Show not Tell
“Show not Tell” is the art of providing enough details that your readers don’t have to take your word for it, they get to “see,” “feel,” and experience the event, idea, or whatever you’re writing about for themselves.
If you do a good enough job, the experience of reading will be almost as effective as the real thing. That’s because whether your words create the experience in the readers’ imagination or whether the experience reaches them through their five senses, the experience always happens inside their brains. So an actual sensory experience and a vivid imagination may not be so different.
The pages listed below cover various types of show not tell skills, and each skill comes complete with explanations, step-by-step guide for guaranteed success, examples and exercises for practice.
Has it ever occurred to you that you don’t experience anything outside
your own body? When you look at a tree, all you experience is the reaction
of your optical nerves stimulated by light on the back of your eye, then
translated by your brain. A summer afternoon may be boiling hot, but the
only way you know comes from nerve sensations that originate in your skin
and travel to your brain. What’s your favorite food? What you experience
when eating it is merely a combination of four tastes, a rich mixture of
smells dissolving against your olfactory gland, and texture.
But something other than actual objects can stimulate these responses.
Have you stubbed your toe or bitten your tongue recently? If so, the mere
mention of it probably brings back vivid memories of the pain. Have you
ever woken up on a dark, raining morning with all the windows shut but
still imagined the humid, earthy smell permeating the outdoor air? Or
watched a good screen kiss in a dark theater and licked your own lips as
you remembered a real one from your own life? Memories and imagination
are the next best (or worst) thing to the real thing.
If you know how to use words descriptively, then you can evoke
imagery and sensation in readers’ minds that make the story seem nearly
real. To do so effectively, you must do more than tell. You must go beyond
making readers know what happened, you must supply enough details -
and the right kind of details - that they understand thoroughly and imagine
clearly the sensations that would accompany the actual experience. This is
the essence of Show not Tell, and this chapter will teach you, step by step,
how to do it powerfully.
In kindergarten, you had Show and Tell. You had the benefit of
bringing in your puppy or spider collection or your grandfather’s dentures
to make your audience understand. You stood at the front of the class
and said, “This is my brother’s cell phone.” You held up the phone and
everybody got it. Now, in writing, without the visual aid, saying “This is
my cell phone” doesn’t reveal much about the phone’s characteristics.
Show and tell is gone forever. From now on, you will do most of your
showing with words. You must learn to paint vivid verbal pictures in your
audience’s mind. Smells, textures, tastes, and emotions.
Some writers pick up show not tell quickly and naturally, while others
must work a bit harder to come up with the list of items to describe, but
the process is the same for all. If you find yourself having serious difficulty
generating lists of objects to describe, read the last part of this chapter,
The Creative Process.