Your Stories are Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Show Versus Tell: Part Two: Getting Away With It

When to Tell

So, some of you think that telling is okay sometimes. And you’re right. But, in the same vein of thought, you’re also wrong.

See, the issue lies, not in the fact that telling is bad (it isn’t, really), but in the amount of telling that is bad.

Like alcohol (sometime most of you aren’t allowed to consume yet), a little bit of telling can be good. It allows you to drop some boring exposition, or move a scene that would otherwise be dull to the next part. If you consume just a little too much though, you’re left looking like a bloody idiot, you talk too much, make a few rowdy jokes and next thing you know, your aunt won’t talk to you and your best friend’s girlfriend is pregnant. Or something like that.

Basically, if you tell just a little bit too much, you can ruin your story.

A good rule of thumb is to always show unless you can’t. Why? Because telling does a few things that you want to avoid. Or should want to avoid.

First, it glosses over information without letting the reader have the time to absorb it.

-Sometimes that’s what you want to do. Sex scenes are popular places to do this sort of telling  if you don’t want your story to be rated pg.18.

Second, it lacks the finesse and beauty that full prose can bring, it’s also rather monotonic in tone.

-But if you’re facing something that is impossible to show, then telling might be your only option.

And third, it fails to create an accurate mental image of the things you want the reader to see.

-In a horror story, this might be a good thing. The reader’s imagination is better than your writing ability.

That’s as boiled down as it gets. Telling is basically the lazy way out. Avoid it if you can. But if you can’t make it quick.

Why Show?

I’ll end this little charade with this one, final point. Why show and not tell. I’ve told you that its bad already, but that in-of-itself goes against the very rule I want to teach you.

Showing is dramatic.

That’s it. That is the simplest way to boil it down. To show a scene by describing what is going on in it is far more dramatic than telling the reader what happened. Drama might be marked as a bad thing in some circles. The people in those circles are idiots. By showing you create a bond between the reader and the characters. You make it so that they (the reader) will actually care about the situation that the characters are in. And that right there is the most valuable thing you can do as a writer.

Showing allows for emotions.

Keep warm.