“Come in, come in,” he mutters, edging around the heavy dark desk, moving carefully, perhaps a bit stiffly, to avoid knocking over the books and papers piled, half-read, along its outer reaches. “I’ve been hoping to see you for a while. I want to talk to you,” he pauses a moment, looking somewhere above the left side of your head, “about showing – and about telling.” You wait for him to proceed. The sun shines in through the window, lighting up innumerable particles of dust, and where the light shows through the band of stained glass at the top of the window it dyes the particles red and green. Somewhere outside there’s the muted beeping sound of a truck backing up.
“We taught you always to show, rather than tell, your reader what was happening, So, for instance, rather than saying you got a note from your kindly if somewhat odd instructor and proceeded to have a conversation about whether ’tis better to have shown or told than to have never written at all, you’d instead talk about, I don’t know, my desk or that window. You set the scene, describe it through concrete elements instead of the bare facts of what transpired and what it meant.”
The band of green and red light from the window slowly crawls along his desk, delineating the topography of old mugs of coffee, half-read books, and ungraded papers. You hear the sound of machinery moving, and then a distant crashing sound. “Sorry about that,” he says, “they’re demolishing the next building over.”
“I see,” you lie.
“Anyway: We have this rule of writing, to show instead of tell, and the reason that this rule exists is because humans so desperately want to tell. We want to convey information! We care about things, and we want to impart that care to others. What are you even doing writing if you don’t want to say things?”
“I-” you begin, as the sounds of demolishing outside get louder.
“Exactly! All the showing just becomes a medium for the telling! You insert vague, poorly defined characters whose only role is to be the mouthpiece for your ideas. No name, no description, just a vague picture of paternal authority, with a big desk and dusty office, where the last remnants of the band of green and red light from the stained glass top part of the window has almost tipped off the edge of the table. That’s got to symbolize something! Death, probably.”
“Probably,” you’re forced to agree – literally, by me, the writer, just now. How quickly is the light moving? How much time has passed?
“But if we elevate showing over telling, how is that helpful? Surely for every artist who conveys too much through rote exposition there is another who conveys nothing of substance through description and metaphor. Why are we giving tools a hierarchy? Should a hammer outrank a screwdriver, and we think less of a craftsman whenever he must resort to the inferior tool?” As he speaks, or yells really, he’s pulling tools, hammers and screwdrivers, out of his desk and slamming them down. It’s barely audible over the sounds of the deconstruction getting closer. The room is shaking and the towers of books are toppling, adding slightly to the mess, as used mugs fall over and muddy coffee rivers fill out the topography. This, too, probably symbolizes death.
“We’re so incredibly talented at lying,” he cries out as the walls began to disintegrate, “that we seldom can tell when we begin to lie to ourselves. We make promises to ourselves than then break them and then convince ourselves we didn’t. We pretend to show while telling, tell while showing, we pretend to be writing shallow entertainment while pouring out our deepest-held beliefs or pretend to be making great art while describing our sexual fantasies.” The room has collapsed. Existence has ended, so you have very little to distract you now.
“I can tell you or I can show you, but in the end it’s just me and you, having a conversation.” How does he speak when there is no air to carry sound? “It’s just me and you… and by that I mean it’s just you, because for me these words died the moment I wrote them but for you they are alive right now, in you, spoken through you and by you and for you.” The world has ended, wholly deconstructed, uniform in topography. Somewhere nearby, though, there is a band of light.
There is a blank piece of paper. You begin to write.