The Writing Craft: Show or Tell?

The writer’s adage of “show don’t tell” suggests telling is less effective in presenting a story than showing; however, great storytellers do both. Let’s explore how we lure readers into our story to enjoy our fictional dream through balancing show and tell.

Show

Showing slows down the pace to immerse the reader in a detailed sensual and emotional experience. Readers will ignore a full bladder, an empty stomach, and the need for sleep for the unique thrill of being in a story.

• Help the reader inhabit the hero’s skin. When you anchor the hero in the world of the story through sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch, you entice the reader to experience these basic senses. More subtle senses include balance, the passage of time, movement, temperature, direction, muscle memory, and intuition. Use key details to evoke these senses for the reader.
• Convince the reader to identify with the hero. Make the reader care by showing your hero’s weaknesses and strengths through dramatic action. Falling in love, fighting for life, raging at injustice, solving a mystery, and exploring new worlds generate reactions in the world of Star Wars and in Shakespeare the reader can relate to. Instead of telling the reader the hero is clumsy, show him tripping and falling up a stairway. Demonstrate the hero’s humanity—flaws and all.
• Draw the reader into the moment and deep inside the hero’s mind. Create immediacy by revealing the hero’s unguarded thoughts. During crisis moments and discoveries, the hero will react emotionally and physically. Later, the hero will sort out what happened, reflect, and plan.

The movie Pearl Harbor lasts longer than the actual event. Dramatic moments are drawn out and explored from multiple points of view.

To master showing, remove sense labels (thought, felt, smelled, heard, tasted, saw, and touched) and restate the sensation from the hero’s point of view. Like this:

Martha felt sad. / Martha collapsed in the chair like a deflated balloon.

Bill thought he had forgotten something. / Did I forget something?

Tell

Telling provides information and context. Telling summarizes, labels, and describes an event or person. It communicates facts from an objective, distant, narrative point of view.

• Summarize boring stuff. For forty-five minutes, George droned on with unjustified enthusiasm about his gall bladder surgery.
• Summarize rather than repeat what the reader already knows. Later that night, Jane told her husband what had happened.
• Summarize the passage of time, like a jump-cut transition in a movie. A month later, Jane walked without crutches.
• Describe a place, situation, or person for context. In the following excerpt, notice how the final statement breaks the rhythm of long, complex sentences to deliver a punch.

In appearance, boomers are usually big men … Some who heat rivets have charred complexions; some who drive rivets are hard of hearing; some who catch rivets in small metal cones have blisters and body burns marking each miss; some who do welding see flashes of light at night when they sleep. Those who connect the steel have deep scars along their shins from climbing the columns. Many boomers have mangled hands and fingers sliced off by slipped steel. Most have taken falls and broken a limb or two. All have seen death.  –Gay Talese, The Bridge

Beware of delivering your perspective instead of the hero’s, because such author intrusion tends to be preachy or condescending to the reader. Beware the temptation to overexplain!

Resources: The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood, and Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway.