'Show, don't tell' is broken

Emotional depth doesn't have to mean flushed cheeks

The train to Maynooth, where I gave a workshop today

Ciao,

As an autistic woman writer, I despise ‘show, don’t tell’.

Explanation below.

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The most annoying question journalists ask me — and it’s not even close — is how being autistic affects my writing. The answer I’m tempted to give is: ‘First you tell me how not being autistic affects yours’.

My neurology stays implicit in most of my work. When autism itself is not the topic, I see no need to hold readers’ hands and break it to them gently that they’re in communion with a lady of the spectrum. I would find it a hindrance and nuisance to continuously monitor whether my autism was showing, just as neurotypicals would find it unhelpful to constantly ask themselves: ‘Am I coming across as emotionally incontinent and desperate for the validation of my peers?’

If this seems a cruel summary of neurotypical writing, please note how entirely normalised it is to describe autists’ fiction as inhumanly aloof. Literary culture has a narrow definition of emotional depth, particularly when it comes to young women’s writing. Certain readers seem to demand endless paragraphs on how the untimely death of a character’s chihuahua made their stomach clench. Personally I’m far more moved by descriptions of emotion expressed through cognitive realism rather than somatic signs: the stomach cramps could equally be attributed to an ill-advised third cup of coffee, while zooming in on each pixel of a character’s thought process can far more precisely reflect their experience.

It’s not only that I theoretically value rigour over vibes — although I do. Clarity is an emotional experience for me. ‘This is so fucking specific, fuck yes’ I think as I read someone like Nabokov or Sayaka Murata or Mary Lavin. That’s what loving a book feels like for me.

I enjoy descriptions of bodies when they’re linked to concepts I find theoretically engaging or when the prose is stunning enough to become an object of interest in itself. (See: James Baldwin.) Not all somatic writing is intellectually vacuous; I do not wish to reproduce the accusations of sentimentalism that have historically been weaponised against gay men and writers of colour who work in that tradition.

What I object to is

1. the assumption that cognitive descriptions cannot equally produce emotional affect, and

2. the tyrannical expectation that all women should foreground bodies — and that if they don’t, they’re depriving the reader of something essential.

When a female character written by a woman has been romantically betrayed, she’s not expected to analyse the language or the behavioural patterns or the accumulation of data as I would. She must instead direct the reader to her shaking hands or shallow breath. To me this shorthand seems coy, a cute way of containing systemised female rage. There is a power in the relentless pinpointing of facts that a focus on flushed cheeks seems designed to tame.

(Except when the cheeks are done well, of course. My only prescriptive stance is that more people should write well.)

The expectation to lead with blushing is a curse for autistic women writers. In our actual lives we’re often concept-focused, not as a distraction from emotion but as our way of feeling it. This is not a deficit. We’re not broken. We’re just different.

There’s one striking exception: Jane Austen. She has been grandfathered into perceived emotional heft despite offering little in the way of somatic detail — or indeed interior design or slobbering pets or any of the things women are supposedly meant to write about. She will name a furniture item or note that a dog is present. Her characters have bodies and use them. But the real action is verbal: the sentences her characters think in and the ones they exchange.

Austen is so clearly a genius that no one credible accuses her of emotional banality. Maybe that’s the best hope for autistic women writing now: accept that in your lifetime you will be misconstrued as an ice queen for focusing on the elements of human experience that you yourself find most arresting and powerful and raw, but that maybe one day when enough dust has settled you’ll be admired for your elegant restraint. It will still be a misreading of your burning cognitive intensity, just as it is of Austen’s, but at least they’ll stop calling you superficial. (I do think Austen herself was autistic, but that’s another essay.)

I’ve focused on fiction here because it’s where I feel most keenly the disconnect between how I want to write and what’s expected.

Non-fiction can produce moments of similar disjuncture. ‘Where’s the you in this?’ editors ask me. The whole thing is me! It’s all my thoughts. There’s an absence of relatability-based pandering in my essays, too, that probably reflects my being autistic. My ideal reader can cope without constant reassurance that I’m just like them. I don’t bother with an ‘I know I’m such a nerd for caring about these things’ schtick, because the truth is that I don’t find it untoward to have interests. All people do, though perhaps not everyone’s revolve around comparing the degree to which the vocative case has declined in Irish versus Slovak. (I haven’t actually written about that one yet, but since you’re all so keen …)

On the whole, though, non-fiction is more implicitly masculine than fiction as a genre, so I feel freer to write however I want rather than reciting a gendered script. My fiction often gets perceived as modishly empty, too cool for school, for deploying the exact same cognitive architecture that is accepted in my essays as deeply felt. I can write bodies by thinking about it — by forcing it out — but it’s not the native grammar of my emotional perception. Reading over my published fiction, I can see all the points where I wanted to describe a character’s analytical interiority but thought readers might prefer a quivering lip. Those sentences are not my best work.

Besides gender, the American-influenced creative writing MFA is another factor in this weird privileging of what are essentially stage directions over cognitive interiority. A worthy maxim (‘think of all the senses when you write’) got turned over the past few decades into a tedious paint-by-numbers: ‘Don’t tell us they’re embarrassed, show their face flush’. The telling us they’re embarrassed could consist of gorgeously maximalist David Foster Wallace-esque spiralling that details each aspect of the character’s abashed inner monologue; the showing their face flush could be just that, this vapid little curlicue that any hack could pen; within the ‘show don’t tell’ framework, the latter emotion is still automatically more ‘earned’. Trust Americans to make their metaphors economic.

(Neither DFW nor Jonathan Franzen has ever made much use of bodies as shorthand, by the way, and neither of them gets show-don’t-telled by critics. They express emotion mainly through dialogue and transcription of their characters’ thoughts. When they do write about bodies, it’s as actual subject matter. Which I love, by the way. I adore somatic experience when it’s actually investigated in its own right. Ulysses is a great example of this, or for a shorter one there’s Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth: the protagonist’s emotions are conveyed almost entirely through cognitive realism, and his masturbation gets enough airtime to wind up in the title. My point here is not: men get away with writing worse. It’s: men benefit from a more generous conception of what it means for them to write well.)

In terms of its intrinsic scope to challenge me technically, fiction is my favourite form. It forces inventions and formal risks that essays don’t, at least not for me. But regarding external reception, I think my non-fiction is more often understood for what it’s actually trying to do.

Through writing this piece, I’ve settled on a promise to myself. From now on, whenever an editor asks me to insert X sort of somatic detail, I will reframe the note to myself as: bring out the characters’ emotions in whatever way feels truthful.

To reiterate, I’m not telling anyone else how to write, beyond ‘well’.

Le meas,

N

PS: I have started an Irish-language evil twin version of this newsletter, dá mbeadh suim agat.