How do I apply show not tell into third person?

Without reading an excerpt it's difficult to advise you, and you don't have enough posts for us to give you a proper critique.

In general terms, though, I'd try to show the characters' physical reactions to things: so, show them shoving things aside if they're angry, show them bunching up a handkerchief in their hand if they're upset. That sort of thing. It shows their emotions without you saying, "She was upset" and so on.

Narrate, don't explain. Don't spoonfeed emotions to the reader; give the reader the scenes and character interactions, and let those carry the weight. It really has nothing to do with the narrative POV. I don't know exactly what you mean by "emotional descriptions" in your first-person narratives, but if you are doing a lot of "I was sad, I was afraid, I was angry" kinds of things, that's a problem in first person as well as in third person.

caw

Show is about the broader picture, a lot of times.

Emotion is in every word you use, every sentence, every piece of imagery or metaphor. Emotion is about mood and atmosphere, and although it can be bolstered by occasional descriptions or elucidated through direct internal narrative, those should be pillars to support a broader narrative construction, rather than isolated sections here and there. If that makes sense. Ymmv.

AshlynnHeart said:

I wrote my project in the third person limited. Everything feels like I'm telling and not showing despite my efforts to do the reverse. What can I do to change that? Usually, I write in the first person and I like to add emotional descriptions into the mix. But, it's not turning out well and just makes the situation worse than showing what the character is going through.

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Without seeing a sample, it's hard to know what the problem is.

Showing involves writing "real-time" description, action, emotion. If you can do that in first-person POV, you can do it in third-limited.

AshlynnHeart said:

That clear some things up. How do I know when that bit is too descriptive before it becomes telling, again? Avoid long-ish sentences? Sentence length has little if anything to do with showing or telling. Around dialogue how much should I use showing throughout a conversation between two people?

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How do your favorite authors do it?

There's also nothing inherently wrong with tell.

I use a lot of tell, on a sentence level. Sometimes it needs paring back.

I think tell begins to feel like a problem when it isn't matched up to the text. So it's fine for your character to say, Gosh I'm sad, if that's how they think. But if they then go around acting cheerful and unfussed, it feels like telling because we see no evidence of the character being sad.

In Sidney Sheldon's or Danielle Steel's fiction it's like 90% tell.
I don't mind. No one minds. Well, within the intended reader demographic. Outside it people will mind, but knowing who you're writing for is half the battle.

yes! fairytales are basically all tell.

The ogre got angry at the king during their daily chess match and bashed him over the head. Realising he was now guilty of murder, the ogre fled in a panic. The king's daughter, Princess Such&Such was deeply offended by this rudeness and went to fetch her sword. She arrived at the ogre's house and promptly cut his head off, thus sating her consuming need for vengeance.

etc etc. No emotion! Very little show! Just, People did X and felt Y about it. Not always appropriate for every story, not by a mile, but not inherently wrong.

Such & Such were a most profitable agency in the city of N, but the siblings who managed it raised many an eyebrow in certain circles.
While Goldman Sach was a man of zeal and somewhat extravagant in his choice of hats, it was his sister, Princess Such, who was the talk of town, for she was known to visit fencing classes on a weekly basis, and dressed in trousers at that.

Echoing that telling isn't always bad. There are good reasons why it's given as advice, but it doesn't mean that everything you write has to be "show" or that "tell" is bad. Aside from anything else, there's no consensus on what exactly is show and what is tell to begin with - though reading a range of different writers opinions on the subject can give you lots of ideas about different ways to show stuff which you can apply to your own writing.

Personally I think a more fundamental bit of advice is "don't bore or confuse the reader" and all other advice is just ways to help you not bore or confuse the reader. Too much tell and not enough show can lead to boring writing that lacks depth, hence the advice. There will be times when it's better to tell, and as long as you're not being boring, it's fine.

As a start, whatever the character feels "in their heart" is written as acted out (angry: kicks a trash bin - tired: sags down a wall - excited: drags fingers down face). Not "He felt angry", but "He sent a trash bin flying into a nearby bicycle".

Observe giddy, hyperactive, ever-angry, or overly emotional people. Those who make a show of their feelings. You always know their mood based on their actions alone; they don't need to tell you how they're feeling.

Ravioli said:

As a start, whatever the character feels "in their heart" is written as acted out (angry: kicks a trash bin - tired: sags down a wall - excited: drags fingers down face). Not "He felt angry", but "He sent a trash bin flying into a nearby bicycle".

Observe giddy, hyperactive, ever-angry, or overly emotional people. Those who make a show of their feelings. You always know their mood based on their actions alone; they don't need to tell you how they're feeling.

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Would like to add a caveat to that: not everyone shows their emotions in an overt way. So that could work for some characters, but not for others. There are a lot of different ways to communicate emotion.

AshlynnHeart said:

That clear some things up. How do I know when that bit is too descriptive before it becomes telling, again? Avoid long-ish sentences? Around dialogue how much should I use showing throughout a conversation between two people?

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One piece of advice that helped me perry down my telling was that you don't need to show/tell everything in a scene.

You don't need to describe every single piece of furniture in a room. You yourself don't might skim everything in a room but you only focus on a few objects. So write the same way. Focus your descriptive effort on a small number of objects. Something that enhances the mood of the scene. Then move on. The rest of the description will happen naturally as the character experiences his/her/its environment.

BethS said:

Would like to add a caveat to that: not everyone shows their emotions in an overt way. So that could work for some characters, but not for others. There are a lot of different ways to communicate emotion.

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That's a great point. I think it's also important to not spoon feed our readers and instead let them infer emotion based on expressions / actions of another. Let the POV character observe but not make obvious deductions, just describe what he sees.

She pursed her lips and frowned slightly as she lowered her gaze to the floor, then slowly nodded. "Yes; I suppose that could be the case."

AshlynnHeart said:

I meant showing feeling of emotion and explaining their emotions in their mind and why they should do what they do.

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I don't see where anyone pointed out that you certainly can go into a character's thoughts in 3rd person. Take care to stay in only one person's head per scene, lest you stray into headhopping territory.


Griselda crouched in the balcony of the church, wiping her eyes on a scarf someone left behind. He's really going to marry her. That son of a bitch is really going to do it.

The vows floated up to the rafters, every word a crystal clear dagger in her heart. They were officially husband and wife. She wanted to puke.

Carrie did a nice job of showing in third.

You have good feedback.

I didn't see anyone mention that showing can help the reader get into the character's head a little more firmly.

The tang of bile at the back of her throat tends to evoke more of a sympathetic response from the reader than She felt ill. So, showing can reduce narrative distance.

Fairy tales tend to be distant. I liked imagining Cinderella at the ball when I was little, and I certainly wanted a magic lady who would give me a dress, but I never felt like I was Cinderella or that she was really in that much danger.

Lakey said:

......“Jane grew more and more agitated as the conversation wore on.” <— might be telling

“Jane began tearing little bits off the cocktail napkin.” [then, after some more dialogue] “There was nothing left of the napkin but a heap of tiny shreds on the bar.” <— might be showing Jane’s growing agitation

Does that help at all?

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Yes. It helped me a great deal. As I read your example I flashed to one specific scene in my manuscript and thought 'that is exactly how I did it.' Thanks, I feel much better about the whole concept.

I'm struggling with third person too. Here's me and my beta reader:


"She felt cold." <----- I don't like this! Show, don't tell!

edit: "She rubbed her hands together." <---- Okay, better, but what is she thinking????

edit: "She rubbed her hands together. Wow, I've never been this cold in my life." <------ You use italics too much. It's jarring and pulls me out of the story.

edit: "She rubbed her hands together. She'd never been this cold in her life." <---- Eh, I'm just not connecting with this character. Too much filtering. I'm not in her head.


The struggle is real...

Emotional Craft of fiction by Donald Maass Good trick can be to aim for the unexpected reaction or thought.

She forced a smile and made an effort not to shiver despite the subarctic wind. (showing prideful character, local temperature, etc. also apologies for slapdash sentence - Sparverius does this sort of thing better than me!)

Harlequin said:

Emotional Craft of fiction by Donald Maass Good trick can be to aim for the unexpected reaction or thought.

She forced a smile and made an effort not to shiver despite the subarctic wind. (showing prideful character, local temperature, etc. also apologies for slapdash sentence - Sparverius does this sort of thing better than me!)

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I just got that book a week ago! Thanks to a recommendation I found here. It's amazing, and I'm continuing to work with it, but I really struggle applying things I learn from "how to" types of books. I understand exactly what Mass is saying (emotion is important!), I read the examples he provides (look how Twain and King did it! see?), but... then what?

I'm trying to figure out precisely what my roadblock is. I know I am completely inside my character's head. But what's elusive is, how to convey those thoughts without blatantly stating them?


She wished she were anywhere but here.

Oh, if I only I could be anywhere but here.

She looked all around, thinking about how any other place would be better than this.

She thought about the beach... or the spa... or whale gutting in the arctic. Anything would be better than this.


But everything is filtering, or italics, or too on the nose. Yes, I think the unexpected reaction is a great technique, and I see how your sentence is doing a lot. But like any technique, it can't be applied to every single thought, right?

I'm not really the best person to talk about emotion--I tend to have far too much distance in my own writing >.> which has to be rudely beaten out of me by my very-patient CPs.

But I guess I would say that it's not really about applying that to every single thought, so much as every single thing *is* a thought that is coloured by the MC.

The example you gave in the post above is fine, just incomplete. It's a negative space statement--she doesn't want to be here, fair enough. So why doesn't she want to be here, and where does she want to go instead?

She looks around--what does she see? Dog turds, potholes, rusty fences, empty high street, broken cars, something that she fixates on as being unpleasant? What's appealing about the beach, or the spa? Just a change of scene, the weather, etc? What makes *you* want to leave somewhere, or go somewhere?

(I appreciate that was just a single line, though, and you could easily flesh it out with more lines--not everything fits into one sentence.)