This was a thing in kindergarten, right? Show and tell? Where you’d bring something from home to show the rest of the class and then you’d tell them about it? Maybe I’m off by a few years, maybe it was from nursery school or from first or second grade, but I’m pretty sure it was a thing. However, I can’t remember a single thing I took to school for show and tell, nor do I remember any of my peers’ show-and-tell presentations. I just take it as a given this was something we did. I have no personal memory of it.
Whew; you haven’t lived till you’ve referred to your fellow kindergarteners as your “peers.” I bet kids today make elaborate Powerpoint presentations for show and tell and bring in the robot housekeeper that cooks and cleans for them. I don’t know. I’ve been out of school a long time. Flying cars when?
It’s possible that the most-repeated, dead-horse-beating writing advice there is—neck and neck at the front of the pack with “no adverbs ever”—is “show, don’t tell.” Experienced writers like to offer this like a pearl of sage wisdom and creative writing teachers like to write it in red pen on your manuscript—do students hand in manuscripts on paper and get them marked with red pen anymore?—but those same advisers are not always so forthcoming when you press them: “What do you mean? How do I do that?”
This is particularly true if you’re getting writing advice off the Bird App. There’s nothing wrong with getting writing advice from Twitter; there are many writers there who are generous with their advice and experience and you can learn a lot. But with a 256-character limit, people don’t always get into the level of detail needed for learning. That’s when we Google “How do I show instead of tell in my writing?” to find out more and land on this article (and subscribe, please, it’s free).
Today’s Shelf Life is on the nuances of showing and telling, when to use which, for what, and how to tell the difference. Then, if you stick around to the end, I’ll give you my top tip for finding instances of “telling” and quickly changing them to “showing” in your writing. I’m talking about a specific action plan for showing not telling. In this essay I will dot gif.
First things first, I’d like to share my two-cent takeaway on the topic. There are two points so each one is worth one penny:
Showing is not superior to telling in every instance.
All writing is telling.
If you are a literalist or an overthinker (me and me), internalizing item number two is going to help you out. All writing is telling. You’re not holding up a picture for someone to look at. You’re painting a picture in their mind with words. When you show, you tell the reader in an indirect way, through context clues and description. The words you use are instructions for painting the picture. It’s all telling.
Consider the following example:
Janet was sad.
This is telling. I, the writer, am telling you, the reader, that Janet was sad. This is as telling as it gets. Now consider:
Janet closed swollen red eyes and drew a shaking breath.
This is me, the writer, showing you, the reader, that Janet is sad. I do that by telling you what she looks like and how she sounds (like she has been crying, if I did a good job). I might tell you that Janet’s lower lip was trembling, which shows you that she is sad or upset. In writing, all showing is really telling. Don’t let the terminology trip you up.
If a writing instructor ever told you to “show not tell” and you wondered “but isn’t all narrative writing telling?” Yes: You were correct. Further, I was in a meeting with Janet earlier today and she seemed in good spirits, so if you’re worrying about Janet you may stop. She’s not actually sad (to my knowledge).
This is the point where I branched off on a tangent about filter language for so long that I wrote an entirely different article (No Filter). If you didn’t already read that one, it dovetails nicely with this one for reasons I believe I have made explicit.
Let’s address the misconception that showing is always superior to telling. Sometimes it’s better to tell the reader something directly rather than to illustrate it with words and let the reader extrapolate. There are two reasons for this:
Any type of writing gets tired if you do too much of it in a row.
Showing allows leeway for misinterpretation.
Anything you do on and on without pause will tire out and bore the reader. If you use the same description words over and over the reader will get bored of them. If your sentences all have the same rhythm you will tire the reader and bore them. If you show everything and never hand over any information directly, you’re going to fatigue your reader.
When you show instead of tell, you put mental work on your reader. This is a good thing: Readers, generally (when reading fiction), don’t want to be handed every tidbit and conclusion. Readers want to figure things out from context. It’s a rewarding and triumphant feeling for a reader when they figure something out from context and their supposition is later proved right. It’s like figuring out who the murderer is before Poirot does. Figuring out that correct balance between telegraphing your punch and blindsiding the reader with information in the climax is a challenge that most of us are dealing with when we write.
The flip side of this is that if the reader must figure out everything from context and nothing is given, it’s exhausting. The reader is doing mental labor the whole time. Sometimes a great book is exhausting to read and that’s fine, like if you’re Margaret Atwood or AS Byatt or something I don’t mind being a little exhausted at the end of a reading sesh but I’m not going to put up with that for most writers. The payoff has to be huge for me to put in that level of effort.
Further, each time the reader extrapolates information from what they’re shown, rather than receiving information directly in the form of exposition, there’s a chance for misinterpretation. As writers, part of our job is showing things in a way that’s unmistakable to most (ideally, all) of our readers, but readers often surprise with their inferences. Readers come to your manuscript with a whole host of life experience and they may interpret things differently than you intended when you wrote a scene based on your own life experience. (Hence, the importance of early readers like betas and critique partners.)
When you’re writing fiction, you have different modes of storytelling you can use to convey information. There’s not a specific set of existing modes like there are parts of speech; depending on who you ask, you’ll get a different list of modes that appear in narrative fiction. That’s fine. I’m not going to try to exhaustively list all of them but I’m going to discuss a few of them here to illustrate how to use telling strategically.
A handful of the primary modes of storytelling as I think of them are:
Dialogue: Characters speaking to one another.
Introspection: Characters’ internal monologues; their thoughts.
Experience: Sensory information the characters experience (smells, tastes, sensations, visuals).
Action: Characters performing actions.
Exposition: A character, characters, or the narrator explaining information directly.
I omitted “description” as a mode of storytelling because several of those items fall under the broad heading of description. How does the reader understand that action is happening on the page? The writer described the action. How does the reader learn about a character’s sensory experience? Writer described it.
Exposition is always telling. Exposition is a summary or report of information that the reader needs to know—hopefully they need to know, and we’re not just giving them exposition for nothing—that is told directly to the reader. Let’s look at this passage from the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring:
Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure.
The narrator is telling you information about Bilbo. He’s rich and weird. Now you know. There’s nothing wrong with the expository paragraph above, but be mindful it was written about 70 years ago. Exposition is less favorably regarded now and other modes of storytelling take precedence (hence the advice to, you guessed it, show and not tell).
Action and experience are always showing. For instance, if I were to write “there was a big fight between Michael and Zacharias and Michael won and Zacharias’s arm was cut off,” that’s not action writing. That’s exposition that tells you about some action that happened. Action means writing the fight scene, not summarizing it for you. Experience means describing the pain and shock and surreality of losing an arm in a swordfight, instead of telling that Zacharias lost an arm. I mean he didn’t lose it, he probably knows where it is. It’s just not attached to him anymore.
Dialogue and introspection fall somewhere in between. I group these two together because introspection is almost dialogue; it’s the character talking to themself. Monologue, whether internal or aloud. In both dialogue and introspection, the reader receives information directly. That said, dialogue engages the reader in a different way than exposition does. Dialogue is a great way to impart information directly to the reader, in an unmistakable way, without infodumping exposition on them.
Just as there’s no part of speech you should banish from use (adverbs have their place, whatever people say), there’s no mode of storytelling you should banish from use, either, including exposition. Exposition has its place and there’s no reason not to use it. Just as with adverbs—particularly those -ly adverbs—using exposition in moderation is key, and using exposition where another mode of storytelling is better suited to imparting the same information is lazy writing. Use exposition when it’s the right type of storytelling to hand over the information.
For instance, let’s say in your story’s present, some characters know about an epic battle 500 years ago. You need to share that information with the reader because it’s important. Is this the place for showing? Probably not—what’s even the mechanism for showing something that happened 500 years ago? Did you just say “a prologue”? Remember, you need to handle those with care. Honestly, I think a lot of prologues, particularly those in fantasy novels, come about because writers were told they should always show and never tell and then they scrambled to show you something that happened in the past or something that’s happening far away from the main action. We’d all be better off with fewer prologues.
Rather than a prologue to show us the ancient epic battle, you could:
Write dialogue of two characters discussing it.
Write introspection of a character thinking about it.
Include it as narrative exposition.
Not everything has to be shown. You don’t have to shoehorn in a dream sequence and then have your character jolt upright in bed and go “But that was 500 years ago!” Sometimes it’s fine, even preferable, to just tell it.
In editing, take a pass specifically for exposition. Skim over your writing and look for it—for the places where information is being told directly to the reader without a mechanism like dialogue or action. If you’re doing first-person or close third narration, look out for exposition passing as introspection, too (ie, a character mentally ruminating at length on one topic for the benefit of informing the reader about it). Flag all instances as you go, and when you’ve finished your scan go back and consider each one. Ask yourself whether this is the best way to impart the information to your reader, or could it better be done through another mode?
If the answer is “exposition is the best way to share this information” then let it be. It takes all kinds (of storytelling modes) to make a (fictional) world. A good early reader, critique partner, or editor will let you know if you’re leaning too much on exposition or telling in a place where showing would be better. A reader or editor who flags every instance of exposition with a “show don’t tell” note is probably just following a checklist.
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Ooh, boy, what a lot to unpack. I think all the exceptions are best summed up by "rules are meant to be broken", as long as they're broken with intent.
Are internal monologues considered ableist these days since a substantial number of people don't have one?
Huckleberry Finn was the example of "show, don't tell" back in HS English class. The teacher spent a good portion of our class time reviewing Samuel Clemens' /description/ of the plantation mansion's coffee table, with pages upon pages about its immaculately stacked books and decorations and accoutrements that were supposedly there to covertly convey the message that these were a bunch of dumb illiterate southerners that only put up a facade of wealth and well-upbringing. Of course that message failed to land on our adolescent brains, but the insight we did gain appreciation for by slogging through that laborous passage once again was that Samuel was paid by the word count.
For another wonderful counterexample of where tell works better than show, have a look at the sci-fi short Swarm (from Love Death + Robots S3E6 on Netflix). It certainly is a visual feast, but the most memorable bits are fed as brief exposition dialogue between two scientists that set up the rapid buildup for the reversal that bites you in the face. Any two sentences would have taken an entire feature-length horror film to explore and establish using inductive show reasoning, but such is the way when it comes to evolutionary xenobiology. It's also the only story from all of the shorts that leaves me wanting to explore a spinoff sequel.
I appreciate the disquisition on show don’t tell. This is something I always try to keep in mind as I write. Thanks, Catherine.
Like many things, a lot of people took this advice too literally. It’s meant to be a helpful guideline, not a decree etched in stone. Sometimes, too much telling is deliberate, like with an unreliable narrator. Sometimes, the excessive telling says something about the teller, having nothing to do with what was literally told.