Show and Tell: Workshop with Dr Paul Shanks on May 26th 2025

Show and Tell: the craft of narrative

A workshop led by Dr Paul Shanks

‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.’  It’s a quotation drawn from Chekhov, which Dr Paul Shanks used to illustrate some of the thinking behind the old advice to writers to ‘Show, don’t tell.’

He was leading a workshop at the HighlandLIT May event on 26 May, discussing the relative merits of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’.  We were in the Bike Shed venue in Grant Street for this event, joined by one person on-line – there were about a dozen of us present sitting round a big table drinking coffees provided for a donation by a Bike Shed member of staff. The venue was warm and welcoming, the atmosphere congenial.

Introduction

Showing has great value, Paul agreed, highlighting ‘the telling detail’, drawing the reader in and exciting their empathy. But we need both showing and telling, he continued: for each of them has a role to play, and possibilities develop through the interaction between showing and telling.

We examined different pieces of writing to unpack this theme:  A poem, The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, in which so much significance  hangs on the meaning of cryptic first line, ‘so much depends’; a passage from James Kelman, of which Paul concluded that ‘the more detail given, the less is revealed, as though Kelman were dismantling the narrative’.

We looked at a section from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in which, one day in 1818, children are playing on a vast gun carriage outside an inn called ‘At the Sign of the Sergeant of Waterloo’. Paul highlighted the juxtaposition of the fairly straightforward telling of the story with that powerful image of vulnerable children scrambling over an ugly instrument of war and death.

Finally, we examined a passage from Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts, a story of two women searching for a grave in a war cemetery in Europe - the playfulness of the typography and photographic style of the writing hinting at a subtextual reflection on the viewpoint from which the characters see the world.

The point Paul was making is that each of these pieces of writing contained not simply ‘showing’, not simply ‘telling’, as each writer carefully selected their words.

Workshop

After the break, it was our turn! Paul gave us an example of ‘Telling’ (newspaper articles from the Inverness Courier and the Press and Journal about ghostly goings-on in the Inverness Old High Church graveyard) and an example of ‘Showing’, a fairly impenetrable passage from a piece of Samuel Beckett called ‘Ping’.

Our job was either to take the paranormal news stories and turn them into a piece of ‘showing’, or to take Beckett’s complex ‘showing’ and re-write it in a mode of ‘telling’.

At the end of this fascinating exercise those present who wished to share what they’d written were invited to do so. We heard mostly imaginings of the ghostly encounter, some wonderful pieces from very gifted writers. And we heard a few brave, and perceptive attempts to discern what was happening in the Beckett text. Most interesting among the latter were the comments by Giannis Zappas, a friend of Beth Jordan’s who noted that in its structuring of ideas and images the Samuel Beckett's piece was akin to Rachmaninov’s patterning in his Prelude No 5 in G Minor (Opus 23)

It was a great evening. We are so grateful to Paul for taking the time to prepare and deliver this event. So grateful too to Cathy Carr, just back from an energetic walk in the roasting heat along the West Highland Way who coped admirably as usual with the challenges of IT and recalcitrant laptops, and connectors which don’t.  And thanks also to David Goldie who arranged the Bike Shed venue, and to the Bike Shed team for the venue and the warm welcome.

We hope to see you all back, and more of you, at the June event.

And we're honoured to print here the piece Beth Jordan wrote at the workshop taking the paranormal theme!

On this cold Halloween night, the air around seemed to shimmer and quiver, like the now fragile autumn leaves shaking on their almost bare branches.

The sky, dark, with streaks of pale luminescent shards of light cut through the surrounding darkened trees, piercing and burying themselves in and around the gravestones of the children’s part of the cemetery.

There was a hum in the air, low frequency, a vibrancy which emanated from deep within the ground.

Philip Murray a local paranormal investigator, stood with his EMF meter on the ground by the grave of five orphaned children. He had written many articles about paranormal activities in and around Inverness but sensed something different today, as he stood in this dark corner of the local cemetery, amidst the tumbled headstones, part broken, names no more than scratches, spots of soft furry lichen scattered across the greying stones.

The EMF needle began to swing slowly from side to side and as he looked down at it, he felt a softness, like baby’s breath brushing his leg through the thin fabric of his chino pants. Then another and another. The breathing enveloping his body from his legs creeping upwards.

His mind seemed to race away on those dark gathering clouds overhead, the luminescent light now fading as he stood amongst those ghostly stones on this night of legend and mysteries.

And then, almost imperceptibly, his fingers seemed to curl around small fingers, soft and delicate yet with a hardness, as the humming grew in intensity.

He felt the ground swaying as though standing on a tremulous leaf; as the autumn leaves responded overhead.

He knew he was in a space of tears, of lives, tortured by poverty and pain and felt tears of memory of lost lives and children’s pain roll down one cheek as the EMF slowed down and those little fingers withdrew.

He bent down and picked up his EMF meter and played back a short recording, a disturbance of 30 seconds.

He had to believe something had happened on this dark Halloween night and legends and mysteries had been revealed.

Beth Jordan