Lately I've seen several people say there are other and better ways to teach people about what's normally called showing and telling, and yet nobody has said what they are. I'm curious, what are these alternative methods? Let's get a list of them here, and maybe we can stop talking about showing and telling altogether. To kick it off, I've heard certain YouTube writers refer to it as "Describe, don't explain". Of course really those are just alternative terms for showing and telling, but to some people they might make more sense. How about it, do you know of any other ways to get the idea across?
Why would we want to stop talking about anything that has to do with writing? I welcome talks about this subject and others that are often somewhat of a repeat, but forum members come and go. I think fresh talks about these kinds of discussions should always be encouraged.
I agree. But a lot of people seem not to like the term, or something about it. That's why I wanted to have this discussion. I'm interested in any other ways to talk about it or alternative approaches people might know about. My belief, at least so far, is that it's an important and necessary thing to learn, and that once you learn it you can move past it into more advanced levels. I suspect that's what some people mean when they say they don't like hearing about show and tell. But I don't know how to get beginners to an advanced level without teaching them the basic principles. If there are other ways, I want to know about those too. I also suspect some people just mean they think "Show, don't tell" is incorrect. I agree, taken at face value, it's wrong to say "Always show, never tell". My advice has always been that people need to learn the difference between showing and telling, how to do each well, and when to use them.
To me, it is not about showing v. telling per se. Too often on forums, whether due to inexperience or lazy critiquing, I've seen people flag instances of telling and say something like "show don't tell," without any analysis or apparent thought as to whether showing is appropriate in that circumstance. Although it is important to learn how to show and how to tell effectively, it doesn't do beginners any good to make them think you always have to show.
I don't think this is something you just learn and move on from. It's something that can always improve your writing.
Honestly, I can't say showing vs. telling is something I actually learned. And I went all the way is school for writing and got an MFA. But I can't remember having a single discussion about this in school. It's not something I ever think about while writing, but I believe it's something I just do for the most part. I think it's important to keep in mind that showing vs. telling is not really something that is on a sentence level. It's bigger than that and that's something to keep in mind for those struggling with this issue.
I'm still interested in hearing from anybody about these alternatives. Seems nobody is going to show up. I've spoken extensively enough about showing and telling, but I have yet to hear word one about these alternatives. Looks like we stick to the tried and true. Same here. I don't think I ever heard the term until I got here. Well, I take that back. I probably first encountered it in the early 2000's, when I read a few books on screenwriting. Before that though, it's just something I picked up from doing a lot of reading and writing. When I got here is when I first remember learning it had a name or any rules—it was strictly intuitive for me. I would have had a hard time explaining it to anybody, but I could feel when things were too vague and needed to be more specific. Well, in the future if anybody starts talking about better alternatives, I'll link them here and ask them to explain. But until that happens I'm treating these fabled alternatives like Bigfoot—show me some solid evidence or stop complaining. The main way I can think of that it could be explained without using the terms show and tell would be to get across the separation between narration (narrative summary) and scene (action and description). And really that's still the same idea, just using different terminology. I think it's good to give it a nice simple name like show and tell to make it easy to remember. In fact I'd say it needs to be introduced first as showing and telling, which is the basic idea, and then when they have a firm grasp on that they're ready for the next level, to start thinking in terms of scene and narrative summary.
Now that I think about it...maybe Narrative distancing is like a little similar to showing and telling? But I wouldn't say it's a complete alternative to showing and telling.
I'm not sure what you even mean about alternatives. Show vs. tell is a thing. Narrative distance is another thing. I say don't muddy the waters here because that will make it even more confusing.
There are no alternatives. If you are telling, you aren't showing, and vice versa. The reason people deride the "show, don't tell" advice is because the actual advice should be "show most of the time, but know when to tell".
Showing in using content to lead the reader into satisfying inferences (at varying levels of consciousness), as if the reader is a dog and the treats spawn from the ether whenever he gets a pretty good idea of what the author meant. That's why there are tiers. You can still demonstrate something unsaid with a passage that at first-glance reads like telling. Very few people know this overtly, but many writers know it intuitively. Show don't tell as a concept is as old and hardy as bread. It's the common, generalized understanding of it that's warped it to the point that no one really knows what you mean when you say it anyway. One of the worst offenders? Freaking Anton Chekov: Sure, this quote is probably ripped out of context, but that doesn't save it from being a useless wiener in the soggy bun of profundity. It's a trap! And perhaps it is fitting that I'm quoting out of context, because it itself says nothing, nothing about context. And usually the people who post this quote won't say anything about context either. Here's a bit from a compelling (IMO) workshop post from a while back, The Device by Aleksis Dillon: That's telling! Or is it? Not exactly. First glance will say, 'well, his disinterest can be easily demonstrated by his reaction to what the main character says, so that bolded bit is obviously telling. Show, don't tell, loser.' But that bolded clause shows the narrator is fully aware of her date's disinterest in her profession (identity), which makes the story more compelling when she is apparently not turned off by it. Context matters as much as the important/boring bits distinction that people make when they unintentionally, but strictly, define telling's ideal role as 'summarizing.' Illustrate or state... (and show or tell uses fewer syllables). It all comes down to each working part of the scene. My working solution is to be specific. I try to give the reason why certain things should be told and others shown. Sometimes it's just 'this seems important or notable, something worth demonstrating so the reader can appreciate it' or 'there's no real significance here, so I would summarize this with telling.' Using words like 'illustrate' or 'demonstrate' at times might help with other people's understanding, too. Ultimately, show this and tell that are totally fine. It's the vague usage, show, don't tell, that is getting dismissive nods these days. Said dismissiveness is now getting conflated with the specific notions of showing and telling—and it all started with Anton. Fucking Anton. No one's slick as Anton No one's quick as Anton No one's neck's as incredibly thick as Anton For there's no man in town half as manly Perfect, a pure paragon You can ask any Tom, Dick or Stanley And they'll tell you whose team they prefer to be on
Now this is more like what I was looking for. Although the very beginning of it reads like you were having a drug trip But it quickly becomes lucid and makes sense. What you're calling tiers is what I mean by the intermediate and advanced levels. And yes, I agree—it's something you pick up on intuitively. I think that's generally true in art about the higher levels beyond the basic. What I find is that it's necessary to first understand the basics, or the principles as they're often called. That would be the basic idea of showing and telling. I don't know if this is the best way to illustrate it, because most people haven't studied drawing, but it's like learning to draw in perspective. It's rough at first—you have to start by laboriously drawing the horizon line and vanishing points and then making sure all your depth lines converge on the vanishing points. At first you need to always draw the horizon line etc. The guide lines. But after you've been doing it long enough you internalize the rules and you can now freehand it, like this: You just develop the feel for where the lines need to converge, and you can stop drawing out the guide lines. What I also refer to as taking off the training wheels. You've now developed something like a 3D rendering engine in your head, and it keeps getting better as you forge ahead. Occasionally you might still need to sketch in some light guide lines like the artist did in the second drawing, but for the most part you're free of that basic stuff. From that point the development takes place intuitively. This is why you tend not to see articles explaining showing and telling at the more advanced levels, you don't even think it through in those 'rulebound' terms anymore. You no longer need to, and in fact it would hinder your development. I completely agree with you, that sometimes you can have a sentence of telling in the middle of some showing, or even just a phrase like the one you bolded. In fact usually you don't have large blocks of pure showing or telling, often there are other things mixed in, like dialogue. But unless the writer in question already understands the basics of showing and telling, I don't think it does any good to try to present the intermediate or advanced level to them. It's too complicated to explain, and would be pure gibberish if they aren't already grounded in the basics. I think the problem you're talking about comes in when rule-bound writers who haven't experienceed the intuitive development keep hammering away at the basic level and don't see the more subtle stuff. Or that it isn't always necessary to show, sometimes telling is the thing.
I'm pretty sure this started from my comment in the workshop thread. I'll post this here only because it was asked. If you notice, I seldom post in show/tell threads anymore. If show/tell is working for someone then they should keep doing it. More power to them, but it's an idea I don't think about much anymore. Don't hate me for it. I'll try to collect my thoughts here. This will be a stupidly long thread. It's why I didn't want to explain it before. But there's nothing to derail here. -------------------------------------- I don't use show/tell. I'm not really impressed by it. I do agree it's an okay way to correct certain writing problems because it makes the writer try again. There's that. A thoughtful second pass should improve a paragraph. But it doesn't always, does it? There's a reason for that. It's the point that show/tell is missing, or the point that it's simplifying to the point of error. All the caveats in the previous posts are pointing at it too. I'll be the only person on the internet to name it, because whenever you look up an example on show/tell, people seem to love the approach. It's like an elixir for your writing ills. I get that other writers use it and like it. The following is just my approach. It's an "IMO" based on reading a lot of books and thinking about certain discrepancies. So, what I don't like about the term . . . The idea of show/tell is taken from Chekhov, but he never said "show/tell." And I'm not talking about Russian translations. Show/tell was added to a paraphrase of what he said, and then those words were treated as being sacrosanct, being Chekhov's, but they're not. They're invented by the paraphraser. It is highly disingenuous to pretend otherwise. What Chekhov said is that you could describe nature by "seizing on small details . . . grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture." That would be synecdoche, vivid language, and (if you read his examples) imagery/metaphor since he tossed those in too. You could even say that it's an inward-pointing technique because it relies on the reader's previous knowledge to assemble details into an unsaid idea. So Chekhov said a lot there. Still, I don't like how the show/tell term itself is misattributed. It's meant to sound as if it's been around since the 1800s and was spoken by one of the greats, but that's just not true. It's a recent invention. I also don't like that so many other modern solutions are added to that list. You'll routinely see sensory description, deep-POV, active sentences, dynamic verbs, dialog, et al. added to Chekhov's examples. The solution becomes so broad and encompasses so much of writing that when you really examine it, you realize the solution is all of writing. That's not a solution at all. By saying everything you've said nothing. Here, I will become the first person in history to add this to the show/tell legend. Seven Crowns decrees that you can fix a tell by showing a flashback. And you can. (It's an easy exercise left for the reader. Remember, flashbacks can occur over a sentence or two.) There! The solution set has expanded. I also don't like that show/tell is named as some sort of all-encompassing idea. It's not up/down, right/wrong, sin/virtue. It's not a merism that covers all aspects of writing. It's presented this way, nearly religiously, and I find that vulgar. The terms "show" and "tell" don't even make logical sense. Everything is told because the author is speaking. Or maybe everything is shown because you're looking at words. Show also conflicts with descriptive techniques, since visual language is the original sin. I realize what the terms are supposed to mean but they are poorly chosen. It's nothing Chekhov would have said, and there's a reason for that. I also don't care for show/tell examples on the internet. They start with a sentence that is written poorly. You're meant to assume this. It will be a simple sentence, usually a stative kernel, although it could have a single action in it. It will seem to have been written by a child or maybe by a special needs adult in assisted living. The writer will then demonstrate how to fix the "error" by actually writing. Remember, the solution set contains everything. The sentence will expand into a little paragraph, and that's the fix. I feel that type of demonstration is a strawman and is deliberately misleading. It also defies another standard rule (to be named later). Most of those pages will also proudly include the Chekhov paraphrase (which he didn't say) and then pretend it means more than it does. The "quote" will usually be up at the top of the webpage. That's what I don't like about show/tell. Some of it. There's actually more. ---------------------- So what is it really? Show/tell is just a proportion error. That's all. If that still seems too fancy then call it an error of emphasis. It wasn't that the "tell" (whatever line was in the original draft) was wrong; rather, it was rather that more needed to be said. You don't have to replace the tell. You just have emphasize. The fix has nothing to do with sensory description, deep-POV, emotional characterization, or any of the other solutions. Those elements are part of writing, but they're outside of the solution. A proportion error simply means that here, at this place, something was not said. An idea needed to be emphasized. It doesn't say how to write the idea because that is determined by other factors. You can never look at proportion errors without looking at the paragraph. This is why most of the web explanations that correct a "tell" sentence are wrong. You can't know if there's a proportion error without seeing the paragraph, and you can't tell if the revision fixes this error without testing its fit among the other lines. Many simple lines work just fine even though they're "tells." (As many posters mentioned above.) They fit perfectly their paragraphs and don't need to be corrected. Building them up with imagery or deep description or amazing kinetic verbs breaks a second rule, hinted at above but not mentioned until now: Kill your darlings. "Kill your darlings" inverts show/tell. It reverses it. It de-emphasizes. So we have two rules that are in conflict. (Guidelines, more accurately.) At least the King advice can be made to be always right. "Kill your darlings when they're too noisy. The quiet children live on." Show/tell is broken on so many other levels, listed above, that I won't pretend to fix it. I don't think it deserves to be fixed, and I'm annoyed it's ascribed to Chekhov because I like him a lot. I've read all his short stories. The sentence is the smallest element representing a complete thought—as a baseline, you can break this with clever constructions, but we're talking about averages. The paragraph is the smallest element of thoughts in motion, on average, again. Every paragraph has a purpose to its motion, and your proportion error means that the motion of a paragraph omitted some point. In idea was left unsaid. Or, its reverse: The motion of a paragraph said too much on a particular subject. You need to redefine the paragraph's purpose. You must gave it a new motion. That forces you to fix proportion errors, either by 1) emphasizing a point, typically with more words, or 2) deleting words (Jack Torrancing the darlings). The fix can never be mentioned as a part of the solution (the "show"). That is because the fix is determined by the motion of the paragraph. It is completely outside the scope of a proportion error, and you can't presume to pile on your favorite writing techniques and say that they're the answer, because there are infinite solutions, and the paragraph holding the error will decide what fits. Proportion errors are not mechanical and at the level of a sentence. They are story errors. They exist in the paragraph. (There are scene-level proportion errors too. There are even story-level proportion errors. Those people mentioning "The Godfather" book in the other thread will know what I mean.) So show/tell makes it sound like "tell" is broken and "show" is not. That's not the case. There are proportion errors in both directions, and from what I've seen, they happen with matching frequency. The new motion of the paragraph decides the solution. The motion is a rhythm, and "rhythm" is somewhat outside of the scope of this post. I'll try to summarize it though . . . You move through the paragraph with shifting rhythms. You look inward and outward. You push dramatic action and sink into static description. You vary mechanical structures. You focus on character, setting, or plot. You may make simple statements and then rely on the reader to grasp their meaning through senses, common wit, estimation, imagery, allegory, whatever. You drop out of the current tense for aphorisms and grand statements. You might rise up into 2nd-person from 1st/3rd. You can fall back to Chekhov's whole shown by small parts, vividly realized . . . Whether or not any of this fits depends on the paragraph's rhythm. If the rhythm ever becomes rigid, then you will get amateurish writing. You'll get overwrought sensory passages with fluttering hearts and sweating palms. You'll get purple prose. You'll get boring blocks of exposition and setting description. You'll get lines that keep looking backward instead of moving forward. You will basically irritate the reader. Rhythm is far more complex than this, and I've thought about it much more than show/tell. Like I say, show/tell is just an error of emphasis and doesn't deserve the attention it gets because it's too easy to address. I seldom hear anyone talk about rhythms in the paragraph unless they simplify that too, usually (99% of the time) into long/short sentences. Using sensory language and deep-POV and emotionally charged metaphors rely on the reader's involvement, and that's good up to a point. It shifts the rhythm of a paragraph, but if that's all you do because those techniques are always shown as superior, then your writing will come off as moody, micro-realized, and emotionally hysterical. There has to be a balance. (I've also seen "rhythm" called "texture." There are other terms for it. I prefer rhythm.) ---------------------------- I guess I should mention that there are proportion errors within the sentence. Sort of. I should say it before someone else does. They're not really proportion errors though. They have nothing to do with story. They're mechanical clunkiness. An emphasis has been put on the sentence structure itself. (99.99% of the time, more words == more emphasis) The sentence will be grammatically okay but will drag. It has to do with the empty connectives in the sentence vs. the words that are loaded for meaning. The cat made an escape from a dog chasing it. The cat escaped from a dog. (optionally, add a pursuing dog or something along those lines if it's important) Real proportion errors are always within the paragraph, not the sentence. Anyway, the show/tell examples always denigrate kernel sentences. Kernel sentences are extremely powerful. They should never be put down. If they fit into the rhythm of the paragraph, they will connect with an immense force right between the reader's eyes. Like a captive bolt pistol, right? Succinct and with lethal charge. The kernel for the above is: "The cat escaped." There's nothing wrong with it. It shouldn't ever be used as the "fail" portion of a show/tell example. I hate that it usually is. (Google a show/tell example for proof of this.) It makes writers avoid that structure. Imagine this example . . . You've written a full page on how a girlfriend has wronged the MC. He's recounting the worst offenses. She's cheated on him. She lies. He hears rumors about himself that only she knows. It goes on and on with demeaning detail. Then the page ends with "I love Clara." That's a sentence-kernel "tell," but it carries enormous weight. In contrast with what came before, its impact is immense. It raises questions in the reader, so it's an inward-looking statement that involves the reader even though its technically the worst kind of tell, a stative. (His love is not active, it's a state of being in the same way that "I like chocolate" is a state of being.) The point is that simple "tells" are not wrong. It depends how the paragraph holds them. ---------------------------- This is all really more suited to a book than a forum post. Really. If I had the credentials, I would do it. Show/tell is fine for making a simple point. It's the lingo everyone's latched on to. It's probably too late to change. Its one-sided nature bothers me. Its infinite solutions prove that it goes too far. It's contradictory and makes no allowance for the contradictions. What it's really doing is making a statement without naming the statement, which as I said, can be in contradiction. Instead of telling that "It is raining," show that it is raining. The puddles across Broadway are suited to waterfowl. Cars dart between the low spots, roaring, hissing. When dishwater torrents arc up over the sidewalk, I step away quick. A sodden newspaper's held over my head. Now, instead of telling that the MC is sad, continue by showing that the MC is sad. It is raining. Too long didn't read: Show/tell is a snake oil solution. It pretends to be an old authority and throws every solution at an assumed problem. Show/tell is really just a proportion error. The paragraph's motion must be changed and an ignored/understated idea must be emphasized. Show/tell doesn't even acknowledge proportion, and so it often ends with an error in reverse. The method of emphasis depends on the paragraph's rhythm, not on deep-POV, sensory language, or anything else. Those are different subjects.
Half right—it was both you and Not the Territory I was hoping to hear from. Thank you both. Lol I feel like I've really accomplished something if I wrung one last mega-post from Seven Crowns! You seem to be fading from the board, or at least you've retracted somewhat in recent times. I was afraid we might never get another of your massive doses of knowledge. And you've made me better understand part of what NtT said above you. You've explained how what is often seen as telling can be showing. Something he tried to explain but I waved it off (sorry @Not the Territory ). My fix for that is first to never say "Show, don't tell", and second to always say "Learn the differences between them, when each is appropriate, and how to do both well." In my humble opinion, what you've said here is also too advanced to share with beginners, so I'll keep throwing Showing and Telling at them. That gets them over the initial hump anyway, and then maybe they'll develop the more advanced knowledge to one day understand what you're throwing down here. I hope one day I can. I get parts of it. I'm definitely aware of rhythm on various levels. It's like your mega-post scintillates with sparks where I understand, but there are dull patches in between that will doubtless light up as my understanding develops further. Now at least I have the ideas in mind and something to aim for. Often that's enough—just get the mind cogitating and the understanding will grow piece by piece. Lol yeah, when you made that comment in the workshop I was all like "Wait wut??!! Must hear more!"
I hold up my hand, I can be guilty of this. But I don't automatically read something and go "show, don't tell" - for me, it's intuitive, when it seems that showing/telling is more appropriate for that part of the story. But that doesn't mean I'm right, or that I have some kind of insight, it's just what feels right. If I remember correctly, King begins the main part of Salem's Lot by doing a long tell about small towns in Maine. That's exactly what is needed - I doubt I could bear reading three chapters showing small-town Maine before the fangs start showing up (I'm sure Maine is very nice). I would hazard putting it into words as "what is going to drive the story forwards?". One paragraph of exposition, or pages of attempting to build that into narrative. Ursula K. LeGuin does that as well - one paragraph tell about archwizards or somesuch sets the scene. Job done, the readers know where we are, what's going on, now to move on to the story. Where it goes wrong, particularly for fantasy authors, is doing a lot of telling to show off how great and comprehensive your worldbuilding is. Unless it's germane to the story, I really don't need to know that it's the 12th cycle of Tar'Kuli'Gut'Napeshtim, 11th scion of the son of Great Duma's pet voregut. On the other hand, if you want to tell me it's been raining non-stop for forty days and forty nights and the locals are all moving their animals onto houseboats, that's cool, I'd rather know that than have Bob casually drop it into a conversation with Jebediah, in an obviously forced scene.
It's actually a LOOOOONG time before any fangs start flashing. I'm re-reading it now, and I had forgotten at first it's really just a huge portrait of the town, seen through portraits of dozens of characters (rotating POV), and that it's almost halfway through the book before a vampire actually shows up. First there's a lot of talk about serial killers, mobsters (Hubie Marsten), and preeverts. I kept saying "Um, there will eventually be vampires in your vampire story, right?" (Paraphrasing Jeff Goldblum talking about dinosaurs).
Me too. I think that level of analysis is very difficult to achieve in a critique, unless you're going to read it—probably several times—let it sink in overnight or so, and then take a good long time writing it up. Often I breeze through and my level of analysis is pretty surface. Especially if I start a crit and it ends up being really long (most of them do). You run out of steam after a while.
To be honest, show/tell never really made sense to me either, even as a newbie. I sometimes see instances of telling that work perfectly fine, yet "show don't tell" has me inclined to, well, say "show don't tell"! But why should I do that when it works perfectly fine? There are examples of telling in the posts above me, so I won't add my own observations, but I think you get the point. The rudimentary of show/tell confuses me. In fact, the more I look into show/tell, the more confused I get. It feels like some elementary way to look into something and that's just not helpful, at least for me. I'm a computer person, I like to look things from a technical point of view, because I have to look at things from a technical point of view, and that's exactly what Seven Crown's answer is. But like others have pointed out, newbies like me won't interpret it easily, but it surprisingly makes a lot more sense than show/tell articles. Technical terms like "kernel sentence" help a lot. Yeah, there's a long journey ahead with this stuff for me...
Well, when people say "Show, don't tell", that's not right. I know it's become the standard somehow, but for the most part we don't do that on this board. At least not recently. As I said above, my advice is: Usually followed up by some examples. Telling is vitally important, it's a huge mistake to tell people not to tell.
I think fangs show up (or are hinted at) in the prologue, and the bit about the old Marston house being bought by a mysterious Englishman is there straight away, but yes, the first half of the book is a portrait of the town - or more accurately, a portrait of the people of the town, who are all vaguely interesting in a Needful-Things kind of way. Of course, part of that is also making you care enough about Susan so it's a (blood)sucker punch when she gets fanged.
I can't help but think back to that member who refused to use adverbs and obsessively (see what I did there?) went through his work to remove them, because that's telling, not showing. I think the advice went wrong somewhere. I read through some of my work on the forum and I must admit, I sling them in fairly liberally, but moreso in particular styles of writing than others. It just seems more suited to particular voices.
Yes, I've been thinking about what you said since you've said it back in the workshop thread, and that's because it makes a lot of sense to understand something from a root level. Understanding what telling is, understanding what showing is, then you'll know when to use them appropriately. It's a bit like building a house, you need to know when to use the right kind of materials to make a solid structure. I get it, because I know perfectly well what it feels like to understand something from a very deep level. I'm a computer person, meaning I have a technical understanding of how computers and the Internet work. Yesterday, my OS broke, so I dug into my OS's kernel and started pulling it apart to fix it. I knew what to do. Because I understand how to look deeper. I know the feeling. That's why your comment struck to me, it suddenly made so much sense, I just need to understand from a fundamental point of view. Which is easier said than done. I somehow need to get there. That said, I've been working on a piece nearly all day, re-writing and writing. It's precisely this problem I'm trying to tackle. But I think it's about time to call it a day, my mind is turning a little foggy
It was the first or maybe second King book I read. The other at the time was probably Carrie? Now that I'm familiar with many more, I can see he tends to use the same ideas over and over. There's definitely a Needful Things vibe to the furniture shop and the guys who run it. The main character is definitely a pseudo-self portrait (that's often true, as in The Shining). How many of his books have a writer as the protagonist? True even of The Body—a boy already becoming a writer. And so often the main theme is people having a hard time confronting death. And of course there's also a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of The Shining in 'Salem's Lot—a writer retreating to a creepy place to do some writing when it all hits the fan. It's almost like his later stories mined the fertile ground of The Lot, where they all exist already in utero.
