When to Show and When to Tell?

Any time you feel like it. It's up to you the author to balance the two. Showing is usually more entertaining and involving, telling is usually more boring but can deliver extra information (that's my perception, offered as a very rough rule of thumb). You get to decide when and why telling is appropriate. It's a matter of style choice.

Rather than ask these hugely broad questions, which could get you a thousand different answers, you might try going back to a particular story you liked and try to judge how the author balanced show and tell.

-Derek

Telling is best used for when you have to summarize something, I've found, while showing is good to get a reader in the moment, to help them actually "be" there and feel and sense what's going on.

In the end though, it's a balance you have to learn to strike through experience. Every story's needs are unique and some require more telling, some require more showing.

Rough rule of thumb:

Show the money scenes; tell the transitions in between.

For example:

BIG EXCITING BATTLE SCENE!!! (Shown over a number of pages, action and conflict in detail.)

how they get from the battle to the council chamber (Told in a paragraph or so.)

BIG INTRIGUING COUNCIL SCENE!!! (Shown over a number of pages, with much dialogue and supporting detail.)

Note that transition is not necessarily the same thing as reaction, that is, the character(s) responding to events/stimuli and working toward new action. In the example above, the first bit might be called action, the second transition, the third reaction. Important reactions deserve the same dramatization as action. Lesser ones might be treated as transitions and told.

I do not believe telling is in any inherent way more "boring" than showing. There was a period when I tried to tell EVERYTHING in my story. Even the boring walks between scenes. Even showing every single character trait of every single minor character, no matter how minor they are, when I could've gotten it over with a few sentences of telling. The story that came out would be a jumbled mass of actions, without any focus.

I slowly found that, sometimes showing the wrong thing can be as boring as telling everything, and telling the right thing often beats showing them.

I also think that an exception could be made for passages which are told, but in a very interesting voice. The first chapter of Louis Sachar's Holes is a good example. It hooked me in very well. In fact, it would've worked even better than if he had used a "showing" scene instead.

If it's exciting or interesting and drives the story forward - show me in an interesting way.

If it's dull and boring, but I have to know it happened so I can keep up with the unfolding story - tell me, still in an interesting way but get it over quickly.

Most of these "rules" you hear like this (i.e. "show, don't tell") are only in place to remind you not to do something too much.

You shouldn't show everything, but you shouldn't tell everything either. It's just that telling is more prominent, becuase it's easier to tell someone something than it is to describe it and show it.

Just make sure you don't do it too often, and you're fine. Same with most of the "rules" like this.

I think when you can show something, do.

But when you can't or when you need to speed things up, just get from point A to point B, you can tell. For me, when a character is internally reflecting on something that is happening or has happened, telling is appropriate. Sometimes, I have a whole scene of a character mostly telling his or her thoughts. I can throw in some showing - what he's doing or his heart jumping or something like that - but mostly it's telling. Like:

But he wasn’t wrong. Avery was lost, and she needed to be happy. She deserved the joy she’d had years ago when they were still together, even if he wouldn’t be alive to see it.

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I just asked my English professor about this very thing. He sent me this link and told me it was a decent place to start.

Phaeal said:

Rough rule of thumb:

Show the money scenes; tell the transitions in between.

For example:

BIG EXCITING BATTLE SCENE!!! (Shown over a number of pages, action and conflict in detail.)

how they get from the battle to the council chamber (Told in a paragraph or so.)

BIG INTRIGUING COUNCIL SCENE!!! (Shown over a number of pages, with much dialogue and supporting detail.)

Note that transition is not necessarily the same thing as reaction, that is, the character(s) responding to events/stimuli and working toward new action. In the example above, the first bit might be called action, the second transition, the third reaction. Important reactions deserve the same dramatization as action. Lesser ones might be treated as transitions and told.

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This post was extremlty helpful for me. Thank you. I feel like every time i write something i tend to blend when i should show vs tell or it kinda just happens and i need to catch it later on when i edit it which takes a ton of rework to resolve. This was a great way to think about it

tell the leadup
show the action

words i will live by

I tend to agree with Phaeal. If it's an in-the-moment scene of action and emotion, show. If it's summary, e.g. a snippet of backstory or some kind of transition, tell.

You might find this article by Martha Alderson useful:
http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=814

I think the idea is to show by showing and to tell by, well, showing.

If I'm reading your book I don't want you to tell me John is a boy who is afraid of many things.

You can tell me that, but it sure as hell won't stand on its own and it'll be redundant and silly to say if you've done a good job showing John quivering in a dark corner while a rat scampers about.

Or John unable to eat his vegetables because he heard they contained anthrax.

Or John screeching like a howler monkey when a spiderweb catches his hair.

Or...

You get the idea.

Just my opinion on it, but I feel showing is a much more active and engaging style in any kind of writing (unless encyclopedic etc.).

My rule of thumb is: if telling is tedious, show. If showing is tedious, tell.

A scene has to deliver value for the money, or in this case, the word count. If all it does is get the characters from point A to point B and show me a little scenery, it doesn't justify the space it takes. Tell me in a sentence or two. Better yet, just put them at point B. I'll figure it out. If, on the other hand, there are some interesting personal conflicts along the way, with essential backstory being dropped into entertaining conversations, by all means, do a blow-by-blow.

Tell when the details are not important or pacing is more important.

Show when you want the readers to be immersed in your world -- smell, taste, see, hear, and feel everything your characters do...

I use showing versus telling as a pacing tool in my writing. Basically, the more I tell the faster the pacing becomes. Important, exciting scenes obviously have to be shown, while a boring scene that reveals one small piece of information or takes the characters to a necessary place should obviously be summarized and 'told'. There's a large number of 'gray' scenes in most novels, however; scenes which could be interesting if they were shown, but could also have the relevant information told. An example of one of these 'gray' scenes from one of my current WIPS happens when a supporting POV character goes to ask her teacher a question thats very important to the plot. I could show her entire conversation with her teacher, or I could cut to her telling the MCs what her teacher said a little later. If I wanted to be really cut-throat with the pacing, I could even cut to after she's told everyone the answer and they've made their decision, summarizing both the teacher's answer and the discussion that leads to the decision in a few paragraphs. Showing everything, showing part of it, and showing nothing but the end result could all be the correct approach depending on the pace I wanted for that particular section of that particular book.

Isn't writing wonderfully concrete?

I like this thread, but I wonder if I could toss something into the mix here? In a first person narrative (e.g. my own WIP) the telling, when appropriate, can be as entertaining as the showing, if we bring our MC's humour into it. How the MC/narrator tells the reader of events can enliven the process and make those transitions between action scenes less boring. I realise it is still not the same as taking the reader into the story as an active participant, but having the MC's spin on matters does give the writer a bit more flexibility, I feel. The reader will then (hopefully, if we can do it well enough) 'relive' those memories/transitions, whatever, with the narrator.

Just my two penn'orth.

Hope To The Horizon said:

I use showing versus telling as a pacing tool in my writing. Basically, the more I tell the faster the pacing becomes. Important, exciting scenes obviously have to be shown, while a boring scene that reveals one small piece of information or takes the characters to a necessary place should obviously be summarized and 'told'.

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Precisely.

I wouldn't try to think about showing/telling as a hard-and-fast distinction. After reading enough literature of varying craftsmanship, I've concluded that if a writer switches back and forth between a discrete showing-mode and telling-mode, it's very obvious, and the flow suffers. The best prose fiction recognizes that showing and telling are two points on a continuous spectrum of levels of observation.

The closer you observe the action, the tighter your sense of time. It all comes down to the balance between the depth of your fictional reality and the rhythm of your piece. You want to engage the reader with detail without bogging down things that should progress quickly.

Telling can still be done in an active way. Sometimes it's important to convey information to the reader to help them follow where the story is going. In that case, dialogue is a wonderful tool to convey information in an active way. You'll also reveal something about your characters, like how they say something, or the facial expressions they use.

I'm working on my WIP today, and I happen to be in a scene where a fair amount of information needs to be told before the plot can move forward without getting confusing. I just finished writing the following:

"Not that it's any of your business, but if she were still alive, she'd be proud of what I've become." Wanda wasn't offended by his question. She wanted him to know who and what she was. That's the only way to convince him to help her.

"Hellspawn don't die easy." He appeared to try masking his sympathy with disdain, but it wasn't working. "She was murdered?"

"No." Wanda swallowed a small lump of pain. "She killed herself."

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It's all telling, but I don't think it's boring. The pace is slower in this section, which comes just after these two almost killed each other.

I have never liked the "show don't tell" arguement. First, if I wanted to be a story shower, I'd write movies. I am a storyteller of the old fashioned kind, a rare find these days.

Second thing: When people have read and critiqued my stories and tried to show me a sentence they said was "tell" and give and example of "show" - the sentences were as different as night and day. Pretty prose - but it did not convey the thoughts or feelings that the reader needed to know. As a reader, they would just skim through with no idea that something important had just happened.

Of course, it may just be my difference of perceptions. I don't read minds, and perfer clear writing that says what it means, and means what it says. Don't leave me guessing, I won't guess.

So in final answer, it depends on your audience, and what you are writing. Are you writing about something medical, fitness, or education? Tell will be far more clear, conscise, and to the point (yes, you can still have fun writing these). Si-fi, fantasy, romance, poetry - leave the reader guessing what you mean all you want - it leaves them with more ownership of the story, though their interpretation may never be yours!

Then again, we may all see "show" and "tell" different as well. What one views as "show", another may think is "tell".