Show vs Tell: Telling is the Bud Godzilla of Novel Writing Sometimes
Write Better Now
When my daughter was about 18 months old, she had this story that she loved to tell over and over again.
It went, “One day the pole was sad. Pole was so sad. Why was pole so sad? Haha!”
As far as little kids go, it was adorable.
Anyway, as far as stories that show rather than tell? It needed a little work.
Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of writers about show v. tell. We recently did a podcast about it. And I keep going back and back to it because I see a lot of amazing and cool stories fall prey to the evil TELL MONSTER. Imagine it like a less kind Bud Godzilla stomping around on character development, happy plots, and setting, rendering them flat and useless beneath his giant, scaly foot.
And I see a lot of people talking about it, but people are still not getting it. This bothers me. So, I’m going to talk about it for a bit in a series of posts. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful!
To start, let me just remind you what show, don’t tell is about.
Show, don’t tell is about:
Making your reader feel like they are in the story with the characters;
Doing that via putting them in scene (action and reaction) and not all exposition (talking and describing things especially backstory or feelings in a passive way, which means using “was” and “am” a lot usually);
Not explaining things (see that last point, actually).
There are a lot of different levels of showing and telling, deeper ways, shallower ways, extreme ways. Today, let’s start off with a super deceptive little bugger.
I walked over to the door to open it.
“What?” you might say. “You’re walking. There isn’t even an ‘am’ or a ‘was’ or a distancing word in there.”
True.
But part of showing vs telling is that feeling of explaining or of stage directions or overwriting. It’s almost like the difference in early AI writing a story rather than your cousin Bud telling it.
Look what happens when you pull out the ‘to’ and the “over” andthat feeling of over-explaining:
I opened the door.
Even if you were halfway across the room before, the reader knows that you probably walked over to open the door, unless you have a really long rope or a remote control door, which would be cool.
You see the difference, right? Read it out loud, maybe look at them side by side.
I walked over to the door to open it.
I opened the door.
Or, my cousin Bud:
I opened the expletive door. What do you want from me?
So, all that’s in first person, right? What happens when your first-person (the I) narrator talks about someone else doing this?
Bud walked over to the door to open it.
Is that narrator sure though? Maybe Bud’s going to do something else to the door. How does the narrator know ahead of time that Bud’s going to open the door?
They don’t. Not in first person.
And when they lay it out there like that—the reason for Bud doing what he does—it takes away from the stakes and the immediacy.
Look at all the things that could happen:
Bud walked over to the door and kicked it.
Bud walked over to the door. He smashed the glass out. “Help! There are rabid hamsters here!”
Bud walked to the door. He kissed its wooden panel. “You are the best door, I have ever ever known, baby.”
If you are in the third person POV, you can get away with a bit more telling sometimes and a bit more distancing if it’s the omniscient (all knowing) POV. That narrator knows motive. But, be aware, it’s easy to lower the stakes and immediacy with that type of POV.
QUICK EXERCISE:
Go to FIND AND REPLACE or similar tool on your word processing program. Look for “to.” Pick five of them and rewrite the sentence it’s in so that it doesn’t feel quite so much like stage directions.