I apologize for some of what follows, I’m typically not one of those people who tosses metaphors and allegory around, but my mind has made a couple logical leaps of it’s own accord and now I am slave to the connections, forgive me. The reason for the disclaimer is because I’m going to draw a parallel here, and I think there are a subset of people who’d benefit from reading it. Feel free to skip down to the numbered list if you want to get straight to the point, but beware that some of my reasoning resides within the following paragraphs.

Have you ever tried to follow one of those “How to draw a human face” diagrams – the ones that start with an oval and end with a perfectly shaded face? Back before art school that’s how I started out learning to draw. If you have followed one of these, then you’ll probably understand the frustration of moving from step 3 to step 4 – I call it step 3.5. Step 3.5 is the transition between an oval with two lines and half an eyebrow, and a fully detailed face – it’s usually accompanied with a helpful explanation like “And now, fill in the rest of the detail.”

When you tell someone “Show, Don’t tell” most of the time you’re 3.5’ing them – but the damage isn’t all in the ambiguity of the statement or the lack of direction, it’s the way it ignores the higher processes involved. You’re telling them that their work isn’t perfect (which no work is perfect anyways), but that the problem lies in a very difficult to define gray area of SDT, which all the writers I know interpret differently themselves (so asking a beginning writer to understand it is even worse).

The most confusing concept for many writers (certainly me) to wrap their head around is this business of “show, don’t tell.” (hereby referred to as SDT) It took me a long time to understand exactly why I needed to know SDT, even longer to incorporate it into my writing, and then longer still before I began to wrap my head around why even thought SDT made my writing immeasurably better, it wasn’t a fail-safe, catch-all rule.

Here’s what drives me nuts about SDT: people hide behind it as a catch-all when it comes to critiquing, or largely leaves up to preference the ambiguities of the rule, since it seems that just about everyone has a differing interpretation of what it actually means. I recognized this one day when a chapter I was having critiqued by two different parties dragged out. Early on I had received a critique that suggested “… don’t tell me he’s in the kitchen, show me he’s eating.” Seeing this as useful advice I modified the chapter to contain a level of detail greater then had been previously present. I then sent out the second draft to a second critic, who replied with something akin to “… don’t tell me he’s eating, show me what it tastes like.”

So naturally, as I always do when I receive a couple of frustrating critiques from people who are far better at writing for me to argue the point back, I quit. I put the work down. I agreed to think about what two fresh pairs of eyes were trying to tell me. I decided I would let the advice marinate while I gained some needed distance from the work. When I’m not writing, I’m drawing. I went to art school, creativity is simply the dominant part of my brain and although I’m capable of putting writing down for a while, giving up creativity altogether isn’t something my hands or mind could tolerate.

When I transition disciplines like this it’s necessary for me to make generalized correlations between my work, so that even though I’m doing something else a part of my mind gets to stay geared towards the old topic – it keeps me centered, even though the tangents I draw look more like straight lines then intersecting curves. So I drew (actually, 3d modeled) a woman I thought might inhabit the universe I was writing. Now, I’m a far better artist (like, I actually get payed to do it) then I am a writer, and what I love about my ability to create in the visual space is that I can take the level of detail all the way to pores on a face – I can put realistic scratches on leather, scuff a belt-buckle and stuff dirt under nails.

So, now I’m drawing but also trying to sort out my thoughts on the the writing process. That’s – for all I can remember it – the first time I made a correlation between the way I construct a drawing, and the way I construct a scene.

When someone tell you “Show, don’t tell”, what they’re really trying to say is “Mind your level of detail.”

You see, when you draw, you start with the basic shapes – in the case of the face, this is often an oval. You add more specific shapes to this until you have a rough outline of what you want, then you add another level of detail and then another and another. You don’t violate the level-of-detail-hierarchy by, for instance, penning in all the specific strands of hair before you sketch out the overall path of the hair; you don’t draw fibers of a shirt before you figure out if it’s a t-shirt your character is wearing. In the case of drawing tutorials, the oval is step one, the line across the eyes is step 2, the line that bisects the face is step 3 … and according to the tutorial step 4 is the rest of everything – but in reality step 4 might be defining the basic shape of the cranium, or adding mass to the barrel of the mouth. The point in all this is that like step 3.5, SDT has become a catch-all for describing a very intricate and difficult to learn process of knowing exactly what to show, and what to tell.

By the way, feel free to roll your eyes and mutter, “Finally, the point.”

When I wrote my rejected chapter, I wrote the sentence about my character waking up with one level of detail in mind, say, the top level, the most bare bones description of waking up. The first critic wanted more, they wanted to feel immersed, but they didn’t really know how to direct me to the correct level of detail, so they use SDT. I corrected the SDT and submitted it to a new person. This is where the ambiguity of SDT comes in. The new critic read the revamped sentence (now several sentences about eating breakfast), and wanted more. So I got frusterated. After all, I could go into infinite detail about my characters morning rituals – and all this to say that my character woke up, which wasn’t even the point of the thing. Now I know that I could have just started where the action starts and skipped all of this unnecessary detail, but to the beginning writer, or writers who value different things, this can be a frusterating circle. After all SDT is ambiguous because it tells you something without really telling you anything. It’s like telling a person they need to run faster but not saying how fast.

To me, the whole comes down to how much resolution your SDT needs – where, and how often (and even just how) do I know and or learn the correct way to apply details to my story? To that end, I developed the following rules about level of details, what I call resolution.

1.) The universe exists in infinite resolution.

In the world of the writer, this means that any statement can be violating the rule of show, don’t tell. A broad, single sentence statement can be split into several smaller statements that better show. However these smaller statements themselves can be split again, and again, and again and again.

2.) There is (generally) an appropriate resolution to be writing in, but that resolution is determined by the intent of the writing and the flow of the story.

The writers job is to determine the “resolution”, and I mean that term like display resolution or the magnification of a lens, rather then like the resolution of a story. If you need a scene to span several days then it’s often a necessity to work in a lower resolution, a pixelated timespan. Then when it’s appropriate, you need to shift into a higher resolution and better detail the important things.

For instance if I’m doing a dramatic scene I don’t need to know with the same level of detail what a character eats for breakfast as I do how the gripping pattern on the head of the hammer feels against the back of their skull, or how the grain of the floor catches their blood. In many cases I could just leave out breakfast, but sometimes I wake up next to my killer, and I have to cross a breakfast in time in order to die. In cases like this, the breakfast (unless awkward or otherwise important), can have a lower resolution then the death, or the waking, or whatever else is important.

3.) The resolution we write in should always be enough to keep the reader engaged and “in the moment”.

More often then not, when we need to write in lower resolutions and skip days at a time, we would be better off with a chapter break. Thinking of writing in terms of resolution does not allow us to ignore the way in which SDT is a good and constructive rule to follow. Keeping the reader engaged at all times is the end-game. Don’t be lazy.

4.) The resolution we write in can be used like punctuation. I can show the reader that something is unimportant by skipping it or skimming it the same way I can show a reader that something is important by giving it a greater resolution.

When I describe things in higher detail (higher resolution, higher on the “show” scale) what I’m really doing is emphasizing something with an exclamation mark – I’m trying to put the reader in that moment with the way things taste and smell and feel. Othertimes though, if I can’t do it with a chapter break, I’m filling in moments. However, because lower resolutions can make the reader feel apart from the story – so the same as “show, don’t tell”, I’m trying to arrange the particulars so that I can keep people “in the moment”, as long as possible.

5.) You still have to deal with descriptive statements versus descriptive actions when it comes to characters.

If you write “Mary disliked Ben.” I will tell you to stop making descriptive statements. You need to “show” me that she does. This is one of those instances where SDT is a perfect measuring stick with which to brow beat an offender.

I’ll end with this because I can already hear the arguments. I’m not saying that “Show, don’t tell” is invalid; exactly the opposite, the biggest strides in my writing were all made under the pressure of learning to “show” more. But my point in all this is that simply repeating SDT over and again isn’t as helpful as having a system with which people can understand the “why”. I’m not claiming that these are things I learned by any other means then working out the kinks in my own SDT endeavors. The above rules are designed only to take the ambiguity of step 3.5 out of the process, to demystify “Show, don’t tell” so that it feels less daunting to writers who struggle at first to understand its ambiguities.

Tell me what you think.