing to hear someone else challenging this idea and giving it more thought.
Thank you!
Great interview!