For anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class, I'm sure you've had the phrase,
"show don't tell" forcibly shoved down your throat over and over and over again,
and for good reason.
Aspiring writers have also probably heard this quote from Anton Chekov many times, "Don't
tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass."
In creative writing the idea behind "show don't tell" is that using descriptive
language to help the reader visualize the setting is far more interesting and immersive
than just blankly stating what's happening.
So as an example of this, instead of writing something like, "He hit the ground hard
and got the wind knocked out of him," you might write something more like, "He plummeted
to the frozen dirt and laid absolutely still for a full painful minute as his chest burned
in increasing spasms.
Just as his vision began to fade, his lungs finally obeyed him, and he lay gasping for
several minutes unable to stand."
While both examples say essentially the same thing, the latter actually paints the picture
of what the character is experiencing.
This kind of descriptive language is crucial in non-visual mediums where the writer is
trying to communicate what he or she sees in their own head to the reader, but how does
this idea apply to visual mediums like film or video games?
For me, at least in one sense, the answer can be found in how exposition is delivered
to the audience.
How do we learn what a character feels, what a character's history is, or what a character
wants?
Now, before I dive into this any further let me say really quickly that while "show don't
tell" is a pretty good rule to live by, it definitely isn't something you should
abide by all the time no matter what.
Sometimes there are details that just aren't necessary to focus on, and if too much time
is devoted to that it can really bog down the pacing and the audience will either lose
interest or become frustrated.
Sometimes it's okay, and even beneficial, to just tell the audience something so that
we can get to the parts of the story that really *need* to be shown.
Well, how do we determine what *needs* to be shown then?
This actually goes hand in hand with what I talked about in episode 1 of the show, setup
and payoff.
If you haven't seen that video I recommend watching it.
There will be a link in the description as well as an annotation card at the end of this
one if you're interested, but in short, stories are really just a series of setups
and payoffs.
As storytellers we have these big moments in our stories that deliver the emotional
impact we want to bestow on the audience.
These moments are the ones where characters are changed, where the messages and ideas
of our themes are delivered in force, and where we find common ground and shared experiences
between our characters and our audience.
However, in order for those big moments to have any emotional power at all, we have to
give the proper context to the audience so that they can relate to and understand what
the characters think, feel, and need.
This "context" that I'm referring to is what we call in storytelling terms "exposition".
We've all seen examples of bad exposition in the form of a trope called "as you know".
These tropes are basically where characters give exposition dumps for the sake of the
audience, even though the characters should all understand the context of what's happening.
In other words, rather than showing the audience what they need to understand in a steady,
progressive, and natural manner, the writers instead have the characters explain it awkwardly
even when they really have no need to do so because the people in the scene should already
know it.
The opening scene from Final Fantasy VII contains a pretty good example, where Barret asks Cloud
if this is his first time in a reactor.
Despite Cloud affirming that it's not, Barret continues to explain what a mako reactor is
anyway.
As much as I've criticized Final Fantasy XV and Kingsglaive for this kind of writing,
the Brotherhood anime does an excellent job of showing rather than telling.
Take this scene for example, where Prompto comes home from school to an empty house.
Not once is it ever explained what his home situation is like.
We can draw those conclusions ourselves from the fact that no one is ever at home to greet
him.
The way they highlight Prompto's loneliness is immensely more meaningful than if he explained
it with a narration.
The same is true of this scene where Noctis and Regis eat together.
We get so much information from their awkward body language and inability to carry a natural
conversation, that there's no need for Regis to have a line where he bemoans this out loud.
Additionally, note how the camera shot selection and sound design help to reinforce how large
and empty the room is, mirroring in many ways the state of their relationship.
This is where showing the audience, rather than telling them, can have a much greater
emotional significance.
Recently I played through both Fire Emblem: Fates Conquest and Fire Emblem: Shadows of
Valentia, and while I think both are pretty decent games that I enjoyed playing, I couldn't
help but notice how much telling the writers insisted on doing rather than showing when
it comes to exposition.
Now one might argue that the format of the Fire Emblem games is one that necessitates
a little more telling based solely on presentational aspects - where most of the story is delivered
through text - and for a video game's pacing you generally want to get to gameplay without
bogging down the player with hours of reading.
I get that, but I would counter that point by saying that if that's the case then this
format probably isn't suitable for the kinds of stories the developers are trying to tell
here.
In Fire Emblem Fates' case, let's examine one of the game's early payoff moments,
and then analyze how the context for that scene was delivered.
So the pivotal scene in Fire Emblem Fates comes when the player is forced to choose
between two rivaling families.
When we look at the way the scene plays out, it's pretty obvious that the choice is supposed
to be agonizing for the main character, who feels as if he belongs to both and loves them
in equal measure.
I understand what the character is supposed to be feeling, but to be honest I just did
not feel it at all.
I think the execution of the scene is pretty good, but the setup for this moment, the way
the exposition was given, was not adequate in helping me understand the proper context
to feel what the main character was feeling.
This is because for the vast majority of the previous chapters, I was told over and over
again how much all of the character's siblings just *loved* him *so* much.
I was told, again and again, that the character had this strong bond with his family.
It became a bid absurd how obsessively some of these characters just fawned over the protagonist,
in an attempt for the writers to beat me in the face with the fact that THIS FAMILY IS
REALLY CLOSE OKAY?
THEY LOVE EACH OTHER A LOT PLEASE BELIEVE ME!
The problem here is that you can tell me that all you want, but I won't have any understanding
of why these characters care about each other unless you *show* me how their relationships
developed.
Because they didn't show me this, by the time we get to this payoff I have no genuine
understanding for why Elise, for example, is important to Corrin.
Because I wasn't there - so to speak - when these characters shared meaningful moments
that lead to loving memories, I can't relate to their unique situation, and therefore I'm
not emotionally engaged when this choice is presented to me.
I want to juxtapose that example with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
Hellblade is so far my favorite game of the year, and that's in large part due to the
fact that the experience is all about showing the audience what it's like to suffer with
a debilitating mental illness.
Seriously I could go on for an hour talking about how they accomplished this, but what
I really want to focus on is how this game delivers its exposition, and I want to show
a specific scene to illustrate the point.
The game's timeline happens after the event you're seeing here, so this is a flashback
of a mortifying experience Senua had, where she discovers the aftermath of the brutal
murder of her fiance.
Now, they didn't dedicate an extraordinary amount of time or anything to giving us this
important piece of exposition, but what's important is they're showing us, not just
having her retell her experience or giving a few lines to the narrator to fill us in
on what happened, they're really showing us what this moment meant to her.
It's a terrifying thing to witness, extremely uncomfortable, but so necessary in order to
empathize with her plight throughout the game.
We get to see how this moment broke her, how she entered into the very depths of anguish,
and this is extremely important for us to understand from an experiential point of view
rather than a descriptive one because of what the final payoff for the game is.
In order for us to feel the power of Senua's acceptance at the end of the story, we have
to know how far she was forced to go to be able to reach that level of acceptance.
This moment carries so much impact because the developers showed me the natural human
tendency for denial, and the willingness to do absolutely anything to hold on to the belief
that death could be undone.
None of this would have been communicated in nearly as effective a manner had I not
been allowed to be with her when this life altering moment occurred.
Without that context, the game's theme would lose so much of its significance, and that
is the power of *showing* your audience, rather than *telling* them.
So the next time you're in your creative writing class, and your teacher is pounding
"show, don't tell" into your brain, understand that it's not just about making
your prose ready more interestingly.
What it's really about is helping your reader, or your audience, connect with the *people*
in your story; and that's really the point of storytelling when it comes down to it,
right?
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