Showing and Telling

Perhaps the most common axiom to writing is "show, don't tell." I have always had a great amount of trouble with this saying, largely because it doesn't make any sense.

If you've never thought about it before, then consider this. You have a character who is very nervous and you write, "He was nervous." This is a problem because you are telling us he is nervous. Instead, you should show us that he is nervous with a sentence like, "His body was shaking and sweating uncontrollably."

Now, this is where the general advice goes. Instead of telling us how somebody felt, you painted a picture that showed us how he felt. This is also where the problems begin.

Pay attention to the showing sentence. It is a statement. Every statement is a telling. In that sentence, I am telling you that he was sweating. I am telling you that he is shaking. It may be more descriptive, but it is still telling.

The problem is that this advice is recursive. Every sentence you write can be made more descriptive or more artistic. Eventually, you could take a sentence as simple as "He was nervous" and turn it into a whole chapter.

Look at writing in general. It is storytelling. 'Tell' is right there in the name. How do we ask for it? "Tell me a story." How do we offer it? "Let me tell you something." Everything we do is telling. The only way we can really show something is to use pictures without words.

Still, though, there is a truth to the matter. We have all read things that were so plain and boring that we couldn't get interested in it at all. Rewriting the sentences to add more description can help that problem. So if it is incorrect to say "show, don't tell", then what is correct?

I would say that the more accurate axiom is "use the proper amount of focus." Of course, that means nothing if you don't know the nuances of focus. The short version of that is to focus on the passage of time. The closer you focus in on something, the slower it moves. A bullet is very fast, and if you want to show that, use a sentence like, "he pulled the trigger and I was shot." If you want to show time slowing down as you are facing your own mortality, then you spend two pages describing every single thing that happens from the moment the trigger starts to be pulled and the time the bullet finally lodges itself inside your chest.

Every line you write will tell. Just tell people the stuff that matters to your story.