Showing and Telling

How each works, how to make them co-operate, and why anyone who believes "show don't tell" is making a big mistake.

It’s a rare aspiring writer who’s never heard someone say ‘Show, don’t tell’. And it’s true that many beginner writers tend to Tell where they should Show, whereas it’s less often the other way round.

But both are one of the basic tools in our tool-kit, and it’s hard to get far as a writer if you don’t understand their respective strengths, and practise using them to your story's best advantage.

Mind you, like everything in writing, it isn’t even binary, but a spectrum, from the telliest tell, to the showiest show; in fact, each of these two simple labels get stuck on quite a range of possible effects, techniques and word-choices.

But let’s start with the basics. In the New York part of my childhood, Show and Tell was a fixture in every elementary school’s class timetables. You brought an object - a model you’d made, a souvenir from a holiday, the invitation to your sister’s wedding - and Showed it to the class. The other children rubbed the nylon fur on your model racoon; smelled the bunch of herbs from your grandma’s farm; admired the swirly, sticky-up writing on the invitation and asked what ‘requests the pleasure’ meant.

And while they were doing that, you were Telling them about it: how long the racoon took to make and what pictures you used to help; where grandma’s farm is and what she told you these herbs are; what your bridesmaid’s dress will be like and what your dad said about your brother’s fiancée - and maybe even what fiancée means and why it sometimes has one e and sometimes two.

SHOWING

So SHOWING is all about getting the reader to feel they’re in the world of the story.

• That means feel as in smell, touch, see, hear, intuit, believe the actual experience of the characters in the setting: ‘the clutch at his coat is a beggar’s hand’; ‘the sandstorm billows above the village roofs’; ‘rage was beating in her ears’; ‘the wind whipped my cheeks’.

• As John Gardner says, it’s by being convincing in the reality and detail of how we evoke our imagined world - by what the characters do and say - that we help and persuade the reader to buy into the story we’re telling, to read it as if it really happened.

• The term ‘detail’ is a bit misleading, to my mind, because it implies small things, trivia, stuff the story could perfectly well do without. But the reader’s mind recreates things more vividly - comes to feel they’re real - much more easily when those words are specific: ‘rose’ not ‘flower’; ‘ambled’ not ‘walked slowly’; ‘taffeta’ not ‘fabric’. So I tend to talk about ‘specificity’ or ‘particularity’.

• The more I talk about Showing, the more often I call it evoking, and sometimes

  channelling, as in the channelling of direct experience towards the reader. It can be helpful to think in terms of presenting physical events, settings and feelings without a frame of summary or comment.

TELLING

And TELLING is all about getting the reader to understand what’s going on.

• It’s supplying information about the scene, situation and characters: the storyteller saying ‘Once upon a time’; ‘A volunteer army was quickly gathered together’; ‘She decides that the only solution is to marry him’.

• It’s supremely useful for clearly and swiftly setting up what’s going on - covering the ground, establishing facts - so that the ‘reality and detail’ of the scene can then take effect.

• Human beings summarise and inform all the time - ‘Oh, the picnic was a complete disaster’; ‘I am a photographer’; ‘You must turn left after about a mile’ -so it’s completely natural that narrative does too.

• The more I talk about Telling, the more I call it informing, and sometimes explaining to the reader. It can be helpful to think of narrative summarising what’s going on for the characters and their world, or even commenting on what’s happening.

Some examples:

1. The basic idea:

• Telling/informing: The meeting took place near the large tree.

• Telling/informing: They met at the big tree.

• Showing/evoking: They kissed under the rotting willow.

• Showing/evoking: They fought in the shadow of the sapling oak.

2. More different classes of word. What word-choices have what effects?:

• Telling/informing: The temperature has risen overnight and the increasingly bright light makes it easy for her to see her way along the road.

• Showing/evoking: It’s warmer now, and as the sunlight reaches the road she picks her way ever more easily over the stones.

3. Very different in length and effect. When might you use each of them?:

• Telling/informing: The taller woman was a photographer, toting all the tools of her trade.

• Showing/evoking: Two cameras dangled round her neck and a lens stuck out of one pocket, her fingers were stained with chemicals, and when she turned he saw her hair was tied up with a shabby strap on which he could just make out the lettering Nikon.

4. Almost the same length. Which do you prefer? Why?:

• Telling/informing: They stood close and wrapped their arms round each other in a passionate embrace, so that she became aware that he had been riding, and then that he was as nervous as she was.

• Showing/evoking: They gripped each other and the tweed of his jacket was rough under her cheek. His hand came up to stroke her hair; she smelled leather and horses on the skin of his wrist. He was trembling.

5. A longer event being narrated. I’ll leave it to you to write the Showing version of the next pair. When would you do which of these?:

• Telling/informing: Bella was tall and attractive to women as well as men, being so charming to them that they fell for her immediately and never guessed how little she cared for them.

• Showing/evoking: Show us how Bella stands at the bar; give us what she says; show us Ali looking into her eyes and seeing love in her smile. Then show us what Bella says, in the toilet, about making sure this - ‘What’s the name? Andi? Ali?’ doesn’t discover where she works.

USING SHOWING AND TELLING

Showing and Telling need to co-operate in your narrative:

The trick is deciding which to use, letting each play to its strengths.

• Showing often takes a bit longer than Telling the same thing, because you can’t explain what’s important, only give readers the evidence for them to understand on their own. But as in some of the examples above, it doesn’t always take longer. Specific, particular details might seem to take up more space, but because they’re good at making things come alive you usually don’t need as many as you thought.

• Sometimes plain Telling is exactly what you want: in They met at the big tree, its simplicity is its strength. More about this here. Having said that, the chances of The meeting took place near the large tree. being the best option are small - unless your narrative is channelling the voice of a character who would actually be as bland and Telly as that.

• Showing, generally, asks more brainwork of the reader: in the last example above, the Telling version gives us exactly what the writer wants us to know about Bella. In the Showing version, we might infer that the way she treats Ali is the way she treats many people - but that is only our inference, not an established fact of Bella’s character.

• Although, broadly, you’ll very often be Telling to get from one scene to the next, or to skim over a part of the scene in which nothing important happens, it’s always possible to make your Telling more Showy by swapping in specific details, as I have with the tree examples.

• We separate them out to talk about them, but in real narratives there will always be a constant shift to-and-fro between Tellishness and Showishness - which is why this stuff is always more -ish than nervous writers hoping for a definitive answer wish it was. But as with psychic distance, the shifts to and fro along the spectrum actually create a dynamism in the narrative prose which most of us miss if it’s all Tell - and actually we find just as ploddy if it’s all Show.

Dialogue

is always Showing in the basic sense, as it directly evokes sounds and actions. There's more about writing dialogue here but TLDR: make sure that

• the character’s voice is right for who they are, and the way they talk (including being Telly sometimes) is shaped by their personality in general and circumstances at the moment.

• you don’t use dialogue as a way of stuffing in slabs of Tell-ing which just happens to have ‘speech marks’ round them: you need a proper story-reason for this character to be saying this stuff here. The more individual and particular to this character you can make the voice, the more likely you’ll get away with it.

• if one character has to tell another things the reader already knows, use Telling to cover the ground instead. More here.

Physical description

of red hair and freckles, say, or the mountain having dark cliffs and a rocky plateau on the top, is also Showing in the basic sense. But it may not do much more to evoke the actual experience of that person or landscape than Telling the reader that ‘he was beautiful’ or ‘the landscape is dangerous’.

For more about how to make description a fully-paid-up part of your storytelling, try this post. 

Psychic distance and showing and telling

are closely related. I’ve blogged in more detail about Psychic Distance here; for now, just have a look at Gardner's range of psychic distances, and see how they’re very like points on the spectrum from the telliest tell, to the showiest show:

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway into a snowstorm.

2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

3. Henry hated snowstorms.

4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

Because the farther-out distances are less engaged with the immediate experience of the viewpoint character, they are often more Tell-y; but of course you can still write the narrative in a vivid and evocative way, making your Telling Showy.

Because the closer-in distances tie the narrative in to a character in their setting and circumstances, it’s natural that things get more Showy. But as the narrative is coloured by their thought and voice, it’s also natural that they sometimes think Telly things like ‘this picnic is a disaster’.

For more the uses of the different levels, click here.

If you've been told to ‘avoid adjectives and adverbs’

which I dug into in more detail here, at heart it’s a Showing-and-Telling issue.

• If you Tell us a house is ‘imposing’ and Sam approaches ‘nervously and wearily’, you are informing us about what the effect on her is, but not really evoking the character's experience of it.

• It’s usually more vivid to Show Sam’s experience of the house, using words which embody that physical moment: Sam has to ‘crane’ their neck to see the roof, and the stone eagles ‘look down their noses’ at them as they climbs ‘on and on’ up the steps until their legs are ‘aching’.

• Embodying the effect of the setting on a character-in-action makes our bodies feel it too, because the mind doesn’t know the difference between an imagined thing and a real one, and feels the craning, and the endless walking and the aching legs.

• The fact that if you’d asked Sam afterwards, they might very well have talked about the house being imposing and how nervous and weary they were, just shows us that Telling is natural too!

Showing/evoking helps to evoke character and subjectivity.

In Sam’s point of view, the eagles are looking down their noses: the evocation of their posture is shaped by Sam’s consciousness and personality. We are given the physical experience in a form which evokes Sam’s emotional experience, which clues us into their consciousness and personality.

Because we’re aware that it’s Sam’s emotion, we know it’s subjective, particular to them, not the whole story. Someone else might see the eagles as nodding in friendly welcome; a third person wonder which species they're supposed to be. Our sense of Sam’s character by the implied contrasts.

Using speech tags well

is tied into Showing. I blogged about in more detail here, but the TLDR points are:

• Don’t inform us ‘she said jokingly’ or ‘she joked’, write the joke and trust the reader to know it is one.

• Don’t usually inform us that ‘he shouted furiously’ or ‘she whispered pleadingly’: evoke the furious or pleading words and actions. Having said that, if it would take half a paragraph of red faces and shaking fists, or upward glances and melting looks, to evoke it all, there are unquestionably times when the adverb is the most efficient way to evoke volume and a sense of the energy behind the speech, so the reader can get on with the story.

• If the speech really could be taken a different way from how you intend, then show us its effect on the speaker or the other characters. Indeed, show us the effect of the joke anyway, as that’s really what’s interesting in the scene: Jo tells a joke and waits for the laugh; Jane smiles slightly; Grandad snorts in disapproval.

• Even less successful, usually, are speech tags which comment on the speech, i.e. which Tell the reader how to take what’s said: ‘he laughed ingenuously’, ‘she whispered unhelpfully’. If in doubt, stick to ‘said’, which is invisible, with ‘shouted’ ‘cried’ etc. when you really need to indicate volume.

Don't be put off Telling.

Telling is a huge part of making a story come alive, because it’s so easy to keep things moving and concentrate the reader's attention where it really matters.

Bad External-narrator Telling: The weather in the months of November and December was inclement, as Jo saw every time she looked up from her day’s weaving. The work made good progress, on the whole, but the horses suffered from the wet weather. She waited for Hosein to get in contact with her, but he didn’t, and as Christmas approached she had almost managed to persuade herself to give up hope that he would ever contact her. She had decided that she would nonetheless celebrate the season by decorating the Christmas tree, when she finally heard her mobile make the sound which indicated that someone was trying to get in contact with her.

What’s wrong with that one is the bland, generalised language: not quite office-speak but not far off. This says exactly the same thing, but with more energy and vividness - and it’s shorter too!:

Good External-narrator Telling: November became December and the rug on the loom grew steadily, while under Jo’s window the horses stood with their heads hanging in the rain. And still Hosein didn’t ring. By Christmas she had begun to give up hope, but she decided to get a tree anyway. She was trying to get the first bauble to hang straight when her phone bleeped.

Good Internal-narrator Telling: November it rained - poured - buckets, on and on and on. It felt like one long wet weekend, and the horses stood miserably in the field, and I got on with the rug, and still Hosein didn’t ring. I know it always rains in the autumn but this time it felt as if it was raining on me personally, just as my phone was refusing to ring out of spite. It rained all through December, too, and even opening the box of Christmas decorations didn't make me feel better. And then my phone bleeped.

Compare all three and see what conclusions you can draw. Some of my thoughts:

• Whether I was using an external/third-person narrator, or Jo as an internal/first-person narrator, they’re each Telling a story about this period in Jo’s life. So as you’d expect, the narrative doesn’t get right close in: the psychic distance is hovering around the 2-3 mark.

• But it is still specific: it covers the ground, but it doesn’t generalise about numbers of months and inclement weather and celebrating the season. When Jo’s telling her own story about herself at that time, it’s also coloured by her voice and personality.

• Everything is embodied in physical, tangible, imaginable things: time is embodied in the rug growing, Jo’s mood in the depressed-looking horses in the rain, the gradual erosion of hope in the phone not ringing while the rug grows.

• Where there are relatively abstract, un-concrete ideas, such as months, you can help by using words with more energy: in this case ‘became’ brings in the sense of forward movement. And although when Jo is the narrator, she does use Tell-y things - ‘always rains’, ‘didn't make me feel better’ - that feels quite natural: humans Tell all the time. So the voice is still particular and specific to this character.

When Jo answers the phone, you’d probably go into full Show of character-in-action: what’s said, done, felt, thought.

Showing and Telling in balance

The more crucial the scene - the characters-in-action, the setting - the more full-on showing you’ll probably be doing. Almost all of your big scenes will probably happen in something close to real time, because these are the crucial moments of change, conflict, decision and experience, and they need and deserve to be evoked as fully and vividly as possible, so the reader feels it all as strongly as possible.

I often think of it as a train: Showing is the compartments and carriages where it all happens, Telling is the good, strong, flexible couplings that lead from one carriage to the next.

Especially at the beginning of a novel, the balance between showing and telling can be tricky to get right. On the one hand Showing helps to draw the reader as quickly as possible into the characters’ lives and feelings, and get us to care about them - and so want to stick around and find out more. On the other hand, it will take Telling to make sure we know enough about what’s going on, and what’s urgent and important, for us to care about what is happening and what will happen next. Learning to make your Telling Showy can help enormously with keeping these two needs in balance.

In the fable-like story, or the tale or fairy-tale - very much told by a storyteller, with the narrator’s voice ever-present - the voice of the storyteller is even more critical. To make up for the distancing effect of the narrator keeping us with them and not the characters, the narrator and what they're saying must be extra-engaging in itself. But if you read the great modern exponents of the tale - Angela Carter comes to mind - you'll see that even with a very tell-y narrative, a very present narrator, the physical and emotional experience of the world we're watching is extraordinarily vivid. That's what Showing is all about - and you'll be Telling at the same time.

An example of Showing and Telling in action

which was posted by one of the writers doing one of the Self-Editing Your Novel course. The setting is a Victorian theatre.

I don’t know if it was the people getting up--which made the gallery seem to heave about; or the shrieking woman; or the sight of Nancy, lying perfectly pale and still at Bill Sykes’s feet; but I became gripped by an awful terror. I thought we should all be killed. I began to scream, and Flora could not quiet me. And when the woman who had called out put her arms around me and smiled, I screamed louder. Then Flora began to weep--she was only twelve or thirteen, I suppose. She took me home and Mrs Sucksby slapped her.

It’s from Sarah Waters’ wonderful Fingersmith, and it’s a lovely example of Showing and Telling co-operating. Let’s unpick it a bit.

• the gallery seemed to heave about is, I’d say, very Show-y: physical, in the moment, very much how it would feel. And here seemed is entirely necessary, not a dispensable piece of filtering. Same with things like shrieking, pale and still, scream, weep, screamed, slapped. (Notice how they’re mostly verbs? Well-chosen verbs probably make more difference to the vividness of a scene than anything else.)

• So what about She took me home? No stumbling through lamplit streets or reeking alleyways here, but I think most of us would say this was a perfectly sensible bit of Telling: information about something which the writer has decided doesn’t need any more detail than that. And Flora could not quiet me, though also information more than evocation, does have the vividness that voice brings to a narrative because

  • the simplicity suits the fact that this is memory, and of a child’s experience; you could even say that it’s free indirect style: older-Sue’s narrative is being coloured by child-Sue’s voice

  • quiet used as a verb (verbs again) breathe the period, without in any way being consciously olde worlde.

• Then there’s I became gripped by an awful terror. Put that in your story, and many a writer’s circle would cry that it’s Telling. Where’s her thumping heart, her clammy palms, her metaphorical sense of a monster looming over her? Well, the narrator is telling a story. Sometimes when we tell stories we explain what’s happening, rather than evoking it. Especially when we’re a nineteenth-century girl (albeit one being ventriloquised by a twentieth-century novelist) writing in a world shaped for us and for its inhabitants by the words of Dickens, Conan Doyle, J S LeFanu and Poe.

• And the same goes for phrases where, for example, narrator-Sue informs us that I thought we should all be killed. Should this thought be in Free Indirect Style or even be directly quoted? Should this whole passage not have been shifted from narrator-Sue fully into child-Sue’s experience in the moment? No, it shouldn’t, to my mind.

Showing is always at risk of become ‘signalling’

This is an idea which you may have had when you read her thumping heart, her clammy palms, her metaphorical sense of a monster looming over her. The Show-y, Evoke-y ways to narrate, say, fear, are always at risk of becoming what I call signals.: those gestures and phrases which describe things which human feelings absolute cause - but which have become formulaic: the Victorian tossed head and bitten lip, the 21st century suffers endlessly from lurching (or twisting) stomachs.

Even if not quite clichés, the fact that they do the job nicely means an awful lot of writers have already used them to do that job. They’re efficient, off-the-peg, second-hand, tired. The reader gets it, and moves too swiftly on, before the moment has time to flower in their own consciousness.

So I’d suggest that if you can’t find a good, first-hand way to show/evoke an event while keeping the story moving forwards, think about whether you might work with voice, period, information and your narrator's own nature to Tell that event instead.

Showing and Telling, working together, are fundamental to human storytelling

We are conscious creatures and so we experience life in two layers - the experience, and the consciousness of the experience. We tell our lives to ourselves even as we’re immersed in what life shows us.

The proportions of the two vary constantly, of course: a passage evoking the red mist of battlefield or the golden glow of sex will have different proportions of Showing and Telling from an unemotional, fact-based account of a car accident, or an analytical heart-to-heart with a friend or a therapist.

But as far as I’m concerned, the double-layered narrative is virtually always more exciting to read than the single one because it’s more like our real experience. And that, really, is why Showing and Telling co-operate in any good narrative: they do the same in life.

Image credit: woodleywonderworks on flikr, via Wikimedia Commons.