Author's Note: A thoroughly extended second draft is here, this time with an added guide to showing as well. Same as last time, I'd particularly love comments about the structure, the effectiveness of the examples, and the overall helpfulness. Let me know if there's any typos or odd bits of phrasing as well, because I haven't done as thorough a proofread as I probably should've.
If you’ve been kicking about on YWS for as long as I have,
odds are you’ll have seen the words ‘show, don’t tell’ more times than you can
count. It’s an old piece of writing advice, practically hobbling about with a Zimmer
frame, and while it is important, it’s often simplified. ‘Show, don’t tell’
suggests that showing is good and telling is bad, but both techniques are
crucial when it comes to writing a story.
What are showing and
telling?
If you’ve never come across either of these terms, buckle
up and get ready for a crash course.
Showing is how
you make your reader feel like a part of the scene. It’s rich in detail; it
uses the senses; it gets right up close to the emotional and physical sensations
of the characters. It involves painting a picture that the reader can draw
their own conclusions from.
Telling is how
you cover the ground and move the story from place to place. It’s how you
deliver the information that is important for the reader to know, but not
important for the reader to witness. Some writers call it informing, because
that’s often its primary function.
Telling is your claims; showing is your evidence. Telling is
having a person described to you; showing is meeting said person yourself.
Telling is the grocery list; showing is the actual groceries. Before my
analogies get any more abstract, let’s look at some examples.
Telling – Rick was a real womanizer. He’d prowl the
bar for women every weekend and pounce on the prettiest blonde he could find.
It never mattered to him if she was single or not.
Showing – “Bottle of your best bubbly,” Rick told the
barman, sliding onto a stool. He turned to the blonde woman next to him, his
eyes flitting to her chest and back. “You look like a lady that appreciates her
champagne.”
“Nice try,” she said, waggling
her fingers at him. Light winked on her wedding band. “Best drink that bubbly
yourself.”
“Oh, help a man out. I
couldn’t possibly manage the whole bottle.” He leaned over to inspect the ring,
taking her hand and holding it to the light. “It’s a natty bit of bling, for
sure. But shouldn’t a stunner like you should be wearing diamonds?”
He didn’t let go of
her hand. She jerked it away.
Note that the telling example isn’t badly written. In the right
context, it would be perfectly acceptable – it’s pretty common for writers to
tell a little about a side-character’s personality when they enter a story.
However, what telling can’t do is give the reader a personal sense of what a
character is like. Where the first example informs us that Rick is a womanizer,
the second example gives us evidence of Rick trying to entice a woman at the
bar. Where the first example says that relationship status never deters him,
the second example actually shows him persisting even after she’s shown him her
wedding ring. The second lets us form our own conclusions about Rick’s personality
where the first does not.
So, with the definitions cleared up, let’s get to the actual
guide.
How to show well
Showing doesn’t end at just whacking it into your story. If
you aren’t careful, it can become bloated and dense, and every bit as boring to
read as an endless stream of telling. Let’s look at some examples of bad versus
good showing.
Bad Showing
Helen tipped the
stream of white into the mug, swirling it with her gleaming concave utensil and
watching as the chestnut liquid clouded, gradually paling to copper, then to
peanut, then to the tanned brown of wheat in the sun. The heat oozed from the
porcelain and into her hands, and bitter steam wafted into her nose. Her eyes
trailed to Diane, and to the creases and cracks around her eyes, and the dash
of red on the petals of her mouth. Diane looked back at her, her gaze like a
red-eyed tree frog that has just detected a predator overhead.
“Why did you invite me
here, Helen?” Diane said, her voice low and trembling like a twanged string.
Helen raised her
coffee and crossed her legs, her warm thighs moving over one another, sticking
slightly. She sipped the dark liquid, closing her eyes as the molten heat
slipped down her throat, bitter and creamy all at once. Her lips curved. She
sighed and settled a little more into the plush cushions, the roughness of the
fabric knotting against her back. Her fingers roamed the arm of the sofa like
the legs of a spider.
“I think you know,”
Helen replied, tasting the words on her tongue, rolling them in her mouth like
sweets.
Diane’s flesh turned
to snow and a tremor jolted through her. She planted her feet in her sandals,
which were black leather and well-padded, sheened in the radiance lancing
through the ornate, leaded windows. Her legs propelled her upwards and launched
her away, and a choking hiss escaped her throat. Helen flung the dark, steaming
liquid from the mug and over the spiny matchsticks protruding from Diane’s
skirt, then took a handful of Diane’s soft, frothy locks in the hooks of her
hand. She yanked Diane’s head backwards, a stiffness chasing down her arms, heat unfurling in her stomach, and then thrust her into the
wall.
Good Showing
The spoon clinked in
the silence. Helen stirred her coffee long after the milk had swirled into it, watching
Diane in the corner of her eye. Diane watched back, her gaze still and
unblinking. Any minute now.
“Why did you invite me here,
Helen?” Diane said, her voice low.
There it was. Helen took a long
sip of her coffee, smiling against the rim of the mug. She settled a little
further back into the sofa.
“I think you know.”
For a moment, the world was caught between breathing in and breathing
out.
Diane leapt for the door, her
sandals squealing against the hardwood, but Helen was quicker – a leisurely
flick of the wrist and her coffee sprayed everywhere, lashing Diane’s bare legs.
A scream snagged the air, but Helen clamped one hand over Diane’s hot mouth and
forced it shut, the other biting into her curls and wrenching her head back.
Savage joy furled in Helen’s stomach as she threw her forward again. Diane’s
skull hit the wall with a crack.
Both of these are examples of showing, as they follow the
events as they unfold and hone in on the sensations of the characters. However,
I’d definitely argue that the second one is better. Let’s get down to why.
- The first
example shows too much. It’s detailed, and there are some good turns of phrase
in it, but it’s so bogged down in description that it gets in the way of the
actual story progression. There is no reason to extensively describe the
coffee, nor the style of Diane’s shoes nor the fabric of the sofa because it isn’t important for the reader to know.
The second example, by contrast, is a lot sparser. It still uses the senses –
we hear about the spoon clinking, the hotness of Diane’s mouth, the squeal of
sandals against the floor – but it’s a lot pickier about which details are
shown. When your description isn’t muddled in among a soup of other similes and
metaphors, it has a lot more impact.
- The first
example tries too hard to de-familiarise the familiar. When writers are
afraid of telling, they find extensive and convoluted ways to show things. ‘Milk’
becomes ‘stream of white’. ‘Spoon’ becomes ‘gleaming concave utensil’. ‘Lips’
become ‘petals of her mouth’. Instead of saying that Diane’s gaze ‘was still
and unblinking’, the first example reaches for an odd, obscure metaphor about a
red-eyed tree frog noticing a predator. These examples may seem extreme, but
they aren’t far off things I’ve read before – I have seen a clingy dress compared
to Saran wrap around butchered meat, turbulent thoughts likened to a wind
turbine chopping up sparrows, and a kiss likened to a gerbil lapping at a water
bottle. There is a real threat of straying into purple prose territory when you’re
trying too hard to show.
- The second
example champions clarity. You’ll notice moments of telling in the second
example, such as when it directly says ‘Helen was quicker’ and ‘savage joy
furled in her stomach’. It is often necessary to tell within a showing passage –
sometimes the reader has to know which emotion a character is feeling, or has
to be filled in on some information in order to interpret what’s happening.
Because showing is more ambiguous than telling, it can be harder to follow, so
tiny snatches of telling point the reader in the right direction and make sure
they’re on the same page as the author.
Let’s take a look at a real example of showing, taken from
Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of
Filigree Street.
A titanic bang made
the ground leap. Smoke and fire roared out from the Yard. A wave of heat shoved
him, and he saw a cabby fly across the road, then smash into the front windows
of the pub. There were a series of crashes from inside that were the heavy
tables dominoing. The noise made white bursts across everything. A spray of
typewriter keys floated by. When he turned his head away, his skin was stiff
from a coating of soot. Standing in the alley, he was shielded almost
completely, except from a few shards of glass and brick from the far edge of
the blast. They pattered down around his shoes.
At once, we can see the same principles being used. Pulley
describes only the details that are relevant to the explosion – she writes of
the heat, the fire, the soot, the pattering debris. She doesn’t go on about
colour of the bricks or anything too specific that isn’t relevant. She also
doesn’t de-familiarise things mercilessly at the expense of the pace; the fire
is just fire, not a roar of orange tongues; the smoke is just smoke, not a
billowing mass of black and grey. She also uses bits of telling to make the passage
easier to follow. She specifies that the crashes are of the dominoing tables,
because otherwise we wouldn’t have a clue what to attribute the noise to. She also
informs us that being in the alleyway shielded the main character from the
blast, which allows us to understand how he survived it.
Guidelines for Good Showing
- Use the
senses. Writing with all of the senses is a key way to bring the reader
into the scene. Tell me about the smell of frying onions or the taste of burnt rubber
in the air. Invite me in.
- Keep
description proportionate. Don’t describe something extensively unless
there’s a reason for the narrator/POV character to pay it a lot of attention.
When we meet a new person or enter a room, we usually only notice the standout
features. There’s rarely a reason to describe something for more than a few
sentences unless that something is notably
unusual or remarkable.
- Show us
only what we need to see. Scenes need a reason to be there – don’t show us
conversations between characters if nothing happens during those conversations
to advance the plot.
- When it
comes down to it, prioritise clarity over showing. If there really isn’t a
way to show a bit of information in a way that is easy to understand and doesn’t
hurt the pacing, there’s nothing wrong with telling it to the reader. Sometimes
context isn’t enough for us to work out if someone is exclaiming in triumph or
irritation or exasperation, so the author has to specify which one it is.
Sometimes we need to know the reason that a character is doing something so we
can follow what’s going on.
- Use
strong verbs rather than neutral verbs with adverbs. Verbs are awesome
descriptors and much subtler than adjectives and adverbs. ‘He sashayed across
the room’ is a lot more effective than ‘he walked sassily across the room’. Don’t
get me wrong, adverbs aren’t evil, but they can break the immersion of your
showing if used unnecessarily.
- Use
dialogue. Unless you show us you characters interacting, we’re going to
struggle to get a sense of their personalities.
- Avoid ‘filter’
words where you can. Filter words such as ‘felt’, ‘realised’, ‘saw’ and ‘heard’
are words that clarify who is doing what action. They’re key when writing
scenes with more than one character, but when used too much they can create a
distance between the reader and the action, making them feel less involved in
the scene. The removal of unnecessary filter words gives the writing more
immediacy.
With
filter words: The girl heard
footsteps creaking up behind her and noticed warm breath on the back of her
neck. She felt herself freeze.
Without
filter words: Footsteps creaked up
behind her and warm breath spread over the back of her neck. She froze.
The truth is that, just like with every area in writing,
there are no set rules. Everyone has a different idea of what good showing is,
so by no means should you take my word as gospel. Use these points as a
guideline, experiment with them in your own writing and see what works best.
How to tell well
Believe it or not, telling requires as much delicacy as
showing, because it takes a lot of skill to write exposition in an interesting
way. As with the showing section, let’s look at some examples of bad and good
telling.
Bad Telling
It was snowy in
December. I attempted to build two snowgirls in the garden, but the weather was
unpleasantly cold, so I only managed to construct one before I decided I had to
give up on it. Seeing it standing by itself reminded me of my own situation,
which upset me, so I destroyed it.
A few weeks passed but
the police still didn’t make contact. At Christmas, my mother drank too much
wine and acted distraught all day, arguing with my father and rejecting her
food. I missed my sister so badly that I went up to her abandoned room that
night rather than my own. I slept in her bed to feel close to her, but she had
been gone so long that it seemed like it had never belonged to her.
Good Telling
When December came, whiteness
swallowed the garden, outlining the thorny bushes and the branches of the oak
tree. I tried to build two snowgirls on the lawn, but the cold bit right
through my gloves and I could only finish one. She looked more like a lump than
a girl, and lonely by herself. I kicked her over.
The weeks melted with
the ice, but we still didn’t hear anything. Christmas Day was a blur of raised
voices and untouched turkey. I ended up in Haylee’s room that
night, watching the sparks of dust sift through the moonlit air, tracing a
finger over her cold horse figurines. I slept with her duvet right over my
nose, but it didn’t smell of her anymore.
These are both examples of telling because the narrative has
a significant distance to it, but the second improves on the first in a number
of ways. Let’s break it down.
- Where the
first example is vague, the second is specific. While it may not cover a breadth of detail, it still picks out
key images, painting brief snapshots of the passing days. In the first example,
we know that it snowed, but in the second we get precise information about
outlined bushes and a garden lost to whiteness. In the first example, we know it
was ‘unpleasantly cold’, but in the second, we get a sense of the
unpleasantness from how the cold ‘bites’ through
her gloves. Telling is and should be briefer than showing, but that doesn’t
mean you should lose sight of the detail. It’s like flipping quickly through a
picture album – the detail is all there in the photos, but you’ll only see
parts of it before you move on.
- In the
second example, the progression is symbolised in tangible events and actions.
The passage of time is embodied in the ice melting; the narrator’s fraught home
life is embodied in raised voices and untouched food. Haylee’s long absence is
represented by the dust in her room and the fact that the narrator can no
longer smell her on the duvet. Even though the writing is telling, it still
leaves room for inference and interpretation, just like showing
does.
- The second
example maintains a sense of the narrator’s voice. Because telling is often
used as a summary device, some writers become clinical and removed from the
narrator’s perspective when they do it. In the first example, we see ‘my sister’,
whereas in the second she calls her by name. The language in the second example
is generally less formal, creating more of a sense of this particular
narrator’s voice.
I have exaggerated the differences between the two examples
so as to make them easier to compare, so let’s quickly look at an example of real
telling, this time taken from The Kite
Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
When we were children,
Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father’s
house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a
shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high
branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried
mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries,
pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing.
Like the second example, the passage is specific; Hosseini doesn’t
just say that the two boys annoyed the neighbours, but specifies that they did
it by reflecting sunlight into their houses with a mirror. Hosseini also symbolises
information through events and actions – he never states that the boys were friends
or that the memory being recalled is a happy one, but represents it in the
playful way they pelted mulberries at one another and the mentions of giggling
and laughter. The third point is hard to gauge from a single passage, but
having read the book I can testify that the narration is consistent with the
rest of the prose – it does not break from the main character’s typical style.
Guidelines for Good
Telling
- Keep it
brief. Telling should be interspersed with showing, and the purpose of it
should be to propel the story towards the next active scene.
- Be specific.
Don’t tell us the weather turned bad; tell us the rain battered the windows and
turned the garden into a swampy mess. Don’t say the main character grew
listless and sad; say they would find themselves pacing the house at night,
forever tired but unable to sleep. As far as you can, show within your telling.
- Maintain
your narrator’s voice within telling passages. This is true for writing in
third person, as well – third person narration still tends to be coloured by
the POV character’s outlook, and that shouldn’t be lost during telling and
exposition. If it starts to feel like a clinical list of events, the reader
will be pulled from the story.
Like showing, people will have different ideas about what makes
good telling, and so these are only guidelines to help you on your way. Don’t
sweat it if you find yourself breaking them – just stay aware of them.
When to show and when
to tell
Most of the time when people say ‘show, don’t tell’, what
they really mean is ‘don’t tell in this
context’. Every story contains a balance of showing and telling, and the
trick to good writing is figuring out when each technique is appropriate.
Showing is usually suitable when:
- Dramatic action is unfolding.
- Your characters are in conflict and emotions are
high.
- You’re introducing a key character.
- You are writing about any kind of major plot
development.
- Crucial information is being revealed to the
reader (such as a plot twist).
Telling is usually suitable when:
- You are establishing a new scene or chapter and
want to quickly get your reader up to speed with what is happening/has just
happened.
- You need to fill the reader in on necessary,
brief information.
- You want to pass quickly over a period of time.
- You’re writing about a flashback that is
important for the reader to know about, but doesn’t have a significant bearing on
the plot.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can use both in a lot of
situations. Let’s say you’re writing about two characters having dinner together.
You don’t want to show the entire scene because it would mean trawling through
a lot of casual conversation that doesn’t affect the plot at all, but you don’t
want to gloss over the whole thing because you’re worried that the reader won’t
believe in their chemistry if they don’t witness it.
In
situations like this, you can show and tell.
You can keep your distance for most of the scene, hone in on one or two key
bits in the characters’ conversation to give the reader a flavour of what they’re
talking about, then withdraw again. Think of it like a telling sandwich – you can
break up the bready chunks of telling with a thin filling of showing, just to
make it a bit more palatable.
To
conclude, showing and telling aren’t as distinct as we think they are. Good
telling can have showy parts; good showing can have telling parts. More often than
not, the two operate in tandem. What it comes down to is making your words
count. Whichever technique you’re using, every bit of information needs to
advance your characters, add to your settings, and contribute to getting that
story told.
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