So again, I guess we're talking past each other? We're both saying that a good novel is a mix of telling and showing, with the telling used to quickly and efficiently convey information while the showing adds depth and interest?
To me, "showing" and "telling" are terms that do not even apply to individual sentences, let alone three-word phrases. They apply to scenes. If the scene is fully dramatized, fully realized, it's showing. If an important piece of information goes by in a paragraph, it's telling. Trying to apply these rather grand concepts to tiny bits of text - relatively insignificant minutiae, over the scope of a whole novel - is a waste of time and unproductive. Readers are not dissecting novels down to their last three-word phrases. They're looking for a rich imaginative experience. Let's keep that in mind first and foremost.
Telling is a required part of any novel but for the most part when something is told it is an absolute, leaving nothing to stimulate the imagination of the reader. Showing gives the reader a chance to relate or empathize with the characters.
There do seem to be several ways people perceive show vs tell. To me showing is all the things which are conveyed through the POV characters' real time perceptions and telling is the bits which aren't. Transitions are an obvious form of telling. They're not a problem unless you start skimming over things that are important. Where I think new authors make more mistakes is with bits of telling during scenes. When we're trying to get our readers to feel the emotion of a dramatic section it's harder to build that up when we're throwing in bits of narrative that the character wouldn't be thinking about at the time. In a vacuum I can't tell if "he was tall" is showing or telling. If it's the first time you've seen a tall person standing you may very well take notice of his height, so it could be showing. If you're talking about a tall POV character or someone they see regularly, it's telling, so then something like ducking through a door would be needed if you wanted to show it. Even within a scene there are times when telling is fine. I've seen stories were characters enter the room and then we get an entertaining bit of their bio from the narrator and it works. The more intense you're trying to make the moment, the more likely it is that telling will spoil what you are trying to do. In terms of the sentence @CMastah is talking about. A lot of the time we only subconsciously take note of the emotions that other people are experiencing. So a lot of time a bit of subtle body language will give the reader the same experience as the character. Making a mention of specific little emotions would be telling. Other times we do notice someone's emotions and it's obvious from their words and actions how we worked that out. If they're shouting angry words at us, they're clearly angry. In those cases, if we only show the words and actions, then the reader will be able to work it out too and we're giving the reader the same experience as the character. There are times however that we directly notice through someones expression that they're experiencing an emotion, but unless we're experts in such things we don't quite know what it is about that expression that conveyed that emotion. In that case 'anger in his eyes with a subtle hint of sorrow' might genuinely be all that the character sees. I'm not sure I'd necessarily define it as telling in such situations. I think that sort of sentence is useful when we want to draw attention to the fact our POV character has noticed the emotion, but some on the nose dialogue to convey that emotion wouldn't be appropriate for the situation. It's not something to be overused, but it's not completely taboo.
I agree that readers aren't dissecting, but writers often are, right? I mean, if we're trying to achieve a "rich imaginative experience" and don't think we have, we try to figure out what's gone wrong? Readers aren't worried about a lot of things that come up on writers' sites. They don't generally care which publisher put out a book, or what the terms of the contract were, who someone's agent is, what writing software was used to create the story, whether the writer is a plotter or a pantser... most things on a writers' site are of interest to writers, not readers. So saying that a particular issue isn't interesting to readers is probably true, but doesn't mean it shouldn't be of interest to us.
Both of my beta readers found the same problems in my first draft of a short horror story. It sounds like I was able to address at least one well enough of these in my second draft (introducing too many characters too quickly), but I hadn't executed some of the supernatural elements in a way that made sense in the first draft, and both betas said that was still a problem in the re-write. ___ The story starts with the protagonist John driving home, terrified by a new serial killer that he's just heard about in his area. When he gets to his house, he sees a stranger sneaking in to his next door neighbor's house. At first, he tries to write this off, but when his girlfriend calls the neighbor and doesn't get an answer, John goes next door to check in person. He finds the neighbor murdered, and then gets attacked himself before he can call for help. John manages to take the killer down, but discovers a child in the house and becomes convinced that she has been kidnapped by the killer. He comes to the conclusion that the girl shouldn't be found by the police, so he steals the dead neighbor's car and takes the girl to the house of a friend he knows to be out of town. Problem: throughout the story, I'd been peppering the story with some asides in italics that, at first, the reader is supposed to believe are John's own thoughts: As the story progresses, he starts acting making decisions based on information he could reasonably have learned on his own, but gradually veers into areas that he shouldn't know about: The story ends when the friend's son surprises John by bringing a few college friends to the house: When I wrote this, I originally thought that the twist of Spoiler the girl having supernatural mind-control powers would make it possible to accept her also having supernatural foreknowledge powers , but both of my beta readers said that the connection wasn't as clear as I'd hoped: it still didn't make sense that Spoiler John would know / be told the friend's safe combination, or the the girl would even know about him before he killed her previous puppet and ran into her physically. They didn't seem to mind my explanation out-of-story, but they didn't have any tips for making it more clear in-story without spelling it out directly (which none of us think would make sense). Does anybody here have an idea for a "clear+subtle" middle ground between "clear+clumsy" and "subtle+opaque" that we haven't thought of?
I read the first few thoughts as being his own and I think it's fine if it stays that way. The little girl is gradually invading his thoughts right? But he can still have his own too. As it is currently written, the problem seems to be that there's no shift when the girl starts to take over. All the italicized bits still seem like he's just remembering thing's he's already knew or that they really are his own thoughts. I think it might make it a bit more obvious if you make John surprised by some of the information or show the girl acting weird. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ John saw Linda’s safe next to the bed. He racked his brain trying to remember where Linda kept the combination to the safe. He knew it was written inside one of her books, he went to the bookshelf and began to slowly flip through pages. The girl grew impatient and scowled at John's back. 18-5-23-4-19 Somewhat startled, John realized he already knew the combination. He opened the safe and saw that Linda had left her service firearm behind. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ I think you probably want to make John accept the weirdness but you want your reader to question it, not to the point where its totally obvious and predictable but just enough that its unsettling.
Hey everyone. A few writers who I do critiques with have warned me against explicitly stating a thought, as it is too "tell-y." Is there a way to show a thought? I've been making use of facial expression, behaviour ticks, etc., to indicate how the character is feeling. Should I use that in conjunction with free indirect discourse to avoid telling thoughts. For example: Riley stood with his back to the wall. What on Earth could have growled behind the door? Riley was panting, and his hand quivered as he brushed the hair back from his eyes. He remembered watching a nature documentary about tigers. The growl on the other side of the door had sounded like that: low, but canting upwards in pitch, . . . How do you guys avoid "telling" when there is a solitary character?
Is dialogue "telling"? Thoughts are just internal dialogue. ETA: There is a tendency to accept whatever is said in a writers' group as gospel. Please don't fall into that trap. When an unpublished writer states something as dogma, it's likely something (s)he heard from someplace else and is repeating. Happens around here all the time. As for your question above, glance back over some quality literature that you've read and see if thoughts are presented. I guarantee that not only will you see that they are, but you will also note a variety of ways to present them. Good luck.
Some people plain don't like italics for thoughts as they call it "lazy writing" I consider that just a form of dialogue so it doesn't bother me none. You can show thoughts through narrative, as the event/discussion brings the character mind to this and that subject. Also, your second example is much better than the first. It's more descriptive.
I don't know if I find this tell-y but I would maybe rearrange it a bit differently. And lose some of the details of the thought. I don't find it's problem is that it's tell-y or that it's a telling thought, it's that it doesn't seem to have the events and reactions in the right order. You seem to have him just standing, then thinking about something the reader hasn't been shown and then reacting to it. Feels a bit out of order. Have the growl. Show a body reaction - a jump a move, his hair standing on end or something- and then maybe an internal thought like - What the hell was that. If something like a tiger growled behind a door and I was near, I wouldn't be anywhere near it two seconds later.
There are at least two ways I have seen people interpret "show vs tell" (and there are probably more): 1. To tell something is to state it; to show something is to state a consequence of it. (e.g. if a character is very tall, then you could tell that by saying he is very tall or you could show it by saying he bumps his head on a doorframe.) By that interpretation, yes, explicitly stating a thought is telling. Our inner state is the root cause and our actions are the consequences. Therefore, describing someone's body language is a way to show the character's inner state. 2. To tell something is to give the reader just enough information to know what is happening; to show something is to decorate the narrative with sensory details in an attempt to help the reader "see" the scene. By that interpretation, stating a thought is not telling per se, but if you lack sensory details to go along with it, then you are telling. Show and tell aside, you do not need to set the point of view character's thoughts apart from the narrator's voice with something like attribution (e.g. "he thought" or "he remembered") or italics. You can explicitly state thoughts without the reader even realizing it. Basically, you would have the narrator speak on behalf of the character.
I agree that a thought isn't fundamentally different from dialogue, in the show/tell, demonstrate/explain spectrum. And I think that both of your examples are more on the "show" or "demonstrate" side--a "tell" or "explain" version would be: Riley stood with his back to the wall. He was afraid that there might be a tiger behind the door. I do like your second example better, but not because it refrains from using direct thought. I like it because it makes his fear more specific and detailed. If I were writing it, I'd eliminate most of the physical signs of fear, because the fear is pretty obvious anyway. Riley stood with his back to the wall. What the hell? He'd seen a documentary about tigers once. The growl on the other side of the door sounded like that: low, but canting upwards in pitch. BTW, even if you're in favor of italics-for-thoughts, the italicized sentence in your example doesn't seem correct; it sounds like it's phrased by the narrator instead of the character. As a direct thought, I'd expect it to be What on Earth is behind the door? Edited to add: Or, really, What on Earth is that? He thinking to himself, so it seems off for him to tell himself that there's a door.
There's nothing wrong with telling. Writers tell all the time. The problem comes when it's all they do - when they tell what they should show. In this case, I'd skip the italics, and maybe pep up the language a bit, but I don't think there's a problem with using internal dialogue in general. Riley pressed his back to the wall, straining to hear through the door. What the hell was in the other room? It had sounded like a damn tiger, a growl so low it had been a physical vibration as much as a sound.
You shouldn't avoid telling. It's a matter of the balance between showing and telling, and that depends on your style. Internal dialogue is fine.
Want my advice? Forget about the show vs. tell "rule." It's an unnecessary and confusing guideline that doesn't seem to be helping anyone. If it's necessary to state a character's thoughts, then do so. While there may be times when thoughts should be replaced/taken out to improve pace, tone, etc., that decision should not be dictated by some silly rule. Just my two cents.
Every piece of writing is telling to some degree. You can try to show all they to the point where you're writing the atmoic interactions in the brain of a character which make up the emotion you're trying to convey but at that point it's much better to just say "he was sad about it". The way you have to judge where to stop complexifying in an attempt to 'show not tell' is to decide whether the interruption in the flow of the story is worth what the extra content. It's really a decision the author has to make for themselves based on their unique point of view.
Internal dialogue is great. Plenty of authors make use of it, and it works very well when combined with some visual details. I also think telling things—even lots of things—is fine, as long as you throw in some powerful interprersonal dialogue and imagery.
It's not a rule. It's never been a rule. At its strongest, it never meant "don't ever tell". Expanded, it's a guideline that means, "Often, though certainly not always, it's more effective to demonstrate things than to explain them."
Speak for yourself. I find the advice incredibly helpful. Riley stood with his back to the wall. What on Earth could have growled behind the door? You are telling the reader that the character heard a growl and didn't know what it was. Why not show us what the character heard, let the reader experience the fear the character is feeling? It's stronger, more interesting reading if the reader is there, rather than the character telling the reader about the event. Riley stood with his back to the wall. A growl like he'd never heard before came from behind the door. He pushed the dresser up against the door as if that would be enough to stop the monster. But he knew, nothing would ever be enough to stop the thing from getting through, from getting to him. There is plenty of telling in that version, you are telling the reader what is going through Riley's mind. You are not telling us how Riley would describe the events to someone later.
That's why I put it in quotes ("rules"). Too often writers automatically assume that showing is preferable to telling, which is why I believe advice like this one isn't helpful. Sometimes a simple sentence does wonders. The example I always give in threads like this is from James Joyce's "Eveline." This is the first paragraph of the story: Those simple three words at the end are more effective than having some long description showing the reader she was tired. Knowing when to use a simple description like the one Joyce used is an art form by itself. Unfortunately, most writers would have written a longer description instead of a simple "She was tired." And it's all because of this silly guideline.
It's interesting to note that while "showing" inevitably requires more words than "telling", agents and editors routinely fuss over word count. In my group at the pitch conference I recently attended, one first-timer was pitching a novel of 130,000 words; the gasps were audible. I had one editor warn me that my estimate of 119K words was "at the high end" and suggested I may want to keep that in mind in revising. I mention this not to advise one kind of writing over another, but rather to point out that different modes of writing serve to accomplish specific goals, and are often in tension with one another. Adhering to absolutes, therefore, is not generally a good idea.
Yes, my apologies; I realize you're not the one I'm arguing with. I just wish that even when it's put as a short pithy rule, that "rule" were phrased more accurately. To use other rules as examples, some people may really truly mean "Never use an adverb" or "Never use passive voice." But the equivalent "show/tell" rule isn't "Never tell", but "Tell less often, show more often."
