Why is Show Don’t Tell So Damn Hard!?!
Show, Don’t Tell is often the monkey on our back as writers.
When we receive a note from an editor on a story we’ve sent out to a literary magazine or an online magazine or a book to an agent, and the note says, “More showing. Less telling,” we scream to the ceiling, “But I thought I WAS SHOWING!!!” followed by new, inventive expletives.
The bane of our existence as writers is this concept of show, don’t tell, and it’s bandied about like a missive from God. Some agents, editors, publishers, and professionals in the business who are tasked with helping writers achieve success with their work pretend to know what show, don’t tell means, but they’re often as clueless as the rest of us.
They can recognize good writing, and they can ascertain when there is too much telling and not enough showing, but many of them can’t tell you where ‘telling’ fits in because they’re focused on the showing.
I want you to know that while telling is important, it is merely the Thanksgiving table before the food is added. Set with dishes and candles, but no placemats, no steaming mashed potatoes, no dish after dish of deliciousness everyone can’t wait to devour. No laughter yet. No tears. No thankfulness.
In his book, Show Don’t Tell: A Writer’s Guide, author William Noble tells us,
“There’s no mystery in all of this, only a readjustment of approach so as to bring out the dramatic side of any incident or circumstance.”
There you have it. I’m done. What else do you need to know?
How about this—that showing is a skill while telling is something we do naturally? We experience something, and we tell our friends about it, and they laugh or cry or whatever emotion we attach to our story.
Often, in the telling, we gesture. Our voice goes higher or lower. We scowl. We shrug. We point. We turn the story into a tale of woe or happiness or joy or whatever it is, and in the telling, we show them how it made us feel.
There you have it. Showing vs telling. Mere narration vs emotional intensity.
Noble also writes,
“We think in terms of storyline and characters and scenes and moods, and these things have impact when they develop with drama. We must never be far from the drama [though] because this is where we get the food for ‘showing’ instead of ‘telling.’”
He goes on in the book to mention that people want stories, not lectures. I am fond of saying, “No one wants to read your PP presentation!”
You can dress up that PP presentation with animation, colored numbers and bullets, and all manner of interesting elements, but it’s still just a presentation—a lecture. It’s you telling me something you think I need to know. The story has to come from you. Jennifer Aker agrees. She says, “… studies show that if you share a story, people are often more likely to be persuaded. And when data and story are used together, audiences are moved both intellectually and emotionally.”
In show, don’t tell, it isn’t that I ‘need’ to know something (though I do), it’s that I need to feel something. I need to be there with you, experiencing the action. Oh, did I say action?
In Noble’s book, he writes, “Novelist Phyllis Whitney put it quite well when she wrote: ‘Perhaps the best and safest beginning is for the writer to present immediately someone interesting doing something interesting.’”
Interesting. A good word. A solid word. A mysterious word because who will decide what is interesting?
Your audience. Your book, fiction or nonfiction, is written to serve a specific audience. If your content is not interesting to them, do you suppose they will read on? Amazon and other online bookstores have a ‘peek inside’, and your would-be readers will ascertain in the space of a few seconds whether your book is interesting to them.
A few examples of showing and telling from both fiction and nonfiction.
NONFICTION:
From Next Act, Give Back: Discover Your Personal Path to Go from Being Charitable to Being a Changemaker by Kirsten Bunch:
“I understand what it’s like to see a human being suffering and to do nothing. Not because I didn’t care. Because I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t think I had the power to do anything.
“In 2006, I was walking down Chicken Street in Kabul, Afghanistan. I was exploring the small, family-owned shops that line the street and sell local handcrafts, jewelry, and carpets. My colleague and I were trying to get a feel for the craft traditions of the country.”
Further on, she says,
“After spending an hour or so going in and out of the stores on Chicken Street, I came out of one, and a woman wearing a blue burka approached me. I hadn’t interacted much with a lot of women during the short time I had been in Afghanistan, and it felt pretty foreign to me to have this woman who was completely covered from head to ankle, with a mesh square surrounding her eyes, edge nearer to me. She stood not directly in front of me but off to the side a bit, careful not to block my path. She put out her hand for money.
“A baby, probably six or seven months old, lay in her arms. The baby was nothing but skull.”
Bunch goes on to say she did not give the mother money and shares her inaction by saying she felt helpless herself.
The book is about that moment, the way it haunts her to this day and her journey to becoming a changemaker. Her description of her experience brings us into the story. We’re walking down the street with her. We feel her despair over the fate of the mother and child. She tells us what happened, but she shows us how it made her feel.
From Savvy Auntie: The Ultimate Guide for Cool Aunts, Great-Aunts, Godmothers, And All Women Who Love Kids by Melanie Notkin:
“The day my nephew was born, I took a photo of the sky to remember what the world looked like on the day my life changed forever.
“When I cradled him in my arms for the first time, I felt the weight of his tiny body. I felt the weight of my devotion to him. I felt more joy and love than I had ever felt in my life. In fact, what I felt was a love I’d never known before. A powerful, unconditional, prideful love.
“But as the days, and weeks, and months passed, I realized that as much as my nephew changed my life, my life actually didn’t change that much. I still went to work, on dates, out with my friends. Other than photographs, I had no badge of honor to express my aunthood. And believe me, I looked. But in a city as big as New York, all I could find was a little onesie that read IF YOU THINK I’M CUTE YOU SHOULD SEE MY AUNT,
“It started to dawn on me that I was sort of in limbo.”
From the first sentence, we’re given a glimpse into the story’s heart – that picture of the sky showing its photographer the moment her life changed.
In subsequent paragraphs, Notkin paints the picture of a childless woman in NYC, going about her life from day to day, unchanged. Her photo is just a photo of the sky. She tells us how she feels and shows us how it affects her. She is in limbo because aunts are of no importance; only mothers have meaning.
This book, like Bunch’s, describes a world that needs change. In each of their stories, they want the reader to be part of the tale, not just a bystander listening with only half an ear.
Telling matters. It sets up the story. Showing matters because it is the story.
FICTION
From The Library Thief by Kuchenga Shenjé:
“I fell in love with the feel of cotton before I fell in love with the books. Leather felt too masculine and reptilian. Cloth was so much warmer and didn’t slip out of my hands as easily. As a child I played underneath the tables and made toy families from the scraps that fell at my father’s boots.
“He would never talk to me about where the cloth we used came from, nor the contents of the books we worked on. There were a lot of things my father wouldn’t tell me, and rather than keeping me ignorant, his silence made me more curious. And fortunately, I was surrounded by the means to nourish that curiosity.
“Most of the time we spent together as I grew up was in silence, folding, beveling and smoothing. I sometimes wished my fingers could be as thick as his; he didn’t grimace when schooling leather and cloth into precise lines under his digital tutelage. I tried to be like my father, but all the books he left lying around gave me opinions.”
In these short sentences, we’ve learned a lot about the main character of this book. She’s curious, loves books, and works with her father, binding books. We know it is not present time; this is far in the past when bookbinding was a skill. And we know she is lonely, though she hasn’t said so.
In those few paragraphs, we understand that the telling is there, and we hear, see, feel the showing in words like “leather felt too masculine” and “his silence made me more curious.” We feel a part of her world when she says, “…as I grew up in silence, folding, beveling and smoothing.”
Next, The Politician’s Wife by Andrew Segal:
“Prologue”
“The body was that of a woman of indeterminate age. Only partially decomposed, it had lain undiscovered in the undergrowth of the Heath for several days. The clothing was either that of a vagrant, or else the choice of an individual who favoured bohemian dress. Comprising baggy, purple harem pants ill matched with a filthy, once white, balloon-sleeved blouse, the ensemble was already rotting through exposure to the elements.
“The pathologist had remarked, that while the removal of the victim’s head, hands and feet would render identification problematic, DNA taken from the corpse would no doubt prove conclusive once a missing person had been reported. The pathologist’s other observation was that notwithstanding this being an obvious case of murder, the body showed signs of a sustained attack, post-mortem. It was as though the killer has spent time venting an almost insane rage against the victim, whose slaughter has not been enough to satisfy the lust for, what? Revenge? Perverse sexual gratification? Cause of death had not yet been determined.”
In this opening, we are thrust into a murder scene and given the gruesome details rather casually, as if the person sharing them is unfazed.
The narrator could be a detective (we think he is, as we are all accustomed to this from television and crime novels) or a member of the pathologist’s team. Or an innocent bystander.
Notice how, in the telling, the narrator describes what he’s seeing; the better to shock us. Still, these are gory details necessary for the telling of the story. As an opening scene it must deliver “someone interesting doing something interesting,” to quote Phyliss Whitney. The details are where the showing lives. Bohemian dress. Missing head and hands and feet. Sustained attack post-mortem. We’re not merely learning about the discovery of the body; we’re there with the narrator, looking at it.
Segal is a client of ours. Tom worked with him to create the book and publish it on Amazon to great acclaim. It’s a great read for those cold Saturday afternoons in front of the fire or curled up all cozy in bed.
The Story Doctor
I sometimes turn to my storyteller friends on LinkedIn for insight into the power of stories and how to be better at them. James McCabe, The Story Doctor, had this to share about show, don’t tell:
“The adage Show Don’t Tell is one of the trustiest nuggets in Hollyworld and Filmland and applies perfectly to this most visual form of storytelling. But how well does it apply to the world of books and in particular the world of non-fiction?
“Tell is a German word that means accounting, essentially. Zahl (i.e. a Tale) is a telling, an account, a word which still applies equally to stories and numbers. If all you do is tell, you are accounting for human experience, recounting it. But you are not showing it. What is the difference? If your story has a message, it may have a meaning, but messages are what you send – stories are what you share.
“Telling is sense-making. But the ultimate purpose of storytelling of any kind in words is not that. Meaning, remember, is multivalent, and too much telling robs the reader of making their own mind up. They need the showing to immerse themselves in the experience and assign their own meaning.
“In the words of that great storyteller Anton Chekhov, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Showing vs. telling will go on and on and on and into infinity. On Reddit, r/Screenwriting, in his “Leave a Chair for the Audience” note to those of us who follow him, wrote recently,
“Hitchcock once explained the difference between surprise and suspense with scenarios: a bomb suddenly blowing up, or the audience being shown a bomb ahead of time while the characters remain oblivious.”
Showing vs telling.
Any questions?
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