Monday, April 7, 2014

Show AND Tell

“If I wanted you to know, I'd have told you.”—Robert Frost*

Trying to show everything in your writing can be exhausting, and can lead to painfully obtuse prose. Maybe you don't want every scene to be a riddle, and every character's emotions to be a mystery. You're not wrong in this. It is often the case that if you want your reader to know something, you have to tell them. Don't avoid this because of that tired mantra, “show, don't tell.” Showing is a technique, not writing dogma.

It is expedient to tell your reader things. Page time matters. Your writing focuses your reader's attention. You don't always want to distract them from the important part of a scene with a lot of page time spent on inconsequential details.

For instance, if you wanted to write a scene in an old bar, but the state of the place wasn't relevant to the story, you could spend a lot of time on peeling lacquer, creaking chairs, and cracked beams, or you could tell your reader “it was an old bar” and move on to the interesting stuff. What could be objectionable about that?

Similarly, maybe you want a character to sit comfortably in one of those old chairs. You could probably wrangle together a sentence or two about their position and expression, and maybe you could even make it sound natural enough, or you could tell your reader straight out and avoid the burden for both of you. Telling might especially be the right choice here if this detail is meant to imply something further about the character. Sure, you could show the comfort in an attempt to show whatever is behind it, but know that choice moves the desired detail further off the page and away from your reader. Is that where you want it?  Obscured?

Finally, maybe you want your reader to quickly know something beyond surface details. There is nothing wrong with readily supplying that information. For instance: “The old bar had been through a fire, and there were still scorch marks on some of the walls. Danny sat comfortably in one of the wooden chairs. Having grown up poor, she felt at home in the decrepit surroundings.”

Or how about something as direct as, “She was happy to see him, and it showed on her face.” It's not poetry maybe, but it doesn't have to be.

Of course, saying you can and should tell your reader things doesn't mean that you can tell them any old way. “Show, don't tell” has become an adage because it so often applies to mismanaged writing. Writers can want their readers to know something so badly, they beat it into the ground. This forces sentiments and steals the experience of the story from the reader. You have to maintain a balance. The nature of that balance is up to you. That's style.

See Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon (historical fantasy) for a good example of an author who tells often and well.

*note: The quote is Frost's response when asked what the “promises to keep” were in his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Sometimes the audience doesn't get to know. Sometimes they are better left wondering.


  1. As a very general rule, how much (%) of a novel is narrative and how much is scene? I would think literary novels are more narrative than genre.

    1. How would you distinguish narrative from scene?