HOW TO WRITE FICTION - Lesson 5: How to Reveal Through Telling

So. By now you’ve created one or more fictional characters. Maybe you based them directly on people you know well, or not so well. Maybe you combined the traits of a variety of relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers. Perhaps you’ve even constructed profiles.

In other words, you’ve done your homework. Now what? How do you reveal this carefully observed, compiled, and recorded information to your readers? How do you let your characters come to living, breathing life on the page?

Reveal Gradually

Well, you could simply show the readers your homework. As soon as a character appears, you lay your cards on the table, revealing to the readers everything you’ve learned about the character. Certainly this method would be efficient, not to mention easy.

It wouldn’t make for good fiction, though. Imagine if Fitzgerald had taken this easy route. Remember the scene when Nick first meets Gatsby at one of Gatsby’s lavish parties? Well, suppose at this point Fitzgerald had just given us a profile similar to the one you saw in the last lesson. You would wonder why the book is considered a classic, that’s for sure.

In real life, we don’t know everything about someone as soon as we meet him. We have some first impressions but that’s all. It takes time to get to know a person. Similarly, it should take some time to get to know characters, especially the round ones. It’s also more entertaining if readers gets to piece things together for themselves, rather than receiving the whole person in one neatly tied package.

The way that Gatsby is gradually revealed to the reader – changing from distant silhouette to a fully realized person – is one of the major charms of the story. This has been a recurring theme in our analysis of The Great Gatsby and, in fact, the character of Jay Gatsby is a masterpiece of gradual revelation.

Think of the narrator in Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." We get some information about him early in the story but we don't get to know him deeply until the story's end. Of course, there are things we never know about him; he's like Gatsby in that respect. But wondering about this man, then growing slowly to understand him – perhaps being downright surprised by what he does – is part of the fascination offered by this story.

In general, you want to dole out the material you’ve prepared on your round characters gradually, somewhat mimicking the way people are revealed to us in real life.

Narrators Tell

Now, how do you dole out this information? Here’s where things start to grow really interesting. As a writer, you can reveal your characters in two fundamental ways:

Telling vs. Showing

Let’s focus on telling right now, and on showing during the next lesson.

Telling is a perfectly legitimate way of revealing character. You are, after all, telling a story. The telling about a character may be done by the writer/narrator or by a character. It can be done through narrative description or dialogue.

In "Cathedral," the guy who lives in the house serves as the narrator, telling the story in First Person. (Interestingly, he never gives us his name and, interestingly, he mostly refers to Robert as simply "the blind man." What does this indicate about the narrator?) The narrator is often telling us information about the other characters. Here is he telling us about Robert:

"This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard."

Here he is telling us about his wife:

"She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her."

Notice here that Carver isn't dramatizing this information, as a playwright or screenwriter might – perhaps by having Robert say, "I just turned forty-seven" or by showing the wife intently working on a poem. Carver (through the narrator) merely tells us what we need to know.

We can assume all this information is accurate. There's no real reason why the narrator would lie about Robert's age or clothing, or his wife's poetry habit. Usually, the narrator of the story is giving the reader trustworthy information. However, be warned. This isn't always the case. Especially if the narrator is also a character in the story, as in "Cathedral."

Characters Tell

Characters in fiction are frequently telling us about other characters. But characters can't always be trusted to tell the absolutel truth. After all, they're only human (sort of). They may, indeed, tell us something about a fellow character in the story that isn't quite accurate. Even narrators can be guilty of this.

At one point in "Cathedral," the narrator tells us this about Robert's late wife, Belulah:

"And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved."

Is this true? Probably not. From what we learn about Robert, it seems that Robert is the type to shower his wife with compliments, even if he couldn't see her. We would guess that Robert was a very loving husband and that, in fact, he made his wife quite happy. Maybe the narrator can't understand this because he's not exactly winning any husband-of-the-year awards himself. The reader senses that Robert could "see" Belulah much better than the narrator "sees" his own wife.

In the above example, the telling is done through narration. But characters also tell about other characters in dialogue. Is what they say always true? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As in real life, we have no easy way of knowing.

When Robert says, "Bub, I'm a scotch man myself," we sense he's telling the truth about his own drinking preference. What about when he says:

"My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It's funny but if I turn the TV on, and I'm always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It's funny, don't you think?"

This is slightly harder to believe – how can he tell the difference? But, after learning something about Robert, we sense that this too is accurate information.

What about this heated exchange between the narrator and his wife:

"'I don't have any blind friends,' I said.

'You don't have any friends,' she said. 'Period.'"

Is the wife telling the complete truth about her husband? Well, we can certainly imagine that this man doesn't have many friends. He's not the friendliest guy in town. So she's probably close. But he might have some friends, at least one or two who are perhaps just as close-minded and miserable as himself. The wife may have been exaggerating slightly when she says he doesn't have "any" friends. She's angry at the time and she's trying to make a point. Do you always tell the exact truth about people you know? Ah, perhaps not.

The fallibility of what narrators and characters "tell" about other characters helps to increase the interest level of a work of fiction. Instead of being spoon-fed the perfect truth, the reader gets to draw her own conclusions about what she's being told. In such situations, we're also learning about the character doing the telling, as well as the one being discussed. Whether it's true or not, we sense years of frustration and resentment when the wife proclaims, "You don't have any friends. Period."

Telling You How To Tell

Perhaps this technique of telling is starting to sound somewhat complicated, but it’s really nothing you can’t handle in your own fiction. Let’s go back to our character, Maria Rialto (formerly known as Mystery Woman). If you were using her in a story, you could tell about her in a variety of ways.

You, as the narrator, may write something like: "Though Maria Rialto possessed a well-spring of kindness, she was incurably shy. As a child she had been quite open and playful but around the age of eleven she acquired this shyness, which, over the years, grew increasingly acute."

Good, you’ve told us a lot about Maria, and rather eloquently, at that.

Other characters might tell us things about Maria too. Her mother might say, "My child is not shy, she is quiet." A fellow employee at the bookstore where she works might say, "Maria is so rude. She never says a word to me." Someone else might say, "What a weirdo." Who is right? Perhaps all of them, perhaps none of them. Remember, when other characters are doing the telling, it’s not so easy to tell where the truth lies. You’ll also notice that we’ve learned something about each of these characters by what they say, or tell, about Maria.

What would Maria tell you about herself? If you’re really curious, perhaps you could go ask her.

Discussion

After reading the lecture, try answering some or all of the following:

1. Is there a stronger way to reveal characters than telling about them?

2. Do you prefer a story to be told by a writer or by a first person narrator (who is a character in the story)?

3. When people tell you about themselves, how do you know whether or not to believe them?