I took a class on playwriting my freshman year, and my professor’s idea of an unforgiveable sin was putting adverbs before a character’s line.
“BOB: (patronizingly) That’s nice, Dear.”
He hated them. He said good writing ought to stand for itself. If Frankie and Billy are in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight, and I have to throw in a descriptor— “FRANKIE: (angrily) I hate you, Billy!” —then my writing probably isn’t very good.
If my reader cannot tell the emotion of my character by what he says and does, applying a bandage adverb won’t help. This idea pervades good art in all mediums. In acting class, they called it “Show, don’t tell.” Maybe Billy wants to punch Frankie; what would convey the message more effectively? Billy screaming, “I really want to punch you right now, Frankie!” or Billy taking shorter breaths, his back muscles tensing up, and his jaw clenching?
The work of a shadow theatre group called Attraction that rose to fame after wining Britain’s Got Talent in 2013 provides a good example of this. The group uses lighting, screens, and music to tell a story with shadows. One of their performances showed the story of a young man who died in war, and their depiction captivated their audience.
What do you think would have happened, though, if they had performed the same movements, but used a narrator instead of music? Instead of melody accompanying their art and creating a space for understanding, what if someone had stood to the side and said, “And here, we see the young man kissing his wife goodbye. He is about to go to war. And now he is marching with a troop of soldiers”? They would have lost the attention of their audience.
As artists, part of our craft is learning how to frame a moment for a viewer or listener or reader to understand. We don’t give them a list of things to think; we let them think for themselves. Christian musician Michael Card calls it creating “a frame around the silence—the kind of silence in which God speaks to the heart.”
So next time you approach a drawing or a poem or a story, leave space for your audience to think for themselves. Create a framework for understanding. Show, don’t tell.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.