Show Or Tell—Which One When?
Many of us are familiar with the advice “show, don’t tell” in writing. Unfortunately, this advice seems to give “telling” a bad rap and “showing” ends up being overused. Both “showing” and “telling” are valuable storytelling elements, but how do you know when to use which one?
In this blog post, I give you a list of storytelling tools to help you “show” instead of “tell” and some questions you can ask yourself to decide if a particular passage or scene should be “shown” or “told.”
Let’s hop to it!
The Art of Showing
Most important events, actions, and feelings should be shown—dramatized or demonstrated—to the reader. Showing what matters to the character helps the situation come to life on the page, and the reader will then feel the intimacy, vulnerability, and potency of that particular scene.
Showing is one of the best ways to connect your readers to your characters. When your characters feel emotion and express it through eye-opening dialogue or page-turning action, then your readers will care about your characters.
Storytelling Tools that Help Show
- Dialogue. This gives readers a real-time accounting of what the character is hearing and how they are interpreting what they’re hearing (their emotional reaction and mental processing).
- Action + Emotion. Writing out a detailed action scene infused with character emotions allows your reader to bear witness to what is happening between your characters. Detailed action puts the reader in real time with what the characters are saying or doing, rather than summarizing or reporting the action through “telling.”
- Specific Details. Infuse your scene with specific details that allow your reader to visualize what is happening on the page. Instead of writing “Bette’s neglected bookshelves,” describe what “neglect” actually looks like in this particular situation. Are there cobwebs? Dust? Are the books disorganized, stacked in haphazard piles? Torn jackets?
- Visceral Emotion + Inner Monologue. Readers are more likely to feel compassion and empathy for character who are experiencing visceral emotion while expressing their thoughts.
- Body Language + Sensations. Physical gestures, expressions, sensations, or actions can show how a character is feeling or what a character is thinking. Emotions manifest in our bodies in both overt and hidden ways. A tapping foot, a thudding heart, sweaty palms, clenched jaw, dry mouth—all of these are examples of a body reacting to a situation.
- Sensory Details. Use the five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell). But don’t simply say Ronnie tasted the hot bread. Show us the steam from the bread fogging up his glasses, describe how it melts in his mouth, have him think about how it reminds him of his Sundays with his grandmother.
What is at Stake?
Showing brings situations to life on the page and engages the reader on an emotional level. But not all situations warrant a detailed passage. Sometimes, you can get by on summarizing or reporting a situation and move on to the next event.
A great way to test if you should Show or Tell is to look at your STAKES.
If the stakes are high, then this is probably a situation you should be showing in detail. If the stakes are low to non-existent, you can either summarize the situation or show a portion of it.
“Telling” instead of “Showing” allows you to slow down the pace, to generalize information, to provide distance, and to put the reader in a restful state before the next big event comes along. All of that works with situations that carry low stakes.
Revising to Show, not Tell
It’s usually easier to tell than it is to show, so I typically recommend writing through the telling lens in your rough draft. Just so you can get the big picture events and character growth onto the page. When you’re ready to revise, then you can start developing the passages with a showing lens.
Try this exercise. Flag all your emotions with an asterisk, your actions with a hashtag, and your senses with a dollar sign (or some other kind of feature that’s easy to search + find).
1.| Run a search for all emotions. For example: Mary was happy; Sadness filled his eyes.
2.| Run a search for all senses. For example: Mary heard the birds; Tina felt woozy; Ronnie tasted the hot bread; It smelled lovely; Greg saw the dog.
3.| Run a search for actions. For example: Tina fell; Ronnie baked.
For each named emotion, sense, and action, ask yourself if the moment is worth showing, or if naming the emotion, sense, or action the best choice for this particular passage? What is happening here that would warrant an extra few lines of expressive writing to show the named emotion, sense, or action?
Check if you’re showing the named emotion, sense, or action somewhere else in the passage. If you are, then you have a choice to not show this additional emotion, get rid of the other one and show this one, or you could show both. This is totally dependent on the kind of story you’re writing, what you have coming before this moment, and what you have to follow this moment.
If you decide to rewrite your named emotion, sense or action so that you’re showing instead of telling, choose robust verbs and words that can pull their weight.
Telling: She was happy
Showing: She glowed like the summer moon.
Ask yourself if you’d get more mileage out of an emotion, sense, or action if you dramatized it.
Telling: Tina was drunk.
Showing: Tina’s booze-soaked brain jiggled like Jell-O as she tripped over the threshold and crashed to the floor.
Instead of naming what the character is sensing, would the scene come alive if you described it?
Telling: The air smelled wet.
Showing: Noah’s nostrils filled with the cool dampness of the air, and he grinned as the colony of bee-eaters snatched the worms writhing through the soggy ground.
Can you imply the character’s emotion through the context?
When his father loomed large, Graham took a step back.
When his father loomed large, Graham forced himself to step back.
Character Motivation
Ask yourself WHY your character feels, senses, or acts the way they do in this particular situation. When you can answer the why, then you’re able to come up with some great material to enliven the moment.
Why is Sophie happy?
Why is Tina drunk?
Why does Noah notice how the air smells?
Why does Graham step back from his father?
How to Decide if Telling is Necessary
Sometimes, your characters will need to be introspective, which is a form of “Telling,” but introspection slows a story to a crawl. Sometimes, we need that breather in a story—but more often, introspection lowers tension and readers are tempted to skim.
Report-style backstory, flashbacks with few specifics, summaries of anything, narrative overviews, and generalizations are all forms of “telling.”
Any time you can have your character run through a thought or two in the middle of some action, take that route. This way, the story is still moving forward because we haven’t stopped to hear the POV character explain things to us.
However, that’s not always possible. So, if you come across a passage of exposition where your POV character is telling the reader something, ask yourself the following questions to make sure you really need it:
1.| Have I already delivered this information some other way?
2.| Can my readers understand why my character feels this way or why they’re acting this way without me having to also explain it?
3.| If I omit the telling part of the scene, can I create a passage that shows it instead?
4.| Is my character giving us too much information? Would my reader rather piece things together for themselves?
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Telling is much easier and faster than showing, and I recommend to give in to telling while you’re working on your rough draft. This will prevent you from getting stuck on details and help you get the big events on the page.
If you’re struck with an inspired passage of showing, then by all means, answer the call. However, showing requires a lot of work to get it flowing smoothly while it also needs to co-work with your pace, conflict, character development, setting, and mood.
Making the choice between showing and telling will be based on a few different factors including tension and pacing and level of importance. Ask yourself what you need the reader to see play out on the page versus hearing in a brief summary.