Writers Going the Full Monty
Sometimes showing too much goes wrong
So, for the next couple of weeks on the podcast and in our free posts, we’re focusing on Showing and Telling. No, not the fun kind in grade school when you bring in your pet Godzilla, but the kind on the page. It begins here, but if you just look up the SHOW tag, you’ll find a bunch of posts and episodes.
Here’s the thing: You can show too much sometimes. It’s like flashing during the football field to try to get your favorite police officer’s attention. Yes, you got it, but maybe it’s a little too much and you’d have been better off just showing a little shoulder rather than the full monty.
It’s about extremes. When you describe something, you don’t need to put in every adjective in the world.
Like this:
The tall, mighty, green-leafed, white-trunked tree swayed in the cold, chilly, freezing breeze.
Writing is communication. And when we write stories for other people? Well, we’re giving them some power. We don’t want to be control freaks like above, but we also don’t want to give them nothing like below.
The tree moved.
It’s a balance.
You want to pick and choose the details. And sometimes being specific helps like here:
The birch swayed in the Arctic gale.
Or:
Hurricane Bertha smashed into the palm tree.
And if we go back to that original example:
The tall, mighty, green-leafed, white-trunked tree swayed in the cold, chilly, freezing breeze.
That second half needs some work. A lot of us writers are insecure and we think that one word isn’t enough to get our point across. We do this with adjectives sometimes, like up there with “cold, chilly, freezing.” But we also do this with actions and dialogues like here:
Bud Godzilla nodded. He gave a thumbs up. “Yes,” he agreed.
That four ways Bud Godzilla is doing the same thing: providing an affirmation. The reader is smart. They are your reader, of course they are! They catch your drift with just one of these:
Bud Godzilla nodded.
He gave a thumbs up.
“Yes.”
He agreed.
As the awesome writer, you get to determine which one to use, cool right? So, when you revise, just be on the lookout for places where maybe you’re showing a little too much, going full monty, repeating something like ancient AI on a bad blog post.
