Who best can show? Whether we approach the notion of ‘showing’ by considering that creaky fiction course recommendation ‘show, don’t tell’ or from the more generic or general sense of showing as display, or ‘to show’ in relation to ‘to reveal’, we have not yet adequately dealt with the concept and conditions of showing when it comes to creative writing.
A creative writer can show directly by providing information or observations. But they can also show somewhat less directly through the employment of voice, tone and/or viewpoint, for example. Showing is a provision, a tool, an implication of creative writing, both in the act of doing it and in its end results in physical form (that is, inscribed, possibly published or distributed).
But there is much more to the relationship between showing and creative writing than this. Because creative writing involves both acts and results, showing in creative writing is itself a communication between the physical and the psychological, the inscribing and the inscribed moving between ordinary or common states and metaphysical conditions. It could be said that this exchange is no different than that which occurs in any other form of writing. However, by definition creative writing comes from and exists in the imagination and is delivered through the orchestration of creativity and critical understanding. It is so to a distinctive extent, and this identifies it as creative writing. The inscribing and the inscribed therefore exist in a more transcendental mode of exchange than takes place in other forms of writing. The practice is most certainly more than intellectual, and not purely cognitive, incorporating as it does recognisable and encouraged emotional aspects. ‘Show’ in this sense becomes in creative writing a display of a unique kind.
Such a discussion as this one places the concept of showing in the purview of the creative writer. But, of course, we do need to be wary of being self-centred, not least because the results of creative writing most often involve a communicative exchange with others. While creative writing is a mode of self-expression, ‘showing’ in this sense can mean both action and re-action. The person offering the reaction is not necessarily the creative writer. The reader or audience for creative writing reacts in numerous ways to the physical results of creative writing. Whether poem or short story, a work of creative non-fiction or the text of a graphic novel, the reader shows in their personal engagement, in their discussions with family or friends, or with a class or reading group, to note just some examples, their thoughts or feeling about a work. They show how the work has impacted upon them emotionally, intellectually. Audiences for works of theatre or film or leisure software often show their engagement with the scripts of such works by even more clear reactions: concentration, facial expressions, even exclamations.
Showing thus is part of the communicative condition of creative writing. More than a structural condition or a compositional strategy showing is the actual condition of creative writing. We could even say that the characteristic of the creative writer, in which the majority of the work out of view is such that it highlights revelation, it creates interest in display, and through the perceived mysteries of the practices foregrounds both the person and the result. The creative writer shows and, through their work and their selective appearances in the world, is shown.
More research needs to be done – via our creative practices and via critical theoretical and empirical study – into the ontological and epistemological conditions of showing in our field. If creative writing is foregrounded as a practice in varieties of showing, then understanding how, in what ways, and to what results showing occurs will reveal more about what we creative writers do, and can do.