Last weekend I was at the comic shop playing Magic, and I got paired with a guy of a sort you would not normally expect to meet in a comic shop playing Magic: a lifelong competitive athlete. This guy had the sort of physique I sometimes covet: thick arms, broad shoulders, the kind of body that makes every t-shirt look like workout gear. He told me he’d been a triathlete before he got hit by a car while training on his bike, and lost all his front teeth (they’d been replaced skillfully. I never would have known). Then he’d been a boxer, until he noticed how all the older trainers were jittery with CTE. He’d done natural bodybuilding for a while, but didn’t like the diets, or the feeling of all those eyes on him. So he’d settled into the comparatively gentle sport of no-gi Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

This guy did tournaments. In jiu-jitsu, tournament matches are decided by submission — that is, they go until one player either falls unconscious from being strangled, or gives up by tapping out. To force their opponents to tap out, a jiu-jitsu player might try strangling them, or they might utilize a “joint lock” or “arm bar,” two techniques which boil down to “put one of your opponents limbs in a position where you can really fuck it up if they don’t tap out.” Most matches end this way. But sometimes, my new friend told me, there are people who won’t tap out.

Maybe they’re too carried away with adrenaline, or a desire to win, so that they ignore the pain. Or maybe it’s a kind of dare: I know you won’t actually break my arm, you weenie. I don’t need to tap out. Either way, the athlete said, the solution was simple: you break their arm.

“People are so used to being honorable, you know… so used to pulling back before they hurt each other, that they might not have the…” he gestured sheepishly, “the grit to actually follow through. And maybe some people take advantage of that.” But he did have the grit. And when it was necessary, he had broken arms in competition.

This experience was so alien to me, because I am definitely one of those people who lacks the grit to break an arm in competition. At least I think I am. I’ve never had to find out. I’ve dabbled in martial arts, but never at a competitive level, and sparring in the gym there’s always a tacit understanding: we’re all quite attached to our faces and limbs and genitals, so let’s try not to fuck those up for each other, yeah?

Beyond that, I’ve never been in a fight at all, beyond a few sucker punches exchanged in middle school. Which is why I am always so fascinated when I get to talk to people who have. People for whom violence isn’t merely theoretical.

Several years ago, after a charity Dungeons and Dragons event, I ended up in a car with a guy of a sort you don’t expect to meet at a charity Dungeons and Dragons event: a former US Marine Scout Sniper. Obviously he had killed people — we moved past that part of the conversation very quickly — but he also had a theory about violence that he was happy to share.

“In the 60s,” he told me, “there was a sexual revolution, where people began to feel comfortable saying ‘I’m a sexual person.’ I think we’re going to come to a point in our society where people can say, ‘I’m a violent person.’ Because I am a violent person. And right now it’s not acceptable for me to say that, but it’s true, it’s part of who I am.”

While not a super reassuring thing to hear from a stranger in a car late at night, he was getting at something real: violence, like sex, is one of the most intense activities human beings engage in, and like sex, there are all sorts of taboos about when to do it and how much you’re allowed to enjoy it. Most people only allow themselves to fulIy engage with these things when they’re heavily altered: drunk, or sad, or angry. But my friend in the car wasn’t a drunk person, or a sad person, or an angry person as far as I could tell. He spoke casually, conversationally, in the same friendly tone the jiu-jitsu player used to describe breaking his opponents’ legs. If this violent man had not joined the Marines, he might never have found a culturally-sanctioned arena in which to explore that part of his identity. But he had joined up, and he had killed people, and that had made him realize something, and he had carried that realization back into civilian life, and into that car, where he calmly told me he was a violent person.

I am 34 years old, and I have never seen a dead body outside of a casket. All of my grandparents have died. My brother has died. A close friend committed suicide. I never saw their bodies. They were all burned before I could see them. It’s hard for me to imagine how my mind would be different if I had not only seen death, but participated in it. Which is why I ask so many questions when I meet people who have.

So much of the luxury we enjoy is the result of heavily abstracted killing: the meat we eat, the gas in our cars, our diamonds, our bananas. What would it be like to have that abstraction removed? To fight in a war, or work in a slaughterhouse? To step through the veil and suddenly see only the killing, and none of the rewards? It must feel like seeing reality for the first time. No wonder we seem like fools to soldiers. No wonder they don’t want to talk to us about “what they’ve done.” A former sniper used to beg for change outside my grad school. One time I asked him who he’d killed.

“Enemies,” he said, and laughed.

My friend at the comic book shop had never killed anyone, at least not as far as I know. He wasn’t even playing jiu-jitsu lately, since he’d torn a ligament in his left shoulder while sparring.

“Do you wanna see something gross?” he asked. “When they did the surgery, the doctor took a photo.”

In the photo, the skin of his shoulder was held wide open, horizontal black marker lines visible on either side of the wound so that they could line them up to sew it back together. Inside was meat. Pink meat, like raw pork.

“It’s crazy, right?” the guy said, smiling with his perfect, artificial teeth. This guy who’d had his body broken and reassembled at least twice — who’d broken other peoples’ bodies just the same. If anybody knew deep down that people are just meat, you’d think it would be him. But maybe “just meat” is reductive, a casual shorthand used by cruel machine intelligences in science fiction. Maybe it’s more accurate to say our bodies are also meat. That beyond everything we call human — our rules, our languages, our false teeth and tight clothes — there is another world of blood and bone and ligaments. Only a few people see that world, and when they do, it changes them, in ways they don’t even always notice.

But I notice, and I try to understand. And it makes it very difficult for me to eat pork.

I have always been into the idea of “shitty first drafts,” but, embarrassingly enough, I had not actually read the chapter of “Bird by Bird” that the phrase comes from. In fact, I had not read any part of “Bird by Bird,” which is itself an oversight, but come on, if I were reading books every day when would I find time to watch Magic: the Gathering videos on YouTube? Anyway, the essay is really good. You should read it. Here, I’ll even give you a link.

The essay is helpful, and funny, and does a really good job of explaining why one writes a shitty first draft, and reassuring the reader that it’s okay to do so. What it doesn’t do is explain how to write a shitty first draft. Maybe this is because Anne Lamott belives it’s self explanatory: to write a shitty first draft, you simply write something that is shitty, for the first time. Maybe it’s because the purpose of the essay is merely to inform people that it’s okay to write a shitty first draft, with the assumption that all people need is permission to let go of their perfectionism and they will simply do so. But for people like me, for whom perfectionism is about as easy to let go of as a live wire, it might take a little more.

I have known since I was very small that my perfectionism actively hindered my achievement. In first grade I was put in a remedial reading group because I insisted that — since I could not read novels meant for adults — I could not read at all. To this day, there is a petulant little child in me who would rather do nothing than do something suboptimally. I could theorize about why this is. But I have already spent a lot of time and money doing therapy about this, and in the end I have discovered that where this impulse comes from is much less interesting than what I can do about it. Here is what I do about it:

Don’t start – continue.

In college I had to write a lot of essays, and I often wrote them at the last minute because I needed the rest of my time for watching Magic: the Gathering videos on YouTube. The hardest part of those essays was always coming up with the first line. I would sit, sometimes for hours, trying to come up with something that would grab the readers’ attention, make them laugh, introduce my topic, and make a plate of delicious waffles. It never worked. So instead of doing that, I started button mashing. At the beginning of every essay, I would write my name and date, and then I would literally just roll my hands across the keyboard for a couple of seconds like I was having a siezure. Then I would add a period at the end of the “sentence.” Then I would write the second sentence of the essay, and go from there.

“I can go back later and write a better first sentence,” I would tell myself. In practice, I usually just ended up deleting the keyboard mashing and using the second sentence as the first sentence. It didn’t really matter either way. The point of the exercise was to skip over the part where the page was blank, by filling the top of the page with literal gibberish, so that I could get on with the actual work.

I still do a version of this, and it still gets me past the first line. But most written works are comprised of at least several lines, and I can’t button-mash my way through all of them. Once the initial euphoria of A New Thing wears off, I’m often left gazing up at a sheer wall of text without any text on it. What to do, then?

Don’t continue – conclude.

When I stop writing, whether it’s for the day, or just to take a break, I try not to stop at the end of a thought. Whether it’s a new chapter in a book, or a new paragraph in a blog post, starting a brand new thing on a brand new day is a recipe for crippling neurosis. Instead, I’ll stop in the middle of a chapter, the middle of a paragraph — hell, the middle of a sentence if I’m feeling spicy.

My brain may hate starting things, but it loathes not finishing things. If I do not allow myself to finish a thing before stepping away from it, I know that some small part of my brain, a tiny mind-goblin, will continue fiddling with that loose end until he’s figured out how to knit a sweater with it. And then I’ll sit back down to write, and there will be a sweater waiting for me. I still have to turn the sweater into words, but that’s the risk you run when you mix metaphors.

This works from the other direction too: if I’m banging my head against a particular paragraph, and if I’m mindful enough to realize that’s what I’m doing, I just stop. I go do something else — wash the dishes, or play with the cat, or watch Magic: The Gathering videos on YouTube. I don’t have to worry that I won’t come back to the writing later, because my particular neurosis means I have to come back to it later — maybe not the same day, but eventually.

By stumbling forward in this way, I’m able to make it through the bulk of the writing process. Unfortunately, there’s still the matter of actually finishing a thing, which is the bit which my perfectionism resists the most. So once again, I have to make a mental substitution:

Don’t conclude — get to the end.

I have a book coming out early next year. It took me a long time to write because it was a very ambitious project and I initially had no idea what I was doing. There is a part near the end of the book that is VERY complicated and VERY ambitious, and there was a period of some weeks where I had no idea how to land it. And because I had no idea how to land it, I couldn’t even bring myself to start it. It’s hard to jump out of a plane when you’re not sure whether you’re wearing a parachute.

What I did, eventually, is give myself an exercise: I made myself write the entire sequence as if I were a five-year-old explaining an action sequence from a transformers movie. “And then the good guy comes out of the ocean in a big wet car with a gun on it and it goes BOOOOOOOM” and so on. I knew I wasn’t going to use the five-year-old version in my manuscript — it was too shitty even for a shitty first draft — but it allowed me to write to the end of the scene.

Basically, I try not to get hung up on landing the plane. Sometimes I just crash the plane into the ground and come back later to comb through the wreckage. I shovel the details from my patchy outline into the manuscript, and hit save, and tell myself I’ll come back and tidy it up in the second draft. Sometimes I even do!

The important thing is to get to the end, whatever I have to tell myself. Because once I’ve made it to the end, once I’ve “gotten it down,” as Lamott says in her essay, the task of writing becomes ENTIRELY different. It transforms from an additive process to a subtractive one, from painting to sculpture. For me, at least, that resets the clock on my exhaustion — the new task gives me new energy. I just have to trick myself into getting there.

If this all sounds like an elaborate campaign of self-deception, well-spotted. I lie to myself at the beginning, by telling myself it’s actually the middle. I lie to myself in the middle, by telling myself it’s actually the end. I lie to myself at the end, by telling myself the ending isn’t all that important. There’s nothing inherently wrong with deception. We lie to children all the time, for their own good, or just because it’s funny. Why not lie to ourselves for the same reasons? After all, isn’t perfectionism a self-deception all on its own? The mistaken belief that my ideas are so important and good that they don’t even deserve to exist if I can’t express them flawlessly? In the face of that horse shit, I think lying to myself is an act of ultimate justice.

I want to be clear, because I fear it may get lost in all of this: I genuinely enjoy writing. I like finding unusual ways to say things. I like making myself laugh, and sometimes cry. I like wrestling with story puzzles and inventing goofy characters. And ideally, if I had all the time and all the money in the world, I would like to engage in a writing process free from self-deception, a zenlike routine where I give myself as much time as I need, and go on a lot of walks, and occasionally appear on podcasts or actual play DnD series so that people remember who I am. That’s not the world I live in. For better or for worse, I have to finish my stories relatively quickly, and I have to do it between all of the other shit that’s important to me.

This means that, unavoidably, there will be some pain. But I’ve decided the pain is worth it, because it’s getting me closer to something I adore. And, more importantly, I’ve found as many ways as I can to make it not so painful. Because if it was just pain, if the pain was greater than the joy, that would be a very strong signal to stop doing what I’m doing, and do something else. This is very important. I do not want anyone to come away from this thinking that my advice is “tell yourself whatever lies you need to hear to keep you grinding away at your joyless project forever.” What an unhinged position to take. No thank you.

All I’m trying to do is share the ways I’ve managed to trick myself into letting me write. I’ve used them all in this post, in fact. I just went up and deleted the first paragraph of this post (which originally began, “Writing is hard and bad and you shouldn’t do it if you have anything else going on.”) Every time I was called away to do something else, I made sure to leave in the middle of a paragraph, with maybe a sentence-worth of notes about what I was planning to say next. And now that I’m here at the end, rather than coming up with something clever or pithy to say, I’m just going to end it.

If you want to get punched in the throat by me, a great way to accomplish this is to tell me that a piece of my writing needs to “show, not tell.” Hell, I’ll punch you in the throat if you say that about someone else’s writing in front of me. Actually, maybe I have an anger problem that needs addressing but THAT IS NOT WHY I AM WRITING THIS POST. I am writing this post because every time I hear somebody parrot this dank linguistic meme as a substitute for having an actual considered opinion about a piece of writing it spikes my blood pressure, and my doctor says I need to keep an eye on that, and I’m not going to cut back on salt so this is what I’m doing about it.

Part of the problem with “show don’t tell” as a piece of writing advice is that nobody’s super clear on what “showing” or “telling” actually are, so let’s start by knocking together a definition. I want to be fair about this, so let’s start with a quote from someone who epitomizes the style that “show don’t tell” champions: Mister Earnest “Bigdick Rhinokiller” Hemingway:

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.“

In other words, if you’re clever about it, you can lead your reader to understand the facts of the story without straight up saying what you mean. That gives us a pretty good working definition: “showing” means communicating things to your reader via indirect implication. “Telling” is the opposite: directly stating whatever it is you want your reader to know. “Show, don’t tell” implies that one of these things (showing) is good, and the other one (telling) is bad. Oops, I just told you what it means. Fuck me, I guess.

Now look, I get that teaching writing is hard. Ideally it requires a careful analysis of what is and isn’t working in an individual’s work, an understanding of their intentions, guided reading of relevant authors, and a buttload of practice. In the face of all that, I understand the temptation of a hard and fast, one-size-fits-all rule like “show, don’t tell.” But it seems to me that anyone who seriously champions this literary rule must not have read very much literature. Let’s take, for example, the first line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Everyone agrees that this line whips. But there’s not much left to the imagination, is there? Tolstoy just comes straight out and tells us a clever thought he had about families. So clearly some good writers get away with using telling to begin their novels. But surely it’s always better to begin a novel by showing, right? Uh oh:

“Mr. Jack Hyde… he smiles down at me, his blue eyes twinkling, as he leans against my desk. ‘Excellent work, Ana. I think we’re going to make a great team.’”

This is the first line of E.L. James’ seminal work, Fifty Shades Darker. Note the provocative use of ellipses, and the author’s admirable restraint in not mentioning Mr. Hyde’s massive boner. Personally, I find this sentence to be cloying, overwritten, and cliched. It’s certainly no Anna Karenina.

Now, maybe it’s unfair to compare a revered work of literature with the second book in a softcore porn saga. But I’m not arguing that all telling is good and that all showing is bad. All I’m trying to prove is that it’s possible to do amazing things with telling, and to do less than great things with showing. I think it’s also clear from these examples that the two techniques have wildly different uses (although maybe it’s not clear exactly what those uses are yet).

This is the nuance that gets lost in the clickbait blog posts that promise you One Weird Trick That Will Change Your Writing Forever. These posts usually contain an “example sentence” that is meant to represent telling, like:

He was very sad.

And then they “rewrite it” into something “better” like:

He sniffled, and wiped at one red-rimmed eye with his sleeve.

SEE?? ISN’T THAT BETTER? MAKE SURE TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! Except… there’s no way to actually know which sentence is better without reading the rest of the story it’s a part of. Maybe you like the second one better because it’s got more “flavor” or whatever, but most stories are not one sentence. Most stories are made out of several sentences, and each sentence contributes to the whole. And guess what? EVERY story uses at least SOME telling, because you can’t tell a story with just vibes.

A better way to explore showing versus telling is to look at actual examples of showing and telling – ideally one of each, from the same author – so that we can figure out what each technique accomplishes in practice. I’m going to use Borges, because pretty much every single one of his stories is about a labyrinth of some sort, which gives us a nice point of comparison. Let’s compare two of his labyrinths: the one described in “The House of Asterion,” and the one described in “The Library of Babel.”

First, an excerpt from “The House of Asterion.” (If you’re not familiar with the story, the narrator is the legendary Minotaur. Whoops, spoilers.)

“Of course, I am not without distractions. Like the ram about to charge, I run through the stone galleries until I fall dizzy to the floor. I crouch in the shadow of a pool or around a corner and pretend I am being followed. There are roofs from which I let myself fall until I am bloody. … But of all the games, I prefer the one about the other Asterion. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I show him my house. With great obeisance I say to him “Now we shall return to the first intersection” or “Now we shall come out into another courtyard” Or “I knew you would like the drain” or “Now you will see a pool that was filled with sand” or “You will soon see how the cellar branches out”.”

This is a pretty classic example of showing. The narrator (Asterion) never once calls his home a labyrinth (In most of his stories, Borges can’t use that word enough). Instead, the labyrinth is implied through action, dialogue, and sensory detail. The result is an eerie feeling of being trapped in the labyrinth with the unlucky Asterion, seeing his home as he sees it. Hemingway would be proud.

Now let’s look at “The Library of Babel”:

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries … The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides … each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters”

Immediately we can see the difference between the two descriptions. The labyrinth in “Asterion” is dark, twisting and confused, seen as it is through the eyes of the person trapped in it. The Library of Babel is no less baffling, but its strangeness comes from the unearthly clarity and scope of its design, rather than the visceral experience of being trapped inside. You can almost see Borges setting up the wide shot in this passage, giving us a bird’s eye view of the entire impossible library at once. The description of the Library is so clear, in fact, that some cunning computer programmers were actually able to faithfully create a digital version of it. Both stories are terrifying in their own way, but Asterion’s labyrinth is terrifying in a personal way, while the Library of Babel is terrifying in a cosmic horror sort of way.

So showing is great at creating empathy – Asterion’s description immediately puts us in the labyrinth with him – while telling excels at creating clarity. This is especially useful when describing big things – big concepts, as well as things that are physically big (the Library of Babel happens to be both). Telling won’t necessarily give the reader a feeling of how big a thing is (that’s what showing is for), but it can allow them to imagine the entire big thing at once.

That bigness and distance is sometimes weaponized against telling. I’ve heard it said that showing is better because it’s more immersive, and thus more capable of evoking strong emotion. While it’s true that showing is more immersive (because it places the reader directly within the world of the story) immersion is not the only way to evoke strong emotion. Like, have you read the end of the original Grimm’s version of the Cinderella story? It goes like this:

On the way to church the elder was on the right side of the bridal couple and the younger on the left. The doves came along and pecked out one of the elder sister’s eyes and one of the younger sister’s eyes. Afterward, on the way out, the elder was on the left side and the younger on the right, and the doves pecked out both the remaining eyes. So both sisters were punished with blindness to the end of their days for being so wicked and false.

I don’t know about you, but I find the above description chilling specifically because of the distance and precision with which it’s described. I don’t need to see the eyeball goo, or hear the screams. The calm, direct language of the passage makes me feel like I’m having one of those fucked up nightmares where I’m at the grocery store and I discover I no longer have teeth. If that’s the effect you’re trying to achieve, this is a way to achieve it.

There’s another interesting thing about Grimm’s fairytales in this context: all of them are transcriptions of stories told by unknown storytellers throughout Germany. See what I did there? “Tellers”? “Telling”? God, I’m so clever. When a story is told aloud, it’s impossible to ignore the storyteller. They’re right there in front of you. When you’re reading a story, on the other hand, it can be easy to forget who’s telling it. That’s part of what we refer to as immersion in literature. It’s another compelling use for showing. If you want to remind the reader who’s telling the story, though… well… telling is good for that. Here’s an example from all-timer T.H. White’s The Once and Future King:

“’Couldn’t send them to Eton, I suppose?’ Inquired sir Grummore cautiously. ‘Long way and all that, we know.’

It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not port, but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel.”

This is not the only way that T. H. White could have written this passage. He could have simply replaced “Eton” with the name of a historically appropriate college. He could have used “Eton” and not commented on it, thus achieving the same effect he’s describing in the next paragraph without having to stop and tell us what he’s doing. Instead, White chooses to explicitly give us this information, and let us know what a huge solid he’s doing us. He doesn’t open the second paragraph with “Hey, listen, T. H. White here to give you some historical context,” but we understand that it’s him talking anyway, because who else would it be?

By coming out and addressing us directly like this (on the second page of his book, no less), White is already starting to build a personal relationship with the reader. He’s telling us, “Hey, I know the historical context of the Arthurian legend is pretty dense, but don’t worry – I’ve got this covered.”

So while showing is immersive because it helps us forget we’re reading a story – by removing the barrier between us and the events of the story – telling is immersive because it helps us forget we’re reading – by removing the barrier between us and the storyteller. Both are powerful techniques, because both exploit the relationship between reader and writer. Showing gives us the details and relies on us to infer the broader facts. Telling gives us the broad facts and relies on our imaginations to embroider the little details. 

Get you a reader who can do both.