Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

"Show, Don't Tell" and Other Thoughts On Description

"Show, Don't Tell." 

Those three little words get repeated a ridiculous amount of times. No matter who you are on Wattpad, If you get critiqued regularly, I bet you've been told that at least one time. If you've read a bunch of my chapters, you might have found I've touched on the subject of show, don't tell in the past. However, I've found this sort of advice misleading authors. In a way, it's kind of bad advice.

It's not bad advice because it's not right, it's bad advice because most people don't really understand what it means. In previous chapters, I've complained about how to keep a story interesting by limiting the amount you write. The longer it takes to say something, the slower and more boring your story potentially becomes. You, of course, want to avoid purple prose and pretty little nothings, words said just to make a scene feel pretty, without adding in substance to your story. And you also want to avoid adding details that in no way improve your story. 

So what you're left with is a bit of a balancing act. The fundamental thing everyone needs to remember is that you're telling a story. You're trying to convey scenes to your audience. Whatever you do to achieve that goal is considered fair game, but how you tell your story can be just as important as what your story is about. 

I've been reading a lot of web novels lately, and I've found stories with basically nothing happening, that I can't put down simply because the writing is so good. If you have interesting characters doing interesting things, even if your story is cliched or not terribly exciting or new, you can keep people interested simply with how you do it. This is the fundamental problem with the "show, don't tell" advice. It focuses on the what, and forgets the how. 

People see telling as an active statement that describes something. Meanwhile, showing would be describing the scene in a way that conveys the same information.

"Jenny was Angry." Becomes:

"Jenny furrowed her brow, her mouth twisting and her forehead forming a scowl."

The problem with this advice comes in that it almost always increases the words it takes to say it. I conveyed Jenny was angry in three words, but by showing it, it ended up inflating to 13 words. That's just that much longer to convey the same exact idea, which is the emotional state of Jenny.

And this almost always ends up the case. Take my example above, and I bet a bunch of you were nodding and saying that my choice to show, not tell, was done right. But... I could have just wrote, "Jenny scowled." Like that, I showed anger and even said it in one less word with a  stronger verb. But when you're writing your first draft, you usually don't think that far ahead. 

And so, what do you end up with? A little phenomenon I like to call "Overshowing". Overshowing occurs when you shove too much detail into something in a desperate attempt to convert telling into showing. Some of my previous advice in this very book can lead people astray on that very concept. I once wrote a chapter on describing characters. And at one point, I wrote this paragraph long character description and perhaps hinted at it's improved descriptiveness compared to just stating their eye color and hair color. And you've all witnessed books dedicating a descriptive paragraph every time someone "new" shows up in a story.

"I look up and see him, Jerry Francis. He had long blonde hair, a perfectly shaped nose, a strong jaw, and eyes that were just large enough to be considered doey. He had a tall build, with large arms and well-defined legs. He was wearing tight biker shorts and a loose fitting t-shirt that didn't quite hide the abs underneath his shirt. He gave me a bright smile showing his pearly white teeth."

You've probably heard this description or one very similar to it hundreds of times in hundreds of books. Maybe not the same adjectives, but certainly the same paragraph dedicated to describing someone in detail.