Why Is Telling Bad?
Write Better Now
We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts.
You can check out the rest of the series on here or just the podcast episodes on her website.
Telling in writing is sometimes okay, I swear and we’ll get to that in a later piece of this series, but there are (in our current writing culture in the US) some big hate-ons for telling.
That’s because telling is often considered:
Distancing, meaning it keeps the reader from feeling the story with the characters
Weak writing or lazy writing—gasp! I know, those jerks.
The thing is that everyone has a different tolerance for TELLING in the story. Some people even describe it different ways. And some genres allow more telling and so do some point-of-views.
EXPLANATIONS
One of the biggest places that people dislike 'telling language’ is in explanations.
Usually an explanation on the page means that the forward thrust of the story’s plot has stopped.
Like here:
The zombie jumped on Bud Godzilla, it’s mouth gaping open, molars exposed. And its breath—rotten fish mixed with ashtray mixed with bear feces. Ah, Bud Godzilla remembered that smell one other time. It was a night he was chilling with Dude Bigfoot at the bar and that night—that night—Dude Bigfoot had spoken about how hard it was to find floss that’s big enough when you’re a cryptid living in the Maine woods.
The whole story stopped, right? At an important point.
It’s not always that obvious. Sometimes it’s a bit sneakier like here:
The zombie bit into Bud Godzilla because he was hungry.
Duh, right? That whole “because he was hungry” is an explanation that kind of doubts the reader’s ability to get it and make the correlation.
Or, here’s another example that’s a bit sneakier.
Bud Godzilla howled as the zombie bit into his toe.
There’s not a lot of details here and the order of events is off.
Try:
The zombie bit into Bud Godzilla’s toe. Bud’s screams echoed throughout Boston.
You want to keep the tension in the scene and on the page. Explaining kind of kills that. And readers can be insulted. You don’t want them to throw the book down and yell, “Duh! Do you think I have no brain cells? Of course the swear-word zombie bit Bud Godzilla because he was hungry! Ugh.”
Keeping tension is important. Not insulting the reader’s intelligence, trusting them to get it, is important. That’s why you have to be really careful with telling.