Sweet Emotion

Exercise Your InkTank
Insides and Outsides: Telling A Good Joke

We’ve all heard the advice that showing is a better choice than telling, but if we always show what a character is feeling, our stories will likely collapse under the weight of a thousand meaningful hand and facial gestures. In other words, sometimes it’s necessary simply to say, he was mad, especially if showing him pocketing his hands or biting his lip until it bleeds disrupts the timing or rhythm or efficiency of the storytelling. Imagine a world in which characters can never say what they feel, but instead must find ways of otherwise revealing themselves. How cumbersome and how comical.

(A few provisos and sidebars: Of course, he was mad, can be written more interestingly. Word choice alone often seals the deal, brings the reader in like showing can. And of course some telling is always a terrible tire. Inflated dialogue tags, for example, or telling that is appended to showing, which is a sign that the writer does not trust the reader to make the proper assessment.)

How do we know when to say he was mad and when to send him stomping down some lonely corridor? Many writers will tell you that it’s a matter of instinct. We learn how to tell a good story when we’re children and we learn it by listening to the stories of others. We carry those same lessons with us as adult readers. We can remind ourselves of what good storytelling is by looking to what children want from a good story. According to Margaret Atwood, in “Reading Blind” children want these things: “They want their attention held … They want to feel they are in safe hands, that they can trust the teller … They will not put up with your lassitude or boredom: If you want their full attention, you must give them yours.”

Atwood also likens timing in stories to the logic of joke telling: “If we guess the riddle at once, or if we can’t guess it because the answer makes no sense – if we see the joke coming, or if the point is lost because the teller gets it muddled – there is failure. Stories can fail in the same way.”

Bringing it all together: If the writer’s desire to demonstrate/show what the character is feeling inside overwhelms the reader’s basic investment in the story by losing her attention, by betraying her trust, by seeming to lack urgency, or by muddling the story, the story will fail.

Let’s work on this by telling some really bad jokes and turning them into good ones. You’ve all probably got one joke, an old standby you’ve told a dozen times. First try inflating it to the extreme, omitting nothing and showing as much as possible. Next try paring it back. Keep some of your showing, but only enough to perfect the timing of the joke.