The prime directive given to creative writers — “Show, don’t tell” — is a shorthand way of saying that good writing reveals through action and dialogue, and not through exposition. It is based on the idea that readers want to interpret a text with minimal interference from the author. For example, instead of being told that a young child is precocious, readers prefer to see how the child acts and talks and then decide for themselves whether there is evidence of precociousness. This prime directive can serve as the boundary between good and not-good writing: good writing shows; not-good writing tells.
While there are instances when a writer will decide it is necessary to tell the reader something, even then, good writers will still use the prime directive to guide how they’re going to tell it. Take, for example, the following passage by Phillip Roth’s Plot Against America:
On a Saturday a couple of weeks earlier I’d gone into the cellar with my mother and helped her empty the cartons full of Alvin’s belongings… Everything washable, my mother scrubbed on the washboard in the divided cellar tub, soaping in one sink, rinsing in the other, and then feeding a piece at a time into the ringer while I cranked the handle to force out the water. … One evening a few days before Alvin’s scheduled return [from a veteran’s hospital, where he was recovering from losing a leg in battle] I shined his pair of brown shoes and his pair of black shoes, ignoring as best I could any uncertainty I had as to whether shining all four of them was still necessary. To make those shoes gleam, to get his good clothes clean, to neatly pile the dresser drawer with his freshly washed things—and all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.
Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America, pp. 131-133
The key element in this passage is the “prayer imploring the household gods to protect” the narrator’s home “from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.” The prayer takes place in the form of the family’s act of cleaning and preparing the clothes of the returning soldier.
To say this is the key element is to say it motivates the entire passage; it is to assert the prayer as the reason the passage exists. As proof, note how Roth tells his reader how the cleaning must be understood: He refuses to leave the significance of the cleaning to the reader’s interpretation. At the end of the passage, if the reader doesn’t understand that the cleaning is prayer, then the passage isn’t worth anything; the prayer is not something that can be left out the picture.
But even when Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive and tells his reader that the cleaning is a metaphorical form of prayer, he also follows the prime directive and shows them, choosing words with strong illustrative power: “all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg” (emphasis added, 133). Imagine this passage without such power: “all of it simply a prayer, a prayer asking for protection from the missing leg.” Not only is the writing flat, but it loses its connection to the story, and in the processes, loses the story’s grip on the reader.
This passage comes in the middle of a novel that imagines what the early 1940s might have been like if, instead of re-electing Franklin Roosevelt as the President of the United States, the American public elected isolationist (and Nazi sympathizer) Charles Lindbergh. When President Lindbergh keeps the United States out of World War II by recognizing Germany’s dominion over Europe, a number of angry Americans (and American Jews—Alvin included) go to Canada to enlist in the fight against the Nazis. After Alvin loses his leg in battle, he returns to the narrator’s family, angry at the world. He resigns himself to a life of crime and disappears for much of the novel. When he returns years later, he gets in an explosive (and climactic) fight with the narrator’s father, a fight that demolishes the entire house.
[ Despite all the family’s worst fears about the increase in brazen anti-Semitism in President Lindbergh’s America, this fight between Alvin and his uncle is the only violence that infiltrates the narrator’s household: one Jew fights another Jew over the ardor of the other’s Jewishness, as if Roth is suggesting that the only anti-Semitism a Jew must truly fear is the anti-Semitism of the Jews.
[Of course, Roth knows the truth isn’t as simple as this, which is why an exiled Jewish neighbor and an exiled Jewish family member suffer at the hands of Gentiles, as if Roth is qualifying himself by saying an individual Jew is most likely to be hurt by other Jews, though no one (in their right mind) can deny the agony inflicted upon the Jewish race by the non-Jewish world.]
The passage of the housecleaning prayer foreshadows the climactic fight wherein Alvin’s “vengeful fury” is unleashed and the “five humble rooms and all that they contained” are destroyed. Though Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive when telling his readers the housecleaning is a metaphor for prayer, he tells them using words that show—even if only faintly—the climax of his entire story. His powerful word choices throughout the passage illustrate its deep connection to the narrative and maintains the interest — and more importantly, the imagination — of his reader.
That Phillip Roth is a good writer, few people need telling. But it never hurts to show them why.