Itchy Bitesized 39: Ten Things About Showing and Telling

Why you need both, and how to develop your skills

What writers label as ‘showing and telling’ is fundamental to the effect of your writing on the reader, and the good news is that it’s not hard to get your head round.

This is a round-up of the main things to think about, with links to other posts which dig into the detail, including my main post on Showing and Telling, and finishing with some suggestions for how to work on your own showing-and-telling skills.

For the full Itchy Bitesized series click here. And apologies for capitalising Showing and Telling throughout; I know it looks a bit faux-eighteenth-century, but it helps to make it clear when we’re specifically thinking about this question of technique, rather than other uses of those words.

1. Showing is for getting the reader to feel as if they’re in the physical world of the story, experiencing these actual events and being present in the moment.

2. Telling is for getting the reader to understand what’s going on, feeling the wider context and experiencing the forward movement of the story.

3. The more I talk about Showing, the more often I call it evoking, channelling or presenting the vivid specifics of this moment or stage of the story. The more I talk about Telling, the more often I call it informing, explaining or summarising what’s important about this moment or stage of the story.

4. Showing and Telling need to co-operate in your storytelling: when should you evoke the specifics and let the reader’s mind sense how they matter? When should you write the important things, the basics of what’s going on, explicitly, and let the reader’s mind fill in the specifics?

5. When Showing and Telling are in balance, the reader will feel the forward movement of the story but never feel skimped or rushed through the full experience. Seen from the other side, the balance is right when the reader always experiences the real vividness of the things that matter but doesn’t get bogged down in a welter of description, or lose touch with the larger arc of the story.

6. Learning to make your Telling Show-y. will help to avoid both skimpiness and bogging-down. But the plainest kind of Telling has power too. Sometimes all we need to know is the bare facts.

   

   Photo by Matheus Frade on Unsplash

7. Showing and Telling are closely related to psychic distance. Getting your head round the latter can help hugely in working out that crucial balance, and help you to clarify and integrate all the separate decisions of voice, narrator and viewpoint, pace, and showing-and-telling into a single, clear question. (Join me online at Blue Pencil on 25 Sept to dig deep into psychic distance.)

8. Different characters will perceive things differently, according to their physical and psychological makeup. So which things get Shown, and which get Told, and how they are shown and told, will vary depending on who your viewpoint character is. Thinking hard about those differences doesn’t only help you to make both Showing and Telling more effective on the page, it can really help to strengthen your characterisation throughout the story.

9. If you’ve been told to ‘cut adjectives and adverbs’, at heart it’s a Showing and Telling issue. This post unpicks why that ‘rule’ is nonsense - and when sometimes it isn’t nonsense at all.

10. Showing and Telling isn’t hard, but getting good at it takes practice. Here are some things which will help:

    1. Get your head consciously round how this stuff works by looking at examples such as these.

    2. Starting training your unconscious intution by reading like a writer: notice how it makes your reader-self feel, then study the writer’s choices. Where and how do they Show? Where and how do they Tell? Why do you think they did it that way? Does it work?

    3. Play with the tools: Try writing different versions of the same idea, as I did in those examples, or get stuck into some writer’s yoga.

    4. Set yourself a brief to write some flash or short stories specifically to explore the decisions about where and how to Show, and where and how to Tell: it’s often easier to explore freely if you’re not tied to the characters and situations of an existing project.

Good luck!