Show and tell

Recently my old supervisor asked me to look at a collection of short stories. The student had been deemed to be “weak”, and asking an outside reader was an attempt to get a fresh insight.

I read the student’s portfolio and right from the start his work had garnered comments like “too much explanation”, etc. After reading his stories it became clear that the problem was a lack of balance between show and tell.

Coming from a background of oral storytelling the student had applied that skill to his stories. They were good stories and I could sense his frustration. Although trying his best, he could not “fix” his stories. And as we all know, a writer’s ego is a fragile thing and once doubt sets in you are lost.

It took me back to my struggles as a beginner writer. “Show” and “tell” are pretty simple words that in the early grades of schooling is easy to understand. You show an object and then describe or tell about the object.

Applying the concept to a story is trickier. In the context of a story, what is show and what is tell? A Google search will bring many descriptions, some good and some not so good leading one to suspect that the author maybe didn’t have a good grasp of it at all.

I found that writer websites and books on writing provided the best descriptions. For example the book “Show Don’t Tell: A Writer’s Guide” by William Noble is helpful. A succinct description can be found on Jericho Writers website: “Show, don’t tell’ is a technique authors use to add drama to a novel. Rather than telling readers what’s happening, authors use this technique to show drama unfold on the page. ‘Telling’ is factual and avoids detail; while ‘showing,’ is detailed and places the human subject at the centre of the drama”.

More wisdom from Writers Digest: “Both showing and telling are forms of description. ‘The baby drooled on her new dress’ tells you what the baby is doing. It also shows you what she’s doing, in that the sentence enables you to form a mental picture, a scene you can ‘see’. Because a description can be interpreted in both these ways, there’s a very large overlap between telling and showing. It helps to understand telling versus showing not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. A sentence like the one above falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum: It both shows and tells.” https://www.writersdigest.com/improve-my-writing/show-and-tell

My own understanding of show and tell materialized when I thought of a scene in script-writing. There is dialogue and there is action. The writer’s eye is the camera and he or she tells the story with images or in the case of writing a story, imagery.

I hope this helps to clarify what is required to master this concept. Please let me know in the comments what show and tell means to you.