By Christopher Schuck

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~Anton Chekhov

Show, Don’t Tell, is the most common advice given by and for writers (nearly on par with Read and Write, Often).

Showing is giving details and letting the reader infer, feel, and figure out what they may.

Telling is giving your own inferences, feelings, and conclusions.

PROBLEM 1 – I Forget What the Reader Wants: Showing is important because it gets the reader involved. Several factors should be present in every scene of a story: Plot Progression, Character Development, and Constant Suspense. These factors are shaped using dialog, narrative, action, and setting. Because I spend hours refining these ideas and details, it can be tempting to tell the reader specifically and explicitly what I crafted, ensuring my hard work is not overlooked. However, the whole point of reading fiction is to experience the story – to participate, to care about the characters, to figure things out.

PROBLEM 2 – I Don’t Trust My Writing: Writing can be very challenging compared to thinking or describing a television show. The problem with this obvious fact is that it makes it easy to begin writing thoughts – narrating – and describing scenes subjectively instead of juggling all of the senses, settings, and situations of a real world. Excessive narrating is not only boring (unless you are an amazing literary genre writer), but it does not let the reader participate by forming their own thoughts. Writing subjectively uses words that might not be true to everyone (“He wore an expensive business suit” – expensive to who? To me, the author, but probably not to Bill Gates. See topic 6, below).

PROBLEM 3 – I Just Didn’t Make a Conscious Effort to Show: When I really get writing, typing out line after line without pause, I simply do not think about everything that should be shown. While such free writing is great for a smoothly transitioning story, I am not skilled enough do it right. The results can be similar to problems 1 and 2. This is where editing come in.

Regardless of the source of the problem, the result is the same, an urge to explain. There is an acronym just for this – RUE (resist the urge to explain).

THE GOAL: A well-shown story will result in Suspended Disbelief (I accept what is written) and Total Reader Immersion (I lose myself in what is written); without these, the most interesting story falls flat. With them, the other essential elements – Story Progression, Character Development, and Constant Suspense – can thrive.)

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COMMON OFFENSES:

1. Emotions – Give experiences, not information

From Self Editing for Fiction Writer, Pg. 16:

“Telling your readers about your characters’ emotions is not the best way to get your readers involved. Far better to show why your characters feel the way they do.”

Telling emotions outright cuts the suspense; avoid the actual words for emotions and describe what is experienced.

Part of being human is experiencing emotions that no one else can understand and being confused by other’s emotions. “You can’t understand how I feel,” is an often stated fact. Writers cannot overcome this fact, not with colorful narrative or with heartfelt dialog. While we cannot fully explain emotions; we can show and evoke them. This is what good writings should want – to make the reader feel something, not to have the reader understand what they feel.

How to Show, Don’t Tell Emotions

“I was so excited!” → “I danced around, grinning like a fool.” “She smiled angrily at him.” → “She smiled at him with lips pressed tight and thin; her eyes narrowed.” Also, avoid cliché and emotional eye descriptions (such as “her eyes squinted angrily” and “her eyes shadowed with longing”), which are a commonly overused writing tactic. (Commonly overused = editor red-flag)

From Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, pg. 156:

“I had no trouble finding the bookstore, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. The windows were full of crystals, dream-catchers, and books about spiritual healing. I didn’t even go inside.”

I admire Meyer’s sentences because they show so much. They not only describe the setting and advance the plot by moving the character, Bella, along, but they show that she likes books and that she does not like mysticism. Setting, plot, character development, and emotions are all shown in three sentences.

2. Negative Information – Don’t Negate it, Create it

Describing things by their absence, well, is literally impossible to see.

New writers often describe situations in contrasts or nearly-happeneds. The problem is that saying something did not happen or that it nearly happened does not describe anything that did happen.

How to Show, Don’t Tell Negative Information

“He nearly fell.” → “He stumbled.” or, “He tripped.” or, “His legs gave out, but he caught himself.” “She walked away and did not look back.” → “She turned her back and walked away, eyes locked on the distance.” “’Funny,’ Smith said without laughing or smiling.” → “’Funny,’ Smith said, glaring stone-faced.”

3. Indefinite Hyperbole – Always, Everything goes on Forever but Never does Nothing amount to Anything. Got it?

Such terms are usually not true and are, by their nature, tough to imagine. While such hyperbole can seem useful and harmless, it is simply vague and lazy. Unless describing time and space, reality does have a creative description available for most situations, and being creative is what writing is all about.

How to Show, Don’t Tell Indefinite Hyperbole

“Everything went quiet.” → “Everyone in the room went quiet, leaving the background noises of the city noticeable for the first time.” “The road stretched on forever.” → “The road stretched on out of sight.” or, if the hyperbole really seems necessary, “The road stretched on for what looked like forever.” “She had always hoped this day would come.” → “For as long as she could remember, she had hoped this day would come.”

4. Audio/Video Descriptions – “I saw that movie, the book was better.”

Writers often describe sights and sounds, at the exclusion of smells, tastes, and touch sensations. I blame television, which has given us many moving moments to inspire a new writer but can only access two of our senses. Whereas, reality immerses us in all five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Writing can give all of this and more, like interoception (which includes the body’s perceptions of pain, temperature, well-being, energy, stress, mood, etc) and character perspective, providing layers of creativity and immersion no movie can imitate.

How to Show, Don’t Tell Sensory Descriptions

“He stepped into a dim room, unsuccessfully trying to step around what he feared were dead bodies on the floor.” → “He gingerly stepped around a shadowy shape on the dim lit floor. The rancid stench brought to mind the bloated corpse of a cow he walked past on a hot day years ago – a smell that then, as now, demanded an instinctual fear of death. His foot bumped something low on the floor with a fleshy thump. Acid bile rose to the back of his throat.”

From Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, pg. 185,

“The great opening that was blacker still than the walls around it, the vines encrusting its edges [. . .] the damp smell of stones in my nostrils [. . .] there was only the low back drop of the wind.”

5. Excessive Detail – Don’t overcompensate. Regardless of the size of your boat, just show us the waves it makes.

There is a psychology experiment where you go into a room then leave it. One question is asked, “What details do you remember?” Usually, it is not more than six or seven things. Similarly, I don’t remember a thing about my drive home from work every day. We notice very little, and remember less, about our surroundings. Our minds fill in gaps to create a continuous story for our lives, only bringing to consciousness things that really matter. Good story telling does the same – giving the most pertinent details only.

Excessive details often take the form of a list of adjective or adverbs, a paragraph of several sentences, or words and details beyond the viewpoint characters vocabulary and interest.

Sometimes, a viewpoint character may study the details of something/someone, but there has to be a good reason; maybe they are particularly interested in it/him/her or maybe they are having a deep moment. When this happens, it should be intentional.

How to Show, Don’t Tell Excess Detail

Reread details and ask if anything is lost from the plot, character development, or suspense if they were removed. If not, try to remove them. I’ve heard that up to 20% of a first draft should be cut out in editing; cutting excess detail is a painful but necessary step.

From the first line in the first book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series:

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pg. 26, a guest room has apparently been ravaged by Huck’s drunken dad. This room, ripe with possibility for interesting details is described:

“And when they come to look at the spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.”

On the next page, Huck is brought to his father’s cabin, somewhere he spends several scenes, and the only description given is:

“An old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn’t find it if you didn’t know where it was.”

6. Many adjectives or adverbs – “Description is, in effect, word painting.” ~Rebecca McClanahan, Word Painting

Many words simply do not paint a picture. Words like tough or expensive are ideas; they are ideas created by details, the kind of details reality, and a good writer, creates.

How to Show, Don’t Tell adjective and adverbs

“Lucy was the toughest, meanest girl in school.” –> “Lucy sauntered through the halls, as usual, with a smug smirk and clenched fists. No one wanted to mess with the girl who beat up Jake Ramos.” “He wore an expensive business suit.” –> “He dressed in a black, double breasted business suit that had been tailored to fit him perfectly.”

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The caveat is that there are good times to tell. This usually happens in a narrative summary or when a viewpoint character is thinking something through. Everything explained above has an appropriate time and place to be disregarded. As long as I know I am doing it and have a good reason, telling can be okay.

Not wanting to end on such an off-key note, I conclude: Show, Don’t Tell.

Next, I will cover: Common Dialog Mistakes.

Please feel free to comment below. 1) What do you think about Show, Don’t Tell as a rule for writing? 2) Do you have any examples of well written Showing (or, for that matter, Telling)?

Thanks for reading!