Small Skills: Show, Don't Tell

Hey Everyone. I am so sorry that this post is yet again late. I seem to have a lot to do this week and not enough motivation to do it. A lot of stuff was undone this week and sadly this post ended up being one of them. I've had some weird health stuff going on, but we think we've got it figured out so, I finally am here to write it. We've finally got to the writing portion of small skills and I'm excited to write this part of the series. A lot of these skills are thing that a lot of newer or younger writers don't think about. A lot of them I've never even heard have real technical writing names. A lot of them are just things I've noticed about writing. So here we go with the first skill,

Small Skills: Show Don't Tell

This skill was something that was introduced to me in about the 8th grade. I remember that when I first heard of this skill I was deeply confused. My teacher tried to explain it to our class, after class I asked for extra help, I got it explained to me by classmates and still it didn't make a lot of sense to me. It finally clicked when I was able to find examples of a piece of writing that used show don't tell and the same scene without it. So, in this post I'm hoping to do just that. I'm hoping to give a brief explanation of show don't tell and then use a couple examples to illustrate exactly what it means.

American novelist Jerry Jenkins said it well, “If you struggle with the difference between showing vs. telling, you’re not alone. Once you’ve got it, it seems simple. But until you do, this maxim causes as many questions as anything in the writing world.”

Show, Don’t Tell.

It sounds simple at first. The technical definition is, “When you tell rather than show, you simply inform your reader of information rather than allowing him to deduce anything.” You don’t want to tell your reader anything. You want your reader to think sometimes. I heard an analogue once that works really well as an example of Show, Don’t Tell (Although her analogue was for something completely different). Think of it this way:

You are the master of this world and the readers are like your children. You want these readers to become master’s of green. You have two options here. First is called Telling. You can place your readers into the world of green and tell them, this is green. They’ve never known colors before so if they’re placed into a world of green that’s all they’ll know. If everything is green, nothing is green. But that’s how we teach little kids. We want our readers to be MASTERS of green. So, the other option is something called Showing. Showing is when you place your readers into a world of blue. Then you tell them that this world is blue. But if everything is blue, nothing is blue. So, then we place them in a world of yellow. And tell them this is yellow. And that’s when your readers will recognize green. This is showing.

The problem then, with showing and not telling is trying to actually write using that skill. I decided to write a couple examples of showing instead of telling.

Telling: The street was scary.

Showing: There was only one light on the street. At the very end. I stood beneath the small light, protected within its walls of luminescence. The shadows at the end of the street seemed to be moving, forms shifting in and out of my vision as I tried to focus and discern what was real and what wasn’t. But my vision, refusing to settle, seemed to trick my brain into the ethereal belief that something was watching me from the shadows at the end of the street. I felt a shiver of dread trail down my spine at this thought.

This is the difference between showing and not telling. Telling informs your readers. Showing helps them to think and to feel what your character is feeling. In the first examples, the telling, my reader understands one thing. The street was scary. However, this does not attach any sort of emotion to the reader. Sure, it attaches an emotion to the character, but the reader doesn’t feel anything about the street or the character. In the second example, the showing, our reader can suddenly understand. There’s no light on the street, the shadows seem to be watching the character and the character is scared. Suddenly we know all the things that the telling wanted us to know, the street is scary. But we also know what makes it scary. And suddenly the reader can actually feel the readers fear.

This is the difference between showing and telling.

Showing is a great skill for new writers. It really gives a different feeling than writers who have just entered this world of noveling. It gives a better sense of a writer’s voice and can help you to define a character. The way your character views the world, and shows it to your reader, can be a defining characteristic of your character. It makes your reader feel appreciated and entertained. When a reader reads a book that tells them everything, they don’t enjoy it and it feels like a child’s book because it doesn’t challenge the reader at all.

When you can use showing in your writing it really shows great talent as a writer. It increases your capacity to share your story with other people, including with yourself. When you can see what your character sees, you can help others see that as well. And this is also were you can tie in your observation skills from the prewriting skills. When you can see the world around you and describe it, your world goes from telling to showing.

So, the street was scary, or the room was clean, or the building was old. Those are the ends of thought processes not the beginnings. What made the street scary? Why was the room clean? How could you tell the building was old?

When someone reads a book and they have these sorts of questions about statements that the character makes they can’t fully absorb themselves in the world. It doesn’t exist in their minds eye as a place they can exist. When a world is described to the writer’s fullest ability and the reader can create that world in their mind, then a reader can get lost in the pages because they can see and get lost in the world. That’s why Showing instead of Telling, is an important skill for all writers to have.

I am so sorry that this post was so late this week. I really struggled with a way to describe this skill in an understandable way. I hope that it ended up being clear enough for everyone. I’m working on Saturday’s post and I will try my best to make sure that this one is on time. Like I mentioned earlier, I managed to fix up all my health stuff so hopefully I’m feeling more up to it this time around. Thank you all for reading. If you have any comments, feel free to leave me a little note in the contact me page. You might also notice that there is a little person on the banner now. You can click on that and create an account on my blog and log in to send me comments. When you log in you can also take part in special writing discussions that I put up for the members of the page. I just started figuring out how that works so I hope to hear from you all again! So,

Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!