Show, Don't Tell! The Truth of It

by Fragon Calfbreaker

One of first guidelines of writing you may have heard is show, don't tell. I spoke about this briefly in the Inheritance prose article. I will go into detail about this now, and hope you can follow along. Note that if you've very little experience in writing, this article is really not worth much to you (better peruse General Writing Guidelines) since it will only bring up confusing ideas which you may not understand at this point in time.

Okay, now that I've said that...

Part I - Prose

There are many, many different ways to convey a story, and you've probably experienced that over your life right now. Most "fairy tale" books, for example, are written in a "telling", or summarized, manner.

The prince found the golden rose and was elated. Taking his golden armour and his golden horse, he journeyed past the fifteen hills and the ten dancing maids and into the castle of the evil king...

Many classics have much of their prose written in this manner as well.

While a good majority of modern fiction is written in a sort of "inside the flesh" mode, wherein you show everything that's happening to a character at a given point, what he sees, what he experiences, etcetera. This usually goes along with the first or limited third person point of views, which are currently very popular right now.

What you have to understand is that there is no right way, in that general sense. Depending on your story, you can choose to tell an event, to show an event, and so on and so forth. This, however, does not mean that you should be lazy and just choose what mode you think you'd like to do right now. When I meant depending on your story, I REALLY do mean depending on your story. I mean look at what you want to do, what images you want to convey, how your story is going to flow or has flown the past few pages.

How do you decide what to do? Well, as a general rule of thumb, if the scene is very important to the story line, then you should show it. If the scene is not very important, then you can tell it. If the scene is not important at all, you could probably remove it, although again that's your decision to make.

You can also use this method to purposely mislead a reader. For example, you could have an important scene 'told' by means of the character encountering the story through someone else (i.e. Silas heard that the king had been assassinated by a man in a black suit. Why this had any bearing to the Yagrithan affair, he wasn't sure...), for the sole purpose of making the reader believe that that is what happened, when in fact something else did. You have to make sure you are not just leading the readers in circles though if you choose to go this route--set down certain things in order for them to go "AHHHH" when they finally get to the real meat, rather than flipping back and going, "But you said here..." There's a difference between brilliant confusion and genuine confusion.

Choosing whether you should show or tell is also crucial for the pacing of your story. Again, so as not to go into a long tirade, consider this: "telling" makes for a faster pace, while "showing" slows down the pace. When you get good at this you can make the reader feel as if he's going through a well-rehearsed play.

Part II - Prose Again

Yeah, again, I've touched on this with the Paolini prose article previously. But I want to ingrain it into your mind that showing and telling as I've written about above is different from the showing and telling I will talk about now. Above, I am merely talking about differences in detail and so on. Now I will talk about the manner in which this prose is presented.

You can "show" and still tell, after all. A good example is Paolini's prose. He "tells" us when a character is feeling agitated, apologetic, and so on. This is not a good habit to get into (in general). When you start to rely on "telling" the reader, the reader will often get bored and his mind will wander because it's no longer being "exercised". When you start "telling" a reader what he should be feeling or even the morals of the particular situation and so on, you are putting a choker and a leash on him and dragging him around, showing that you don't trust his intelligence enough to let him come to his own decision.

You don't have to be long and detailed to show, either. Actually--less is more when it comes to writing.

Here is an example of prose that is "told":

Silas felt horrible and guilty about what he had done. The war was evil--so many people were lost to it.

To contrast:

Silas saw a body lying face-down in a pile of rubble and carefully walked to it. He turned it over to its side and a pang of grief entered him as he recognized the boy that he so cruelly turned away the night before. He glanced up and saw other bodies littered through the streets.

Notice how in the second example, the reader is allowed to make his or her own decision about the events and about Silas's feelings. This is on a smaller scale. The story telling can be even more effective if you "show" things throughout the whole story line, rather than confining feelings and actions in segments (another side-effect of using an outline). Which leads us to the next portion of this topic...

Part III - Don't Be a Tour Guide

A common trend between fantasy writers is their eagerness to throw histories, geographies, political intrigues, and so on at the reader at every given opportunity. Many prologues and beginning chapters are so riddled with these things that they become, to an extent, unreadable. Many writers claim it's done to create a setting or to give the reader an idea of the world before they settle down to read. Others are unaware they are doing it, in their enthusiasm to show the reader how much work they've done.

Unfortunately this type of storytelling turns off a lot of readers. Nobody really wants to know why the land of Fantasia is the way it is before they've had a chance to care about anything in the story (unless the story of why the land of Fantasia is the way it is is particularly engaging). And the fact is...it's just unecessary. It drags your story down like leaden weights, and will create a flat image of your world rather than a rounded one.

By "showing" your reader parts of your world and its histories at a time, rather than throwing it to them at first light, you are actually creating more depth than your words alone can carry. I often refer to this technique as the "blank space" technique. Do I, for example, need to show you a picture of a whole elephant for you to figure out that the picture is of an elephant? No--I can just show you the trunk. Your brain will fill in the gaps. If I show you the trunk, the tail, the legs...well...that creates a more vivid picture of the elephant, won't it? Make you feel as if you're right there beside it since you can see every wart and every skin fold rather than if I just showed you the whole picture (in which case you'd probably just see, gee, an elephant, and lose interest).

This can be particularly effective if your viewpoint character already comes in knowing the world like any other, rather than an ignorant farmboy (especially one that's been transported through time). That way they can make comments or "see" things that can hint to the reader that there's more to the world than meets the eye. Perhaps he is walking in the market and he sees a man advertising a bard's performance in an inn later that night. Perhaps he is browsing through a shelf and sees a book he read last year. Instead of starting a chapter off as telling us about a war, perhaps the character can be sleeping and he wakes up to the sound of gunfire; perhaps his father comes into the house with a wound and says, "The revolt has begun."

By showing us these things, the writer is not only giving the impression that he knows more about the world than we think, he is also etching the images so deep in our minds that they become real. And he is doing it in such a way that we actually care about what's happening.

This method works equally well for building character depth, but we will discuss that in extent in this article.