We’ve all heard the adage, “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s everywhere, a warning to writers that this is a rule that without a doubt can’t be broken. Right? Well, the reality is that it’s much more nuanced than that.
If we showed everything that happened in a story, books would be thousands of pages long. There’d be no way to streamline the plot or our character’s internal dialogue, and it would take forever to get from scene to scene.
The secret is that “Show” and “Tell” lie on a spectrum. Both have their place in storytelling, and too much of either results in equally overwhelming overshowing or infodumping.
But how do we get to the sweet spot? To the balance between showing and telling, that results in a well-paced book that feels lived in?
Let’s get into it!
The difference between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’
One of our favorite quotes about ‘show, don’t tell’ is from Jennie Nash of the Author Accelerator. She says:
“‘Show, don’t tell’ is one of the most often misunderstood pieces of writing advice. Everyone thinks it’s literal—show us what people and places and things look like—but it’s not. It’s not about showing us the color of the sky and the time on the clock on the wall and the bowl of lemons on the table. It’s about showing us the meaning of the moment. It’s about giving us the emotion behind the people, places, and things. It’s about showing the reader what it feels like to be in the character’s skin as things unfold.”
In other words,
SHOW is the technique of bringing a reader into the emotion of a story so they can see and feel a character’s experience.
TELL is the technique of narrating about objects, people, and events.
We like to think about it as show versus tell, because there are plenty of times when it’s preferred to tell, but also we want to keep engaging with that effort of drawing the reader in so they can experience the story as if they were there themselves.
Why would we favor show over tell?
As writers, we yearn for our readers to feel something while reading our words. We want to move them to happiness, sadness, anger, and everything in between. The problem is…nothing we write can force anyone to feel anything.
As much as we wish we could, all we have to work with is words on a page and we can’t use them to inject our readers with the exact emotions we want them to feel. But we can guide them into feeling something akin to the emotions our characters are experiencing.
In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall says:
“[While consuming stories] your brain looks less like a spectator on the action than it does a participant… If the scene is sad, your brain looks sad too. Not like you’re sitting back passively watching someone else look angry or sad, but you are actually experiencing the emotions yourself… Story is so powerful for us, at least in part, because at a neurological level whatever’s happening on the page or on the stage isn’t just happening to [the characters], it’s happening to us as well.”
In order to deeply move your readers, you have to guide them into creating that feeling for themselves. As Donald Maass say in The Emotional Art of Fiction by Donald Maass, “Artful fiction surprises readers with their own emotions.”
Creating big feelings in readers requires laying a foundation on top of which readers build their own towering experience. You’re trying to put all of these building blocks in place so that your reader can develop those emotions themselves.
‘Show’ and ‘Tell’ lie on a spectrum
As we mentioned above, Show and Tell exist on a spectrum. On both ends are writing issues you will likely want to avoid (overshowing and infodumping), leaving us wiggle room in the middle to play with elements of both showing and telling to fit the needs of a specific scene. This middle section is broken down into three writing methods: in-scene showing, summary, and exposition.
Let’s break it down
We’re going to give you specific explanations of the spectrum, from overshowing all the way to info dumps, to show why you’ll want to avoid the extreme endpoints as well as the benefits of in-scene showing, summary, and exposition to really help you immerse a reader into the emotion of a story.
OVERSHOWING: When a writer shows every little detail of what a character is seeing, doing, thinking, and feeling—even when it’s not important to the story being told.
Let’s look at an example. Since this is an example of what we don’t want to do, I’ve written my own example piece to show you why overshowing is jarring for the reader.
EXAMPLE of Overshowing
Tommy rolled over with a groan. The silk sheets of his mother’s guest bed were soft and extravagant. When he opened his eyes he saw the expensive, weird paintings she’d hung on the walls and the dresser that she’d bought at some antique show. The fan was running but it was too cold for the fan, which was annoying. Then the scent of bacon filled his nose. He loved bacon. He could hear clanking in the kitchen and the meow of his mom’s cat. His stomach dropped. Had his mom really called his grandmother? Of course she did, he thought.
Tommy sat up, rubbing his eyes. He’d slept awful. In the mirror over the top of the dresser he saw that his hair was a mess and his eyes looked red and tired, like he’d fallen asleep crying. He was wearing his old Styx T-Shirt. That was Ava’s favorite band. His gut wrenched as he remembered. Ava had a new boyfriend already. The guy’s name was Richard and he was blonde and tall, like a famous soccer player. Tommy had seen a picture of them at some theater show on her Instagram. Ava wore a pretty red dress and the other guy wore jeans. The theater show was some Shakespeare show he kind of recognized. He thought he’d seen it once with his grandmother, and he’d liked it.
Tommy got up from the bed and grabbed his jeans. He pulled on his jeans, then flattened his hair. He put his wallet and keys back in his pocket. The cat slipped through the cracked-open door and he petted it on the head. He hated being at his mom’s house but he did like this cat.
WHY IT DOESN’T WORK
I went a little over the top in this one, but you can see how getting every one of Tommy’s actions, sensory details, thoughts, and feelings dull the focus of the scene. This scene should be about how Tommy is upset about Ava having a new boyfriend, and his thoughts and feelings around that are in here, but they’re drowning in details about his mom’s furnishings, his actions getting ready, and his thoughts about the fan and the cat. To revise this, we would want to get rid of every action, feeling, and thought that’s not directly related to the important plot and character events of this scene that would show us his feelings about Ava.
IN-SCENE ‘SHOWING’: When a writer shows what’s happening in a moment in a story in a way a reader can see and feel as the character does.
In this example, we’ll look at an excerpt from the romance novel Book Lovers by Emily Henry. In this excerpt from the first chapter, Nora meets the story’s love interest, Charlie Lastra for the first time. Nora is a book agent and she’s hoping that Charlie, who is an editor, will be interested in her clients’ work. Right before this moment, Nora was dumped on the phone by her boyfriend.
EXAMPLE of In-Scene ‘Showing’ — Book Lovers by Emily Henry
It’s late in the day for lunch, so the crowd is thin, and I spot Charlie Lastra near the back, dressed in all black like publishing’s own metropolitan vampire.
We’ve never met in person, but I double-checked the Publisher’s Weekly announcement about his promotion to executive editor at Wharton House Books and committed his photograph to memory: the stern, dark brows; the light brown eyes; the slight crease in his chin beneath his full lips. He has the kind of dark mole on one cheek that, if he were a woman, would definitely be considered a beauty mark.
He can’t be much past his mid thirties, with the kind of face you might describe as boyish, if not for how tired he looks and the gray that thoroughly peppers his black hair.
Also, he’s scowling. Or pouting. His mouth is pouting. His forehead is scowling. Powling.
He glances at his watch. Not a good sign…
He stands, his chair scraping over the floor. His black clothes, dark features, and general demeanor have the approximate effect on the room of a black hole, sucking all the light out of it and swallowing it entirely.
WHY IT WORKS
We’re deeply in Nora’s head and body, living her experience with her in real time, inside her frustration and shame over the break up. We see the thin crowd at the restaurant, we scan for Charlie alongside her, and all the while we’re deep in her racing thoughts and emotions, which are a result of the previous scene’s breakup. This moment attaches meaning to her perception of Charlie (he’s a pretty vampire) as well as her assumption that he’s upset she’s late to the meeting because he checks his watch. (Spoiler alert: she’s wrong.)
SUMMARY: A brief statement or account of the main points of something (ie. a passage of time, backstory, or world building details).
In the below excerpt from the opening chapter of the YA novel An Ember in the Ashes, Laia and her brother Darin are trying to escape the government soldiers raiding their house. Laia found sketches of enemy weapons in her brother’s sketchbook and she’s worried he’s working for the government, which she considers her enemy.
EXAMPLE of a Summary — An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
Darin’s lean shadow falls over me, and he grabs my hand as the door closes behind us. He slouches to blend into the warm night, moving silently across the loose sand of the backyard with a confidence I wish I felt. Although I am seventeen and old enough to control my fear, I grip his hand like it’s the only solid thing in this world.
I’m not working for them, Darin said. Then whom is he working for? Somehow, he got close enough to the forges of Serra to draw, in detail, the creation process of the Empire’s most precious asset: the unbreakable, curved scims that can cut through three men at once.
Half a millennium ago, the Scholars crumbled beneath the Martial invasion because our blades broke against their superior steel. Since then, we have learned nothing of steelcraft. The Martials hoard their secrets the way a miser hoards gold. Anyone caught near our city’s forges without good reason—Scholar or Martial—risks execution.
If Darin isn’t with the Empire, how did he get near Serra’s forges? How did the Martials find out about his sketchbook?
WHY IT WORKS
In this scene we get a brief summary (bolded above) of this country’s history, revealing how Laia’s people—the Scholars—came to be oppressed by the Martials. The purpose of this summary is to give the reader just enough information to understand why she’s so shocked that her brother has sketches of the enemy’s weapons, and nothing else. The summary is extremely relevant to what’s happening in the moment on the page of this scene, so the reader is able to attach the information to the action and remember it without bogging down the scene’s pacing. This is a helpful method for including useful context and world building history for your readers without taking them out of the scene.
EXPOSITION: A comprehensive explanation of information that occurs outside a story’s present moment but is critical to the reader’s understanding of the present moment.
In this excerpt, from pages 16-17 of the epic fantasy novel The Poppy War, the reader is introduced to Nikan history through the main character Rin’s studies. This exposition is relevant and significant to Rin who is learning about the country’s violent history as part of her schooling.
EXAMPLE of Exposition — The Poppy War by RF Kuang
That night, cradling a stolen candle on the floor of the cramped bedroom that she shared with Kesegi, Rin cracked open her first Keju primer.
The Keju tested the Four Noble Subjects: history, mathematics, logic, and the Classics. The imperial bureaucracy in Sinegard considered these subjects integral to the development of a scholar and a statesman. Rin had to learn them all by her sixteenth birthday.
She set a tight schedule for herself: she was to finish at least two books every week, and to rotate between two subjects each day. Each night after she had closed up shop, she ran to Tutor Feyrik’s house before returning home, arms laden with more books.
History was the easiest to learn. Nikan’s history was a highly entertaining saga of constant warfare. The Empire had been formed a millennium ago under the mighty sword of the merciless Red Emperor, who destroyed the monastic orders scattered across the continent and created a unified state of unprecedented size. It was the first time the Nikara people had ever conceived of themselves as a single nation. The Red Emperor standardized the Nikara language, issued a uniform set of weights and measurements, and built a system of roads that connected his sprawling territory.
But the newly conceived Nikara Empire did not survive the Red Emperor’s death. His many heirs turned the country into a bloody mess during the Era of Warring States that followed, which divided Nikan into twelve rival provinces.
Since then, the massive country had been reunified, conquered, exploited, shattered, and then unified again. Nikan had in turn been at war with the khans of the northern Hinterlands and the tall westerners from across the great sea. Both times Nikan had proven itself too massive to suffer foreign occupation for very long.
Of all Nikan’s attempted conquerors, the Federation of Mugen had come the closest. The island country had attacked Nikan at a time when domestic turmoil between the provinces was at its peak. It took two Poppy Wars and fifty years of bloody occupation for Nikan to win back its independence.
The Empress Su Daji, the last living member of the troika who had seized control of the state during the Second Poppy War, now ruled over a land of twelve provinces that had never quite managed to achieve the same unity that the Red Emperor had imposed.
The Nikara Empire had proven itself historically unconquerable. But it was also unstable and disunited, and the current spell of peace held no promise of durability.
If there was one thing Rin had learned about her country’s history, it was that the only permanent thing about the Nikara Empire was war.
WHY IT WORKS
This exposition is not happening during any ‘in-scene’ moment in the novel. Instead, we’re being transported out of the room that Rin is studying in and into an explanation of her early days at school and what she’s learning. This exposition is powerful, however, because it gives relevant details about what she’s learning to show the reader that this school is focused around teaching her that the only permanent thing in the world is violence, war, and conflict. This way, when we go back to an in-scene moment with Rin at school, we understand how she’s shifting to accept the violence around her as inevitable.
INFODUMPS: A comprehensive explanation of information unrelated to what’s happening in real time during an unfolding story, and unnecessary to the reader’s understanding of the present moment.
Since this is an example of something we don’t want to do, I wrote an over the top example to illustrate why info dumps are jarring.
EXAMPLE of Infodumping
Kaelen crouched behind the crumbling wall of the watchtower, his hand clenched around the hilt of his sword. The enemy’s footsteps echoed off the stone nearby. One wrong move, and he was done. He held his breath.
In the distance, a wolf howled.
It reminded him of the ancient wolves of Varthrun, sacred beasts once believed to be the guardians of the Moonlight Temples. Of course, those temples had since been repurposed into granaries after the droughts of the Fourth Rainfall—droughts caused by the collapse of the Skyweaver Guild, who once controlled all atmospheric magic in the Southern Hemisphere.
Kaelen shifted slightly, peeking over the stones. The enemy was close now. Just a few feet away. His fingers twitched.
It was said that warriors of his lineage, the Vaelari, were born with iron in their blood—a trait supposedly inherited from their legendary ancestor, Vael the Silent, who once challenged a storm to a duel and won. Though, according to the scrolls of Ilon, that story was largely metaphorical and not to be taken literally.
Kaelen exhaled. He leapt from his hiding place with a roar.
WHY IT DOESN’T WORK
Again, I went a little over the top in this one, but you can see how getting information about the wolves and Kaelen’s lineage (the bolded parts) aren’t relevant to what’s immediately happening in this scene. The reader doesn’t care about what the wolf represents right now, they actually want to know if the wolf is the one about to attack him or if it’s someone else. We want to know why he’s being attacked, not details about his warrior lineage. The irrelevance of this information is what makes these paragraphs infodumps rather than exposition.
Other tips!
- Put your character in ACTION on the page, show us the story unfolding through their perspective and highlight what’s happening in their body. What’s happening to them and how is it feeling to them?
- Only ‘show’ us the thoughts, actions, and feelings that are relevant to what your character wants, feels, and is doing in the scene so readers know what to focus on.
- Make sure moments of ‘telling’ (summary and exposition) are immediately relevant to what’s happening in action in the story and/or reveal how the character is feeling in the moment
- Use how an emotion feels in your character’s body to trigger memories or assumptions the character is making.
- Let your characters be “unreasonable” and play with an open perspective. Don’t morally judge your characters’ thoughts and just put them on the page so the reader can understand who they are.
- Investigate your character’s emotional range. What do certain emotions feel like for them internally and externally? By personalizing your character’s emotions it’s easier for you to use those reactions to color their body language.
The balance between showing and telling can be a challenge to navigate, but when we start to focus on what the reader absolutely needs to know in a specific moment and ground the experience in our characters’ bodies, we can really connect with our readers.
Leave A Comment