When is telling better than showing?

Now that we’ve done a close reading of the opening of The Dutch House, let’s anatomize a later scene from the novel in the way a lepidopterist might anatomize a butterfly. When we look at the parts of the scene, what do we find? How can we categorize them? Most importantly, how do these components function in the larger organism of the story?

One of the risks of this kind of analysis is getting too caught up in the categories themselves, creating classifications so specific that we spend more time defining them than analyzing them. So I’ve stuck to broad categories and tried to give them labels that are as clear as possible. We’ll drill down into the nuances as we explore the scene, but let’s start with some basic definitions:

Other writers (or you yourself!) might come up with different categories or define them differently. You’ll also see when we get into the details that some sentences do double duty or could fall into multiple categories. Remember that we’re not labeling and counting for the sake of creating a rigorous taxonomy or performing data analysis, but rather so we can see what components Patchett is using and how she is using them. I’ll repeat this analysis for other novels, so we’ll get a chance to compare how different writers make use of the same set of components.

After all of those disclaimers about the numbers, let’s look at a few of them. We’ll be examining chapter five, scene one, which has about 5,100 words. Roughly a third of the scene is composed of action and dialogue—the two primary components of what I call a ‘live scene,’ the sections you could visualize or easily translate into a screenplay. Another third is interiority, what the point-of-view character is thinking or feeling. The final third is setting, character description, backstory, and summary—the muscles, bones, and sinews connecting everything together. See the figure below for a breakdown of the scene’s composition.

The scene is built around two important action sections: Danny’s father showing him the Brooklyn neighborhood where he and Danny’s mother grew up, and then Danny taking his sister Maeve back to the same spot, where they rehash what they know about their mother and her disappearance. But despite most of the action taking place in New York City, the scene both begins and ends at the Dutch House, a clever illustration of the gravitational pull of the house on Danny, who narrates the novel. These beginning and ending pages are largely summary and interiority, with a few snippets of action and dialogue to give them energy. There are a few large chunks of summary and a chunk of backstory in the scene, but Patchett is careful to position these around the more dynamic live action sections. Interiority is the only element that appears on every single page.

Before going deeper with our analysis, let’s start by thinking about the overall purpose of the scene. Why is it here? How are the characters, especially our protagonist Danny, different at the end of the scene? These are questions I encourage authors I work with to ask of every scene in their manuscript, to make sure each one is pulling its weight.

So what is Patchett trying to accomplish here? By this point in the novel, she’s opened three sets of story questions, focused on three different points in time: How does the family unit in the Dutch House, especially Danny, respond to the introduction of Andrea and her daughters? Why did Danny and Maeve’s mother leave? And how do all of these events shape the adult Danny becomes? Even in the early chapters of the book, we get glimpses of the older Danny in scenes that jump forward in time. By chapter five, we’ve had two of these scenes and we’re about to get another one immediately after the scene I analyze here. (In my next post on the novel, I’ll be saying a lot more about why and how Patchett uses these time jumps.)

In the scene we are examining, Patchett zeroes in on the second question: Why did Danny and Maeve’s mother leave? The event itself took place long before the novel opens—so long ago, in fact, that Danny has no memory of it. Other characters around him, of course, do remember it: his father, Maeve, and the servants Sandy and Jocelyn. Patchett could answer the question via dialogue; we could imagine a scene where Sandy sits Danny down at the kitchen table and tells him everything she knows about what happened. But Patchett wants to maximize the mystery and drama surrounding the question—she wants to show it rather than tell it, in other words.

I think chapter five is her solution: She puts her characters in motion, via the trip from Philadelphia to New York, and she adds a layer of tension by making Danny and his father the two actors in the scene. Danny’s father is allergic to emotion and habitually unwilling to communicate anything personal. The few crumbs of information he drops are gathered up carefully by Danny, who then must go over them with Maeve in order to properly understand them. So in addition to the information we get about the missing mother, we get a much richer understanding of Danny’s relationships with his father and with Maeve, and how these relationships are shaping him. The framing scenes at the Dutch House inject a further layer of tension, showing us the ways in which the relationships between Andrea and Danny’s father, as well as Andrea and Danny himself, are poisoning the already frigid atmosphere of the family home.

Now it’s time to zoom in and look more closely at a few sections of the scene so we can see these components at work. In the beginning of chapter five, Patchett uses summary mixed with action and dialogue to cover a lot of set-up work in a compressed space. We learn that Maeve has left for college in New York, and Danny is lonely without her, even with a stepmother and two stepsisters now in the house. Maeve invites him to visit over Easter break; to Danny’s surprise, his father decides to drive him there and take him to lunch with Maeve. At this point we get a line of interiority that operates like a gut punch: “It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.” After this line, a bit of action and dialogue flicker to life:

We’ve already heard about the formal dining room in the Dutch House, with its ornate ceiling of carved and gilded leaves “more in keeping with Versailles than Eastern Pennsylvania,” so Patchett doesn’t spend any time on setting. We get an action from Andrea (that announcement) followed by a summary of her reasons for wanting to come along, seasoned by a couple of dialogue lines. There is only one snippet of interiority from Danny, his interpretation of Andrea’s line about the girls never having been to New York, but it’s enough to help us see how self-centered Andrea is—and also how narrator Danny’s feelings about her may be coloring his summary of her dialogue. The next two paragraphs operate the same way, before this miniature scene is closed off by another, longer passage of interiority: “It didn’t matter. I was only missing lunch, that ridiculous notion of the three of us. . . . Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted.” In roughly six hundred words, Patchett shows us the state of affairs at the Dutch House and sets the stage for the next burst of action.

That occurs the next morning, when Danny’s father rushes them out of the house, not even giving him time to pack in his hurry to escape Andrea. Patchett stretches the moment out using setting details (the cereal bowl Danny leaves on the table, the wisteria not yet blooming on the trellis along the walk to the garage), action (Danny running to keep up with his father’s long strides), and this dramatic bit of interiority: “all the way to the garage I thought, Escape, escape, escape. We beat the word into the gravel with every step.” Once in the car, Danny’s father surprises him once more by offering to show him around the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. Danny’s surprise at his father’s offer and the reader’s curiosity about what he’ll reveal gives Patchett the room to deliver a big chunk of character study. We get a physical description of Danny’s father for the first time (his height, his rust-colored hair, his weathered skin) as well as some important psychological details, conveyed through a chunk of backstory—Danny recalling the time he’d asked his father whether he planned to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson for president.

Patchett delivers this information right at the moment readers need to understand the finer dynamics of Danny’s relationship with his father in order to interpret the scene that comes next, the tour of Brooklyn. We need to understand why Danny is so hesitant to push or question, why he regards his father as a hot stove—one that burns rather than warms.

Before analyzing one more section of this scene, I want to say a few words about the familiar bit of writing advice to show rather than tell. As Lisa Cron points out in Wired for Story, this “might just be the most woefully misunderstood writing maxim on the books.” She argues that ‘showing’ in this sense is figurative rather than literal. If you want to show rather than tell your readers a character is sad, in her example, the solution isn’t to show the character crying but rather to show us why they are sad. That might mean a live scene, with action and dialogue. But I also think that all of the components we’ve been tracking in this post—not just action and dialogue—can be used to show rather than tell.

Danny’s backstory about his father’s vote is a good example. Patchett might have included his private nature in the list of details she gives us just before the voting anecdote (my addition in italics): “He smoked Pall Malls, put milk in his coffee, worked the crossword puzzle before reading the front page. He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs. He valued his privacy.” But the backstory anecdote—essentially Danny telling us something his father told him—serves to show us this important psychological insight instead. At the same time, the details we are merely told are useful too. One of them—his love of buildings—is also something we are shown in different ways throughout the novel. Others simply round out our picture of the character and serve to make him feel more distinct and real. The art comes not from converting every ‘telling’ moment to ‘showing’ but in being deliberate in your mixture.

Let’s now look at the second half of this scene, which takes us from Maeve and Danny’s lunch with their father through their own pilgrimage to Brooklyn. There is more action and dialogue in this half of the scene, but Patchett continues to use other components, especially interiority, at strategic moments. There’s a chunk of summary in which they say goodbye to their father and go down into the subway. Maeve plans to take Danny to the Metropolitan Museum, but Danny has been waiting to tell Maeve about his morning and it all spills out:

This is a good example of creative showing. Patchett doesn’t tell us that Danny feels overwhelmed; instead she shows it through his lack of words and by whatever physical signs make Maeve think he doesn’t feel well. As so often with Patchett’s writing, the sequence does double duty in showing us how well Maeve knows Danny, how motherly her relationship is to him, and how much attention she’s paying to him in this moment.

As the scene continues, Patchett uses a mix of components to show us a rounded picture of a highly charged moment, one that could easily fall flat in less-skilled hands:

Remember Cron’s advice to tell us why a character is crying rather than just show him cry? Here Patchett dramatizes Danny’s precise predicament. Not only does he not fully understand why he’s crying, he also believes it is wrong for him to be doing so at all. Our narrator here is a much older Danny, looking back on his younger self. Twelve-year-old Danny knows that his mother’s choice to leave the family is “the central question of his life,” but he’s also just heard his father tell him, standing outside the building where she grew up, that “Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.” Danny knows the loss of his mother has wounded him deeply, but he’s being told to just get over it, without being given any tools for doing so—this tension explains a lot of adult Danny’s choices, as we’ll see in my post on the novel’s chronology.

After another paragraph of interiority in which Danny again downplays his pain (which boils down to the possibility or even probability that his mother is dead, just like all of her relatives), Patchett restarts the action: “Maeve was very close. She’d eaten a peppermint from a bowl by the door in the restaurant. We both had. Her eyes weren’t blue like mine. They were much darker, almost navy. ‘Could you find the street again?’” Here the details take us very deep into Danny’s point of view, helping us feel how physically close he is to Maeve. Patchett begins the paragraph by telling us they are close, giving us an interpretive slot for the details she then shows us. Maeve’s dialogue line launches them on their journey back to Brooklyn, where Patchett uses summary to cover the literal ground Danny walked with his father.

The conversation they have in a coffee shop after the tour is an important one because it shows that there are some differences between them—in what they feel both about their mother and about the Dutch House—and these differences will continue to resonate throughout the book. Danny, for example, understands why his father told Maeve to think of her mother as dead: He wanted to stop Maeve from leaving for India to try to find her. Danny also realizes he’s allied with his father in believing there to be “no better house” than the Dutch House, which, he is now learning from Maeve, also puts him at odds with his mother, who hated it. It’s the only reason Maeve has to propose for why their mother left. Danny tries, in twelve-year-old style, to make the contradiction vanish:

That’s the end of the conversation—in this scene at least. The last few pages consist of a summary of the rest of Danny’s time in New York, and then a brief scene back in the dining room of the Dutch House, where we see him lie to Andrea about having seen a play she’d wanted to see and search, fruitlessly, for any signs of a deeper connection with his father: “I kept waiting for my father to catch my eye, to give me some small signal that things had changed between us, but it didn’t come. He never asked me about my time with Maeve or the play I hadn’t seen, and we never talked about Brooklyn again.” By the next chapter, Danny’s father is dead, the repeated “never” here operating as a foreshadowing death knell.

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