We’ve all heard the adage, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s practically the first thing any creative writing course teaches, after the formatting requirements, and I’ve made a pun off it myself. It’s sound advice, but like all short-form bits, it’s not complete. What does it actually mean to ‘show, not tell’? After all, in a sense all our writing is ‘telling’. We’re not using a true visual medium; we have to abstract everything into words in order to show it. Even if we were using television, we’d still have to ‘tell’ the watcher about the smells and tastes via sight and sound. The fact is, our stories aren’t relayed by full-immersion sensory experiences, not even in VR. Even in such a sensory immersion the character’s thoughts and feelings wouldn’t be directly communicable. This presents us a problem. What, at the basic level, does it mean to show instead of telling, and when does this advice hold true?

The natural starting point of this investigation is in basic description. We have two general ways to describe anything in the story: abstract categorization or sensory description. Abstract categorization means saying, “He could see three trees, a house, and three men.” It’s the epitome of ‘tell’. Sensory description is the ‘show’ option. When we’re describing something, as I discussed in this article, we should seek to employ multiple sensory vectors. The more important something is, the more time you can spend on describing it. The main character’s whole-story companion deserves much more time being described than the random guy he saw on the roadside. This doesn’t mean you have to give his initial appearance a bigger chunk of description. Often it will, but it can also mean spreading bits and pieces of description through the narrative, taking advantage of the page-space in order to describe subtly and thoroughly.

This principle that space should be roughly proportionate to importance is a principle we should remember for the future (and a basis of pacing). Here, it means that sometimes abstract categorization, telling, is actually the right choice. Sometimes you need to convey the information that such an abstraction contains clearly and efficiently. Sometimes the perspective you’re using doesn’t accommodate the use of sensory description in the circumstance. Very often you’ll be mixing some sensory description with some telling, getting certain facts across while using sensory description to develop an aesthetic and tonal understanding in the reader. He needs to know that the wall is old, so covered in ivy that the stone cannot be seen beneath the leaves, but he also needs to know that the wall is three times the main character’s height (even here, I’m using an almost-sensory vector to communicate the information, though if greater precision became necessary, I’d switch to feet, yards, or sagenes).

Next, let’s look at how we develop characters. With characters, the ‘description’, beyond its aesthetic element, is how you characterize them. Here, let’s get the good telling out of the way. With bit characters, showing occasionally may be a waste of time. More often, though, you just need to be efficient in showing, preferring the obvious to the subtle. Thus, you might not describe a character as ‘messy’, but you do mention that he ‘has a trail of ketchup running down his shirt, several hours old’. Slightly more time spent for a similar but more lasting effect.

Characterization of main characters (and the ones we’ll discuss next week, secondary characters) is an essential part of writing. Here’s where showing is absolutely crucial. No reader worth his salt will believe you when you call the character ‘brave’ unless he shows himself to be brave in the story. Indeed, unless you’re adopting a nineteenth century style al a Sir Walter Scott, even just describing him that way (assuming a third person POV) can make readers such as myself skeptical that he’s really all that (or more specifically it’ll make me think you aren’t a very good writer, as it’s a clumsy, amateurish method of description). Character must be conveyed not by abstract description but by how said character acts, reacts, speaks, and thinks. It can be conveyed too in how other characters and parts of the setting react to the character. As the author, you have the credibility to make the world do what you like, so long as you maintain suspension of disbelief and fulfil your promises.¹ What you don’t have is the ability to tell the reader how he should react to what you’ve shown; that’s his decision (one you should influence and guide, but which you cannot dictate). His analysis of the characters is his own, not yours.

Characters are described by what they do, say, think, and feel; further, they are described by how these things are conveyed. The first one is the simplest, albeit not simple. How the characters act is part of the plot, and general skills in description are a solid foundation. The problem comes in the next sections. How do you convey what they say and how they say it? How do you convey their thoughts and feelings, their motivations (hidden, declared, and unrecognized) for everything they do? Remember too that you’ll be wanting to hide some of these things from the reader, either because they’re boring or because they’re a secret for later.

When it comes to dialogue, it can be tempting to continually tell the reader what emotion or motive he should ascribe to the character’s words. “He sneered,” and “She said haughtily,” are both examples of this. Be very, very careful. The first type, the use of a verb that isn’t ‘said’ or a similar bland signifier², is permissible and a matter of judgement, but only if used lightly. The adverbial alternative is, as with essentially everything in writing ,circumstantially justifiable, but it needs a lot of justification. Don’t let yourself get anywhere near a habit of using adverbs this way,³ and make sure that when you do replace a bland ‘he said’ with something spicier you have a reason for doing so. The dialogue is the point, not the speech tag, and so the dialogue should contain the emotional as well as the informational message. In most circumstances, adding context- gestures, thought-dialogue, auditory sensory description, etc.- is sufficient to do what your main-stay, carefully written and compelling dialogue, cannot.

Conveying a character’s internal thoughts can be as simple as writing them down in pseudo-dialogue or as complicated as dropping subtle hints in what parts of their demeanor you describe, how they cant⁴ their speech. It can also mean just stating something outright. The essential part is this: they cannot betray what they think and feel, must portray it. If a character is angry, he must act and think angry. If he hates short people, he must act like a person who hates short people. If they act differently, it must correspond to a change in them- meaning an angry character can cool off, but until he does, he must act angry, not just be labelled angry by you, the author. This turns his anger into ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. You must show his anger in how he acts, thinks, and speaks; if he is true to his anger but the reader didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. Further, as you’ve already realized, showing emotion is much more effective in convincing the reader than telling about him about the emotion, so you’re getting a benefit, not just evading a danger.

Plot is another area where it’s essential to balance showing the telling. Generally speaking, just about everything important is going to be shown, not told. Sometimes, though, that means you show the characters being told something which happened off-page. Don’t take this to mean that everything must be on-screen. In a fifteen-day journey, you don’t need to narrate every step, don’t need to show every minute and every thought. That would be boring. Telling, when it comes to plot, is about skipping the parts where detail hurts more than it helps. You tell (summarize) the parts of the story that just need to get done. Thus you tell the reader about the fact that the characters have been walking all day because that’s all the important stuff that’s happened that day.

You tell stuff that’s unimportant but essential (and usually boring). This directive does not translate to ‘telling’ any part that’s boring or unimportant, though. If it’s important but boring, figure out how to tell it better; if all that needs to be communicated can be summed up in a sentence or so of ‘they did this’ without breaking a promise to the reader, go ahead and tell rather than show. If, on the other hand, it’s unimportant without being boring, you have a self-correction to make. First, if it’s unimportant, it is almost certainly boring to the reader, if not to you. Only the best possible prose can induce interest in something the plot and characters have made irrelevant to the reader. Second, you have two options: remove it, despite how sad it makes you feel (I’ve had this sensation, though honestly I’ve come to enjoy pruning), or rework it till it can justify its existence, make it relevant to the plot, character, or (if you’re really confident in your finesse/ feeling like a 19^th century novelist) theme.⁵

Speaking of theme, here’s where ‘show’ almost entirely eclipses ‘tell’. Never outright state what the theme of the story is unless you’re going for a very specific genre or effect (an Aesop’s fable, for instance). Theme, beyond this, is turned from words into worldview by being a constant element of the plot and characters. Theme, the theological focal point of the story, emerges out of the rest of the story into the reader’s mind, consciously or unconsciously. Every part of the story has something to do with the theme, even if only in setting up a more pertinent part. Be particularly careful of not contradicting your theme with what you show. A story about wishes with a plot centered around how everybody needs to be granted their highest aspiration which ends by proclaiming a moral of the necessity of hard work as the path to said highest aspiration can work…. But it will only work if the transition between these two ideas is an exchange of one for the other, a maturing. The desire must be supplanted by the revelation. Unfortunately, in the case I’m referencing,⁶ the two morals are awkwardly shoved into the limelight together; instead of one supplanting the other, they’re both there, blatantly in contradiction.

I’ve only written a few of the many, many words that could rightly be written explicating, ‘Show; don’t tell.’ Nevertheless, this article should serve to show you that both showing and telling have their place. Showing is for most of the story, for the parts that need to hit the reader hard and fast, the stuff that needs to stick. Telling is for the peripheral, if integral, the parts that a reader will likely never remember without specific intention but which hold up the parts he does remember. As such, showing will have and should have the limelight. Scenery, characters, plots, and theme all need their bodies conveyed via an exhibition of their full form, not a bare-bones telling. Meanwhile, don’t forget that telling has its place to, smoothing the transitions and keeping the background in order.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – See this lecture for what I mean by ‘promises.’

2 – e.g. ‘Ask, respond, reply, shout, inquire’. Note that ‘question’ variants make up a fair portion of these, and most convey little extra emotional weight (‘shout’ can, but it is also an efficient way to reflect a sensory reality. It’s halfway between ‘sneer’ and ‘say’, as is ‘yell’). Remember also that sometimes dialogue tags aren’t needed, and that sometimes, when a character already thought the entire content of what he would say on-page, it’s better just to say that he said what he thought than to reiterate it all.

3 – Even if I hear J.K. Rowling does it a lot. Wouldn’t know, never read her work and never plan to.

4 – Literally means ‘tilt’; here it is used metaphorically.

5 – Also, pacing and tone, those ephemeral essentials. As for setting, usually if something is important only to setting it’s a case of bad exposition; try to convey setting information together with the stuff most reader’s actually care about. For some people, like myself, a setting can be an attraction all its own, but even then setting generally comes to life much better when attached to characters and plot.

6 – I’m referencing the Disney film Wish, at least as the review I watched conveyed it. I didn’t watch it myself.