At long last you’ve received feedback on your novel. But your beta readers say they had trouble connecting with the story, or a particular scene or character. Maybe all three! Uh oh.

Then you read a comment that says the dreaded words, the ones you’ve heard many times before, the ones you may know but not quite understand…

“Show, don’t tell.”

*window-shattering scream that startles the area’s wildlife*

What does that even mean?

Buckle up, kids, because that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Let’s define some terms.

Generally speaking, telling tends to use emotion words and straightforward explanations, while showing tends to use verbs and implications.

A classic example: a character is angry. We’re going to take a look at the resident Angry Teen from my contemporary fantasy novel, The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher: Clem Rodriguez.

Telling is exactly what it sounds like – you tell readers the character is angry.

Clem was angry.

Showing is where things get tricky. Rather than telling or explaining to readers how the character feels, you use actions to show or imply the character’s feelings.

Clem kicked the wall. “We should’ve killed it. We have the sword.”

“Yes, and I saw your face when that dragon flew at us. You didn’t look ready to kill it then.”

Clem flushed. “I’m not scared.”

“I didn’t say you are,” Edna said. “But there’s nothing wrong with being scared.”

Clem scowled and lunged for the sword. 

Did I need to tell you Clem was angry in this example? No! I trusted that you were smart enough (and familiar enough with basic human emotions) to recognize kicking walls and scowling as signs of anger. Showing involves trusting your readers. Telling can make readers feel like you think they’re stupid, because you felt a need to explain concepts like anger to them. And they’re more likely to connect to characters when emotions are shown rather than told.

This is also true of action: too much telling, and your story reads like an outline. It’s tough to care about what’s going on in an outline.

For example, in The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher, there’s a scene where Clem accidentally sets a church on fire. Telling a scene like that might look something like this:

Clem set the church on fire by accident. They were all scared. They managed to get out of the church as the roof collapsed.

Telling takes what should be an exciting scene and reduces it to an outline. Are you interested? Probably not. Maybe you wish you were—maybe an accidental fire and daring escape sound exciting, but you’re not invested. That’s telling for you!

In reality, the scene is much longer and includes details about how the fire starts, how the characters react, and how they finally escape. Additionally, I never tell you that it’s “by accident” or that “they were all scared”: I use dialogue, actions, and description to imply these things.

If readers aren’t connecting with your story, an overuse of telling could be the issue. Are you summarizing your scenes, or are you fleshing them out to include dialogue, description, character actions? Are you giving readers a lengthy outline or a fully-fledged story?

That said…

Telling can be useful.

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most well-known and oft-repeated tips for writers, but the fact is that telling has its place. I cannot emphasize this enough:

You don’t have to show everything.

What?

Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t have muttered. Let me try that again.

*ahem*

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHOW EVERYTHING.

Look, showing is great. Showing is what paints a picture for readers and makes your story read like a novel instead of an outline of a novel. Huzzah for showing!

But sometimes showing can make the less-important parts of the story drag. Showing when you don’t need to kills the pacing.

There’s a lot of travel in The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher. A couple days from Pennsylvania to Detroit, with stops in between; a few more days from Detroit to California; more travel to and from the land of the dragons. If I narrated all those journeys, the story would get really, really long…and really, really boring.

In times like this, telling is your friend! You don’t need to dramatize every transitional detail: journeys from one place to another (whether long, cross-country journeys or short trips down the hall), the usual pleasantries people exchange when they run into each other, or explanations from one character to another about things the readers already know.

There are of course exceptions to each of these. Maybe something important to the plot happens on the way from the bedroom to the living room, or maybe there’s serious tension underlying those how-do-you-dos, or maybe you need to show a character’s reaction to learning something the reader already knows.

(This is especially true of the latter.)

Most of the time, however, “they arrived three days later” is better than a long, drawn-out scene in which you detail every moment of that three-day journey. If a scene bores you as you write it, it may be a scene you can skip past by using telling to summarize.  

Don’t forget that this isn’t a zero-sum game: you can, and should, use showing and telling in tandem.

If an important event or conversation occurs on this journey, you can show that but tell us what happens afterward until the characters have arrived at the next plot-significant destination. This also works if the journey is most of the plot. Think The Hobbit, in which Tolkien dramatizes many of the events that take place en route to the Lonely Mountain but uses telling to skip ahead when nothing important or exciting happens.

Let’s clear up a quick point about showing.

In addition to mistakenly thinking showing is 100% necessary 100% of the time, people tend to go overboard with it. So I want to take a moment to discuss what showing is not.

Showing is using action, dialogue, and description to convey rather than state emotions and to illustrate rather than summarize the events of the story. Showing is not deconstructing and describing or defining every single solitary word you use.

An example I come across with unfortunate frequency: the deconstruction of the word “punched.”

What do I mean by “deconstruction?”

*Bill Nye voice*

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING.

Here are two sentences conveying the idea of “punched”:

1) “He punched his brother in the face.”

2) “His fist connected with his brother’s face.”

I see many, many people use the construction “his fist connected with” to “show” punching.

But here’s the thing: the word “punched” already does that!

“Punched” is a verb, a word associated with a physical action, a word for which readers already have an understanding and a mental image. That’s all you need for showing – rather than saying something abstract, like “he was really angry with his brother,” you’re showing that abstract concept of “anger” through an action, namely punching his brother in the face.

Replacing the simple verb “punched” with “fist connected with” takes showing overboard. Instead of painting a picture, you’re defining the word “punched” for readers who undoubtedly already have an inkling of what it means.

(If they don’t, that’s what Google is for. Alexa! Define “punched.”)

Deconstructing verbs this way isn’t good showing. It’s boring. Which sentence packs more of a (pun intended) punch? The one about a character punching someone, or the one about a disembodied fist connecting with something? I sincerely hope you think it’s the first.

Now that we’ve got some inkling of what showing and telling mean, let’s get back to that feedback: Show, don’t tell.

What do you do with this? The first step is to determine whether or not the advice is sound. I like getting feedback from multiple people, because it generally discounts matters of personal preference and potential ignorance. If one reader says “show, don’t tell,” they might have a misunderstanding of what that really means. If several readers say “show, don’t tell,” you might have a problem with summarizing rather than dramatizing the story.

In the context of an individual scene or line, you can also determine whether or not the advice is sound based on what we discussed above. Have you summarized the scene or fleshed it out? If you summarized it, is that okay? Is it an important moment that deserves more detail, or is it a transitional moment you can skip over without sacrificing the story? Are you really telling, or is this reader asking you to turn a word like “punched” into a phrase like “fist connected with”?

Maybe you’ll discover that you’re already showing, and your readers misunderstand this common writing tip. Maybe you’ll discover that you are telling, but telling is the best option for this part of the story. If that’s the case, great! No further work needed.

(At least not for now, on this one point. Revising is a Beast.)

But what if you do need to show?

The first and easiest thing to do is read through for abstract emotion words. Highlight or mark them and then create a list for each word: what do people do when they’re angry, scared, happy, sad? What body language, actions, or speech let you know how they’re feeling? Rewrite the scene using some of the things on your list. Resist the urge to state how the characters are feeling; let those emotive actions, words, and body language from your list do the work for you.

Similarly, read for summary. Highlight or mark any place where you summarize important events and conversations. Rewrite the scene so that those events and conversations are recorded in detail. Verbatim dialogue instead of paraphrase; a play-by-play instead of an overall picture.

(It’ll do wonders for your word count.)

Depending on the state of your story, this might require something close to an entire rewrite. Or maybe you just need to rewrite a few individual scenes.

Let’s review.

• Showing is dramatization, involving action, dialogue, and description to illustrate events and convey or imply emotions. It does not involve explaining straightforward verbs in greater detail.
• Telling is summary, involving straightforward explanations of events and emotions.
• Showing is useful for plot- and character-significant events or conversations. It’s the meat of the story, the things readers need to see to understand the story and characters.
• Telling is useful for transitions, such as the journeys, pleasantries, and explanations that may occur between plot-significant events.
• Showing and telling should be used in tandem.

Keep in mind that this blog post is by no means a comprehensive guide to showing and telling! They have a complex relationship that’s far more nuanced than I can explain in a single post, article, or ardent love-letter to a fellow writer. There are many different examples of showing gone overboard, some involving nouns instead of verbs; there are examples of telling that don’t fit neatly into “stating emotions” or “summarizing events.” There are other times you might choose to tell instead of show, for reasons other than those listed above.

But hopefully this is enough to get you started—enough to get you thinking about the differences and relationship between showing and telling. Have any questions? Additional advice on handling this tip? Drop your comments below! 

E.M. Anderson is a graduate student at Lourdes University, where she studies theology and leadership. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook or check out her blog for puns, excited shouting, and occasional updates on her work-in-progress, The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher: a contemporary fantasy novel about an 83-year-old who leaves the nursing home to follow her destiny when she learns she’s the Chosen One.