Unlock the Hidden Secret Behind “Show, Don’t Tell” That Writers Swear By

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Today I’m blogging about the completely useless advice that every novelist has been given: “Show, Don’t Tell.” What does that mean? What are you supposed to do with it?

The World’s Worst Advice

Lazy editors since the beginning of time have scribbled “Show, Don’t Tell” on novel manuscripts and handed them back to novice writers without any explanation. If you’ve ever been infuriated by this advice, you’re not alone. It’s bad advice.

The reason it’s bad advice is that it tells you to “Show, Don’t Tell,” when you need to be shown how to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s very meta, in the worst possible way.

I’m thinking that the next book I write in my Advanced Fiction Writing series should probably cover this topic. But I haven’t written that book yet. I did spend a couple of chapters on the subject in my best-selling book Writing Fiction for Dummies (see chapters 10 and 15, if you have the book). In this blog post, I’ll lay out the basics.

Novelists typically use 7 tools to write their stories. Here they are (and I’ll define them, with examples, a bit further down in this article):

Action
Dialogue
Interior Monologue
Interior Emotion
Sensory Description
Narrative Summary
Exposition

The first 5 of these (Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description) are what editors mean by “Showing”. The last 2 (Narrative Summary and Exposition) are what editors mean by “Telling.”

None of these are “always right” or “always wrong” to use. Each of them has a place, and part of the art of fiction writing is knowing which tools to use for any given paragraph. When an editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in your manuscript, they mean that the particular section they marked should use the “Showing” tools, rather than the “Telling” tools.

But you can see the problem. Just saying “Show, Don’t Tell” doesn’t give you any guidance on which of the 5 “Showing” tools to use. Nor does it give you any insight into why Narrative Summary or Exposition was the wrong choice for the offending paragraph.

This is a large subject, so the best I can do in this article is to give you definitions of each of the tools, along with examples.

What Action Means

Action means that you show your characters doing something. Here is an example:

Hermione swung her heavy sword at the werewolf’s neck.

The werewolf ducked and lunged straight at her.

Hermione twisted hard to the right and kept spinning clockwise. She brought her sword up to chest level and threw all her weight into the swing.

The sword bit into the werewolf’s throat.

The above snippet is pure action. Nouns and verbs. If you do your Action right, you create a video in your reader’s brain.

What Dialogue Means

Dialogue means that you show your characters saying something. Here is an example:

“Are you going to answer my question?” Mr. Darcy said.

Lizzie scowled at him. “You are the last man on earth I should ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

The above snippet is mostly dialogue. Words within quote marks. The first sentence ends with a dialogue tag that tells us who the speaker is—Mr. Darcy. The second sentence begins with an action tag for Lizzie. When writing dialogue, you can use either kind of tag, or you can leave the tag off completely, if you’re certain the reader will know who’s speaking. If you can’t be sure, it’s best to include a tag. If you do your Dialogue right, you create an audiobook in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Monologue Means

Interior Monologue means that you show one of your characters thinking something. You often put this into a paragraph that also includes Action or Dialogue. There are two flavors of Interior Monologue, direct and indirect. Direct Interior Monologue shows the thought in exactly the words the character thinks them. Indirect Interior Monologue summarizes the thought. Here are examples of each, paired with Action:

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. Have a nice day, bozos.

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. She didn’t care if it hit any of them, as long as they got the message. She was not somebody to ignore.

The first snippet is direct Interior Monologue; the second is indirect. Direct Interior Monologue is often italicized, but not always. It is never necessary to add a tag, such as “Katniss thought.” Most novelists choose to get inside the head of only a single character (the “viewpoint character”) in any given scene, so the reader will always know who is doing the thinking.

If you do your Interior Monologue right, you create an audio voiceover in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Emotion Means

Interior Emotion means that you show your viewpoint character feeling some emotion. This is not as simple as telling the reader what the emotion is. That is considered “telling.” Instead, you typically do this by showing a physiological reaction that implies an emotion. A little Interior Emotion goes a very long way, so you almost always team it up with Action, Dialogue, and/or Interior Monologue. Here is an example:

“Just give me your wallet and everything’s going to be fine.” The knife point pressed lightly into Reacher’s back. All his body suddenly felt cold. He knew that voice. He’d heard it on six different tapes. This was the RSB killer—Rob, Stab, Burn. Everything was not going to be fine.

This paragraph begins with Dialogue, followed by Sensory Description—the knife point in the back. The only Interior Emotion is the short sentence in which Reacher’s body goes cold, a feeling that is commonly associated with fear (although fans of Jack Reacher know that he’s rarely scared). Then there’s some indirect Interior Monologue.

It is not necessary to get fancy with your Interior Emotion. Tell the physical sensation that your viewpoint character feels. If you do it right, your reader feels the same emotion as your character, even though your reader probably doesn’t feel the physical sensation associated with the emotion.

What Sensory Description Means

Sensory Description means that you show what your viewpoint sees, hears, smells, tastes, or touches. This can stand alone, or you can mix it with any of your other tools. Here is an example:

The moon’s surface was blindingly white, pocked by a thousand craters. The black sky touched the horizon absurdly close. Dust rooster-tailed behind the rover that was racing away at six kilometers per hour—faster than a human in an EVA suit could run. Jazz looked at her arm readout. She had 18 minutes of oxygen left, and civilization was three kilometers away. Her comm link continued to crackle useless static. She took a sip from her water supply. It was lukewarm and tasted like dirty gym socks.

This paragraph is mostly Sensory Description, with a little Action (Jazz looking at her watch) and a little indirect Interior Monologue. You might wonder if the rover racing away is Sensory Description or Action. My view is that it’s a little of both. I tend to reserve the term Action for people who have agency, and I use the term Sensory Description for inanimate objects. The rover might be driven by a person with agency, and it might be an AI with some level of agency. Or it might be just out of control. We don’t really know, so my call is that it could go either way and it’s not worth arguing about.

Remember that you are not painting a picture, you are telling a story. Sensory Description works best when it serves the story. In the example above, all the details described highlight the predicament Jazz finds herself in.

If you do your Sensory Description right, your reader sees and hears and smells and tastes and feels exactly what your viewpoint character does. You have put your reader inside your character’s skin, and that’s a win.

What Narrative Summary Means

Narrative Summary means that you are summarizing a story without using much Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. That can be very efficient at moving through time to get to the interesting stuff. But it should never be used on the actual interesting stuff.

Here’s an example of Narrative Summary that does the job it’s intended to do:

When I got on the plane at LAX, I was trying desperately to figure out what I’d tell Corleone about where his investment had gone. My flight attendant read my situation from the get-go and kept bringing me courage in a bottle at about three times the recommended weekly allowance. Somewhere over Indiana, I briefly considered becoming a priest. Or a pirate. Or a peony. About the time we settled onto the runway at JFK, I made the decision to tell Corleone the truth. He wouldn’t like it, and maybe he’d have one of his guys work me over, or maybe I’d wind up in the wood-chipper. But I didn’t care anymore. Like my first girlfriend told me, “No brain, no pain.”

The paragraph moves our character from LA to New York. More importantly, the lad is making what can only be described as a Poor Life Decision. We don’t see any of the logic, which is probably for the best, because no amount of logic will get him to this decision. But copious amounts of the demon drink will do the trick. Note that this is a summary of many unseen events. We don’t see a single bottle. We don’t hear a word of Dialogue, nor Interior Monologue. It’s all just summary. But this paragraphs gets our boy where the author wants him to go in 122 words, which is a lot less than a scene would take. So this is a serviceable bit of Narrative Summary. Even though it’s Telling, not Showing.

Now let’s see where Narrative Summary goes wrong. And this is where an editor is going to hit you with a big red “Show, Don’t Tell” sticker. Let’s show the scene where Corleone sics his thugs onto our hapless protagonist.

When I was done talking, Corleone yelled a bunch of insults at me and told his thugs to beat me up. They took me outside and hit me thirty or forty times. It hurt bad in several places. I begged for mercy. Then one of them shot me.

This 48-word paragraph is way too little. It summarizes a terrifying and violent scene and the reader feels pretty much nothing. The right way to write this requires all the Showing tools you’ve got—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description. To do this well, you’d need anywhere from 500 to 1500 words. I don’t have the word count allowance for that here, but here’s how it might start.

“…so I lost it all on blackjack in Vegas,” I said.

Corleone just stared at me. A vein throbbed in his neck. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm for sure. He leaned back in his chair, and said…

OK, I’m going to stop right there, because what Corleone said can’t be printed in a family newspaper. But feel free to write the rest of the scene yourself. It’s not going to be pretty. It is going to take a bunch of words. Because Showing is inefficient. It burns word-count like crazy.

Narrative Summary is efficient, but it’s usually boring, so it’s your job to make it as unboring as possible while keeping the word-count low. Narrative Summary works best when there’s a bit of story to be told, but it unfolds over a long stretch of time. It works worst when it blurs over the exciting parts of the story that your reader really wants to see, hear, smell, taste, touch.

What Exposition Means

Exposition means that you explain some set of facts that your reader needs to know. Maybe it explains the physics of zero-gravity. Or the history of mockinjays. Or a complicated bit of politics in your storyworld.

There are many places where you need to inject some facts into your reader’s brain. You can do it economically with Exposition, and that’s not bad.

Book 1 in the Harry Potter series begins with a full page of Exposition, describing the Dursley family. Charles Dickens begins his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with a famous bit of Exposition—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” These are both examples where Exposition works very well.

If Exposition goes on too long, or if it doesn’t really serve the story, the reader will get bored, and that’s a major problem.

You can juice up Exposition by having one character explain it to another in Dialogue. When an editor writes “Show, Don’t Tell” on a bit of Exposition in your novel, they may be urging you to do just that. The problem is that Dialogue used as a smokescreen for Exposition can be just as boring as the original Exposition, while chewing up twice the word-count. So this is not always a great strategy.

My advice on Exposition is to think three times about how much you really must have. Use the minimum amount of Exposition to get the job done. And then go back to Showing your story.

There is much more I could say on all of the above. I’ll say more in future blog posts. For now, I leave you with…

Homework:

Look at the most recent scene you wrote. Analyze every single sentence in the scene. Is it Action? Dialogue? Interior Monologue? Interior Emotion? Sensory Description? Narrative Summary? Exposition? Some mixture?
Are you doing too much Telling? (This is common.)
Are you doing too much Showing? (This is less common, but equally lethal.)
Do you like the balance you strike between the 5 different kinds of Showing?

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