I could tell you this: Last night, I woke at 3am to the sound of elephants parading on the ceiling, accompanied by an insistent, rhythmic thud localized somewhere above the laundry hamper, while the sound of laughter slipped through the window in the front hall that I’d forgotten to shut.
Or I could tell you this: our new upstairs neighbours are loud.
It’s an old saw, this show, don’t tell, but there’s nothing like an example to drive the point home. And since I’m on this Shirley Jackson kick, here are three examples that caught my attention from Raising Demons.1
The story
Jackson’s two memoirs both open with stories of moving house. At the start of Living Among the Savages, she says how her landlord casually mentions that because the family has failed to renew its lease by way of letter, that he has lined up new tenants and Jackson’s family will have to vacate by the end of the month. That prompts the family to move into the white house where the rest of Savages takes place, a white house with pillars on the porch that seems fantastically large to the small family. By the end of the book, they’ve expanded in every possible direction and added two (three? I can’t remember) children to the brood.
The house is too small
So it seems appropriate that Raising Demons starts in a similar way. This time the family is six humans and several animals, and it opens with a scene in which Jackson is trying to find room for the box of random sporting goods that she has rescued from the front hall closet. What ensues is pages and pages of her taking inventory of the house, finding crates of boxes in the offices, bedrooms and hallways; toys along the stairs; and no storage space whatsoever, period.
This passage comes on page 6, when she’s made her way through the house and upstairs, through the four children’s bedrooms. She’s since abandoned the box of sporting goods and picked up and put down any number of boxes and other items that don’t have homes.
I thought that I might buy a cardboard closet to put the clothes in, but there would be no place to put a new closet, since both the attics were full, unless I put a closet in the baby's room and moved the baby's things out of the moth closet and then put the winter clothes in the old moth closet, but then there would be no place to put the baby, because there was only just room enough in his little room for his crib, and I had to take him in on the girls' bed to dress him.
We had three more attics, but one of them was full of old lumber and bricks left over from the various additions that had been built onto the house, and one of them was full of bats, and the last could only be reached by climbing through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the next-to-the-last attic and even if I could get past the bats and through the lumber and bricks I did not think I could keep taking the baby up and down through a trapdoor.
Now, to be fair, I’m pretty sure that at some point Jackson does tell the reader that the house is full of stuff. But she also shows, from these two paragraphs, exactly how full of stuff it is, and not just stuff that the family owns, but also building materials and bats.
The first paragraph sets up the situation. There is no room. In fact, there isn’t even room for baby, who sleeps in the old moth closet (which begs the question, is there a new moth closet?) and has to be taken to the girls’ room in order to be changed. The sentence walks you through the house, and Jackson’s thought process, as she Tetrises the stuff and the rooms and the attics in the house.
In the second paragraph, we learn that it’s not just the first two attics that are full. There are three more! But these attics are also full, and these ones aren’t even full of things the family has put there. Even then, her mental gymnastics are trying to make this work, and we’re up there with her, in the dust, clambering through bats and lumber and bricks. All this time, we think she’s talking about finding room to store more things, and at the very end, she lands the punchline: “I did not think I could keep taking the baby up and down through the trapdoor.”
As I’ve said before, Jackson gets most of her credit for writing creepy, unsettling “horror” fiction, but she is also hilarious. This passage highlights two techniques of comic writing, which are (1) to take things further than your audience expects you to and (2) to lead them down one path with one expectation, only to twist it around at the end and deliver something unexpected. The latter is something that Jackson is an expert at in horror fiction, and it’s nice to see her use the same technique here, to different effect.
I also like how she uses, or more precisely, doesn’t use, commas. There are sections where there is zero punctuation, which mimics the stream of consciousness as Jackson tries to shuffle everything around in the house. And there are sections with interjecting thoughts, separated by commas, which feels like she’s taking her existing idea, holding it in front of her, and considering it from a different angle. Lest you think these are accidental commas, I’ll remind you of Jackson’s masterful 102-word sentence from Living Among the Savages, which I dissected in Story #17.
The house needs fixing
Chapter Two of Raising Demons sees the family move into their new house, which is known in the town as the one with the crooked gatepost.
On page 70, she sets things up:
When we bought the house, my husband and I both assumed, upon the candid statement of the real estate agent, that the only thing defective was the left-hand gatepost leaning off at a rakish angle. The roof, the furnace, the wiring, the plumbing, the foundations—all of these, we believed innocently, were new, newly repaired, or so solid that not even an earthquake could shake them.
Now, Jackson is a master of foreshadowing, and in her horror fiction she uses simple statements like this to give you a sense that things are about to go horribly, horribly wrong. In her memoirs, though, things go horribly, horribly wrong—and it’s funny.2
A few paragraphs later, she continues:
We have no local firm of gatepost-straighteners, but every deadpan wit within the county limits had a stab at us. The man who came to repair the roof thought that we ought to get someone to hitch a team to the gatepost and pull it straight. The man who came to repair the furnace suggested that we dig out under the post on the uninclined side, and let the post settle down even-like. The electrician took a few minutes off from ripping out the dining room ceiling to say that what we had to do was dig out the roots of the tree under the gatepost. The plumber thought no; we better get a man to move the gatepost over two, three feet.
She never actually says that the house needs repairs, but given the parade of tradespeople who visit the house, it’s clear the house needed a lot of work.
Because this is Jackson, there is also a ton of internal structure to these two paragraphs. She ties the two paragraphs together with parallel structure. In the first paragraph, she says “the roof, the furnace, the wiring, the plumbing, the foundations…” and in the follow-up paragraph, she follows this same order to introduce the various tradespeople.3
When she introduces the tradespeople, she does so deliberately. The first two are described as “the man who came to repair the [thing]” while the second two are named by profession: the electrician and the plumber. I think part of this is tactical, because I don’t know what you would call the person who repairs furnaces or roofs (I suppose roofer, but to me a roofer makes roofs, s/he doesn’t necessarily repair them). But it also sets up a nicely matched set of pairs. The pairs show that it’s intentional, and then there’s a pleasing effect of getting two sets of pairs.
The second paragraph also includes some lovely little details. Consider the internal rhyme of how the roof repairman “thought that we ought to get…” There’s the idiosyncratic speech of the furnace repairman who says they should “let the post settle down even-like.” Jackson also creates a dialogue between the second pair of tradies, with the electrician saying one thing and the plumber disagreeing:
The electrician took a few minutes off from ripping out the dining room ceiling to say that what we had to do was dig out the roots of the tree under the gatepost. The plumber thought no; we better get a man to move the gatepost over two, three feet.
Finally, she uses the gateposts as the spine of this whole section. This is not just Jackson showing us that the house needs repairs; she is showing us the myriad of people who came to repair the house, as viewed through the lens of how to fix the gateposts.
This section also gives us a glimpse into the family’s small-town life, where people know your house as the one with the wonky gatepost, and where everyone feels they have the liberty to comment on how you should fix it.
The house is so quiet
About halfway through the book, the family has settled into its new home and the children are growing up (too fast, as it always seems). This paragraph comes after Jackson has left Barry, her youngest, at nursery school.
I drove home very slowly because I had plenty of time before I had to pick him up at eleven-thirty and when I got home at last I went and sat in the study and listened to the refrigerator rattling in the kitchen and the furnace grumbling down cellar and the distant ticking of the alarm clock up on my dresser.
First, she doesn’t say the house is quiet; she shows us by listing all the tiny sounds that no one bothers to hear most of the time. She starts the sentence by stretching out time for herself: “I drove home very slowly” and then she draws it out, word by word, without any punctuation to interrupt the slow plodding of one word after another. There’s a sense of oppression, like the words are piling up and crowding your space.
We also get a hint at her mental state. Earlier in the book, she shows the reader she’s feeling anxious about what she’ll do with all her time when the kids are all in school,4 and here she’s showing exactly what that feels like. We get a sense that she’s feeling unmoored in her empty nest, and that she doesn’t know how to occupy all this space and all this time by herself. It taps into one of the broader themes of Jackson’s work about how a person’s identity can be determined by the opposition or response to the people around that person; when you remove the opposition or change the environment, are you still the same person?
Why it works
These passages could be boiled down to a simple statement: the house is too small, the house needed repairs, the house was too quiet. But in showing rather than telling, Jackson gives us a glimpse into the details of her world.
Stories are, at their core, the process of transferring an image from the storyteller’s head into the storylistener’s head. The most successful stories often involve vivid, concrete details that stick—and that means showing, not telling.
The main objection, usually, is that it’s so much longer to show than to tell, and surely if you showed all the time, things would become too dense or too irrelevant or too whatever. I think that’s valid, although you could argue that there shouldn’t be details in a story that don’t actually advance the story. By which I mean, everything in a story is an opportunity to do work: to advance the plot, to shed light on a character, to create context. There shouldn't be too many things in a story that simply need to be told.5
Further, these three examples do add to Jackson’s overall narrative. The description of the cluttered house provides evidence for why they need to move; and then the bit about the new house being a disaster is a funny bookend to the family’s overall housing woes, and leads into their new life in the house. The passage about going home to an empty nest sets up the theme of the second half of the book, the sense of time running away as children grow up. So these are not inconsequential passages that Jackson has chosen to show—they are signposts that guide the reader through the overall narrative.
What we can learn from it
These passages from Shirley Jackson highlight a few writerly things.
Punctuation, or the lack thereof, has a big effect on style. This is a huge topic, period, but I’ve come to realize that Jackson is a master of punctuation, and that any writer would be well-served to sit with her sentences and figure out why she uses commas in some places and not in others.
Put important information at the end of a sentence. We see this most vividly in the first passage, which ends with the punchline about carrying baby up and down through attic trapdoors. She also did this in the sentence I analyzed in Story #17. Humans have poor memories and poor attention spans, so if you want readers to remember something, put it at the end of the sentence.
Don’t give your readers what they expect. Most of the time, Jackson lets readers know what to expect, using things like parallel structure or repeated words. (You can see this under Why it Works in Story #19.) But in these passages, especially the first two, she achieves comic effect by thinking about what the reader is expecting, and then not delivering. Specifically, she goes further than they expect (all those details about all those attics) and twists things around at the end (bringing baby into the attic, rather than a box of sporting goods).
I think the big lesson here is that Jackson trusts her reader to figure things out. Sometimes she does tell, but most of the time she doesn’t—this is especially true in her horror fiction, when she lays out all the pieces and then steps away for the reader to figure out what’s going on.6
As a reader, that creates a more satisfying experience because you do have to figure it out for yourself. More to the point, it sets up the reading experience as a dialogue, between author and reader, back and forth. Readers get to participate in the work they’re reading and authors get to feel, maybe just for a second, maybe just in their imaginations, that they’re connecting with someone and not just shouting into the void.
Did you like this story? Then show, don’t tell, by forwarding it to a friend.
Heads up: I found so much to dissect in Raising Demons that we’re going to hang out here for the next few issues. Sorray not sorray.
I think of Jackson’s writing as the opening scenes of a CSI episode—any one of the franchise, take your pick, but I did always have a soft spot for the Miami franchise—in which you see, for example, some innocent scene of a newlywed couple enjoying a glass of champagne and knowing that 10 seconds later in TV Land, it’ll be morning and one or both of them will be found sprawled on the beach and dead from poison/strangulation/gunshot wound to the head. Cue David Caruso removing sunglasses.
It’s interesting that there are five items in the initial paragraph, which includes the house foundations, but only four in the second paragraph. Aside from the pragmatic point that the foundation of the house is probably okay, my guess is that Jackson wanted an odd number of items in the first paragraph, because odd items are more pleasing rhetorically. This is why lists of three are so common. You see this in the first paragraph, with “…all of these, we believed innocently, were new, newly repaired, or so solid that…”
I also wonder whether there’s a recurring motif of fours in this book. She highlights four aspects of the house that need to be fixed, there are four chapters to the book and she has four children. This only occurred to me after I returned the book to the library, so if I re-read the book later I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.
She shares her anxiety about the impending empty nest in another hilarious passage. She reviews which grades each child will be in, considers going back to college to take courses—endocrinology or advanced French—and then asks her husband what to do with her time. He suggests that by then the floors will need varnishing or that she could “practice cooking.” You can probably imagine how well that went down.
I haven’t really thought about this enough, and I think it really depends on what kind of writing you’re doing. Clearly, in non-fiction or investigative journalism, there is a certain amount of expository information that the reader needs to know. But even then, there are opportunities to show, not tell.
Case in point, the name of the book. Raising Demons could be a tongue-in-cheek look at what it’s like to raise small children, who seem demonic some (most?) of the time. But it also refers to the growing sense of loss and uncertainty that Jackson feels as her children grow up. The book includes many stories in which she doesn’t come off particularly well—she may be the protagonist of this book, but she’s far from the hero. She uses humour to cover up her demons, but they’re still there, as all of ours are.