How to Show and Tell In Writing

When writing fiction, you should never tell your readers anything in your writing. I am totally serious when I say that, too. Never ever ever tell. Always show.

But what exactly is "showing" and "telling"? How can you find the difference between the two? And how can you get information across without ever telling it? These are the questions I am going to be addressing.

What is "telling" in your writing?

There should be no telling in your writing. Therefore, it is best to know what it is.

These are some examples of what "telling" looks like:

1. "Sally is a sixteen-year-old girl with anger issues."
2. "Bobby hates reading."
3. "The sky was always dark in LalaLand."
4. "It was too difficult to say."
5. "They all had eyes the color of emeralds."

Telling is when you give information about a person, place, or thing in your writing. This is okay for nonfiction, in fact, you should use telling in nonfiction. But not in fiction. In fiction you should always use showing.

Yeah. I know. As atrocious as it is, you'll find telling pretty much everywhere, even in fiction. It's nearly impossible to not find. And it's a pain in the butt to fix. But that doesn't mean you should just give up!

To make things easier, there are some situations when "telling" is okay:

• In nonfiction writing.
• In dialogue.

Yep, that's it. Unfortunately those are our only excuses.

Why is "telling" a bad thing in fiction?

Here are two larger examples of telling:

1. "Kim never eats pudding. She hates the smell, the taste, and even the feel of it. It looks like something that came out of her dog's ass! One time she smelled it by accident and was forced into the emergency room for excessive vomiting. To put it simply, pudding is gross."
2. "Layla used to go to the beach nearly every day, but that was before she was forced to move across the entire state and into her cousin's ranch to hide from a certain mentally-ill drug dealer. Now all she has left of her precious ocean is a worn photograph and a seashell."

Those are examples of telling. You may be thinking that they don't look bad. In fact, they may look really good. It doesn't matter. Appearances are VERY deceiving. Telling is not actually a bad thing itself, per say... it's more of a thing that causes immense boredom and poor fiction writing.

This is extremely difficult for me to explain, but I'll try really hard regardless.

When you see telling in a novel... it is usually found at the very beginning, most likely in the first few paragraphs. Here is an example. (Yes, that is my own writing so I'm allowed to link to it and explain what's wrong, haha.) If you read that chapter, almost all of it is an example of telling. The actual "showing" doesn't start until the seventh-to-last paragraph, when Violet is sitting in the tree. The whole part about the history of the land and stuff isn't needed.

But in this first chapter, there is no telling. It starts right off with the action and doesn't skip around the bush with boring details that are bound to distract readers.

Hm... let me try to explain it a slightly different way. When you use "showing" in your writing, all of the content is relevant the current situations and things that effect your character, even if it's written in past-tense. When you use "telling" in your writing, the content includes things that do not describe the current situation and characters, even if it is something that they are. So... you wouldn't tell us that so-and-so's hair is a certain color, even if it is. Instead of telling us what their hair color is, you would slip it in somewhere. You would show it.

Now, this begs the question...

How do you change your "telling" to "showing"?

You can't. Not exactly.

It's much better to just erase/delete/murder your telling. If it is telling, it shouldn't be there. But yet you still might need to include that bit of information somewhere, right? Maybe you find some telling in your writing that's really important for the readers to know even if it is boring. You may feel as if you can't get rid of it. So how do you get across the information without telling it?

This is where the tricky part comes in.

Let me give a few examples first and see if you can pick up what I'm laying down. So, here's some examples of information that is written with telling (the kind you should get rid of), and then how to give that information without using telling.

The telling: Lucy was a strange girl.
The showing: When the clock began to chime its looming toll, Lucy tilted her chin to gaze up at the ceiling. Her chair screeched across the floor as soon as her eyes turned a vivid red, drawing the gazes of her fellow students. She was changing already, and she had to get out of there now.

See how you can imply that Lucy isn't quite normal without straight-out telling it to us?

Here's another example:

The telling: No one ever came out of the forest alive.
The showing: Michael looked up from his newspaper, meeting the gaze of the broad-shouldered man who sat across from him. "No one's ever made it outta that forest with their heart still beating, lad," the man spoke in a gravelly voice as he nodded to the image on the back of the paper. Michael merely laughed, shaking his head. He was still going on that hike no matter what foolish stories the locals shared.

An easy alternative is dialogue. Remember how telling is okay in dialogue?

Hopefully you guys have a better understanding of how to show things in your writing instead of telling them now. I know how confusing and difficult to understand it is, trust me. That's probably why it was so difficult for me to write this! I know I probably didn't explain it in the best way possible, so if you have any questions or comments, please share. I'll make sure to answer them in the journal as well.

Key Points

This is just a list of the key points I discussed here in the journal, for convenience.

• Never use telling in fiction writing.
• Telling is when you give information about a person, place, or thing in your writing.
• Showing is when you use only action and current happenings in your writing (includes past-tense.)
• Telling is found most often at the beginning of chapters, usually in the first chapter if no other. But it could be anywhere.
• It is okay to include telling in dialogue.
• The difference between showing and telling is that telling is simple detail or information while showing is description.