Basic skills–Show and Tell

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Probably the most common piece of technical advice about writing fiction is “show, don’t tell.” I’ve gone on at length in other posts about what’s wrong with this dictum, but today I want to talk about how to do it right. Starting with some technical aspects.

First, I need to distinguish between two types of “telling”: generalizing vs summarizing. Generalizing is abstract and interpretive: “Jake was a generous person,” “Diane was always friendly,” “The battle was long and horrible.” General statements are telling readers what to think about characters, places, things, and events. They don’t give readers any room to reach their own conclusions based on what they personally consider “generous,” “energetic,” or “long and horrible.”

Summarizing is specific, but compressed rather than detailed: “Jake chaired two fundraising committees for nonprofits and contributed annually to several charities.” “Diane smiled at everyone.” “After three days of constant battle, the few survivors crawled off the field.” Summaries often take more words than a general description, because they provide some specifics. They are a brief snapshot of what Jake and Diane do that indicates generosity or friendliness, and summarizes what the results of the battle were that make it “long and horrible.” Readers can then form their own opinions about whether the characters were actually generous and friendly, or whether they are actually showing off or compensating for a guilty conscience.

The “don’t tell” part of that basic writing advice is aimed squarely at the first type of telling, but it frequently gets misapplied to the second sort.

“Showing” is technically another misnomer. All writing is telling the reader something. “Showing” simply gives readers specific details: exactly what the characters say and think, as they say or think it; what the characters do, as they do it; what specific things are present and precisely what they look like. And even then, it isn’t as much detail as one would get from watching the same scene in a movie.

Showing a scene doesn’t include all the details. In a movie, the camera catches the leaves blowing past the main characters’ feet during the big proposal scene that’s the actual focus; in a written narrative, there are simply too many tiny, irrelevant elements. “Showing” a scene in writing is like a detailed pencil sketch that the reader has to fill in with colors and any moving parts from their own imagination. Summarizing a scene is like those lovely Japanese ink drawings that take only two lines and a couple of dots to show you a sleeping housecat. Generalizing is like giving a reader a plain piece of paper labeled “This is a cat” with no picture at all (and then being surprised later to find out that some readers pictured a black housecat, others a calico cat, and a few thought of tigers or lions).

“Show, don’t tell” carries the strong implication that only showing is an effective technique, which is deeply unfortunate. All three techniques can be effective, because they each do something different. Which is where we come to the storytelling part of showing vs. telling, which involves choosing the most effective technique for what the writer wants to do.

The most vilified of the three is generalizing. “He’s generous, she’s friendly, it’s horrible” are all opinions. In straight narrative, they require the reader to trust that the writer is telling them the truth. Reader trust is a precious commodity, hard to gain and easy to lose. If readers have to choose between their own perceptions and what the narrator says is true, they will nearly always choose their own judgments. As soon as the reader perceives, according to their own standards, that Jake is not being generous, Diane is acting unfriendly, or the battle wasn’t as long or horrible as they’d pictured, they lose a bit of trust in what the writer is telling them. Too many lost bits, and the reader stops reading.

This means that 95% of the time, generalizing is extremely ineffective for description. Even if you’re desperately trying to reduce word count.

However, generalizing is useful in dialog and internal monolog, precisely because it conveys an opinion…the character’s. If a character says that Jake is a generous person, and the reader later sees him acting un-generously, the reader doesn’t lose trust in the writer. They lose trust in the character who told them Jake was generous.

Used this way, generalized “telling” becomes a useful tool for characterization. It also works as sarcasm (“‘Such a generous person,’ Harriet commented, watching Jake throw a single nickel in the Salvation Army kettle.”), as a tell for an unreliable narrator, or even in a thumbnail description of a group of walk-on characters where the writer doesn’t need to say more than that it’s an angry mob or a peaceful delegation.

Summarizing is halfway between showing and telling, but I’m treating it as telling because so many people think it is. It’s a really odd thing to forbid, because it is practically indispensable for writing transitions. The longer the period one is skimming over, the more useful it becomes as a way of giving readers some idea of what’s been going on in the past week or month or year or decade.

It doesn’t matter whether the writer is jumping over time in narrative (“George spent the next three weeks in the hospital”), in dialog (“‘After three weeks, I’m glad to get out of there,’ George told Michael as they left the hospital”), or in the point-of-view character’s internal monolog (“That was the most boring three weeks of my life, George thought as he left the hospital”). These transitions are all just compressing a bunch of time that, if told in detail, wouldn’t contribute anything to the story other than “time passed, irrelevant stuff happened.”

Dialog also uses summarizing a lot, for the same reasons. People in real life seldom, if ever, give a twenty-minute blow-by-blow description of George’s three weeks in the hospital. They say, “George? He’s been in the hospital for three weeks getting chemo. He got out yesterday.”

And since I’m running out of space in this post, I’m going to spend the next one on “showing.”