More On Showing and Telling

The previous article on showing and telling in a narrative was a general introduction to the subject. Here, we get to the heart of when and how to show and tell.

Taken to its logical extreme, you could tell a novel in a few words...

And that's it. End of story. At the opposite extreme, showing this novel could take billions of words.

Just the opening scene, when the boy first lays eyes on the girl, could take something the size of War and Peace if you account for every second of time and include everything the boy sees and hears and smells and tastes and touches, together with every thought that passes through his head and every memory that is triggered.

Somewhere between these two extremes lies a conventionally-sized novel. And showing and telling, like a rudder on a boat, is how you steer a sensible course between the two extremes.

Now, the main way to bring down the word count of a novel to a reasonable level (80 to 100,000 words) is to leave a lot of stuff out altogether.

For example, if the boy-meets-girl story lasts for a year, there will be large blocks of time within that year in which nothing much happens. So if nothing interesting happens in March and April, you can cover it with a simple "Two months later..." (You can think of this as extreme telling.)

Of the events that you do decide to keep in the novel, some will be more dramatic than others...

• Some events will be emotional or exciting (or whatever) and definitely ones the readers will want to linger on. These you will show.
• Other events will be necessary but a little on the dull side. These can be told.

The same thing, incidentally, applies to descriptions of the characters or the landscape...

• The first time the boy sees the girl, a lengthy description of her beauty will be called for. (i.e. Showing.)
• The second time he sees her, telling will suffice: "She looked even more stunning than he remembered."

Generally speaking, the important events in a novel are the "scenes", and the not-so-crucial ones the "interludes".

• Scenes, you will remember from the section on Plotting a Novel, are where the character tries to achieve a short-term goal in the face of opposition. They are presented in real time (as opposed to speeded-up time or skipped-over time) and are full of vivid details and sensory description. In short, they are shown.
• Interludes are those quieter, in-between parts, where the character reacts emotionally to what has just happened. Because reaction is generally less interesting and dramatic than action, interludes are usually told.

Except showing and telling isn't quite that simple...

Most scenes in a novel will benefit from a little telling thrown into the mix, just as most interludes can be improved by some showing.

In short, showing and telling can happen anywhere in a novel.

Scenes can become bloated and heavy-going if they are all show and no tell. Sometimes the reader doesn't want a two-page description of your character trying to get up the nerve to enter a delicatessen shop. Half a page would be quite enough.

So you could begin the paragraph with a sentence or two of telling...

Then follow it with a few sentences of showing...

Here are some other ways to condense a scene by telling...

• You can fast-forward through any dull bits in a scene. Say you are writing a scene set in a restaurant which threatens to drag on and on with no end in sight. You could show the conversation as the characters eat their starters, get the main course out the way with a brief paragraph of telling, before switching back to showing-mode when the desserts arrive and the conversation heats up again.
• And you can condense any long speeches to a line or two. Say in the restaurant scene a character has to explain why he is late. It is a complicated story and might take up a page or more, and it really isn't that important. So you could reduce it to a couple of lines by saying something like: Fred took his seat and told Martha he was so sorry for being late. Over martinis, he explained how the taxi driver had taken the wrong turn and...

With interludes, you have the opposite problem...

Instead of becoming bloated like scenes, interludes can become clinical and unsatisfying.

Of course, sometimes clinical is precisely what you want. (Sometimes a "Two days later" is all you need to get from one scene to the next.)

But sometimes interludes are important for demonstrating how a character reacts emotionally to what has just happened, and how they prepare for whatever is to come next.

Let's say your character has just had a fight with his wife and she threw him out...

In the interlude, you describe him driving to the nearest bar to drown his sorrows: "Frank drove to The Horseshoe and took a seat at the bar. It took six large vodkas before his heart stopped pounding."

Getting him from the previous scene to the next one in two sentences like that might be all you need to do.

But maybe in the middle of this interlude you could include a few snippets of dialogue between Frank and the waitress, just to put a little meat on the bones of the interlude and make it a richer experience for the novel's readers.

Like I said earlier, "Show, Don't Tell" is a useful rule of thumb. But, as with all such rules, you must learn when to ignore it.

Next Step: Now it is time to take everything you have learned about showing and telling and use it to Write a Narrative With Pace...