One of the first lessons that any writer or storyteller is taught is to ‘show-don’t-tell’. This piece will elaborate on this golden rule of good storytelling.
The writer wants to convey something, whether it’s the description of a place or an emotion of a character or sequence of actions. There are two ways in which this can be done. Telling the reader what the situation is and providing a clear interpretation; or Showing the reader the situation and inviting them to draw their own conclusions.
Let me illustrate this with an example.
Telling: It was an untidy room.
Showing: The room was more crowded than a New York subway at rush hour. But not with people, with things. Clothes, books, CDs, stationery, bags, chairs, and god know what else. Kevin searched for a spot to plant his foot without stepping on anything. He gave up the effort.
Doesn’t the latter version convey the same thing in a more powerful manner? Can you not feel the untidiness of the room, rather than me just telling you that it’s untidy? Did an image of the room pop up in your mind?
Telling summarizes the scene with a simple adjective or adverb. Showing paints a vivid picture and allows the readers to experience the scene for themselves. Showing makes the reader feel what the adjective was intended to imply.
The same technique applies not just to descriptions but also to emotions of characters. Let’s take another example.
Telling: He felt nervous as he walked up to the door.
Showing: He shuffled back and forth, looking downwards and then sideways. His hands fumbled about inside his pockets. Taking a deep breath, he advanced with measured steps as the wooden front door loomed closer.
Again, can you feel his state of mind as he approached the door? Wasn’t that more engaging than me telling you that he was nervous, and you take my word for it?
Showing is the key to good storytelling. It makes the reader a participant in the story. However the flipside is that, as you can see, showing takes substantially more words and sentences than telling. If we try to show everything, it will become rather verbose. The craft of the writer is to select what details to show and then tell the rest. So, telling has a place in the story too. For information that needs to be known, but is not as critical, telling is useful to summarize things for the reader.
A good technique for writing a description is to close your eyes and visualize the scene. Pick out few striking details that you see in your mind’s eye. Show these, then summarize or leave out the rest. The readers will fill in the blanks with their own imagination. We want to make the readers feel the scene. For this, the writer has to feel it himself or herself. Remember to feel first, write second.
The difference between a movie and a book is that in a movie everything is visualized for the audience. Every detail, every sight and sound is created for the viewers by the director, his cast and crew. In a book, readers have to exercise their own imagination.
For written works, the story begins in the mind of the writer and is breathed to life in the mind of the reader. No story is alive until it has been read. The reader is the co-creator of the story. In fact, no two readers will see the same picture. I’m sure everyone who reads this piece will see a slightly different image of the untidy room in their heads.
Remember that people read a story to be entertained. They want to get lost in the fictional world created by the author. They want to go on the journey with the characters. The writer’s job is to plant the seeds of the story in the reader’s mind and entice their imagination to do the rest.
