Show, Don’t Tell

Welcome back for 2022, where the craziness of the last few years continues to grow. That aside, this post will hopefully serve as an indication of my plans for 2022 with my blogging. I am aiming for two posts a week on average – some weeks will have more and some less due to workload and finishing my Master’s degree. So please enjoy my first Creative Writing post, let me know what you think and stay tuned for another next week!

This is the first of my posts focused on creative writing skills. Aside from being interested in board games as a hobbyist, I am a History teacher, an English teacher and an amateur writer who runs a private writing group. So these creative writing posts will stem from both my interests, my experience and some expertise.

What do I mean by Show, Don’t Tell?

This is one of the most common creative writing cliches. And for anyone who has done any creative writing before, you have likely heard it. As a teacher, I refer to this often: but what does it actually mean?

Like any cliche, it has been overused. After all, there is a level of ‘telling’ writing which is always needed in any format of storytelling, and particularly through the exposition. This being the part of a narrative which can provide description and worldbuilding by using adjectives and adverbs to transform a simple building into a magnificent castle of cascading spirals and elevated stairways.

Even scripts will occasionally need to tell details through stage directions. And poetry, despite being the most elegant form of creative writing, can become expository in its more epic forms. So this should inform what ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ is not, as a rule. It is not prescriptive to the writer.

What I mean by this, is that the cliche ‘show don’t tell’ is not something to take too literally. For an example of detail which is told see the following:

I went to the Zoo.

This is a simple detail, briefly explained, or told to the reader. It does not provide any reasoning for the trip, how long the trip took, why the trip existed, or any other potentially relevant details. Now, those are details which could be delivered in a manner which tells the readers the facts:

I went to the Zoo at 9am in the morning. It was a cold day, it was January and we went because I wanted to take a daytrip away from the house. We spent the whole day there.

This is entirely factual and tells the reader most of the important details. However, because this is ‘told’ to the reader it also is less interesting. Consider this revised version instead:

It was a cold day in January as I strode up to the Zoo. It was early in the morning, and we were about to spend the whole day on our daytrip.

This is slightly more interesting, because the very fact that I have written this in a more active manner creates more interest. Including the verbs and providing more action, turns it from bland telling into more interesting retelling of events. But it could still be improved again:

My breath smoked in the frosty January air as I proceeded to walk towards the Zoo. My wife and I were about to spend the rest of our daytrip there.

So here, changing the description which tells the reader that it is a cold morning, into a description of what the cold is doing in causing smoky breath, is even more intriguing. I do not have to write that it is cold, because the smoky breath explains this. Even better I could remove and edit some of the wording to show this moment to even better effect:

My breath streamed out like smoke in the January air as we strode towards the Zoo. “Gee, it’s almost too early to be here.” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous, we’ve got a whole day ahead of us and it’s not that early,” my wife replied.

Here in this last example, by using dialogue I have explained that it is early in the morning and the characters intend to spend the whole day at the Zoo. I showed that it was cold by describing breath streaming out like smoke (usually a sign of cold). But this of course highlights a problem with going too much into ‘showing the reader’ in that the context clues must be visible so the reader understands it is cold and not merely that the character has been smoking a cigarette recently.

I will note that a creative writer should never avoid telling the reader a detail in descriptive or expository form, if the story needs it. Occasionally you will need to write that a character ‘walked down the stairs’ and you don’t need to describe the action in some dramatic manner. But the reasoning behind why a narrative should rely on ‘showing’ the reader details is that it becomes more engaging by better placing the reader into the middle of the story you are telling.

Examples of Writers or Books that ‘Show’ Over Telling?

While most writers use this as their golden rule, Anton Chekhov is famous for being the writer who explained the concept in the first place. His short stories are fantastic in their execution of description, narrative, and the purpose of every word.

Stephen King is also famous for advising writers to use more verbs and fewer adverbs. I have yet to read his book on creative writing (On Writing) but it is meant to be one of the best guides.

Andrzej Sapkowski, author of The Witcher series, uses this in interesting ways through dialogue. Occasionally I have noticed how characters will respond to an action that is happening and will describe this in their dialogue. For instance say a character was carrying a heavy load of dye, the dialogue might go: “No, let me help you take it. That is far too heavy for you, you’ll drop it and it will break. Oh look now you’ve done it, that’s going to take a lot of work to get out of the carpet and oh gods my robes!” And in so doing the reader can see how the load was dropped and dye was spilled everywhere without this needing to be explicitly stated.

Of course, I will mention that J.R.R. Tolkien is a wonderful author when it comes to description and showing events. However, I also have a clear bias towards his writing and that of Brandon Sanderson, given they have written some of my favourite books. See also Michael J. Sullivan in the same category.

How to improve the skill?

If you want to improve your ability to ‘show don’t tell,’ you need to become more aware of what good ‘showing writing’ looks like. Make sure you read some of your favourite authors to see how they use more immersive language to show events occurring. And then beyond that read more widely, particularly in the genre you wish to write. It is a common fallacy that writers often want to avoid reading in their genre, but the most common advice is for writers to read more in that genre, not less.

Beyond reading, you can practise with a writing activity. Such as by taking a situation and writing it down in a manner which first looks to tell the events. Then focus on rewriting it into a format which focuses on showing the details. Then finally work on weaving dialogue into the piece to replace some of the description.

The first step to improving in your own novel or short stories is awareness. And this often comes with the editing stages. If you are a student you can use your teacher and ask for specific feedback. If you are a writer, gather some like-minded writers around you as your writing group (I am more than happy to provide advice on this) so you have people who can read your writing and provide feedback to help you make your writing show more detail rather than simply tell.