Ye old 'Show - Don't Tell' Fiasco [and what to do about it]

"Just the Facts, Please"

Show – Don’t tell! Every time we go to a writer's conference, we hear it. Each time someone edits our work, we see it highlighted in red. We know it's the right thing to do, but what does it really mean to show and not tell?

Telling is the act of passing along information. Just the facts ma'am.

 Almost anyone can write: Robin was mad so she hit her brother with her doll.

If we want the facts this sentence works just fine. 

It's not particularly riveting, but it works well when we just want the facts. However, when we want to capture and audience, we need to do more to spark the imagination  of the reader.

Showing speaks to the imagination.

Showing allows the reader experience a moment

Consider the following:

 Robin clenched her fists tight around her Raggedy Ann doll.

"Don't come in my room again!" she shouted. Bryan turned to leave and “whap!” Robin threw her doll and hit him square in the head. “Hey!” Bryan yelled back.

See how the reader's imagination engages. Suddenly they're involved. They can see her flying doll, they can feel it hit the back of his head and they can hear the conversation and they can read between the lines. Robin is pretty ticked off about Bryan coming into her room.

If we are unsure whether or not we are telling instead of showing, we can check for these elements:

a) Little or no dialogue. If we haven't used quotation marks in a while, it may be time to re-evaluate our technique. When is the last time our characters actually spoke?

b) Little or no movement. If our characters remain in the same space, sitting, mulling, contemplating, wondering, analyzing, remembering, etc.,

c) The journalistic questions, who said what, when, where and how, are answered - but that's it.

Examples of passive words:  is, isn't, am, are, aren't, was, wasn't, were, will, would, won't, has, had, have, be, been, do, don't, did, didn't, does, doesn't, seem, seems, exist, exists, appears, make, makes, show, shows, occur, occurs, get, got, went, put, some, many, most, that, very, extremely, totally, completely, wholly, utterly, quite, rather, slightly, fairly, somewhat, and suddenly.

These words are not wrong and many times they are needed. Make sure, however, that your writing avoids a plethora of these words. Passivity slows down the piece and often results in a snoozer of a story.

The active voice has the subject doing the action.

The dog bit Jimmy, and that would be active, but if you say Jimmy was bitten by the dog, that is passive.

- Try these:

- The road was crossed by the chicken

- Shirley was loved by John.

- The tree was chopped down by Mark

- The Police were called by the woman who was in the accident.

- Telling can be useful, in some kinds of writing. Scientific writing often employs a more passive style. 

Showing is vital to an effective story, essay, or blog post. Showing allows the reader to follow the author into the moment, to see and feel and experience what the author has experienced.

It takes a bit of practice but having the proper balance of showing and telling will make a story or article more interesting and effective.

Tips to Make Us Think

1. Use dialogue

Dialogue allows the reader to experience a scene as if they were there.

Instead of telling the reader your mom was angry, they can hear it for themselves:

“William James,” mom bellowed, “Get in here this instant!”

Dialogue can show a reader a plenty about a character, the emotion and the mood.

2. Use sensory language

     The five senses, seeing, hearing, touoching, smelling, tasting, should all be incorporated somehow. A good way to see if your story or article has the right balance of senses is to take five different colours and mark off what sense is elicited within each sentences. At the end of the exercise, if there is too much of one and not enough of another, maybe you should consider incorporating a different sense a little more often.

3. Be descriptive

Teachers, when we were in elementary school, pounded the parts of speech into us and we were instructed to use plenty of adjectives and adverbs in our work. As a writer, now it is our challenge to say the same thing but without the ly at the end of a word. Carefully choose the correct active words to replace adjectives and adverbs. Here is an example:

Telling: She sits quietly on the couch holding her guitar. She is upset.

There’s nothing wrong with that sentence. It gives the reader some basic information, but it doesn’t create an image. Compare that sentence with this:

Showing: Tears streaming down her face, she sits on the creamy, leather couch, cradling the guitar like a baby. The only sound is her the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.

The second example takes that basic information and paints a picture with it. It also uses figurative language to help create an image.

 

When using description, we should not overdo it. We don't want to present our characters as a list.

Here is an annoying list of facts. Not wrong...but annoying:

He was tall, with brown hair and blue eyes. He wore a red shirt and jeans, and a brown leather jacket.

Try incorporating these facts in your story somehow. Have someone look up to him therefore implying tall

Maybe somewhere along the line someone could be admiring his hair – could it be the colour of dark chocolate?

Clothing descriptions could be said something like this as you introduce him: His red plaid shirt tucked tightly into his stonewashed Levi’s gave every indication that he was a cowboy. The camel leather jacket tossed over his shoulder confirmed that his dream included prosperity.

Now it's your turn. Look through some of your stories and articles and check for passive words and sentences.  It's time to breathe a little life into your writing. Showing, and not telling is a great way to start the process!