Renni Brown and Dave King wrapped this idea up neatly when they wrote in their book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, "You don't want to give your readers information. You want to give them experiences."
Your goal as a fiction writer is to pull your audience into the world you have created and have them forget everything else. Even the fact that someone created the world they find themselves drawn into. You want to engage not the mind, but the heart of your reader.
Telling is easy, which is why it usually creeps into early drafts too often. But what is "showing"?
Showing is the stuff that scenes are made of. Scenes relate events as they happen rather than describing them after the fact.
Imagine the difference between a newspaper report of a traffic accident and witnessing it first-hand. The report will tell what happened; you'll understand the facts. If you witness the event, you see what is happening as it occurs. You hear the glass break. You smell the tire tread that burned when the driver braked fast. You feel that oh-my-goodness feeling that makes your stomach twist.
That's what you want to give your readers: the event as it happens and all the sights, smells, sounds and feelings that go with it.
So what are some elements that help a writer show rather than explain?
Action: In a scene, something happens. First there is a large, overall action. A character is killed, or betrayed, or convinced, or saved, or otherwise changed. If you let that action unfold before your reader, you're showing. In addition to the large action, the writer can use small actions to help the reader visualize where the character is and what they are doing. This is genearlly done with "beats," often found within dialog:
"This dance is going to be so cool!" Marcy applied the last of her bright red toenail polish and noticed that her fingers were shaking. "I am already so excited I can't stand it, and we have three whole hours before the guys even get here to pick us up!"
Dialog: Dialog is always in the moment. Readers are eavesdroppers, listening in on a conversation as it unfolds. As shown above, beats within the dialog can serve to reveal character, emotion, and action.
Setting: Isn't setting description? Not necessarily. When you set a scene through your character's senses, you can use it to show emotion.
For example: If you describe a forest from the viewpoint of a young girl who is hurrying down narrow paths on her way to meet a secret lover, the scene will be far different than if it were described from the viewpoint of a woman who is running away from someone who intends her harm and has become hopelessly lost. The forest is the same, the trails are the same, but the reaction to them is totally different. The writer will choose different details, different words to show the forest.
One spot where you'll find telling creep in when showing would do a better job is when you're dealing with character emotion. Character empathy is one tool that keeps readers turning pages. Readers stay engaged when they understand why your characters feel as they do. You can do this by portraying the reaction of your character--either through dialog or action--that reveals emotion.
The good news is that frequently writers do both. They show the character in action where he or she is angry, frightened, disgusted, bored, etc. Then the writer will repeat it, this time telling the reader what emotion s/he was aiming at, just to be sure the point is clear. When you come across a place where you tell what a character is feeling (i.e. Ted didn't ask her to the prom. Cindy was crushed.) check to see if you can cut the explanation and still have the feeling come across. If cutting the explanation leaves the situation unclear, then you need to rewrite the passage using dialog and action that shows Cindy is crushed.
The more you practice drawing pictures for your readers, the less work you'll have to do during the revision stages. To get a good feel for the balance of show and tell in your manuscript, use two highlighters. Mark the passages that happen in real time in one color, and those that are reports of what happened in another. Then compare the two. You'll be able to see at a glance where the manuscript is heavy with summary.
Additionally, here are some questions you can ask yourself when you have a finished manuscript in order to weed out passages that explain rather than engage.
Do your characters express their feelings, or do you tell what their feelings are?
Do you let character action and dialog tell the story, or do you often stop to explain in order to bring the reader up to speed?
Do character descriptions come naturally, in the course of dialog or action? Does setting come through in the same way?
Are your scenes rendered through the eyes of a character so that they become an integral part of the story, rather than long paragraphs of narrative description?
Does your dialog stand on its own? If you cut explanations, will it still work?
Are there places where narrative summary is used too much and how can you convert the information into action or dialog? NOTE: Major plot twists or surprises should NOT appear in summary. They should ALWAYS unfold in a scene.
Now comes the hard part. You can't have a story that's all show and no tell. So, when is it best to tell and not show? What purpose does narrative summary serve? We'll talk about that next time.
Exercises: Turn the following "telling" phrases or events into "showing" scenes. Word count is not an issue here so add as much or as little as you feel like adding to make the character, the emotion and/or the event come to life for a reader.
Timmy was sad.
Susan was irritated because there was an accident blocking traffic on her way to work. She had less than ten minutes to get to a crucial meeting.
This was the game that would clinch Nathan's scholarship dreams. He tried hard not to be nervous.
Tilly watched the three-year-old pitch a fit on the floor at her feet and knew she'd made a mistake. Tilly's daughter Darcy had been so excited about her stage play audition that Tilly allowed the excitement to cloud her judgement. She was too old to put up with this kind of thing for a week. She felt trapped and at a loss for what to do.
There was a house and two other small buildings were shaded by elm and pecan trees. The barn stood apart from the house. It was bright red and newly painted, while the paint on the rest of the buildings was dingy and peeling. Penelope wondered what kind of person would care more for a barn than the house he lived in. There was a lot she didn't know about this person who she had just found out was her real father. After months of determined searching, and a tiring trip from New York to Montana, she wasn't so determined anymore. Part of her wanted to turn the car around and go home, but what would she do with the curiousity that would remain if she did that?
©2005Dekat