Say it, don't show it

A contrarian take on exposition

I’m generally not very interested in meta-writing, which is to say, writing about how to write. But for the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows:

‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.

If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle.

A common bit of advice given to people who want to become writers is “show it, don’t say it.” Applied to the above scenario it would probably balloon the description to multiple pages. A “show it” writer would first have to provide a description of the stranger, emphasizing that he had a cheerful and helpful, if somewhat simple-minded disposition combined with great physical strength. Then there would have to be a blow-by-blow description of exactly how the stranger laid hands on Mr. Pickwick to “assist” him (the word “assist” all by itself would never do since it is a “say” rather than “show” kind of word). We would need a description of what specifically transpired after Mr. Pickwick had been “assisted” onto the roof, and an account of the damage inflicted on his clothing, accessories, hair, etc., all to the end of “showing” that he was comedically humiliated. A modern writer who didn’t know a lot about Victorian carriages would probably feel obligated to visit a museum, or at least look at a bunch of pictures on the Internet, to familiarize himself with what a coach roof looked like and what obstacles and hazards Mr. Pickwick might encounter along the way. Similar research would have to go into Victorian gentleman’s attire so that the writer could specify what had happened to Mr. Pickwick’s ascot, watch fob, or whatever. And at the end, it wouldn’t actually be that funny. Not funny enough to be worth spilling that much ink. It would end up on the cutting room floor.

As written, though, it works and it’s funny as hell, precisely because Dickens is just saying what happened, albeit in deliberately over-elaborate prose. He says it quickly and lets the reader play the scene out in their head.

The only catch is that you, the reader, do actually have to get the joke. Dickens, or any other writer of the “say it” school (Jane Austen comes to mind) is implicitly asking the reader to know more and to do more during the act of reading this kind of prose. It’s almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

In modern English the word “precipitation” only appears in weather forecasts. If you do a lot of reading you might encounter the word “precipitous” meaning something that is steep or sudden. Dickens is using “precipitation” in sense II.3.b of the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning “Unduly hurried action; inconsiderate haste; rash rapidity” whose most recent citation is 1870. Very few readers are going to put The Pickwick Papers down and look that word up in a dictionary. Doing so wouldn’t make the sentence funny. But if you’ve encountered “precipitation” and related words over the course of wide reading, and if you’re doing the mental work of conjuring up this little mental movie in your head, you can work it out from the context.

Not everyone is equipped to do this. So one could make the argument that the audience for such books is an educated elite. But Dickens and other writers of his era were straight-up mass market culture, and a vast audience continues to read the works of Jane Austen today. I think that’s because the knack of reading and enjoying this kind of prose is learnable, and you don’t have to learn it through formal education. Readers can and do self-educate. Making that more rewarding and more appealing is that this style of storytelling can move the plot along much more rapidly than “show it” can ever do.