When to Tell & Not Show
Someone mentioned to me the other day that there was a healthy debate going on in their writing group between showing versus telling as a narrative approach. To writers who have heard the refrain “show, don’t tell,” throughout their careers, this might be a bit of a shock. It would seem that not all are in agreement about what is often considered a writing standard.
While I do understand the sentiment behind the advice to show rather than tell your audience what’s going on in a scene, if you’ve read many of my previous posts, you might have picked up on my dislike for one-sided takes. In this case as well, I believe there is a time and place for both showing and telling.
In this post:
Why do we want to avoid telling?
To avoid opaque description
To portray mundane or familiar things
To make room for harder hitting moments
To downplay a moment
To break up showing
Why do we want to avoid telling?
Of course, we’re (perhaps ironically) told to show for good reason. It’s a great way to immerse your readers in a story, and this technique often has the biggest emotional impact on your audience.
We avoid telling because it can often feel too instructional or forced. Showing allows a reader to draw their own conclusions from the situation described, which can be a powerful experience. If we tell them “Timmy felt sad,” we rob them of the pathos they might have otherwise felt themselves.
A pet peeve of mine is when a writer sabotages a poignant moment which they have taken care to build by punctuating the scene with something akin to “Timmy felt sad.” It’s a small but significant inclusion that can undercut the reader’s interpretation of the situation. If stories are an imaginative collaboration between author and reader, which I firmly believe, you have to give your readers a little credit.
Another type of telling which may be familiar to writers and readers of speculative fiction is the great infodump. Explaining the minutiae of your setting can be fun, but is often more fun in person with like-minded individuals. Your readers, at least while they’re reading the story, are more likely to be interested in how the plot unfolds, so they need just the gist to understand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of all the intricacies that go into worldbuilding, but it’s best reserved for an appendix (or appendices, if you’re really ambitious).
When a writer uses telling in their story in cases like these, it makes their writing look amateurish. It may be a trust issue or an insecurity that readers won’t know precisely what you mean if you don’t spell it out. If you feel that you must provide instruction on how to interpret every little facet of your story, if you go out of their way to make all possible subtext plain old text, maybe a few things to note:
Try all you like, but your readers could still walk away with a different interpretation than what you intended, or pick on something you didn’t even realize you were saying. (And as I’ve said before, I believe this is a good and important thing.)
You might have a real gift for technical writing. No, that’s not an insult—in fact, it’s a hard skill to master—but it still has little place in narrative.
You’re not alone. Certain forms of written communication can be particularly fraught for neurodivergent folks. I’m sure it can be for lots of neurotypical folks too, but this is a well-documented phenomenon within ADHD and ASD communities. At times this may have an unintended affect on a neurodivergent writer’s work.
Reading can be a wonderful, intimate experience. Looking for ways you can enhance this in your writing can help ensure your reader has that opportunity.
All that is not to say that telling cannot have its place in our writing. As with any narrative technique, we must use it in a way that serves the story. In the next sections, we’ll look at when it’s helpful to tell rather than show.
To avoid opaque description
Though we’re usually pushed to show more than tell, showing can itself result in amateurish writing if used incorrectly. When we describe things in great detail, we can overcomplicate what we’re really trying to say. So yes, show in your writing, but know when to pull back. Otherwise, you can get awkward, drawn-out passages like the one below.
Terrence took the cylindrical container off of the shelf, unscrewed the lid and withdrew a spear of vinegar-preserved cucumber.
It’s far more effective to simply tell us that Terrence opened a jar of pickles.
To portray mundane or familiar things
Now, that previous example might seem like a bit much, but there are times when a writer can become unsure about how much is appropriate to simply state to their audience. This results in an oddly coy and roundabout description which can inadvertently suggest the reader is unfamiliar with a fairly standard phenomenon of planet earth.
It’s different if you’re taking care to ensure those from a different cultural background will understand an element of your story, but really the main exception. It’s probably safe to assume that most people will understand (or look up the process, if they are unfamiliar with it) how one goes about opening a pickle jar.
To make room for harder hitting moments
Okay, maybe that jar of pickles is part of some crucial underpinning of the very fabric of reality. “What then?” you may ask. And fair enough—if the goal is to make your audience take notice of this very special jar of pickles, then perhaps you’d want to draw it out in more detail.
But if you’ve described every little thing before the opening of said jar of pickles in painstaking detail, your readers might not pick up that it’s an important moment. It’s the writer’s version of the boy who cried wolf. If you address everything with the same level of attention, your readers will start to think none of it is important.
Enter telling. Telling is a great way to establish what is or is not important. Is your character’s commute to work important or is it kind of everyday? Is one particular day’s commute to work interrupted by a fifty-foot-tall kaiju tearing up the downtown core? If so, we should probably be shown more of the action. But unless something notable happens, telling us that your character drove home is probably sufficient (if it’s even worth mentioning at all).
To downplay a moment
On the other hand, sometimes telling in these situations can be used to humorous effect. If the point is to subvert our expectations by glossing over the big kaiju rampage like it’s just another Tuesday, then telling us about it rather than showing it makes sense.
There are leagues of tonal difference between:
I sat in my car, unable to move in the first moments, not fully registering that the train car, sitting on its side in the middle of the street in front of me, had been loosed from the giant claw of a monster the size of a skyscraper.
Versus:
Oh yeah—weird thing happened—a giant armadillo started attacking the city while I was on my way in to work today. Go figure.
This brand of humour can be particularly effective if your characters or narrator are supposed to be wry or nonchalant, or if you’re writing a more fable-like story. Big, weird things happen in fables quite often. So much so that they can sometimes just end up being more of a nuisance than anything, and who wants to spend that much time on a nuisance?
Other times, telling us about something that later becomes important rather than showing it the first time can sometimes be a way to foreshadow without spilling all the beans right away. Showing might draw too much attention if a surprise is in store.
To break up showing
And, sometimes, telling just helps you break things up a little and throw some variety into your writing.
Readers may not find it fun to slog through through paragraph after paragraph of minute detail every time anything happens. Just as it’s not fun when we don’t get to experience the important things as completely as possible.
So, “show, don’t tell,” has its merits, yes, but like any writing advice, it’s important to consider the nuance of the situation at hand. Almost all good writing—scratch that—probably all writing (unless you were very, very strict in your execution) uses a mix of both showing and telling, whether we see it for that or not.
At the end of the day, what matters is knowing the tools available to you and how and when to use them. I tell ya, it’s true.
Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.
She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.
