# Show and Tell



## qwertyportne (Jun 15, 2014)

My guess is that most of us are not very receptive to rules. For me, it's an adventure along a path less traveled by, not along a path beaten down with rules. And I'm not sure this is the best place to post my comments about the Show-Don't-Tell rule. If not, I'm sure a moderator will move it to a more appropriate forum. Either way, I'd sure like to hear what others have to say about this sometimes controversial rule. Thanks!

A few years ago a critic hammered one of my poems with "Show, don't tell!" His criticism motivated me to investigate this apparently absolute rule. In just a few hours of surfing the Internet, I discovered dozens of famous poets exhorting me to "Show, don't tell!"

“Avoid abstractions. Something concrete is always better than the symbol for it.”  Ezra Pound
"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." ~ Anton Chekhov
"No ideas but in things." ~ Wallace Stevens
​Their advice sounded good, but I found hundreds of famous and not-so-famous poems that (in my opinion) breathed deeply with showing and telling. And some of those poems had been written by the poets I just quoted above. Either those poets were saying one thing and doing another or I was missing something, so I went looking for it.

*STEP 1 => *Dismember the rule to separate the good from the bad and the ugly. Rules tend to be declared and followed absolutely, regardless of the situation. The three principles below are the results of my search for something useful in the Show-Don't-Tell rule. The words I used to express these principles may not reflect your understanding of the rule. But they helped me understand why so many poets always show but never tell; as if showing and telling were opposite, mutually exclusive kinds of writing; as if showing is good and telling is bad.

*The Show Don't Tell Rule
*(My Attempt to Extract as Much Good as I Could)​*
Principle #1 =>* Good poetry gives readers an experience, not just information. You and I know more about the world with our bodies than with our brains. We are more connected with reality through our eyes, ears and noses than through our beliefs, opinions and understanding. Poetry should therefore appeal to our senses with concrete images, not to our understanding with abstract concepts.

*Principle #2 =>* Poems are made of words, not feelings, and words are only handles to carry the idea of a feeling from the poem to its readers--NOT the feeling itself. So don't tell us ABOUT your emotional state. Show us the SYMPTOMS so we can experience your feelings vicariously. Don't explain. Evoke.

*Principle #3 => *Showing empowers the imagination, which makes it easier for its audience to believe what they are reading or hearing. Showing pulls your audience into the action and thereby empowers them to participate with their own thoughts and feelings. Telling engages the intellect, which leaves us standing emotionally outside the poem.

*STEP 2 =>* My next step was to write two poems to exemplify how telling can be bad and showing can be good. My model for these two poems was "I'm so sad I could die." versus "She stood at the edge of the cliff, weeping, watching the waves crash on the jagged rocks below."
Example 1 => This first poem merely tells us the speaker is unhappy ~ information we can understand but not feel. Yes, we can empathize with her situation, extrapolate from her telling to our own feelings, and this poem is quite a bit better than "I'm so sad..." but it might work better if it were the first stanza in a poem that includes Example 2.

 Marriage to Jake
 tragic mistake
 I'm leaving that man
 soon as I can!

*Example 2 =>* This second poem puts us in the speaker's shoes by showing her state of mind, which empowers us to experience her feelings ourselves and in our own way. The author, using the voice of the narrator, leaves it to the reader to interpret the speaker's predicament. "Good writing," wrote E.L. Doctorow, "causes your reader to feel something; not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."

 Her gold ring
 tossed on the tracks–
 no match for iron wheels
 rolling into the station.

*STEP 3 =>* Dismember poems that show and tell to discover how they work. I began with one of my favorites by Emily Dickinson. I had read it dozens of times and never noticed she had used the abstraction "hope" to give wings to original thinking. I just knew I liked it. Her poem convinced me a poet can show and tell. So I began to search for ways to do it skillfully. Here's what I found:



 Writing a poem is an adventure along a path less traveled by, not along a path beaten down with rules.


 It isn't all that easy to separate images and concepts in a poem, or to predict how your readers will interpret the images in some abstract way.
 

 There isn't anything necessarily wrong with writer-centered or reader-centered poems.
 

 Both telling and showing can be done well or done poorly.
 

 You can merge abstract concepts and concrete things to take a poem beyond a mere sum of showing and telling.
 

 Showing and telling each have a role to play in a skillfully crafted poem. Poems with only imagery can be vivid and beautiful or boring and pointless. The difference is either the poem itself (because it was poorly written) or the reader's interpretation and expectations.
 

 Words aimed at the body give your readers sight, sound, smell, taste and touch so they can experience what you are saying with their senses.
 

 Words aimed at the brain give your readers perspective, context and meaning so they can interpret what you are showing them with their own understanding.
 

 Evocative poems have peaks and valleys. Show on the peaks, when your readers are holding their breath. Tell in the valleys when they are pondering what they saw on the peaks.
 

 Show when you want to pull your readers into your poem to participate with their imagination.
 

 Tell when you want them to step back to ponder the implications of your poem with their intellect.

*STEP 4 =>* Reassemble the Show-Don't-Tell rule in terms of what I learned from Show-And-Tell poems to develop my own approach to showing and telling. Call this approach a tool, not a rule. If my poem can be assembled with a phillips head screw driver and a half-inch wrench, I shouldn't reach into my Tool Box for a hammer and a crowbar. The reverse is also true because the same tools don't work for every poem.

*Example 3 =>* I began with an attempt at "good" telling ~ telling grounded in imagery but no abstractions that would reveal my own thoughts and feelings.

 My father
 with hammer, saw and nails
 built a house for his family.
 His calloused fingers
 served vinyl-coated sinkers from a leather bag 
 to the heavy hammer
 stitching studs to sheathing
 in the tree-covered hills of Tennessee.

*Example 4 =>* Same thing but with a few abstractions along the way to give readers hints about what the events mean to the author or the speaker without inhibiting the reader's own interpretation. After creating these examples, I put them together as the first and second stanzas of the same poem.

 My father never taught me 
 how to hammer nails with words.
 Watching him drive sinkers into wood
 showed me how to make a house a home
 by joining love and lumber
 with a hammer of my own
 and the certainty 
 I learned from him.

***
​If you are anything like me, you write because you have something to say and a reason for saying it. We want our vision, our perspective known to our readers. We want to create what one poet called "an internal logic that takes our readers on a journey." 

So my current approach to showing and telling is that imagery can show my readers what I'm saying and abstractions can tell them what I mean. And if I blend them skillfully, my readers will have a context for coming to their own conclusions about what my poem means. In other words, I can have my cake and eat it too. A carefully crafted poem can satisfy author and audience if the poet just obeys a few simple rules... er, I mean has some really good tools... 

As many of you have seen, my poetry doesn't always measure up to this approach. Sometimes the abstractions and images merge well and sometimes they look like a pile of melted crayons with weird-looking stuff protruding from the goo...


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## Sam (Jun 15, 2014)

If you are a great writer, it doesn't matter one iota whether you show or tell. 

Great writers can write about the weather and make it riveting.


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## J Anfinson (Jun 15, 2014)

I just try to show what I think is the interesting parts of the story and tell what isn't. For example, nobody wants a play-by-play of the drive to the grocery store unless it matters. I'd end the scene with the guy grabbing his car keys and say, "He drove to the store", and open the next with him pulling into the parking lot, or maybe walking through the doors. That's how I think of that so called "rule". I'm sure some people could, as Sam said, turn even a normally boring drive into a fascinating read, but I cannot unless it plays a major part in the story.


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## Jeko (Jun 16, 2014)

You show and tell in every word you write. The question is not whether you show or tell; it's _what _you show and _what _you tell. You can't do one without the other. Their relationship is like a beautiful dance on the page.


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## J.T. Chris (Jun 16, 2014)

Writers tend to think too much into the "Show vs. Tell" thing, when really it's just what we use to teach beginning writers the fundamentals of imagery. 

Sam is spot-on.


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## Bishop (Jun 16, 2014)

Sam said:


> If you are a great writer, it doesn't matter one iota whether you show or tell.
> 
> Great writers can write about the weather and make it riveting.





J.T. Chris said:


> Writers tend to think too much into the "Show vs. Tell" thing, when really it's just what we use to teach beginning writers the fundamentals of imagery.
> 
> Sam is spot-on.



I'm glad I'm not the only one to think this.

Obviously, the above is about poetry, but I'm going to talk about fiction in the show/tell context, because...
My biggest pet peeve of a piece is when the character's actions (the show) don't match up with perceptions of them, or prose/dialogue about them (tell). It happens in big Mary Sue stories more than anything, but also seems to be coming out in more recent popular books with titles that have a color in them. The character is described as being a strong person, let's say, but then anytime anyone asks her to do something she doesn't like... she does it. Bending to the will of everyone around you contradicts the "strong person" persona that the narration spoke of, and as they say, actions speak louder than words...


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## Kyle R (Jun 16, 2014)

Some literary writers excel at telling so well that it approaches its own art form.

Beginning writers, though, tend to rely too heavily on telling, summarizing and explaining things that could function better if shown.

For example,

Carl's father abused him. Sometimes, he almost seemed to enjoy doing it.

This, obviously, is telling. But why? What about it is telling? How can we distinguish between showing and telling?

The trick that I like to use is: look for the _senses_ (sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing).

*Writing that shows is writing that involves the senses*. It's visual; it's tactile; it's audible...

Carl's father struck his son in the face with the back of his hand. "Go on, boy," he said. "Tempt me some more."

Here the writer is using two aspects of the sensual realm to convey what's happening: the visual and the audible.
_
Showing_ is the writer's attempt at enabling the reader to vicariously experience something as if he or she were living it, as the way we experience the world is _through the senses_.

A writer would _show _by saying,

When Carl stepped into the outhouse, his bladder straining in his abdomen, the stench overwhelmed him. This salty, pungent cloud, it shoved its way up his nostrils and down his throat.

A writer would _tell _by avoiding the use of the senses, and say,

Going to the outhouse was a horrible experience for Carl. He'd never encountered such a foul place in all his life.

Telling has its uses, just as showing does. Like J pointed out, telling is an excellent device to use when condensing moments that the writer doesn't want to explore in depth. 

When and where to tell versus show is really up to the discretion of the writer. But the above is one way I like to simplify and explain the difference between the two. :encouragement:


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## aliveatnight (Jun 17, 2014)

It's all about having a perfect balance of showing and telling. You cannot have a story without one or the either unless you're an amazing writer and you can do whatever you want. You want to evoke the readers senses without boring them with unnecessary details.


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## FleshEater (Jun 17, 2014)

Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.


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## J.T. Chris (Jun 17, 2014)

FleshEater said:


> Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.



Hopefully just as soon as _in medias res _dies!


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## J Anfinson (Jun 17, 2014)

FleshEater said:


> Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.



Don't fight it. Embrace the insanity. It feels good.


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## Morkonan (Jun 18, 2014)

FleshEater said:


> Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.



It's coughing up blood, I think. I just saw it finish filling out its insurance papers, yesterday, so I think it's not long for this world...

Then again, whenever someone say's that, it resurrects the beast. Sorry.


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## Bishop (Jun 18, 2014)

FleshEater said:


> Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.



It's the same reason Iron Maiden has been doing tours with some of their old tunes lately.

The new fans of the forum haven't been around long enough to hear the classics!


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## Nastasya (Jun 18, 2014)

Interesting post. Thanks.

I agree that a good writer knows when a tell is more powerful or appropriate than a show and vice versa, but I do agree that, generally, show, don't tell is a good rule to have in the back of my mind. 'Pavements and pockets' is how I remember it. I often wander off into abstraction and have to pull the piece back into focus with a concrete anchor- 'A bag of ice melts on a dinner plate', or etc.

Once I'm sure of myself and know what needs to be articulated in order to say what I want to say, then I can and often do choose a tell over a show. It's when I'm not conscious of the fact that I'm telling a lot and showing very little that my work loses clarity and engagement.


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## Ariel (Jun 21, 2014)

FleshEater said:


> Will this subject ever curl up and die? Seriously...there are probably 500 threads on the topic already.


Not everyone on this site has been writing for long.  With a new influx of writers there will be new threads rehashing old themes.


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## CerebralAssasin (May 22, 2015)

The whole "show,don't tell" thing is overrated, and often a dangerous advice for newbies. I get it, the whole movement was created because too many newbies were losing themselves into abstractions, but a good piece of fiction needs to strike up a balance of showing and telling. When to tell and when to show is up to the writer,of course, and the demands of the particular piece.


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## T.S.Bowman (May 23, 2015)

CerebralAssasin said:


> The whole "show,don't tell" thing is overrated, and often a dangerous advice for newbies. I get it, the whole movement was created because too many newbies were losing themselves into abstractions, but a good piece of fiction needs to strike up a balance of showing and telling. When to tell and when to show is up to the writer,of course, and the demands of the particular piece.



I think the idea would be to use the "rule" to teach new writers how to strike the balance you speak of. Kyle's examples were pretty doggone good at explaining the differences.


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## KellInkston (May 26, 2015)

"Show don't tell" is a great rule of thumb, but it is _a rule of thumb_. It's something that can easily be ignored by a more experienced writer, as they know exactly how to use their kit of skills.


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## Sulieman (Jun 24, 2015)

Is there a thread for writers about this?


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## Sam (Jun 24, 2015)

There are more threads on writer's block than you could throw a stick at.


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