STORY TELLING; STORY SHOWING
Shannon Donnelly
Published by Shannon Donnelly at Smashwords.com
Copyright 2012 Shannon Donnelly
Discover other works by Shannon Donnelly at Smashwords.com
INTRODUCTION
This book is meant to serve two purposes. First, this is a companion to the "Show and Tell: An Interactive Workshop” I teach online. Second, and more importantly, I hope the information here will help writers of all skill levels make their stories more dynamic with strong story telling techniques and scenes that reveal more about the characters by showing those people in action.
While the phrase "show, don't tell" has become a cliché, there’s both truth as well as a caution in there. Good stories need dramatic scenes, but they also need strong narrative passages to connect those scenes: a writer really needs both showing and telling skills. In this guide, we'll go into how "show, don't tell" really should be phrased as "show more with stronger scenes, and tell when you need to move the story along."
To break this down further, the "telling" part of this guide includes tips, tricks, and techniques to help improve fiction narrative. This will help you identify when it's time to "tell" more to the reader to compress information, smooth transitions, or otherwise better establish settings to help move readers into or out of scenes. The "showing" part blends a set of exercises to strengthen an understanding of what makes a scene come to life by using vivid descriptions that reveal a character's thoughts and emotions by showing that character in action instead of just telling the reader about this character.
Topics covered include:
1) Breaking it Down: What's showing and what's telling
2) Transitions and Word Count: Where telling really helps
3) Better Descriptions: Telling that a reader won't skip
4) Subtext: Showing underneath the surface
5) Showing More: Pulling a reader into a scene
6) Deep Viewpoint: Showing a character's inner world
7) Showing and Telling: Mixing it up
8) Writing to your Strengths
9) Summing it all Up
A few extra notes before we dive into specifics.
First off, there is no right way to write a story. Whatever works, works. There's also no secret shortcut—the basic process is the same. You need to get the words down and you need to edit and polish. Some of the ideas here may work for you, and others may not. This guide is about helping you try different approaches. Your job as a writer is to try new things to see what makes your writing better. So let’s get started.
BREAKING IT DOWN:
What's Showing and What's Telling
Writing fiction is difficult for many reasons. Technical skills (craft) must be mastered. You have to create characters and come up with a plot. You have dialogue to write, putting words into your characters’ mouths which are better than anything anyone would actually say. There's pacing to control, and descriptions that must make the world come alive. There’s background to develop and decisions about how much of that background belongs in the story. But all of this craft relies on the same building blocks, which are: words, sentences, and paragraphs. And these basic building blocks can be used to create good stories as well as bad ones.
Because the building blocks are the same, that's where confusion comes into figuring out what’s showing and what’s telling—it's all words. Both showing and telling use descriptive words, so how do you know when you’re showing more with those words or telling the reader too much of the story?
Let's start with the "tell" part—the narrative. This is often easier to identify and it’s where story telling starts.
Story telling has gotten a bad rap. Writers are told "show, don't tell," but most stories can benefit from good telling, meaning really good narrative. But there are also good reasons why this advice has been around long enough to become a cliché.
If you're telling too much of your story in narrative, that's going to weaken the drama. You distance the reader from the story by putting author narrative between the reader and the action. Imagine if in the movie "Titanic" that Rose as an old woman simply told you all about her first meeting with Jack—if we didn’t get to see any of that. Or if she told you about how she posed naked for Jack to draw her portrait. That would suck the drama right out of those events, and distance you (the viewer/reader) from the characters. But old-Rose is used as a great narrative device to bridge the past to the present, to add tension, to add the narrative voice so that an otherwise long movie does not become even longer. This shows that the real trick with telling and showing is that they work best if used in the right places, and in the right amounts for your story.
Think of these as tools in your writer’s toolbox. As being a hammer and a screwdriver. Each is a great tool. But if you try to use the wrong one in the wrong place, you’re going to end up with a mess.
But let’s get back to how do you know when you’re telling the story?
Here are some quick ways to know you are telling—
- Words like 'was', 'were', 'are', and 'to be' crop up in telling sentences.
- Sentences tend to be passive construction—the subject is not active.
- Telling tends to provide a stated fact to the reader.
- You identify the emotion on the page for the reader, with words such as “he felt” or “she feels”.
A Telling Example: The sun was hot.
This is pure telling in that the reader is given the information in a short burst. The reader is told a fact. Now you may need—or want—that short, punchy telling sentence. Or this may not work for the type of book you’re writing, or for the mood of the scene.
If you wanted to better show this information, you might revise the passage to provide a description that shows the sun being hot (shows the sun in action as it were).
A Showing Example: Heat sizzled from the pavement, bounced off cars and asphalt and glass buildings.
Notice that the showing example brings in vivid descriptions to show the sun actively being hot, instead of just telling the reader this information. And this brings up the other reason for the phrase, "show don't tell."
Bad story telling is bad writing—bad telling is bad writing at its worst. But narrative doesn't have to be bad. However, it takes work to make the telling good. This hard work is often skipped, meaning the telling is first draft writing that is mixed with other scenes that have been polished. Good story telling requires strong narrative—meaning you need to edit and polish your narrative prose.
Another way to know you’re telling is the most extreme example of telling—the author's own narrative voice. If you read Victorian fiction, you'll come across this as: "Dear gentle reader, our story starts long ago..."
That's extreme telling. The author is addressing the reader as if the reader was sitting opposite the author. This can be used as a great device in a story, since the narrator can be unreliable, or can be used as an additional amusing humorous voice (if done well).
It's also possible to back this off a little and still tell the story, just not with such obvious effort. "Long, long ago in a land far, far away..." This is still telling. But we've moved from author viewpoint to omniscient viewpoint. The reader, however, is still being told information.
As noted, this is not a bad thing. It's been labeled bad because, if used badly, it's dull and emotionally uninvolved. It also can be a sign of underdeveloped characters, or a beginning writer who hasn't yet mastered scenes.
Notice that in both of those examples—"Dear Reader..." and "Long, long ago..."—there is no tension, no feeling, no conflict, no drama. And this is just something to recognize. As in, a hammer is not bad because it pounds nails. But don't pick one up and think you're going to tighten a screw with it.
What we've now established is that telling is a narrative voice. It compresses information. Let's look at how this is useful in a story.
TRANSITIONS AND WORD COUNT:
Where Telling Really Helps
Telling provides exact, specific information to the reader.
Telling uses fewer words.
Telling gives you sentences with punch.
These can all be good things. They will affect your story pace, and your writing "voice" or style. This makes story telling or the narrative voice a vital tool in your writer's toolbox. You can use narrative for:
- Tightening word count. Telling compresses the information so you can cover information that a reader needs (as in get the plot exposition onto the page without forcing it into awkward dialogue).
- Alerting the reader that the information, or the character, is relatively unimportant. Less focus and time spent on something in your story tells the reader this is less important—you want your main characters to have the most scenes and the most presence on your pages.
- Smoothing transition in time, distance, or viewpoint. Telling lets you handle passages of time, or lets you more easily cover distances within a story. It can also help smooth any transition, including changes of character viewpoint, changes of location, transitions across time, or transitions into and out of scenes.
- Establishing a mood or setting. You can use telling to set up scenes when you do not wish to do this in any character's viewpoint, when mood or setting is vital, as in a historical novel or a horror story.
- Writing a synopsis. This is the ultimate compression of your story, and therefore is the perfect place to just tell the story.
As noted, good story telling needs very good writing. It takes just as much effort (and sometimes more) to craft beautiful, effective narrative. Great narrative can pull a reader into a story or a scene. It can better create mood. It can become a strong element in your writing style (or voice).
However, good narrative usually takes more than one session of writing—good story telling comes from revisions, and rewrites, and more revisions, and polish. It comes from a strong, active voice, and from the writer having a clear image in mind to convey to the reader. It is not wise to think that you just need to learn how to show more with great scenes. Yes, that can really help a story come to life. You need narrative that works. Also, as a writer, you need to know where your strengths lie, so you can use them to better advantage.
Choosing between showing and telling is really an issue of when do you want the most drama (show more). When do you need to condense time, information, and/or distance (tell more). The trick to learn is how do you do each of these in a way that's the most effective.
Exercise 1
Get two or three of your favorite novels and a marker or a pencil. Underline every line of telling for the first few pages. Do this again later in the book for another few pages. Finally, do this at the end of the book. In these books, look at the balance of telling. Look at how much telling is done at the beginning, the middle, and the end—you should see less and less telling as the story gets established for the reader and as the story pace picks up toward the end.
This will also start to show you your own preference in style for use of telling. If you prefer a writing style that has more narrative, you’ll tend to write this in your own work. If you like books with lots of dialogue, you’ll tend to write that. However, do look to read current authors. There are trends in writing, and the current trend is for fast-paced stories. If your favorite authors are all people who wrote a hundred years ago, this may leave you with a very limited audience within modern readers. But reading a lot is the first step to really understanding what is telling and what is showing.
BETTER DESCRIPTIONS:
Writing that a Reader Won't Skip
We've all come to those pages in a book where you flip ahead, or you start to skim. Maybe it’s the section with dialogue that repeats information you’ve already been given once or even twice before. Or maybe it's the four paragraphs giving details of a mansion you don't really care about because you want to get back to the action. This shows that while story telling is important, it can so easily be overdone—and that showing is stronger than telling.
As noted earlier, showing and telling both use description. That's where confusion crops up about which is what—they seem so similar. And they are. But they are also different. Also as noted, it's like having a hammer and a screwdriver. Yes, they both can be used to attach two pieces of wood together, but they do so in different ways. You can use these tools to craft dull scenes with no conflict or tension, or to write narrative that a reader wants to skip. So how do you avoid all of this?
First off, don't worry too much about what's dull or what's not in the first draft. Just write. That's a great way to get a first draft done. Decisions about what to leave in, what to cut, and what to revise will come into play during the editing phrase. Sometimes it’s good to just practice to write without getting hung up on technique.
When you move into editing, do so with care.
When you revise and edit, you might end up with words that are just different (as in, you’ve changed things, but it’s like moving food around on a plate—it’s still the same food). The goal with your revisions and edits is to ensure that your intent—the scene’s main purpose—is made clear. You also want each transition to be crisp. You want the writing to seem effortless—and that takes writing a lot of junk to get to the good stuff. It also means you have to be very certain you don’t edit out the good stuff. And you have to make sure your edits leave clean prose that has strength and power.
When it comes to showing and telling, some basic guidelines can help you make certain this is writing that will not be skipped.
1) Showing is showing a character in action—that means showing someone thinking, feeling, making observations, talking, or doing something. It is very important to show how each character expresses emotion—to show the character's personality in action. We’ll talk more about this later. You want to show important things for the reader to know about a character—in other words, make certain you have drama to dramatize.
2) Telling is when you tell the reader some bit of information, as in telling the reader something about the character, the setting, or the plot.
3) In showing, the characters are active.
4) In telling, the characters tend to be passive.
5) Showing always takes place in a scene.
6) Telling is narrative prose (so you want to be careful not to put so much description in a scene that it stops or slows the action).
IMPORTANT: What you tell a reader will not be as strong as what you show. In other words, if you show a guy intentionally kicking a kitten and then you tell the reader this guy is a hero, the reader is going to believe the action—that he’s a heartless jerk who hates animals. The reader will not believe what you tell. This works the other way, too. You can tell the reader this woman is a selfish gold-digger, but if she spends her last dollar buying a starving kid a hot meal, the reader will believe she is a good person. You can use this very effectively in fiction to set up more interesting characters—by telling the reader one thing and having the character act differently—and to play up that not everything is as it seems on the surface.
When you’re told that you need to "show more, tell less" this is usually because your character is not present on the page enough—there’s too much telling about the character. This means you, the author, are getting star billing instead of your main character getting the spotlight. This is where you want to focus on showing your character doing things that reveal that person’s inner self to the reader. If you don't show the reader enough, the reader starts to feel cheated by the story and it seems as if the character is not strong or alive. Showing is also one of the best ways to engage and manipulate the reader's emotions.
Now, don’t worry if your story starts with a lot of weak narrative. You can edit and revise this. But sometimes you must also exaggerate a skill in order to learn it.
Which brings us to some tips—yes, there really are writing tricks—to help you out when you're looking for what to show and what to tell so readers don’t skip your scenes or the narrative:
1) When showing avoid "shopping list" descriptions (as in a list of physical attributes: blonde hair, six feet two, hulking muscle, etc, etc.). You do need details to help a reader see a character, but too many telling details stuffed in together will overwhelm the reader. Spread this out. And focus more on putting your character into action. You must know, "What would I do if I were this person?"