I hear you already. “Not that old chestnut!” Sorry. Sad, but true: “Show, Don’t Tell” is one of the most common of errors I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks prowling the new-writer-blogosphere, and sometimes the errors are simply egregious.
First off, let me say that I believe it is damned near impossible to “show” everything in a story. I mean, come on; you have to take a short-cut through a description now and again. I also think it’s unnecessary to “show” everything. And, to round out the argument against, there really aren’t any “rules” in fiction…or at least there aren’t any rules you can’t break now and again. As always, know when you break a rule, and do it for a reason.
As promised, I’m going to pick examples of these errors from my own stories, posted here on this site. Some of these stories are my very first efforts, so finding errors in them usually isn’t hard, but “Show, Don’t Tell” is a mantra that was drilled into me early on in workshops and from editors, so I had to root about a bit to find these offenders. Every story has spots where I need to move things along and not gum up the momentum with a fully descriptive flashback. A memory here, a wondering thought there, these might be difficult to “show” thoroughly. So, even if you find this sort of thing in your own work, the errors may not be big enough to warrant a rewrite; fixing them might alter the flow of the tale.
Show/Tell requires a different mindset, a different approach. Once you get it, the problems are easy to find, but until you understand the difference, it can be hard to really see the forest for all the trees. When I’m rooting around for Show/Tell errors, I look for abstract words: words that lack detail or specificity. “Her hair was beautiful” is abstract. “Her hair was long, silken, and shone like a black cat on a sunny windowsill” is specific in its detail.
From “Intaglio“:
Rea, standing at the town’s edge with a group of others, watched the proceedings. She looked around her and could see that many of the younger spectators were unsure of how to react, confused by the conflict between their own excitement and the dour suspicion of their parents and elders.
The second sentence here is classic telling/not showing. “The younger spectators were unsure of how to react” tells us but does not describe what Rea sees. The second clause gives us a clue as to what is going on (the young people are excited, but their parents are not) but there’s no action in the sentence. It just sits there, passive and bland. Hint: Anytime a character “can see” something or anytime something is “obvious” to a character, I know I’ve gotten lazy.
If Rea “could see” that the kids around her were confused, then their expressions and actions can be described. If instead it were to read that the younger folk switched from wide-eyed, excited whispers to their friends to worried, surreptitious glances at their elders dour expressions, you might get the same impression. The difference is that you can see in your mind’s eye the action.
Another example, from the same story:
The intent, Evander explained to Rea, was to throw a huge party for the whole town – and anyone from out of town who could make it – while holding a smaller, more private gathering for the colonel and his personal invitees at Nestor’s tavern.
In this section, I’m telling you what Evander was explaining, rather than having him explain it to her directly. Here, some dialogue would show you the action rather than tell you. The danger in replacing it is to avoid expository blocks or “As you know, Bob” dialogue. However, I think this could have been replaced with a few lines of back and forth. Dialogue, with some descriptive text, can also help establish the sort of relationship Rea and Evander have, give the reader more backstory, or give us insight into Rea’s opinion of Evander.
Showing almost always takes more words than telling. Whenever I find myself impatiently pushing through a section or scene to get to the next, I know I’m in danger of lazy writing. Almost invariably, such sections require more rewrite than others. It’s a dance, though, to which we do not know the choreography; balancing description and specific action against the pace and flow of the narrative is difficult, especially in the compressed form of the short story.
As I said, this error takes a particular mindset to find. That’s why I find it easiest to take a pass specifically looking for this error. I can’t look for punctuation/spelling errors at the same time as looking for show/tell errors; they’re just too different for me to see at the same time. And once I start finding them, I find them easily, recognizing where I start to get lazy and hurried.
Next up: Marching into the Detention Center.
[…] skills are harder to quantify, but examples might be bad dialogue, uneven or ineffective pacing, show versus tell, and so […]
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A piece of advice I’m sure most writers have heard to death! And yet, like you said, it’s a dance between too much “showing” and too much “telling” – you want to create the perfect choreography for the type of story you are writing! Nicely explained!
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Thanks. By the comments this post received, it was clear that writers hear this a lot but usually don’t get concrete examples.
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[…] virtually unavoidable, this one. Seriously, virtually unavoidable, just like the old show/tell chestnut. It takes a mountain of diligence, discipline, and work for me to avoid it. And in the end, […]
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BTW, I commented before reading the previous comments, so I’ve just pretty much re-stated everything that is in the previous discussion! Note to self: read first, comment later… 🙂
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Hehe…But I find it interesting that we both hit upon the same term–deconstruction–in describing the problem of “too much showing.” Finding the balance is where the art comes in. Thanks for posting, though. It’s good to know these posts are making sense (I _do_ tend to go on…) k
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An excellent post. I still find show vs. tell one of the trickiest pain points to catch and get rid of. These examples are superb. That said though, I also tend to wonder how far one should go… Even if her hair shines like a cat on a “sunny windowsill”, isn’t that telling me that the windowsill is sunny? Maybe it shines like a cat on “a windowsill off which rays of light are dancing”? But then, the fact they’re dancing is also telling… “A windowsill off which rays of light approximated the whirling machinations of a tarantella”? And so on and so on ad infinitum until I’ve deconstructed every molecule of the scene and invented an entirely new vocabulary and grammatical structure to describe them!
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I have a very literal mind when it comes to certain things, and I think that’s why I always got irritated with the phrase “show, don’t tell,” not because it wasn’t true or because it was always said, but because that literal spot in my mind took hold of it and screamed I’M WRITING A BOOK, I’M *TELLING* EVERYTHING! IF I WAS FILMING A MOVIE I COULD SHOW, BUT I’M NOT!
That blocked me from really ‘getting it’ for a long time, because what I felt I was really being told was “make a movie, don’t write a book.” Storytelling is… telling. Which is why I detest the “show, don’t tell” so very much. Again, not the rule itself, merely the way it was phrased.
I’m not criticizing *you*, by the way, it’s my brain that doesn’t work like everyone else’s.
I still struggle with the idea, never really sure when I’ve actually crossed the line from telling to showing.
Would you say that the line is… okay, take your first example, the confused children. Would you say that if you start with the concept of the children being “confused” and then essentially go, how can I get the reader to understand the children are confused without ever actually saying the word? Is that pretty much where you cross over from telling the reader the children are confused, and letting the reader figure out the children are confused through descriptions of confused looks or actions or feelings, but never actually saying the word ‘confused’ itself?
Pardon my impudence for just a moment as I use your example as a lesson:
“She looked around her and could see that many of the younger spectators were unsure of how to react, confused by the conflict between their own excitement and the dour suspicion of their parents and elder”
So if I were given this sentence and told to re-write it…
“Around her, the younger spectators abuzz with the giggles and chatter of youth would become quiet and withdraw when their eyes would turn upward to their parents, the dour suspicion of the elders in sharp contrast to their own excitement.”
Or… is that just more telling? Or does it really depend on which reaction is the one that’s more crucial to the story? I focused on the children’s confusion rather than the parents’ suspicion. You did say it isn’t necessary to ‘show’ everything, so is this a time when it’s acceptable to ‘tell’ the parents are suspicious but ‘show’ the children are confused by it? Perhaps the parents’ confusion was already shown in a previous paragraph and it would be redundant and tedious to retrace those steps.
It does seem that trying to show both would be a bit of an overload, that showing one and telling the other is a good way to make a secondary contrast between the reactions of the two groups, the children being much more animated and therefore getting more active description, whereas the parents are very still and uneasy, and so their description is more curt and to the point…
*a moment while I find a convenient bit of desk to beat my head against for a while.*
🙂
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Okay, Eliza m’dear…breathe…breathe…it’s gonna be okay… 🙂
First off, don’t read too much into my example. Given the flow of the story, that line may have worked really well and rewriting it to “show” the kids’ confusion rather than just simply use the word “confused” may bog things down. In context, that line may work just fine. As I said, you cannot show everything, and in trying to do so, you can deconstruct your sentences down to the Nth degree, and drive yourself crazy. There are limits.
“Show-Don’t-Tell” becomes a problem when I see it a lot, and a lot of the action is related rather than described. (Unfortunately, “a lot” is as precise as I can get, here.) The way I boil it down (for my own rewrites) is this: are my words descriptive and specific? Am I providing enough of that to paint a picture, or am I depending on the reader’s mind to “fill in the blanks?”
Take that first example I used: “Her hair was beautiful.” Naturally, I’m not saying you can never use the word “beautiful,” but in that particular sentence it really doesn’t show anything; I’ve only told you that her hair was…well…beautiful. Now–and here it gets fuzzy–if I want to be vague and if I want you to fill in the blanks, fine. But if I just got lazy and I really wanted you to see that her hair was “long, silken, and shone like a black cat on a sunny windowsill,” well, then I just wasn’t doing my job there, was I?
As with all things artistic, it’s largely a matter of degree. If I’ve already described her hair in detail, I don’t want to belabor or repeat the point. “She picked up the brush, looked in the mirror, and stopped. Her hair was beautiful. She put the brush down and walked out into the hall.” Putting descriptive detail in there is overkill and will have the reader shouting “I KNOW WHAT HER HAIR LOOKS LIKE ALREADY! GET ON WITH IT!”
So, again, you can’t show everything. And you’re right; you can absolutely overload the reader with detail. Unfortunately, I’ve read some fiction lately that tells me the character is unhappy, tells me there’s a fire outside the door, tells me the room is immaculate, but doesn’t show me a thing. I’m left with vague scenes filled with blank cardboard cutouts that I have to fill in with color, sound, and other detail.
Does that help at all?
k
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That… helped… tremendously!
❤
Y'know, this reminds me of another writing assignment I had once where we were supposed to rewrite this set of instructions (it was a technical writing class) to turn the passive voice into the active voice throughout.
I ran into one instance where I finally just told the teacher: no. I'm not rewriting this sentence, not only is it perfectly fine as it is, changing it to the active voice requires that I have more knowledge of this subject than the original is giving me and it just makes the whole thing unnecessarily bulky.
I changed all the rest, but I left the one as it was and I didn't even care if I got marked down for it because the passive voice exists in English for a reason! Sometimes it's what works best.
… so yeah, it's good to know when to ignore the 'rules' but sometimes it's hard when the rule itself isn't fully understood.
But yes, you are a great help! … and one of these days I anticipate receiving a bill in the mail 😉
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Ah, good. This is one of the larger (and therefore vaguer) standard guidelines in fiction, and thus is one of the harder ones to pinpoint.
Oh, and I always get paid in whisky.
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