> all or mostly telling and hardly any showing
Here's a trick someone once gave me a long time ago. Maybe it could be helpful to you. Pick a scene and underline each line that you think is important to the story. Better, underline with different colors, orange for the crucial ones, yellow for the lesser important ones. Setting different colors might help you determine priorities and how much that part needs be expanded. It's up to you.
Example:
I went to see my grand-mother before the sun went down. It was about to rain, so I brought my red cape along just in case. I sat down with her and asked her if she needed anything. She instead broke into tears and told me how she missed grand-pa. I got out of her house, devastated.
All telling. I picked up five things that could use some showing, with the red ones being those I felt were crucial to the story.
Phase 1: You expand on the story elements you have underlined, adding at least two new elements to the story that weren't previously told. There are no rules on what they are, where and how you place them. Just that they need to add to the conflict, description, or characterization. The only other rule is for every description, you add a new action or reaction, and that action/reaction goes in pairs. In other words, you either have description-reaction, description-action, reaction-action, or action-reaction, and you end up stringing those together. To simplify things further, consider dialogue as action - i.e. the character is doing something: speaking.
Let's just expand the first chunk "asked her if she needed anything" with one new story elements, and you get something like the following:
She held a portait with both arms on her chest. {description} I sensed something was wrong {reaction}[SUP](1)[/SUP].
"How are you today?" I said. "Do you need anything?" {action}
Here I have added one new story element with a description-reaction-action triplet, which is a combination of description-reaction with reaction-action. I could expand further on the portait. Maybe there is some obvious feature that stands out, like a gold frame or something. Be daring.
Here's the same text, expanded with annotations. {A}ction, {D}escription, {R}eaction.
I went to see my grand-mother before the sun went down. It was about to rain, so I brought my red cape along just in case. I sat down with her. {need to bridge the action sequence here}
She held a portait with both arms on her chest {D}. I sensed something was wrong {R}.
"How are you today?" I said. "Do you need anything?" {A}
She looked at me with watery eyes and said, "Oh I miss your grand-father so much." {A}
Spend paper tissue filled the wastebasket besides her, and the excess had spilled onto the floor. From a distance it looked like a big ice cream cone from another world. {D} My throat sored. I'm not used to seeing my grand-mother cry like that. {R} I plucked a new paper tissue from the box and gave it to her. {A}
"He died exactly five years ago, did you remember?" she said. {A}
I had completely forgotten about it. {R} I made a mental note to go to the cemetary on my way back. {A} The old man deserved that much. {R}
{Dialogue needs to be expanded. Ideas: what did she remember best about grand-pa? How the MC relates to that? Let's just put a placeholder for now}
We reminesced on grand-pa. She told me how she met him and how they fell in love at first sight. I told her about my fishing trips with him and the day we brought back that humongous trout. Good times.
We exchanged banalities for a few more minutes, and gave her the pound of butter she asked my mother. {A} I just didn't know what else to say or do. {R} The sun was about to set {D} and I wanted to walk back home during daylight and avoid any encounters with wolves. {R} With the pouring rain outside {D}, I put my red cape back on, then left her house.{A}
...
Phase 2: take notes where the text has kinks and smooth them out. Remove sentences that simply don't fit the story anymore. "I sat down with her" needs to be restated differently; the action sequence feels wonky. The dialogue needs to be expanded. There is a lot to be told about her feelings and how they relate to the MC.
Iterate until you feel the scene is complete, then pick the next scene, repeating the process over. Completion may be a difficult thing to judge. That's when betas and SYW can be useful.
But the thing is, invariably you will have added to the story where it counts and the boring part would have either stayed small or be eliminated completely. At each iteration, you swap 'telling' text with 'showing' where it actually counts. What you end up with is a draft that nails down the story.
Some people might be tempted to start editing at this point. My crappy example certainly needs much improvement. I'd usually wait until I have a chapter complete before, but that's up to you.
Hope this helps.
-cb
