Show and tell

The first commandment of writing: show, don’t tell. By showing you’re letting the reader project something of their own experience into the writing. Showing is sharing – always the nice thing to do.

What would be more exciting: visiting Disneyworld and riding on every roller coaster twelve times, or listening to a friend going on about when they visited Disneyworld and rode every roller coaster twelve times? Unless you really hate riding roller coasters, I’d guess the actual experience would be more exciting than hearing about it from somebody else. The same applies to writing, whether prose, poetry or drama: show, don’t tell.

If we were to conduct a survey into what words most frequently appeared in workshops and creative writing seminars, we’d probably end up with ‘show’, ‘don’t’ and ‘tell’. It’s so common a phrase now it even has its own abbreviation. But why should we SDT? Aren’t writers supposed to tell stories? Yes, but we want to make readers feel like they are part of our literary world; to become immersed in our text, not just think they’re hearing it from an old man at the bus stop. When writing, we want to transport readers, convince them that this world of words is the real thing: we don’t just want to tell them that the heroine is in danger, we want to make the reader feel that danger, hear her pounding heart, sense the killer’s breath on the back of her neck, try and fight the panic of imminent danger. People don’t always believe what they’re told, but they do believe the evidence of their own senses. Likewise, people don’t always engage emotionally with the characters they hear about in stories, but if they’re put in that person’s shoes, they can’t help but empathise. That’s where SDT kicks in.

No, it’s not an insurance term: it’s telling when you really should be showing. If you start explaining to the reader something that you should be dramatising, you’re not giving a scene the impact it should have: ‘She wanted to tell him how much she loved him’ – yawn! And it doesn’t help if you resort to abstract terms either: telling your reader that a character is ‘madly and deeply in love’ is no substitute for actually showing how that person feels: ‘She was trembling, her stomach in knots. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his fingers on her spine. She wanted to fold her body into his, so whenever he went away next she’d always be there – warm, ready.’ You have to set your imagination to work full time to show things in a way that is moving and believable. Yes, telling is much easier, but if you can’t invest your words with any humanity or any depth, if you just tell the story from a detached viewpoint, you risk a reader shutting off and thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner, or what kind of bathroom cleaner to buy next.

By telling, you’re assuming a reader needs things spelt out as simply as possible. You have to have faith in your reader’s imagination: don’t try and explain everything in a scene, credit a reader with enough creative power to fill in the blanks, to contribute something of her own experience. To truly make readers feel like they’ve been transported to your world, you need to let them bring part of their own life to the text: telling everything – setting, character, plot – in minute detail denies them this and makes the text the author’s empire, a world that leaves no room for them. Showing allows readers to project part of their own experience into the story – it becomes a story for them, rather than one simply told to them.