“Show don’t tell” is one of the first things all beginner writers are told…
…but it’s also the stupidest.
Let’s discuss why, look at some examples, then write our own story together that does plenty of “telling!”
During the last stream, the subscribers voted that we go over why “show don’t tell” is awful writing advice.
Watch a shortened version of the stream here or scroll down for what we did.
Why “Show Don’t Tell” Is Awful Advice
- One of the first pieces of writing advice that most beginners get for crafting fiction is “show don’t tell”
- But in all honesty, “show don’t tell” sucks
- It’s basically the equivalent of telling a beginner chef “cook don’t fry” or telling a beginner artist “paint don’t draw”
- That advice just doesn’t make sense, both frying and drawing are important too. And the same goes for “showing” and “telling.”
So let’s go over three reasons why “show don’t tell” is awful advice, look at some examples of great authors who “tell” all the time, and then practice it ourselves!
1st Reason “Show Don’t Tell” Sucks: It’s Ambiguous
- What does “showing” or “telling” really mean?
- For example, look at this sentence: The tomato was red and squishy, like an inflamed eyeball between my fingers.
- Is that sentence “showing” us what the tomato looks like, or is it “telling” us what it looks like? It’s impossible to say
Just take a look at this Reddit thread for how confused so many beginner writers are about “show don’t tell.”
- Instead what most writers mean when they say “show don’t tell,” is “show things happening in real time, don’t tell us by summarizing”
- For example, this is telling by summarizing: We fought, and when it was over, I ran away.
- But this is showing in real time: I slammed my fist into his face and the crack of his cheekbone rippled against my knuckles. Blood splattered on my wrist, but I didn’t have time to figure out whose it was, I just ran away as fast as I could.
- The second one is better not because it’s “showing” or “telling” anything, it’s better because it has actual things we can see/feel as they happen in real time
2nd Reason “Show Don’t Tell” Sucks: It’s Not Absolute
- Even though we now know that showing means “describing things in real time” and telling means “summarizing,” that doesn’t mean you always want to show and never tell
- There are plenty of times when you do want to tell/summarize, here’s just three of them:
- To clearly set things up for the reader
- To skip over unnecessary stuff
- To avoid sounding too purple-prosy
Let’s look at some examples:
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss:
Contrary to popular belief, not all traveling performers are of the Ruh. My troupe was not some poor band of mummers, japing at crossroads for pennies, singing for our suppers. We were court performers, Lord Greyfallow’s Men. Our arrival in most towns was more of an event than the Midwinter Pageantry and Solinade Games rolled together. There were usually at least eight wagons in our troupe and well over two dozen performers: actors and acrobats, musicians and hand magicians, jugglers and jesters, my family.
My father was a better actor and musician than any you have ever seen. My mother had a natural gift for words. They were both beautiful, with dark hair and easy laughter. They were Ruh down to their bones, and that, really, is all that needs to be said.
- This is all telling/summarizing, but it’s good!
- It clearly sets up this different culture/family for the reader, rather than throwing them in and letting them drown
- We don’t need to see all those performances, that would take forever, just a quick fun summary is nice
Game of Thrones by George RR Martin:
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go.
“We have a long ride before us,” Gared pointed out. “Eight days, maybe nine. And night is falling.”
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. “It does that every day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark, Gared?”
Gared had spent forty years in the Night’s Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of.
Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year, but no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.
- The underlined stuff is all telling/summarizing, but it’s good!
- It gives us the info we need to know, quickly and efficiently, so that we’re on the same page as the characters without being lost
- Only “showing” the characters’ experience/inexperience would come off as confusing or ambiguous, here we are both “told” how long they’ve been a part of the Night’s Watch and get to see their experience/inexperience in action, making it feel cohesive
Garbage Story by Beginner Writer:
She stepped outside and her arms prickled as though a thousand tempered needles were licking their sharpened tips against her flesh, the only relief a few blessed dribblings of salty moisture that ran down her pores with all the aching speed of a child dragging her shoes across the concrete sidewalk toward the dentist.
- Holy dongs, just say “It was hot outside” for god’s sake!
- Trying to show all the time instead of tell results in prose that is cumbersome, pretentious, and annoying to read
- The only time you would want to go into that level of showing is when it’s relevant to the character/story, not to just avoid “telling” at all costs
3rd Reason “Show Don’t Tell” Sucks: It Destroys the Best Parts of Writing
- One of the best parts of writing is getting inside a character’s head and giving the reader some introspection and narration
- And by definition, when you give introspection/narration, you’re not “showing” anything, you’re “telling” us what a character is thinking
- But a written story NEEDS that, otherwise it’s just a bad movie, stuff happening but without visuals/sound
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn:
“Okay, so what’s your favorite color, your favorite ice cream flavor, and your favorite season?”
“Blue, coffee, and winter.”
“Winter. No one likes winter.”
“It gets dark early, I like that.”
“Why?
Because that means the day has ended. I like checking days off a calendar — 151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn’t ruined. 153 and I haven’t destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me. Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don’t have to worry about life anymore.
“I just like the night.”
- Oh lordy, that paragraph of introspection is so good!
- Not only does it give us great insight into the character, but it also is something going on in her head that is the opposite of what she’s saying, giving us the reader an insight that the person she’s talking to doesn’t have
- And it’s all “telling,” no “showing” in that paragraph at all
ANOTHER Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn:
Someone has spray-painted blue curlicues on the legs of the water tower at Jacob J. Garrett Memorial Park, and it was left looking oddly dainty, as if it were wearing crochet booties. The park itself — the last place Natalie Keene was seen alive — was vacant. The dirt from the baseball field hovered a few feet above the ground. I could taste it in the back of my throat like tea left brewing too long. The grasses grew tall at the edge of the woods. I was surprised no one had ordered them cut, eradicated like the stone that snagged Ann Nash.
When I was in high school, Garrett Park was the place everyone met on weekends to drink beer or smoke pot or get jerked off three feet into the woods. It was where I was first kissed, at age thirteen, by a football player with a pack of chaw tucked down in his gums. The rush of tobacco hit me more than the kiss; behind his car I vomited wine cooler and tiny, glowing slices of fruit.
- Oh lordy that narration!
- The first paragraph is “showing,” giving us what she’s going in real time, but the second paragraph is all “telling” when we learn about her relation to the location
- And it’s so good, showing us where she is physically so we can follow along, and telling us where she is emotionally so we can follow along there too
At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about: using showing/telling together, to write the best/clearest story possible.
You don’t just want to write “Seeing the old park made me feel awkward and weird” and end it there, you want to go deeper.
THAT’S the showing vs. telling that really matters: don’t summarize important things, instead give us the juicy, specific thoughts your character is having in real time .
After that, chat voted that we practice writing a story using both showing/telling based on this auto-generated motivational poster:
Here’s what we came up with: (sections that are “showing” are underlined)
I’d coached thousands of cogs in the machine to become directors and VPs, yet somehow, I’ve ended up being demoted to cog myself.
“So, Travis,” says the manager sitting across from me in the small Burger King office, his outfit reeking of meats and hot fryer grease. He’s even wearing the birthday boy crown, smiling as he looks over my resume. “What makes you think you’re Burger King material?”
Never did I ever expect to have to hear those patronizing words myself. Thanks to my positive psychology program that I gladly shared online with thousands of excited viewers every week, where I discussed savings strategies and the power of enlightened thinking, I’d never had to work a day in my life.
Then Dad went and got caught embezzling money at his investment firm. Whatever. He was just protecting customers’ funds from market fluctuations.
Either way, now I’m here. Thankfully I can leverage my heuristics with multifaceted data to guide the needle back in my direction.
“Well,” I begin, clearing my throat and clearing my mind. “I believe that my analytics will integrate with scalable implementations, to provide the necessary bandwidth for the customers’ agile journey toward digital transformation.”
If that next level response doesn’t get me hired on the spot, nothing will. I used to charge $29.99 for access to that snackable content, so the velocity of the feedback loop I’m creating here should be a game changer.
The manager smiles wanly at me. “I guess we could use someone agile with the deep friers to scale up our kitchen.”
Our ideation had been disrupted. The ping in this guy’s brain was structurally incomplete. Our interaction inactionable.
My intellect and hard work had carried me so far. As the founder, CEO, and sole employee of ExtraExpertMarketingTips.guru, I should’ve been the one on the manager’s side of the desk. I’d turned a small loan of $100,000 from my dad into a positive thinking marketing machine, and what did this burger monger do to deserve a role to lord above me? Pay for the privilege of running someone *else*’s franchise? Ha! What an uninspired life.
“Here at Burger King,” the manager says, adjusting his crown. “we pride ourselves on our flame-broiled patties. What makes you excited about helping customers have it their way?”
I need to make an omni-channel pivot. Drill down on my core competencies and drive this discussion to an actionable result. Make him understand my value proposition!
I spoke aloud my $59.99 paradigm, the next-gen ROI innovation, the organic blockchain evolution for influencers with 10x potential in the market intelligence space!
“Anticipate submission. Urinate synergism.”
The manager stares at me, and I can see the fireworks of inspiration going off behind his eyes. The man had never unpacked such intuitive tenets before. He leans forward, ready to bring me into the fold.
“Oh, good!” he says. “I need someone who can clean the bathrooms.”
You can see how only about half of our story is “showing,” and the other half is “telling,” summarizing things or giving narration/introspection that you can’t “see.”
Going back and forth between showing and telling is important for writing a good story, to have things happen, and give the emotional setups/payoffs for them as they happen too.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Top images: Pixabay