Show, don’t tell
Every single person who has ever engaged in creative writing will have heard this mantra: ‘Show, don’t tell!’ The explanation is straightforward: it is much more impactful to make the reader feel something than tell them what to feel. Less straightforward is the method of how to achieve that.
The most famous example of what that means is Anton Chekhov’s advice: ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.’
As someone who teaches academic writing for a living, this is particulary hard for me. Every single day I teach, analyse, extrapolate on how an idea needs to be previewed in the introduction; it is then introduced in the topic sentence, only to be further explained in the rest of the paragraph, with ample evidence, examples and citations. And lastly, it is to be summarised once more in the conclusion.
Over the years, I have caught myself many times applying this approach to my creative writing as well. When I re-read my writing a few days later, I often think, ‘What idiot wrote this?’ forgetting for a moment that the idiot is me.
However, knowing that this is wrong does not necessarily lead to success. It is still quite hard to avoid that trap of telling the reader what to feel rather than showing them how something feels.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learnt over the years.
1. Not all telling is bad. It is very much needed for so-called ‘narrative bridges,’ avoiding boring details no one wants to read. They are called ‘bridges’ because they take us from one interesting scene to another. The key here is to be concise. Telling allows us to say in one sentence what otherwise would take pages but is not important to show. A rough guide is that a book should be about 90% scenes and 10% narrative bridges.
2. Don’t use filters (particularly in dialogue) to refer to how the character feels (such as ‘she remembers’ or ‘she implied softly.’ Let the reader come to those conclusions through strong action words and the content of the dialogue)
3. Avoid words like ‘because’ and ‘in order to.’
Instead of writing ‘Her stomach growled because she was hungry,’ simply write ‘Her stomach growled.’ Or, instead of writing ‘In order to reach the top of the mountain, Trevor packed crampons, rope, sling and an axe.’ It would be much better to leave out the first clause completely and write ‘Trevor packed crampons, rope, sling and an axe.’ The reader is smart enough to know that this is for mountain climbing.
4. Emotions should not be named but shown by the bodily reaction. So, instead of writing ‘She was so sad she cried all night,’ it is better to just write ‘She cried all night.’ If it is a bit more complex than this, the manifestation of emotions should be built into the character’s actions and behaviour.
5. Use specifics – It might sound contradictory, but the more specific we get, the more universal the experience becomes. If there are enough details about a character, their background, their experiences family situation, etc, the more they feel ‘real,’ and the better we can relate to them. But be careful, no one likes an information dump.
6. Use all senses – the scene becomes more relatable the more senses it can engage.
7. Use active voice – this is a particular pitfall for me as in academic writing, passive voice is favoured (changing slowly, thank god!). Whenever possible, don’t write ‘She was cheated on by her boyfriend,’ but write ‘The boyfriend cheated on her.’
8. Don’t use progressive tenses, such as present continuous (‘I am sitting at my desk’) or present perfect continuous (‘I have been living here for thirty years.’). Action is much more immediate if told in simple tense, such as ‘I sat down at my desk’ and ‘I’ve lived here for thirty years.’
9. Avoid linking verbs, such as ‘be, seem, feel,’ and use active verbs instead. So, instead of writing ‘She seemed to favour the younger brother,’ give an action in which it is clear she favours the younger brother: ‘Once again, she gave the best cut of meat to the younger brother.’
10. Dialogue can be your life saver here. When in doubt, rather than uhming and aahing, write down the scene using dialogue. It is never too late to prune later on (using narrative bridging to delete the boring parts of the conversation), but it will help you avoid the pitfall of being too explanatory and boring the reader.
Useful resources:
· M. McCowan: Effective editing
· J, Hynes: Writing Great Fiction
· Ackerman and Puglisi: The Emotion Thesaurus
· J. Hardy: Understanding Show, Don’t Tell
Websites:
· Edwina Shaw has a number of great pages with great advice, and one of them is about ‘Show, don’t tell’: https://edwinashaw.com/2024/04/22/show-dont-tell-mostly/
· The Reedsy website is a treasure trove for so many aspects of the writing process, and this topic is covered there as well: https://blog.reedsy.com/show-dont-tell/
