“Show, Don’t Tell” is a cliched, classic standard piece of writing advice.
At the heart of it, the concept is a solid part of writing advice. It’s a guide that can tighten up a piece of writing to make it far more engaging. It is too often quoted and too often misunderstood. The problem is that “Show, Don’t Tell” is just too vague and too ambiguous.
The good kernel of advice here is best broken into two different parts.
The first: dramatise whatever can be.
Summarising action, particularly key passages and turning points, takes the wind out of the sails. There’s not much of a story if the dramatised action is taken away. What’s left then is an anecdote, not a story. Put the characters into action.
Don’t tell the reader that the girl chose to leave. Show her getting on the train.
Don’t tell the reader he decided he needed revenge. Show him searching for the lost keys to his gun cabinet.
Don’t tell the reader the couple were still in love on their fiftieth anniversary. Show him seducing her like newly weds. Or, show her picking up after him, either annoyed or without a worry. Both will show you a different kind of relationship far better than simply telling the reader.
The second part to “Show, Don’t Tell” is: write description that appeals to the senses.
The description must be tied into concrete details. Engaging the senses provokes a response in the reader that can far better show what you want to convey than simply telling. The feelings and senses creep into the reading experience and go deeper into putting the reader in the passage, showing the reader the scene in front of them.
Instead of telling the reader that a character is overweight, show how the furniture creaks beneath him.
Don’t tell the reader that the office is untidy, show how the ring of coffee had dried around the base of the cup and when it was lifted it ripped last Monday’s newspaper.
What is interesting is how different writers have approached this, and which details they’ve picked up on to show.
The opening to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms describes the way the dust settles on tree leaves after the troops have gone past. The imagery completely conveys the heat of the Italian landscape, the dust, the entire landscape. Hemingway’s use of sparse imagery perfectly showing a scene is perhaps the strongest part of his writing. Many passages in all his works completely disregard the usual methods of description – like the colour of someone’s hair – but the way he describes the character removing a hat with sweat stains shows the key points of the scene. The imagination makes up the rest.
The first chapter of Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody so vividly depicts the built up grease of the 1950s American diner that reading those passages alone almost tingles the nose with the fried fat and the stained sidewalks. By describing certain concrete details that appeals to the other senses – smell, taste, sounds – this chapter shows real strength.
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty picks odd details to pin certain points about a character or their perspective. The way that Claire sits during the poetry performance, knees bent under her in a yoga position, makes the reader’s knees sore. Her description of Zora watching Carl swimming is written in a way that appeals to the senses to show Zora’s longings for the muscular swimmer. Small details linger longer because they’ve been written in a way that the reader can actually feel them.
A very different approach to the same concept of showing – Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho has so many passages of description that it’s natural to feel he is just telling the reader everything. Ellis tells you a lot but there’s something unsaid in all of this description. What he shows you instead is, through the telling, more about the character. Patrick Bateman lists very few colours. Everything is a designer suit or dress, with detailed comments on the cut or a fabric or accessories. Barely a colour. It’s not something important to Bateman, certainly not as important as the manicure and the designer label. Bateman also gets album titles wrong during his rants. This all shows the reader what is important to Bateman along with the unreliability of Bateman as a narrator.
Engaging the senses with concrete details adds a depth to scenes and passages. The exact choice of details is what makes each writer different. When the story is dramatised and draws on these choice of details then the reader will have more of an experience of reading, having been shown a story not just told one.