B: Showing vs. telling in saying how something looks
Here is a great example from someone on YWS who has shown what their character is seeing and she therefore creates a more vivid picture:
The house was, quite literally, falling apart. Signs of mild decay and, by the looks of the upstairs windows, years of vacancy were visible as Jack eyed it warily from across the street. One half of the russet brick was obscured by lushly growing emerald ivy; the roof needed a great deal of re-shingling in various places of the two slanted gables, and the small amount of space in between his house and the next one was overgrown and choked with clover and deleterious weeds.
She doesn’t just say: the house is falling apart. She shows us how the house is falling apart and in doing that she provides us with, as readers, a stark image of this house.
Another example here is where she describes a character’s appearance:
A young woman stood there, a flowery apron tied around her slender waist, a sky blue blouse on underneath it. Her long, pale blonde hair was tied back into a neat sweep. Her face had a welcoming, natural sweetness, not at all what he had pictured his landlady to be.
Doesn’t this help to create an altogether more vivid picture?
Activity: In this thread you are going to practice showing vs. telling in how something looks. What you need to do is one person will write a sentence that is just showing (e.g.: her dress was red) and then someone will follow that post by improving it into a ‘showing’ description. Then the next person will write another ‘telling’ sentence, the next one will improve it into ‘showing’ and so on... Be inventive!!
*Note: make sure the sentences you choose are to do with describing how something looks, and not anything else.
I’ll start it off: The woman’s dress was red.
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