# SHOW DONT TELL.



## Ian8777 (Mar 13, 2016)

I used to tell stories.

I used to enjoy telling stories.

I would sit down and write whatever was in my mind with no thought about anything other than telling a good honest story. I simply wrote and never gave any thought of telling stories any other way than just telling them.

I was always shy about letting people read my stories. They were personal to me and often they could be on the darker side of what might be considered ‘The norm.’ Showing one of my stories meant letting someone in to who I really was and that was a huge thing for me. I tried it once with a friend in school. I showed her a story I had written about a family of werewolves who moved in next door to a family of vampires and after reading it she never spoke to me again. She told everyone in school that I was a weirdo and everywhere I went people laughed and pointed at me. I was utterly heartbroken and  never showed another person another story again after that.

Despite that girls comments, who by the way was found murdered in her apartment just a few years back, I continued to write my stories. Not long ago I decided to share one with my mother because she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and had been given less than two months to live.

‘You wrote this?’ she said, sitting awkwardly in her hospital bed. ‘You really wrote this?’

‘Sure did.’

She finished reading and looked up at me. Tears leaked down her face. ‘What did I do?’ she said. ‘What the hell did I do?’

I took the story back off her because I did not want any of the nurses or doctors to get their hands on it. I could tell mum was upset and tried to reassure her that it was just a story, but she was completely freaked out. I explained that without people like me there would be no such things as horror stories to keep kids scared around camp fires.
A few days later I got a call from the hospital telling me that my mother had died. I spent weeks feeling that the reason mum had not liked my story was because it had not been written well. What I excelled at in imagination was hampered by what I lacked in form. I needed some coaching so a few weeks later I enrolled on a creative writing class.

And now I can’t tell stories.

I don’t know how to tell stories anymore because Margo, my creative writing teacher told me that writers don’t tell stories.

‘Writers show stories,’ she would say. ‘Do not tell me it is raining, show me the character struggling to put up an umbrella as cars splash by through deep puddles. We must show stories, not tell them.’

Whoever heard such nonsense. When in your life have you ever heard someone say, ‘sit down kids and let me show you a story.’ I can’t imagine Jesus saying to his disciples, ‘Come, let me SHOW you the story of the Good Samaritan. Or, some Grandmother saying, ‘hey kids let me SHOW you the story about Little Red Riding Hood.’
According to Margo, telling sounds something like this: ‘Edward walked along the street. It was raining hard, but that did not bother him because Edward was determined to kill Miranda.’ According to Margo this kind of writing, or telling as she calls it does not allow the reader to engage with the text. Instead we writers should write in such a way that allows the reader to insert their own imaginations into the work. Margo says we should write something like: ‘Edward paced along the wet sidewalk with cars whizzing past as quickly as his heart was beating. Raindrops exploded by his feet like miniscule hand-grenades. He smiled with each step that took him closer him closer to Miranda’s apartment. He imagined knocking on the door and waiting for the clunk click of locks before she opened up. She would smile and beckon him inside, closing the door behind her. They would stare longingly at each other for a few moments, and that’s when he would draw the knife from his jacket.’

Before I tell you and more about Margo and what I have in store for her, let me show you the opening paragraph to the short story I wrote for her, and then I will tell you what she said about it:

My name is Edward Steels. I’m fifty-three years old and I have just committed my first murder. Her name was Shelley Spencer. We went to school together and I had wanted to kill her since I was fifteen years old. Last night I broke into her apartment and cut her throat. I watched her flail on her bed with eyes that asked a thousand questions. It took her ten minutes to die. Ten beautiful and sensuous minutes that felt like my entire body was being massaged with a pair of hands made from the finest silk. So long Shelley Spencer. What goes around comes around.

Everyday I walk among people who think I am happy and amiable, but what they don’t know is that while I may appear light-hearted and jovial, I am actually thinking about skinning them alive, or, pushing an electric plane over their kneecaps. The urge to kill is getting stronger with each passing day. It won’t be long before it happens again. It’s just a matter of working out who, when, and how?’

According to Margo, my story has too much telling. When I first read her remarks I had no idea what ‘too much telling’ meant. The only thing I got from her comments was how important this telling thing was to Margo because she capitalised it every time she wrote the word. ‘Don’t TELL me that your main character is going to kill someone,’ she said. ‘SHOW me them stood outside their victim’s house brandishing a knife or a gun.’ She also said, ‘Don’t tell me the murderer has a knife. Show me the blade glinting in the sunlight and the horror in the eyes of the victim as the blade slices through the air and into flesh.’

I have been stood in the park outside Margo’s house since five this morning. My hands tremble and it’s not just down to the cold air. Cars and busses zoom by, pumping out thick blue exhaust smoke that seems to irritate the early morning joggers who bounce along the sidewalk with headphones stuffed into their ears. I watch Margo’s house from behind a large oak tree. I think it’s an oak. It could be an elm or one of those trees that grow red apples. I do not know what they are called. A red apple tree? Whatever type of tree it is, the branches are bare and ugly like it had had some kind of chemotherapy.

I peer out from behind the tree. Margo’s house is the third from the left on a semi-circular row of expensive looking terraces. I shiver and rub my hands together before thrusting them into my jacket pocket. Inside the warm, velvety lining of my parka I feel the cold hard shape of the Stanley knife. I think about what Margo is going to look like when she wakes up top find herself tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth; or maybe a pool ball. Her scared face will be wide-eyed and full of questions I suspect. I am going to read the short story I wrote for her while rubbing the Stanley knife down her cheek, possibly nicking her so a trickle of blood drips onto the floor. I may even kiss her.

It’s getting light now. The sky looks clear and cold with a few scratch marks put there by passenger planes. I imagine Margo’s screams as I slice her ear off while dancing to Stealer’s Wheels. I will then SHOW her the severed ear and TELL her that I am going to cut the other one off unless she explains to me exactly what she means by, ‘too much TELLING?’ And, why she decided that my short story with all its intricacies, metafictional devices, and intertextual references to several Quentin Tarantino films only deserved a lousy C minus?

As I strop the knife in front of her, getting ready for the second ear, I will remind Margo of another creative writing adage, one that she will soon know the true meaning of — Less is more.


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## escorial (Mar 13, 2016)

i found the first three paragraphs enthralling...and to be honest i was somewhat at a loss when the margo and edward steel took over.....it was good but for me the reality was quite poetic prose at the start.....liked


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## Jack of all trades (Mar 14, 2016)

Raindrops exploding on the ground like hand grenades seems like over dramatized rubbish to me.

Your description of showing your mother your writing (first three paragraphs) was told very nicely. And stories are not called "tales" for nothing. Stories are told. Some are told well and some are boring. The question is, what makes a well-told tale?

There is much dispute and misunderstanding about showing and telling.

Some say replace all -ly adverbs with some dramatic description, and that's showing.

Others say replace all statements of fact (thoughts, etc) with dramatic descriptions, and *that's* showing.


Here's my rule of thumb. If a section reads like a list and makes you yawn, then showing more would probably help. If a reader is confused or ill-informed, then more showing may be in order. If the passage of time is not being conveyed, then showing is an easy way to fix it. But leave the grenades for the army. They destroy the landscape.


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## rcallaci (Mar 14, 2016)

a devilishly dark little gem. I loved the last paragraph, the dark humor was ghoulishly delightful. A well written piece from beginning to end . Every time I hear some one tell me my stories need more showing less telling my mind will wander back to this story, and with a little smile I'll cut the bastards throat  only kidding - but I do love a good horror tale....


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## Olly Buckle (Mar 14, 2016)

Very nice, and no quibbles, nits or typos that I saw. It did occur to me that he might offer to demonstrate that "Less is more", my personal favourite injunction.


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## Ian8777 (Mar 14, 2016)

Olly Buckle said:


> Very nice, and no quibbles, nits or typos that I saw. It did occur to me that he might offer to demonstrate that "Less is more", my personal favourite injunction.




amended-- Thanks Olly.


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## Mickd (Apr 4, 2016)

I enjoyed your story, I liked how you kept a tight focus on your characters desire. Having said that, I felt that the scene with the characters mother was a little too short. Was it his mother's death that sent him over the edge? The character seemed to have no emotional connection to his mother at all. Other than that I felt your story was really well done.


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## Ibb (Apr 4, 2016)

I've read a few stories on here that I'd chalk up to personal favorites. This is now one of them. I liked it so much I decided to browse your profile and look for more. So far I've made my way through 'Hard Boiled Egg Gets Fried' and 'I AM NOT A PAEDOPHILE.' Both are great stuff. I wanted to pause from my reading and come back here to tell you you're fantastic. 

Thanks for the read.


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## Ian8777 (May 25, 2016)

I have re-drafted this story..... I quite like it...



I used to tell stories.

I used to enjoy telling stories.

I would sit down and write whatever was in my mind with no thought about anything other than telling a good honest story. I simply wrote and never gave any thought of telling stories any other way than just telling them.

I was always shy about letting people read my stories. They were personal to me and often they could be on the darker side of what might be considered ‘The norm.’ Showing one of my stories meant letting someone in to who I really was and that was a huge thing for me. I tried it once with a friend in school. I showed her a story I had written about a family of werewolves who moved in next door to a family of vampires and after reading it she never spoke to me again. She told everyone in school that I was a weirdo and everywhere I went people laughed and pointed at me. I was utterly heartbroken and never showed another person another story again after that.

Despite that girls comments, who by the way was found murdered in her apartment just a few years back, I continued to write my stories. Not long ago I decided to share one with my mother because she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and had been given less than two months to live.

‘You wrote this?’ she said, sitting awkwardly in her hospital bed. ‘You really wrote this?’

‘Sure did.’

She finished reading and looked up at me. Tears leaked down her face. ‘What did I do?’ she said. ‘What the hell did I do?’

I took the story back off her because I did not want any of the nurses or doctors to get their hands on it. I could tell mum was upset and tried to reassure her that it was just a story, but she was completely freaked out. I explained that without people like me there would be no such things as horror stories to keep kids scared around camp fires.
A few days later I got a call from the hospital telling me that my mother had died. I spent weeks feeling that the reason mum had not liked my story was because it had not been written well. What I excelled at in imagination was hampered by what I lacked in form. I needed some coaching so a few weeks later I enrolled on a creative writing class.

And now I can’t tell stories.

I don’t know how to tell stories anymore because Margo, my creative writing teacher told me that writers don’t tell stories.

‘Writers show stories,’ she would say. ‘Do not tell me it is raining, show me the character struggling to put up an umbrella as cars splash by through deep puddles. We must show stories, not tell them.’

Whoever heard such nonsense. When in your life have you ever heard someone say, ‘sit down kids and let me show you a story.’ I can’t imagine Jesus saying to his disciples, ‘Come, let me SHOW you the story of the Good Samaritan. Or, some Grandmother saying, ‘hey kids let me SHOW you the story about Little Red Riding Hood.’
According to Margo, telling sounds something like this: ‘Edward walked along the street. It was raining hard, but that did not bother him because Edward was determined to kill Miranda.’ According to Margo this kind of writing, or telling as she calls it does not allow the reader to engage with the text. Instead we writers should write in such a way that allows the reader to insert their own imaginations into the work. Margo says we should write something like: ‘Edward paced along the wet sidewalk with cars whizzing past as quickly as his heart was beating. Raindrops exploded by his feet like miniscule hand-grenades. He smiled with each step that took him closer him closer to Miranda’s apartment. He imagined knocking on the door and waiting for the clunk click of locks before she opened up. She would smile and beckon him inside, closing the door behind her. They would stare longingly at each other for a few moments, and that’s when he would draw the knife from his jacket.’

Before I tell you and more about Margo and what I have in store for her, let me show you the opening paragraph to the short story I wrote for her, and then I will tell you what she said about it:

My name is Edward Steels. I’m fifty-three years old and I have just committed my first murder. Her name was Shelley Spencer. We went to school together and I had wanted to kill her since I was fifteen years old. Last night I broke into her apartment and cut her throat. I watched her flail on her bed with eyes that asked a thousand questions. It took her ten minutes to die. Ten beautiful and sensuous minutes that felt like my entire body was being massaged with a pair of hands made from the finest silk. So long Shelley Spencer. What goes around comes around.

Everyday I walk among people who think I am happy and amiable, but what they don’t know is that while I may appear light-hearted and jovial, I am actually thinking about skinning them alive, or, pushing an electric plane over their kneecaps. The urge to kill is getting stronger with each passing day. It won’t be long before it happens again. It’s just a matter of working out who, when, and how?’

According to Margo, my story has too much telling. When I first read her remarks I had no idea what ‘too much telling’ meant. The only thing I got from her comments was how important this telling thing was to Margo because she capitalised it every time she wrote the word. ‘Don’t TELL me that your main character is going to kill someone,’ she said. ‘SHOW me them stood outside their victim’s house brandishing a knife or a gun.’ She also said, ‘Don’t tell me the murderer has a knife. Show me the blade glinting in the sunlight and the horror in the eyes of the victim as the blade slices through the air and into flesh.’

I have been stood in the park outside Margo’s house since five this morning. My hands tremble and it’s not just down to the cold air. Cars and busses zoom by, pumping out thick blue exhaust smoke that seems to irritate the early morning joggers who bounce along the sidewalk with headphones stuffed into their ears. I watch Margo’s house from behind a large oak tree. I think it’s an oak. It could be an elm or one of those trees that grow red apples. I do not know what they are called. A red apple tree? Whatever type of tree it is, the branches are bare and ugly like it has had some kind of chemotherapy.

I peer out from behind the tree. Margo’s house is the third from the left on a semi-circular row of expensive looking terraces. I shiver and rub my hands together before thrusting them into my jacket pocket. Inside the warm, velvety lining of my parka I feel the cold hard shape of the Stanley knife. I think about what Margo is going to look like when she wakes up to find herself tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth; or maybe a pool ball. Her scared face will be wide-eyed and full of questions I suspect. I am going to read the short story I wrote for her while rubbing the Stanley knife down her cheek, possibly nicking her so a trickle of blood drips onto the floor. I may even kiss her.

It’s getting light now. The sky looks clear and cold with a few scratch marks put there by passenger planes. I imagine Margo’s screams as I slice her ear off while dancing to Stealer’s Wheels. I will then SHOW her the severed ear and TELL her that I am going to cut the other one off unless she explains to me exactly what she means by, ‘too much TELLING?’ And, why she decided that my short story with all its intricacies, metafictional devices, and intertextual references to several Quentin Tarantino films only deserved a lousy C minus?

As I strop the knife in front of her, getting ready for the second ear, I will remind Margo of another creative writing adage, one that she will soon know the true meaning of — Less is more.


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## Jay Greenstein (May 25, 2016)

Too much telling.


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## Bard_Daniel (May 25, 2016)

This was quite dark but it was an intriguing piece. A nitpick is that I think the relationship between him and his mother should be a little more profound but that's just my opinion. I like how, in the second version, you spoke of the tree and how it looked like it had chemotherapy. Good stuff.

Cheers!


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## Duanesb (May 26, 2016)

I enjoyed it a lot as I'm sure many writers at any level can remember the first time hearing that phrase.  I enjoyed the dark path the story took as well as trying to keep the parallels.


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## stevef (Jul 23, 2016)

Good opening paragraphs usually signify that a good story will follow and _Show, Don't Tell_ confirmed my thoughts. A well-constructed piece with an agreeably disquieting conclusion.


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## HoivinRossi (Dec 7, 2016)

If this was not in Fiction I would have been genuinely concerned from the first few paragraphs. That's good, It gave me goose bumps.


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## Ell337 (Dec 30, 2016)

Okay judging by the comments I guess I'm the only with the sense of humour that finds this really funny. 

And yes, had the same thought around the 'show don't tell' nonsense. I tell stories.


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## Ian8777 (Dec 30, 2016)

Glad you liked it! I really hate the show don't tell BS!


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## JaneC (Dec 30, 2016)

I don't have more to say other than that I loved this! So dark, so intriguing.


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## Roo2503 (Jan 2, 2017)

Wow! How good was this story? Really dark and weird with undercurrents of literary theory thrown in there as well! I got the Quentin Tarentino references and I liked the less is more bit at the end. Creepily good.


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## WordAddict (Jan 12, 2017)

I do not generally like tales from the dark side but the writing drew me in and would not let me go until the gruesome end.  I will not need a camp fire to have nightmares about this one!  Great writing.

Word Addict


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## Monaque (Jan 29, 2017)

I have to admit that at first I wasn`t really sure whether this was real or a story. I kept reading it thinking this guy is going off on one on the forum, any time now someone is going to shut him down: it was that well done. The subject matter was a bit ghoulish for me really, I don`t do horror personally, and I suppose the writing could be tightened in places; but overall a great idea well executed. :applause:

The whole thing about showing and telling; I just write and try and feel the story. Sometimes I think we over-analyze everything.


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## Sebald (Feb 26, 2017)

Ian. You are clearly talented. But perhaps try not to appear as woman-hating as your serial-killer. Possibly have your main character kill men as well as women? At the moment, it reads like an angry author, sitting at his desk, expressing rage through his pen.
Seb


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