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Lecture 2: Building Fictional Worlds Through Evocation

Lecture 2: Building Fictional Worlds Through Evocation

One of the most venerable tropes in the teaching of creative writing is this: Show, don't tell. But what exactly does this dictum mean? When teachers of creative writing invoke it, they often mean that a scene or story was under-dramatized or that the writing trafficked in vague generalities. For example, a writer might tell us something that is generally true about a character without fixing that trait or action in a specific moment or situation. In this lecture, we'll see how showing rather than telling can make your writing more immediate, vivid, detailed, and visceral. We'll see how it invites readers to identify with your characters and participate in the story if only in their imagination.

Telling Vs. Showing
Let's consider two versions of a scene, one that gets the facts across and one that puts the reader in the scene with the characters. Here's the first version:

I was driving home from work this afternoon when some jerk came out of a side street and cut right in front of me. I was angry about something my boss had said that afternoon, so instead of just letting it go, I sounded my horn and tailgated the guy for half a mile. He pulled over, and we nearly got into a fight.

Now let's look at an excerpt from what a fiction writer might do with this same scene:

Naturally, as I was just about to cross the river, a guy in a Jeep Cherokee with enormous tires shot out right in front of me and cut me off. Worse yet, he was a young guy, with big redneck sideburns and a feed cap, and when I honked my horn, he gave me the finger and a big nasty grin. Worst of all, he had out-of-state plates and an NRA bumper sticker, and all of these, along with my rage at my boss, made me erupt.

Note that the outline of the two versions is the same, but the second version has much more detail. Instead of "a guy shot out in front of me," it's a young guy with sideburns and a baseball cap. He not only cuts the narrator off, but he seems to enjoy it. It's essentially the same story, but the second version is fleshed out with many more details about the two characters and the setting. The reader is much closer to being in the mind of the narrator.

When creative writing teachers say, "Show, don't tell," they mean: Give us more detail, make it dramatic, and put the reader in the scene. Writing fiction by showing rather than telling means bypassing the logical, analytical mind and going for the gut, engaging the readers' senses, not just their minds. More important, you're engaging the readers' imaginations and allowing them to fill in the gaps by drawing on their own experience.

What you're doing, in fact, is evoking the experience for the reader. The idea of evocation is at the heart of all fiction; it's the thing that allows a fictional story and imaginary characters to lodge themselves ineradicably in the minds of readers.
—James Hynes
Ps. Ginormous mistake by the Professor again here. Worldbuilding has nothing to do with experience that's really called build Atmosphere of the story and is once again something that automatically adds complexity to plots. Worldbuilding sets up the main setting in the appropriate scenes fit for their genre and if we move somewhere else the world building should build up that. This is a crappy teaching style if I ever have seen one. And I know bad teachers when I see and hear one, Skylights. I've had at least 3 1/2 bad teachers in my public school: one in middle school, one in my North Carolina Highschool 1/2 bad teacher my precalculus teacher and then my online World Mythology teacher in my life. So you know I'm truly not lying. —Lumna10.)

Defining Evocation
The variants of the word evoke come from the Latin evocare, which means "to call out" in several different senses: to summon the spirits of the dead, to call forth a deity, or simply to summon another person. In English, when talking specifically about art and literature, the dictionary definition of evocative is "tending by artistic imaginative means to re-create ... especially in such a manner as to produce a compelling impression of reality."