One of the first pieces of advice I came across when I decided to look at writing craft was the ever popular: show, don’t tell. It took me time to piece this advice together. Now I understand exactly what it means and why it keeps being repeated. Here is my take on showing versus telling in writing.
Showing Versus Telling in Writing
When to show, and what does it mean.
Showing is kind of a strange way to put it, when it comes to writing, since everything is written. It’s not as though the writer can somehow make a movie pop out of the book and allow the reader to view something. Showing is simply the act of allowing the reader to visualize what is happening, as opposed to summing it up or “telling” the reader (for lack of a better term) what you want them to know or feel.
Showing versus telling in writing Example(s)
An example of this: The grass was green and warm, the sun shone brightly that day. We sat on the damp ground, unaware that our pants were wet. We picked daisies, the heavy perfume of spring intoxicated our minds, and we drank it in, laughing, finally, our fingers touched, and it was as though sunlight shone from our very souls.
Showing allows the reader to get right into the action, or the emotional center of the story that you are trying to tell. This is a great method during those moments where you have an action scene, or you have a heavy emotional moment, and you want to make sure that your readers are right there with your characters their entire time.
What is Telling, and what does it mean
As you can imagine, telling is the opposite of showing. When you are in telling mode, you are summarizing events, or possibly talking about a person and just letting your readers know what they are like instead of showing actions that they are doing or have done. This is useful for moments when you need to sum up events that happened, or when you have a character that you need to quickly introduce. Also, telling is something that can help you get through parts that aren’t as eventful, but that have a moment you would like to get to.
Showing versus Telling in Writing Example(s)
For example: The old woman was kind. It was apparent in her gray eyes.
Another example: I stopped listening to her yammer on, I’d heard the story so many times, yeah, she’d been through so much, we all knew about it.
In the first example, we are telling our readers that a person is kind, but we don’t have anything to “show.” In the second example, the POV character isn’t listening to the other character, and isn’t what you would call “in-the-moment.” In the second example, you could imagine that there would have been showing before, and showing to come after. But that little piece is telling.
Conclusion
Both showing and telling are important pieces of writing to use. Especially when it comes to storytelling. They say to show as much as you can, but there will be moments where it makes more sense to tell.
It doesn’t make sense to show dialogue for the openings and closings of conversations, you can just tell those parts. It doesn’t make sense to show the parts of the story that aren’t interesting, or don’t develop the character. I am saying that it’s important to be intentional on which scenes you choose to show and which are more tell. Understand the balance. Make it work so that the story flows well.