Show Vs. Tell

I'm no expert but for that last part, "show" could be a call from Headquarters regarding her complaint, which would show us what her problem was, as well as letting us see a bit of her personality (e.g. she's the kind of person that doesn't suffer fools/doesn't put up with neglegence etc.)

She wriggled to settle herself into her Plushy Princess Pilot’s Chair, installed after she’d been on a waiting list for six months. She’d tested dozens of models before choosing this one, but something just didn’t feel right.

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^^^That's show for "She had a special chair because she was so choosy" or similar.

"But something just didn't feel right" is tell, really, but I like the mix.

Telling is definitely useful sometimes. Mostly because you just wouldn't show absolutely everything. That'd take ages!

defyalllogic said:

i don't think i have it down. i realize it's one of those things that requires practice but, I'm never clear if i'm practicing the right one.

It telling NEVER Okay? how do you tell the difference. sometimes it is very clear, other times...

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Yes, it's not only OK, it's sometimes mandatory.

How to tell the difference?

If you describe everything actively, is there any new, interesting and exciting information imparted to the reader that the reader HAS to know right now?

If yes, then show it.

If no, then tell it.

Mandatory stuff that needs to be mentioned for continuity is a good candidate for telling, especially if you can sum it up in a sentence or two and lose nothing for doing it.

Just as a guideline.

There have been some other discussions of show versus tell around the boards. If you can't find them by searching (because they are commonly used words on here) scroll back through the threads in Novels, Basic Writing, etc.

But, in the meantime, I could think of two recent threads that might be helpful:

Discussion of “Telling”:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172799

Show vs. tell in Queries:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173053

While the second one is query specific, the examples would be demonstrative of going from telling and boring to showing and more interesting in manuscripts, as well as queries.

I think the primary difference between showing and telling is about the emotional side of the writing - often when you are telling, you are merely imparting information. And there are definitely places for that in a manuscript. But when you are showing, you force your reader to subconsciously question and intuite and anticipate what is happening, and to actually feel the character's emotions and reactions.

~suki

I try to avoid telling unless it's absolutely necessary - if there's background information that needs to be known but can't be integrated easily into the text, or if it would speed up the pace without losing the intensity.

Showing is much more vivid / evocative than telling. It doesn't put everything right in front of the reader, and leaves it for them to understand the text. Ultimately if there's good usage of showing, I tend to find that the story is much more satisfying to read.

I'm going to try to come up with an example. (keep in mind I'm coming up with this crap off the top of my head) First, telling.

Mark was a quiet person. He regularly spends time alone and doesn't really socialise that much. Not that he's a bad person - people have no problem with him, but he just doesn't identify with them. His flatmates, John and Kim in particular, wonder why Mark chooses to be alone rather than hang out.

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This passage gets the necessary information across to the reader, but it's all abstractions. The reader is fronted with concepts, rather than images. It's unimaginative.

Let's look at how I'd get the same information across in a much more showy way.

Mark walked into the kitchen. John and Kim were sitting around the small table, eating bowls of Cheerios and watching the TV.
"Hey Mark. How you doing? You're like a stranger to me!" John looked up from his bowl and watched Mark walk towards the fridge.
"I'm good. Went back to my parents for a bit." Mark opened the fridge, and grabbed a can of Carlsberg Export. "They were missing me."
"When's the last time we went out?"
"Can't remember. A while back, I guess."
"Had a blast." John returned to his bowl and poked at a Cheerio floating in the milk.
Mark started to walk back to the door.

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etc etc etc

You get the idea. If I kept going on in that way, the same information would have been shown to the reader, but it creates a situation. Nothing about the character is blatantly said - it lets the action and dialogue show for itself. If the information is shown, there's no reason for it to be explicitly told.

Telling is useful. It's just not evocative.

Show v Tell is not an absolute rule. It is usually better to show things, but showing things can also impact on your pace and put too much time on something which is really minor in your story.

I generally deliberately use tell when I feel that the reader would be bored if I sat there and told them all that guff.

You'll drive yourself nuts with this, defyalllogic

Relax.

If two characters drive from somewhere to Boston and nothing important happens en route then on the face of it it's obviously not necessary or relevant for you to detail any of what happens en route. In that case, simply 'tell me' Two hours later they arrived at Boston. Or whatever.

But if the characters talk about things on the way and it's important and relevant to the unfolding story that I know who said what where and when and how etc., then show me by relating what happened during that portion of the journey. Give me the dialogue and whatever actions are related to that.

EVERYTHING in the book is really 'telling' insofar as you are 'telling' or 'letting me know' what's happening -but when we talk about 'telling and/or showing' it's a question of degree.

Show if detail or more information is needed and tell if it is not necessary to dwell on something. Mind you, you may wish to tell me about the beauty of a city for ten pages - but that's your choice, and anyway if it's boring, folk simply won't read it.

To show or tell any given event or action is your choice. Read how other writers do it, and that plus experience, will guide and teach you.

But don't sweat blood over it.

defyalllogic said:

i think i confuse Narrative with telling. things like "sitting at the table eating a bowl or Cherios" and "when Mark entered the kitchen his roommates were halfway through breakfast"

are they different?

it is simply the craft of mixing the two fluidly? in the adverb thread (some people caution to never use adverbs ever) it sounded to me that the realistic approach is "just a dab will do". Never is unrealistic and all the time is gross. is it the same with telling?

is all "he did" "he went" "he verb" considered Telling?

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It's a matter of details... how much detail? Do you say "they had breakfast" (tell) or "they had cereal and orange juice for breakfast" (still tell) or "they chewed on their cereal like cows chewing grass, every crunch hard, then gulped down the orange juice until the last drop disappeared from the glasses."

In reality, everything is "tell" in written fiction. Somehow the writer has to "tell" us what's going on since we can't really see or hear anything (unlike in movies). Still, it comes down to details: the more sensory details (sight, sound, taste, feel, smell...) the more you put your readers in that scene, so they feel like they're there instead of just letting someone tell them what they were supposed to see, etc.

Too much detail (show) slows down the pace and can become tedious. Do you really want to describe every bite and chomp and chew and swallow? Is it okay to just tell us "they had breakfast" and move on? Absolutely. When something doesn't call for the details, by all means just summarize and move on. Don't bore us to death with the details.

But when something is important, or at least relevant, do show us. If the way they eat breakfast somehow reveals characters, for example, show us how Reba likes to lick her lips when she drinks her juice...

Otherwise, just say Reba had breakfast... or better yet, don't tell us at all, if we really don't need to know.

Another way to look at show vs. tell is this:

FACTS vs. JUDGMENT

When you're describing the facts, then you're showing us: She clenched her jaw and pounded her fists on the table. Then she screamed.

When you're giving us a judgment, telling us what to think or feel, then it's tell: She was angry by his betrayal.


The rest, like I said, is just level of details... summarization ("she had filed complaints with the headquarters") vs. expanding on it (show us exactly what she did and what she said).

Telling is fast: She led him to the water tower from which Jerry had jumped. Or, He was trying to break up slowly, hoping his lack of interest would discourage her. Or, She explained all about the porcelain monkey and the guacamole.

Showing is vivid, but slow: She grabbed his arm and pulled him across the grass until they were under the shadow of the water tank. "There! See that second bar? That's where he jumped! They wouldn't even let me see him afterward." She was crying. "They wouldn't even let me see him."

Both are useful. But when you tell, and tell, and tell, it gets old and boring very fast.

The worst, in my opinion, is when a writer shows something and then doesn't trust the reader to get it, but insists on telling it, too: "I hate you!" she screamed, really angry. Or, He was hesitant to approach her. "Bobbi, um, there's something... Uh, I need to ask you..."

• Kal put a marker on her map to represent the planet taking up most of the space outside of her observation window.

Active writing, in Kal’s POV. She’s doing something in that moment, and we assume that she had a reason for doing it, and once done will make use of what she’s done in some way.

• She wriggled to settle herself into her Plushy Princess Pilot’s Chair,

We’re again in her viewpoint, as she prepares to do something, so as with the previous line we’re in real time, as she’s doing it.

But: Having accomplished her task we expect her to observe and react to what next has her attention. Why? Because if it’s a series of “she did this… she turned that… she saw…” It’s boring because we don’t know how she feels about it and what made her do it.

• installed after she’d been on a waiting list for six months.

And here’s where you crash and burn. Why should the reader give a damn how long she waited for it—especially when we don’t know why she wanted it, what it does for her, and what it has to do with the decisions she’s not making. We want to know what's happening, not what happened.

This comes from you, and takes the reader into the immutable past. It’s not only telling, it doesn’t develop character, set the scene, or move the plot, and so has no place in the story.

• She’d tested dozens of models before choosing this one, but something just didn’t feel right.

Same as above, but added to that, it literally says nothing meaningful. We don’t know why she felt a new chair was necessary. We don’t now what her choices were, what they did and didn’t offer, or what didn’t feel right, so it’s like saying, “some.” To a reader it’s indeterminate.

• That idiot mechanic likely installed it wrong,

What idiot mechanic? Which “it” do you mean? Why “likely?”

Here’s the thing: You’ve switched to telling the story from the outside in, so we’re in your POV, and hearing what interests you. But we want to hear the story from the inside out, and know what interests her, and what she thinks is important. And the one thing we know for certain, is that she’s not thinking about how long she had to wait, and how many test seatings she had.

Here’s a good rule: You can talk about nothing the situation doesn’t have her paying attention to. And when she pays attention to something she has to react to it, even if her reaction is to deliberately ignore it. Thus, you don’t tell us what she can see, but what she’s seeing, and about to react to.

Tell = you tell the reader what's going on: her foot hurt
Show = the reader infers what's going on: The skin on her heel was red; tiny blisters had burst, dampening the soul of her shoe and she eased her self down onto the bank. 'I need a break.' (using narrtive and dialogue to 'show' her foot hurts)

But it's not as clear cut as that. Sometimes a telling action can be being used in a showing way too...

Kal put a marker on her map

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Show (action)

to represent the planet taking up most of the space outside of her observation window.

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Show and tell. Tell (summary of why the action took place) Show because she's being shown to view the world as nothing more than a dot on the landscape, ordered, compact etc (you're building character)...

She wriggled

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show (action)

to settle herself into her Plushy Princess Pilot’s Chair,

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show and tell. tell (summation of why previous action took place) show (tying back to previous sentence 'Plushy Princess' sees her almost at the top of her world, same with 'Pilot's Chair', so it's building on character too)

installed after she’d been on a waiting list for six months.

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Show and tell (continuing summation, but the telling fact of 'on a waiting list for six months' also 'shows' character and impatience and determnation to get to where she is.)

She’d tested dozens of models before choosing this one,

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Tell ('tested dozens' and 'before choosing', you're telling us she's 'choosy' (the reader doesn't really infer meaning, because it's there in your words))

but something just didn’t feel right.

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show and tell (you're telling the reader directly what she's feeling BUT showing she's exceptionally picking without saying 'she's exceptionally picky')

That idiot mechanic likely installed it wrong,

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Show (free thought here shows character contempt of a person without saying 'contempt')

good thing she had filed a complaint with Headquarters. They probably thought they’d gotten away with just some harsh words.

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Show and tell (you're continuing character (she's a complainer because she 'complians' using 'harsh' words, only shifting more into edging towards telling the reader because you're using those telling words)


I like the argument that as soon as you put pen to paper you commit an act of telling. Your writing then just has degrees of direct and indirect tellling. It's much easier to say to a new writer, don't tell me directly 'the garden's beautiful' do it indirectly without using the word beautiful, go tell me what beautifull is to you: huge bumble bees that defy gravity as they hum from flower to flower etc. Therefore you build on reader inference and you get them to reach the conclusion the garden's beautiful.

I have the same show vs. tell problem, I think.

'Tell' is for relaying information quickly. Best used for facts:

'Mary had a dog' is a fact, not someone's opinion. I don't need to show everybody that she has a dog as it is not that important.

Or for a plot point: 'Dennis was the most attractive boy in the school.' Now, I might see hairy tall men as being very attractive, but a lot of people wouldn't and so they wouldn't accept that statement. This allows the reader to project their own image of attractiveness onto Dennis.

'Show' takes up more time. 'Show' is best used for moments where telling would be a judgement:

'Mary was obnoxious' is a judgement. Perhaps someone else may not think of Mary as obnoxious. Instead of allowing the reader to come to a conclusion, I've just told them without any evidence to suggest she is obnoxious.

This would be show:
'Mary played her music full-blast at 3AM. She butted in on conversations and frequently swore.'

Now at least the reader can come to a conclusion that she is obnoxious.

The problem with show is that it can quickly fall into either cliches or purple prose. This is normally because the character or setting doesn't actually look like how it's being described, but the writer is using the typical images and associations so the reader will come to the 'right' conclusion.

Sure, you can tell sometimes. There are situations when it's better to give one told line than to give five sentences to show it. It depends mostly on how and why and where. I like to think of telling as anything where the author is butting their nose in to explain things to the reader instead of painting a picture for them and letting them figure it out.

And you supplied three great examples, actually, because I think they sum up the yes, no, and sometimes, aspects of show vs tell.

Kal put a marker on her map to represent the planet taking up most of the space outside of her observation window.
The feels a little told to me because of the "to represent." You're not saying what she does so much as why she does it, telling me intent. She did X for Y reason. But I think you'd probably be fine with this kind of told sentence depending on what else was there. It's a matter of context. If she's been talking to a room full of people about this planet in particular, and then turns and does this, it would flow right by the reader. But if there was a lot of told prose before this, it might not work.

She wriggled to settle herself into her Plushy Princess Pilot’s Chair, installed after she’d been on a waiting list for six months. She’d tested dozens of models before choosing this one, but something just didn’t feel right.
Again, it's the telling me her intent here that makes this first line read as told. "to settle." You could make it "she settled into her..." or "she wriggled into..." to make it more immediate and in her head. The "installed after she’d been on a waiting list for six months." has a told feel as well, because it feels more like the author telling me she waited, not her thinking about how long she waited if that makes sense. That's why "She’d tested dozens of models before choosing this one, but something just didn’t feel right." feels fine to me, because this sounds like something she's thinking about, and has more of a sense of her voice in it. It doesn't feel like an authorial comment, but as internalization.

That idiot mechanic likely installed it wrong, good thing she had filed a complaint with Headquarters. They probably thought they’d gotten away with just some harsh words.
This reads fine to me. This is her thinking and judging the situation. I don't feel the author here.

I agree that every time we write words for a story, we're telling on some level. Part of the problem with the rule "show don't tell" is that it's typically ambiguous, and can mean different kinds of things (I discovered four when I surveyed writers about what show-don't-tell meant to them; those findings and a discussion are here). The fact is, you can't show everything, and neither would you want to. When you demonstrate something about a character, rather than telling the reader about it, readers are more likely to believe you because they've seen that character doing what they do and have drawn the conclusion independently. However, that involves work on the part of the reader, and certain things about characters, and stories, are not important enough to merit that kind of work on the part of the reader. "All showing" would bog the story down. Furthermore, there are examples that look like "telling" that are simultaneously "showing" - in particular, showing something about the character of the person/narrator doing the telling. It's good if each sentence you include in a story is doing more than one thing - telling and showing, or describing a location and demonstrating something about character and world culture, etc. It's important to concentrate on what information is most relevant to drive the story forward (I have a post on description and relevance here, if you're curious).

I hope that helps.

• 'Mary had a dog' is a fact, not someone's opinion. I don't need to show everybody that she has a dog as it is not that important.

Of course it’s important. You say nothing that doesn’t develop character, set the scene, or move the plot (hopefully more than one of these at a time). Given that, the fact that you specifically mention the dog says the reader needs to remember it for later.

On the other hand, if you simply want her to have a dog to show her character, you have her pet, or feed, or even shout at the dog while she’s doing or talking about something else. That way the dog becomes enrichment for a necessary line. Showing doesn't mean the author describing something in the scene. It means placing the reader on the scene as the protagonist. We need to show them life, not vacation photos.

• Dennis was the most attractive boy in the school

Stop and think about that. In whose opinion? Surely you can’t believe that every single girl in the school thought him that? But that’s what you told the reader. And of more importance, you said it, not the character who thinks he's handsome.

If the character in your story says Dennis is the best looking boy that’s an emotional judgment, and meaningful to that character and the story. If you say it, it’s no more emotionally meaningful than learning the color of the classroom.

• Show takes up more time.

No, it doesn’t, I’m afraid. In fact, it takes a lot less, because the reader is deducing rather than being informed. If I say, “An errant gust of wind exposed skinny goose-pimpled thighs,” I’ve told you the weather is chilly, that the character is probably wearing a lightweight, and fairly short skirt, that she’s not dressed for the chill, that she has skinny legs, and that the rest of her is probably the same. In using skinny as against slim, or thin, I set a mode for her character, making her less desirable. By mentioning unattractive thighs rather than talking about her arms, I’ve made her sexually unattractive. And all that took only ten words.

• This would be show:
Mary played her music full-blast at 3AM. She butted in on conversations and frequently swore.

Sorry, again, but that’s the author, talking to the reader, directly, reciting facts, not involving the reader, emotionally. That’s telling.

Here’s one sample of the difference between show and tell. Which would you choose?

1. Fact-based:

John was sitting on the couch when a bullet came through the glass, narrowly missing his head. This was the third attempt on his life in the past week.
He threw himself to the floor and crawled toward the hall, and safety. Once there he pulled his pistol from its holster and went in search of his attacker.

2. Emotion-based:

The window by John's head exploded into shards, sending him diving to the floor.

Shit... again? Three times you try to kill me? Deciding that the man had persistence but lousy aim, John hurried to the hall, wincing as the shattered glass cut his knees and palms. Someone was going to pay for that with pain of their own.

Coming to his feet he pulled Beatrice from her holster and headed for the back door, releasing the safety. Okay, you bastard, you finally have me angry. No more "turn the other cheek" from me. [/I]

A thing or two to note:

• I didn't mention the window being broken by a bullet, the reader deduces that (or assumes it’s anything they care to, an option which can make it more meaningful to the reader), and in doing so becomes a participant.

• I didn't tell the reader he crawled, they deduce that by the damage he suffered.

• Each thing the character does is in response to a real-world stimulus, and in acting on it he influences the next stimulus he will act on. This is what makes the scene-clock tick forward.

• I deliberately gave the pistol a name because both the fact of it and the name speak of his personality. Had he been different I might have spoken of the caliber of the pistol, or something else that demonstrated that personality. His thoughts, too, fit the kind of person who names his pistol Beatrice. Put together, not only do we learn of the event, we learn of him, and his emotional response. Is there an entire history related to the shot being fired? Sure, but the action is what matters. Stopping that to have me come on stage and say, “Let me tell you a little about the character and what went before,” would kill any excitement I may have generated with the shot.

Lots of good explanations on here. I think you probably have it down by now, so I won't get into the details much. But I will say that this is the kind of thing that can drive a beginning writer nuts. Especially if you're in a writing group with other beginners. I found that at this stage writers were extremely nit-picky about this when critiquing and I got very confused by all the different opinions.

I summarize (tell) when something's not important (i.e. if time passes and no new real information is revealed). I show it in real-time as a scene when a character learns new information and reacts to it. The book Make a Scene by Jordan Rosanfeld really helped me make this distinction.

If I find that I'm summarizing (telling) for paragraphs, I have a scene hiding in there & need to show.

Show paints a picture in the reader's mind. Tell is just words.

Tell is sometimes necessary, but not very often.

I quite liked the fact-based one actually, although it sounds amusingly nonchalant at the start. It would work if the character was controlled.
The show one is too long- someone shoots a bullet at you, you're not going to have time to think, or be that coherent. However it's good in that it has more voice- that's the main problem with telling, apart from running the risk of patronising the reader.

Mary could just be talking about her dog to make idle conversation. It could be there to show compatability, or incompatability. The insignificance could in itself be significant.

The main reason that excessive show annoys me is that the writer doesn't trust the power of an action so they have to add unnecessary adjectives.

'Why do you spend all those nights with him? Why do you always try to touch him whenever you see him?'
'I love you,' she whispered. He walked past her, opened the front door, and left. And she knew that he would never come back.

Stanislavski, famous for Method acting, said that in a moment of crisis we revert to the very basic. There's something to be said for minimalism.

I think this is another one of those overblown rules meant to steer amateur writers when in this instance it seems to be hindering you. There's been plenty of good advice so I won't go into a lot of detail, but I'd say "show don't tell" is another way of saying let dramatic action do the heavy lifting of your narrative. Telling is as essential as any other part of the narrative; how else would we ever get background, or explanation, except through the hokey inter-dialogue "as you know, bob" nonsense? The important thing to take from the concept is that fiction is an abstraction through dramatic action. Dramatic action is profoundly more efficient at delivering your story than an explanation and summation by a narrator (tell) is at attempting the same feat. Telling is interwoven because dramatic action sometimes lacks precise clarification and is not fast enough to keep your pacing appropriate to the plot/scene/whatever.

As to your example, I honestly see nothing wrong with it as it stands. It seems to be an appropriate mix, IMO.

If you ask me, I think you're resting too heavily on the rule rather than trusting and fully unleashing your artistic instinct, which, in this case, I would say is doing just fine.

One great example John Brandon made at a writer's conference about show v. tell:

(paraphrasing) If you tell me 'Watch, this guy can throw a football 100 yards' and then he can only throw it 70 yards, I would get a bad impression of that person. But if I just walked onto a football field and watched someone throw a football 70 yards, I would probably find that really impressive.

Specifically he was referring to using tell as a crutch to characterization. "Bob was really funny. All his friends laughed at his jokes." Followed by a crappy joke that the reader doesn't actually find funny; this is a discrepancy between the (lack of) work your drama is doing and what you're expecting the reader to take as truth.

But more widely it is just another example of how the rule came about in the first place, which is to tell writers, show us your story, move the plot and us, primarily through dramatic action.

I'm not convinved show and tell has its roots as just a ficional term, TLO. When was the first time you came across it?

I know for me that it was back in primary school some *coughs* years ago. Lol

Show and Tell session: You'd take a toy, show it the class then 'tell' the class something about it. your mates would 'see' the detail, then get the emotional via the verbal. It works no different in fiction: you show the teddy: missing eye, patchy fur, fluff coming out the seems...then you tell the reader something about it: Jack was Amy's favourite because... (They both work together to expand/contract the moment -- just like in school (mainly for the teacher dying to get it over with!))

somewhere along the line it has got perverted 'show, don't tell'. Imagine the fun a kid would have just holding up a toy and saying nothing about it....