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RobertBMarks
Jul '22

If you're like me, then you've probably had a writing instructor, or teacher, or somebody hand you a bit of feedback with the words "Show, don't tell!" And, if you're like me, you wanted to strangle them then and there, or shout "I am showing!" or the like.

Well, here's the good news: your reaction was 100% warranted (so long as you didn't actually strangle somebody, of course). As much as teachers like to treat "Show, don't tell!" as simple or self-explanatory, it actually isn't. It is pithy, but it is far from simple. And a lot of people who use it don't actually know what it means.

So, what does it actually mean?

What it means is that rather than telling a reader a thing, you lead them by the nose into concluding that thing themselves.

For example, let's take the term "sexy" - a word that should never appear outside of dialogue. Rather than tell the reader that a character is sexy, you should describe the attributes that make them sexy. So, if we are talking about a female character (I use this example because I'm one of those rare people who is 100% on the heterosexual side, and I literally don't register male sexual attractiveness), you might describe her as having pouting lips, or a statuesque figure, or a playful twinkle in her eyes. The reader will then take all of this information, and conclude that this character is sexy.

Ideally, you should aim to always "show" when possible, but sometimes, that's not an option. Sometimes, you have to tell. Let's take our hypothetical sexy lady for a moment. Remember that playful twinkle in her eyes? Well, "playful" is telling rather than showing - we could get more granular than that. We could describe the things that make her gaze playful. But, that would, in many cases, be a mistake. We want the reader to do the mental arithmetic to come to the conclusion that our character is sexy, but we don't want to distract them from making that conclusion by buffeting them with other conclusions they need to draw first. The showing should generally be only one layer deep - any more and you risk getting lost in the details.

As for knowing when to show and when to tell, that just comes with practice.

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Noorie
Jul '22

So... if someone did "show don't tell" thing to say that a guy is sexy, you wouldn't understand it? Maybe "tell don't show" works better for these cases

RobertBMarks
Jul '22

No. In fact, that approach would make it worse.

Regardless of whether you can create the effect with the reader or not, you still have to describe the character. Now, you might be trying to lead them to the conclusion that a character is sexy when they aren't hard-wired to register those clues, but even if the effect isn't created, you've still left the reader with a reasonable idea of what this character looks like, their mannerisms, etc.

If, on the other hand, you tried to take the shortcut of just saying "he was tall and sexy," you've just shot the character description in the foot. "Sexy" isn't one of those terms that is universally understood - everybody has a different idea of what is sexy in a potential romantic partner - so the readers who are hardwired to understand sexiness in that context might not agree on what it means, and the readers who aren't hard-wired to understand it in that context won't have the foggiest idea of what it means.

Hopefully that makes sense.

1 month later

closed Aug 8, '22

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