Emma, I'm totally convinced that whatever you want to do is fine if it works. I was reading the conference papers on the Barbara Pym Society website the other day, and I was struck by this paragraph as a great example of when 'telling' works wonderfully well. One could (if one were possessed of no soul, no sense of humour and cloth ears) say that it was 'distanced' and 'tell-y'. It's also completely brilliant:

They would settle themselves in for one of Liz’s long drinking sessions before there was anything to eat, Leonora knew from experience. The cats would be in and out of the room and Leonora would try to avoid getting one on her lap, kneading at her skirt with its claws. Liz’s own clothes were of course so much plucked by cats that the pulled threads gave an almost bouclé effect to everything she wore. Eventually Liz would embark again on the subject of her unhappy marriage. ‘All that love, wasted,’ she would say. Leonora would feel inadequate, having no experience of her own to match it. She had never been badly treated or rejected by a man — perhaps she had never loved another person with enough intensity for such a thing to be possible — whatever the reason she would keep silent, only perhaps observing that love was never wasted, or so it was said. Liz for her part would be equally bored by Leonora and her reminiscences of her Continental girlhood and later attachments mysteriously hinted at but which never seemed to have come to anything.

Fantastic thread.

LOVE that Barbara Pym paragraph, though I must admit she doesn't altogether do it for me at novel-length.

Emma, I know that feeling: everything starts to look odd, doesn't it. I think it's a sign that one needs to put that bit away and do some broad-brush, big-scale or first draft work. Re-find the energy in yourself, in other words.

The truth is that Showing and Telling doesn't always work as a distinction at this kind of micro-level. It's much more about the overall effect.

"She scowls" is a perfectly good verb, and I do think you often just don't want more than that. You might want a fascinating sentence about the pair of lines that appears on the bridge of her nose and the way her hands shake... but you might not. It IS true that "she scowls" and "he smiles" can become signals - what's technically Showing but is being used in a Tell-y way. (Once upon a time, "She wrung her hands" was a fabby bit of full-on showing, after all...)

but that doesn't necessarily mean one shouldn't do it. Perhaps it's best to treat it as an alert: is it not that the words are a bit bog-standard, but that the idea is. Do we need it pointing out at all? If so, is this minimalist pointing out right, or is it a moment to dig a bit deeper into what's going on emotionally. There isn't a right or a wrong to it - just a case of understanding what's right for this moment.

Have you ever watched TV with the "stage directions" switched on - the ones that are there for blind people? It's quite an interesting exercise to watch a drama - like, for example, "Call The Midwife" with that on. You get thins like - "The two midwives exchange a secret glance" or "Sister Monica crosses herself". You start to think how much time we waste as prose writers trying to come up with new and interesting ways to say, "she looks sad", for example. And then, watching a drama, you wonder if we should even bother and just get on with the story, because after all that's the thing, isn't it?

I bet that's interesting, Jem.

Why doesn't Barbara Pym quite do it for you, Emma? The only thing I don't like about her work is that so many of her characters are anthropologists (No! Oh please, not another one! ) Apart from that, I think she's perfect.

Well it's a long time since I tried one, but I remember a definite feeling of "Remind me why I'm supposed to be bothered?", and no particular urge to try another one.

Maybe I just didn't tune in correctly - maybe I would better these days - but my totally subjective taste is usually for things which are just on a grander scale - either linguistically, or in storytelling terms, or both. I admire those working on little bits of ivory, but don't easily love them.

Except for Austen, of course.

She's probably never going to be for you, then, but if you do ever fancy giving her another try, I think her best is Excellent Women.

It was Excellent Women I read.

I suspect I would get it more now. But, yanno, I've got Bring Up The Bodies and Cloud Atlas to read... And Grace Paley and Muriel Spark and a compellingly and uncharacteristically dull book by Norman Davies ...

It does so depend when you read a book. I remember doing Austen at school, when I was 14. For me it was way to young to get the emotional and social nuances in anything but the most intellectual sense. I read a lot of 'adult' stuff at an early age, things like Margaret Drabble, which I thought were just so-so. I suspect if I went back to them now I would see so much more in them that I could relate to.


Maybe it just took me a long time to grow up!

Yes, it does, doesn't it.

I remember reading Portrait of a Lady at fifteen or so, and absolutely loving it, but without really having the faintest idea why - partly just because I find James's prose completely riveting.

My English teacher suggested I'd like Middlemarch, and now I so understand why she did, but I tried about a page then and was bored to tears - I finally read it recently and adored it, but only after I'd heard a Radio 4 dramatisation and realised it was all right to ignore the small-town politics if I wanted to. Plus I guess I'm more interested in the early-Victorian historical context now, whereas at the time I was only interested in the 18th century.

My mother read P&P and Emma aloud to us when I was much younger than that, (I think because my older sister was finding P&P heavy going at school when she was 12 or so, so I was about 9 or 10). That helped a lot, I think - talking of the Voice thread: the reader-aloud provides a stronger sense of the human interface which is voice, I think.

Plus, of course, you can take stuff read aloud that you wouldn't have stuck with if you were having to put in the energy of reading it to yourself.