Showing vs. Telling
how to level up your writing using both
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is an advice column for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response! Looking to work one-on-one? Find me at Broad Editorial for additional support.
Dear Kate,
I posted an excerpt from my WIP to a group I’m in and got a lot of feedback (criticism) saying that I need to show more instead of tell. I know this is advice that comes up a lot, and I guess I thought I was showing. Which makes me wonder—what’s the difference? Am I doing something wrong, telling the story the way that I am? What am I missing here? I’ll include the excerpt in case you have any advice.
- Telling Too Much
Dear Telling Too Much,
“Show, don’t tell” comes up so much that it can seem cliché, but it’s an important concept to understand—not so that you simply follow whatever “rules” are popular at the moment, but so that you have ample tools in your writer’s toolbox and can make informed decisions as you progress through your drafts.
Telling means, well, telling the reader what happens. It uses exposition to give a basic summary of a situation.
Showing means immersing the reader in a scene as it unfolds. Showing is more subtle and, often, more engaging. It leaves space for the reader to draw conclusions and form their own interpretations.
Telling: She was nervous.
Showing: She jostled her leg under the table.
Telling: He was afraid of conflict.
Showing: He scurried quickly down the hall before his boss could stop him.
Showing involves more visceral details and a sense of experience. We’re inside the character, inhabiting their skin. We’re with the scene as it’s happening, and all the details help us paint a picture of what’s going on, both externally and internally, in the narrative.
Telling is more surface writing. It often forms the connective tissue that moves us from scene to scene. Showing forms the basis of what I think of as deep writing—what gets us under that surface and really develops each moment from inside the scene.
When I’ve seen this question come up in writing groups and forums, inevitably someone will share an example from some well-known book and say “Aha! This sentence is telling, not showing!” like it’s a gotcha moment, or proof that bestselling authors suck and new writers need to be given more of a chance. That may be true! But successful authors know how to use a range of registers, which includes both showing and telling, in the right degrees and in the right ways to best match the story they’re writing and the experience they want the reader to have. “Show don’t tell” doesn’t mean NEVER tell. It means understand what you’re writing, why you’re writing it, and what function it serves. Open any book and you’ll find examples of telling all over the place. But if your narrative overly relies on telling at the expense of showing, and it doesn’t also work to draw the reader in and create meaningful scenes, then the manuscript can feel flat and less engaging.
Telling as backstory
One frequent problem I’ve seen has to do specifically with too much telling in the beginning of novels, before the story really takes off. I don’t know if this is what your writing group was responding to, but it’s worth mentioning. It’s easy to slip into telling mode in opening pages: who the characters are, what their world is like, all the set up we as authors often think we need but in fact don’t.
Telling can mean stepping outside the story and telling the reader from the perspective of an outside authorial voice what the dystopian city is like, or how the world of magic works, or what happens in the protagonist’s day to day routine. It’s all set up—it’s not really telling the story yet. Showing means giving this information through the perspective of your characters’ eyes, in moments and doses in which the reader actually needs this information. Telling reads like an infodump. Showing keeps us inside the story as it unfolds.
A useful exercise here is to go through your opening chapters (or the whole manuscript) and highlight what is story and what is writing about the story. Story is when something is happening (a character’s goals + their motivations = conflict). Writing about the story is information that sets a scene or paints around a picture but isn’t the thing itself. Even if your narrative isn’t plot-heavy, it still needs tension, or something driving the narrative engine forward. Feedback on an early draft suggesting that you show more instead of tell can be another way of saying to give the reader more story right off the bat. Have something happening in your narrative, instead of just telling us things about the characters or about the plot.
In cases like this, just changing out a telling sentence for one that shows more of the characters’ internal experience isn’t likely to solve the problem, because it’s really an issue of narrative. Are you getting into your story enough in your opening pages? Do you have a story? Or have you been writing around something, trying to figure it out for yourself before you fully dive in?
As always, the best teacher is to look at other novels you love and admire and see how they solve this problem. If you study a favorite book, or one similar to what you’re writing/that you aspire to be like, how is the author conveying information, sentence by sentence? What is the balance of showing vs. telling in their prose? For more on how to study other work, see December’s post:
Overwriting
Another word of caution, before you dive into changing all your sentences to show how your character is feeling and reacting in every moment: it’s easy to take this showing business too far. “Pain gripped her temples in a vice.” It depends on what else is happening in your story, and the tone and pace of the manuscript overall, whether this type of description is more engaging and effective than just saying, “She had a headache,” or something that isn’t trying quiiiite so hard. CONSTANT showing can look like overwriting, and it’s essential not to rely on clichés. If your characters are always shrugging, always biting their tongue until it bleeds, always feeling tension roiling in their stomachs, always letting out a breath they didn’t know they were holding, then these descriptions can start to feel uninteresting and like they aren’t really showing very much.
Effective showing means keeping your descriptions and characterizations fresh, interesting, and effective. Sometimes we want to feel exactly what the character is feeling. Sometimes every emotion is too much. The challenge—what’s always the challenge—is to get better at learning and identifying what your story needs and what edits will best help you deepen what you’ve written and correct course when you’ve gone astray.
This doesn’t tell you whether your writers group is “right” or “wrong,” or whether you “need” more showing and what that would look like. No one can really tell you that but you! Ideally, however, this way of thinking about different ways of conveying information, loosely grouped into telling moments and showing moments, will help you think about scene and story and what work is being done in your pages. I’m afraid I can’t give you specific feedback on your writing here—I only have so many hours in the day to devote to this free newsletter (extra shout out to you glorious paid subscribers who help make this work possible!!), and just reading a paragraph or so doesn’t tell me enough about your writing or your larger story or how to get from where you are now closer to where you want to be. I’m always available to work one-on-one at Broad Editorial, but I hope what I’ve written here will give you some ideas for how to go back and re-see your own work.
Good luck and keep writing!
Kate