Show AND Tell

icon by Peg Ihinger

When I was in grade school, we had a regular “show and tell day.” Kids would bring in an object they thought was interesting, show it to everyone, and then explain what it was, how to use it, why they thought it was interesting, or whatever. It made for presentations ranging from fascinating to cringe-worthy (unsurprising, given that the speakers were eight-year-olds), and it cemented in my mind that the two things—showing and telling—went together.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I start writing fiction. One of the first “rules” I was told was “show, don’t tell.” I could see the point, but the absolute insistence on never telling anything has bothered me for years. Because it’s “show and tell;” they’re techniques that each have a useful place in fiction. The problem comes when writers use a technique that’s suboptimal for what they’re trying to do.

For instance, “showing” is absolutely the wrong technique for writing a plot summary. The finished book “shows” the plot; if you don’t happen to need a plot summary to show an editor or to keep the twists straight in your head, then going straight to writing the book is fine. But if you intend to write a plot summary, then narrative summary, aka “telling,” is usually the more useful technique. 500 pages of manuscript is in no way a summary.

Within a story, there are quite a few times when it’s more effective to tell your readers something, rather than letting them see a scene (or several) play out in front of them.

1. Needing to pick up the pace. Summarizing events can move things along a lot more rapidly than showing every incident, especially if the incidents involved aren’t of particular importance to the central plot or characterization. I just wrote a scene in which several characters got into a technical discussion that would have run at least three pages if I’d put it in. Instead, I said “X and Y spent the next ten minutes arguing about theory, until suddenly…” and moved on to the next disaster. I “told” my readers that the discussion happened, which let me go straight to “showing” the important thing that happens next.
2. The outcome is inevitable (from the reader’s perspective). When “somebody” has to go kill the dragon, find the missing top-secret blueprints, infiltrate the enemy base, throw the ring in the volcano, or perform some other vital task, the reader is roughly 99% certain that the protagonist is eventually going to end up in the hot seat. It may be necessary to have eighteen people sit around and make the decision, but if that’s all they do, it’s probably not worth wasting an entire chapter on, especially if most of the people sitting around are the ones who stay home planning and running things instead of going off to kill dragons, etc. Telling readers “The council argued for three days, but in the end decided Our Hero would go.”
3. “Showing” would be boring. Boring the reader is possibly the cardinal sin of fiction. If the scene involves the hero attending a banquet where various important people give a bunch of boring speeches, you do not “show” the boring speeches. The reader does not need to read the boring bits in order to judge for themselves that the speeches are boring. (You can get away with it if you can make it really funny…but then it isn’t boring.)
4. The protagonist is getting an info dump from someone. Usually, this is background information—details about the base the team will be infiltrating, a briefing on the new case the protagonist is being assigned, etc.—something that is complex, important, and detailed. Showing the protagonist getting the information usually often involves a long scene in which the protagonist is lectured by someone—essentially, an info dump disguised as dialog. This can certainly work, but it can also have a deadly effect on pacing. Instead of showing the entire briefing, the writer can set it up and then simply tell the reader the pertinent details, returning to showing at the end of the scene. (James White’s “Sector General Hospital” series does this seamlessly in nearly every book, when the doctors are being briefed on their new cases.)
5. What happens is obvious. Most of this kind of thing isn’t even worth “telling”—many writers just skip over the character waking up, showering, shaving, dressing, making breakfast, etc. It’s obvious that those things happen, so both writer and reader can take them for granted. Normal travel time also tends to be skipped, unless the character gets mugged or has a car accident on the way.
6. Significant time passes. A short time-skip-type transition just jumps over a few hours or days. If weeks, months, or years go by between chapters, the writer usually needs to tell the reader what happened during that time, so they can see that yes, stuff happened, but it was mostly not important to this story. Nancy Kress’s The Prince of Morning Bells skips over several decades of the protagonist’s life between when she gets distracted from her quest and when she finally returns to it, and while it’s clear that a lot of daily life things happened—marriage, raising children, running a household and kingdom—the only thing that’s relevant to the central story is that the protagonist hit “pause” on the quest. So none of that gets “shown,” only “told.”

Except for plot summaries, where telling the story is the only way I know to fit a 100,000 word novel into five to ten pages of text (without shrinking said text into unreadability), you are not required to tell these parts of a story instead of showing them. These are just places where summarizing what happened is often more effective than showing what happened in a full-blown scene or series of scenes.

In fact, a combination of show-and-tell is often more effective in some of these instances than one or the other. Showing the viewpoint character being bored—leaning back in their chair, wondering if the boring speaker wears a toupee, and obviously not paying attention to the speech—can be a lot more convincing than showing the boring speech itself. Similarly, if a bunch of characters have to get together to hash something out, spend six months traveling, or do a briefing, it can be helpful to break up the narrative with occasional comments from key characters (preferably ones who are going to be significant in the rest of the story, as one normally doesn’t want to emphasize characters who only appear as minor walk-ons in this one scene). Example: <Brief description of attack on caravan.> “That was exciting,” Marna said. <Description of tornado wrecking caravan.> “That was more exciting,” Marna said.