A Guide to Showing and Telling

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.

Resources:

• Showing and Telling: The Basics
• ‘Show, don’t Tell’: Examples from books balancing both
• 6 Reasons “Show, Don’t Tell” Can be Terrible Advice for New Writers