Show, Don't Tell (Unless You Want To Sound Like Me): A How-To And How-Not-To Guide

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An aye-write guide to Showing vs. Telling

I’ll bet that if you’ve ever taken an English class or a creative writing class, you’ll have come across the phrase “Show, don’t tell.”  It’s pretty much a creative writing staple! Anton Chekov once said “ Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.” In other words, showing should help you to create mental pictures in a reader’s head.

Showing helps readers bond with the characters, helps them experience the emotions and action more vividly, and helps immerse them in the world you have created. So “show, not tell” is definitely not bad advice - in certain circumstances. But it has its place. More on that later. 

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So How do I Show? 

Dialogue

Thoughts/Feelings

Actions

Visual Details

So instead, of telling me “He was angry”, show me how his face face flushes red, how his throat tightens, how he slams his fist, how he raises his voice, how his jaw clenches, how he feels hot and prickly, how his breathing gets rapid, how his thoughts turn to static, etc.

Instead of telling me “The cafeteria was in chaos”, you could show me  someone covered in food and slowly turning crimson, children rampaging under the feet of helpless adults, frenzied shouting, etc. 

Handy Hint! Try to avoid phrases like “I heard”, “I felt”, “I smelled”, etc. These are still “telling words” (also known as filters) and may weaken your prose, as your readers could be taken out of the experience and you may lose their attention.

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Is Showing Always The Right Thing to Do? 

No! Showing is not always right and telling is not always wrong! It’s important to develop the skill and instinct to know when to use showing and when to use telling, as both can be appropriate in certain occasions. 

So, “Show, don’t tell” becomes “Show versus tell”. 

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What is Showing and Telling? 

Showing is “The grass caressed his feet and a smile softened his eyes. A hot puff of air brushed past his wrinkled cheek as the sky paled yellow, then crimson, and within a breath, electric indigo”

Telling is “The old man stood in the grass and relaxed as the sun went down.”

Both of these excerpts are perfectly acceptable to use in your writing! But both do different things, although their meanings are pretty much the same. The first example is immersive, sweeping, visual, engaging. The second example is much more pared back and functional. But both have their places in prose! 

Telling is functional. Think about when you tell people things. You tell your children dinner is ready. The news reporter tells you there’s a drop in crime rates. Your best friend tells you she’ll be late because her car broke down on the way to yours. These are brief and mundane moments in everyday life. 

So, do these deserve multiple paragraphs with sensory detail and action/feeling/thought for every little thing? Do you need to spend an entire paragraph agonising over a minor detail when there’s a sword dangling (physically or metaphorically) over your MC’s head? No. And I’ll explain why.

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When To Use Telling

As before, telling is functional. It’s brief. It’s efficient. It gives a gist of a situation without getting bogged down in detail.

Showing is slow, rich, expansive, and most certainly not efficient! 

Here’s an example of some telling: 

“Years passed, and I thought of Emily less and less. I confined her to some dark dusty corner of my brain. I had to elbow my memories of her to the side. I was too busy with other things. Finishing school, then university a year later. Life was full and enjoyable. But then, one dark cold September night…”

You can’t show this example, unless you wanted to waste page after page of your MC waking up, going through everyday life, to get to the point your actual story started. If you do that, you will likely kill off any interest a reader would have in your novel and likely, your book itself.

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Summing Up 

Showing: 

Should be used for anything dramatic

Uses thoughts, feelings, dialogue, action, and visual detail 

Will likely be used more than telling

Telling: 

Delivering factual information

Glossing over unnecessary details 

Connecting scenes

Showing the passage of time 

Adding backstory (not all at once!) 

“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.

it drives me bonkers the way people don’t know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said “it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative.” and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we’ve become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it’s the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century “uranianism” and misogyny. second of all, i’m sorry that oscar wilde didn’t include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess…

Some Geology Vocabulary

for your next poem/story (pt. 1)

Abyssal plain - A flat region of the deep ocean floor.

Aeolian - Describes materials formed, eroded, or deposited by or related to the action of wind.

Braided stream - A sediment-clogged stream that forms multiple channels that divide and rejoin.

Colluvium - A general term applied to loose and incoherent deposits, usually at the foot of a slope or cliff and brought there chiefly by gravity.

Conchoidal - Resembling the curve of a conch shell and used to describe a smoothly curved surface on a rock or mineral; characteristic of quartz and obsidian.

Devitrification - Conversion of glass to crystalline material.

Dune - A low mound or ridge of sediment, usually sand, deposited by the wind.

Ephemeral lake - A short-lived lake.

Estuary - The seaward end or tidal mouth of a river where freshwater and seawater mix.

Euhedral - A grain bounded by perfect crystal faces; well-formed.

Fenestral - Having openings or transparent areas in a rock.

Fluvial - Of or pertaining to a river or rivers.

Friable - Describes a rock or mineral that is easily crumbled.

Granoblastic - Describes the texture of a metamorphic rock in which recrystallization formed crystals of nearly the same size in all directions.

Hermatypic - Describes a type of reef-building coral that is incapable of adjusting to conditions lacking sunlight.

Hot spring - A thermal spring whose temperature is above that of the human body.

Isthmus - A narrow strip or neck of land, bordered on both sides by water, connecting two larger land areas.

Lacustrine - Describes a process, feature, or organism pertaining to, produced by, or inhabiting a lake.

Lithify - To change to stone, or to petrify; especially to consolidate from a loose sediment to solid rock.

Lunar tide - The part of the tide caused solely by the tide-producing force of the Moon.

Source ⚜ More: Word Lists

Haunted

there’s wip (active development) and wip (stuck in development hell) and wip (oh you’re not even getting funding for this one)

This.

THE BLACK SHEEP DOG MASTER POST

The Black Sheep Dog

Book I - In the Black 

“What is to you ‘taking advantage'—is to me, merely—” Orion searched around for the correct phrase. “—Adapting to these new circumstances I find myself in, and acting as I see fit when opportunities arise that are to my…benefit.”

“That is the most fucking Slytherin justification I’ve ever heard,” Sirius growled, angrily.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Book 2 - Black Mask

“Then why did he leave his family—truly?”

“Nothing all that exciting, I’m afraid,” he said, staring across the room, his smile grim. “Just a run-of-the-mill blood-traitor who was fed up. A political idealist. Took a different view of things than his family—the Black sheep of the Blacks.” She furrowed her brow. “You look disappointed.”

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 

Chapter 3 

Chapter 4 

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8 

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16 

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35