Episode Sixteen: You’re thinking about “show, dont tell” the wrong way
This week, I’m talking about another of the most common mistakes I see in client manuscripts: a misunderstanding of show, don’t tell.
It’s a writing rule that gets thrown out ALL THE TIME. But how often do you hear someone diving deep into what it really means? Not often enough.
Writers often think of show, don’t tell as one thing and usually something that happens at the line level. But it’s not that simple. Show, don’t tell is really a collection of techniques that make your writing feel alive and immersive to readers and it operates at every level of your manuscript.
In this episode, I’m sharing three ways that show, don’t tell shows up in manuscripts and what you need to do to create an immersive experience for your readers.
You can listen to the full epsiode here or watch here.
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Transcript
Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Hello and welcome to episode 16 of the Better Writer podcast. As you can see, the background behind me has changed quite a bit. ⁓ I basically, I got a new desk and then that spiraled into me completely reorganizing my office. And honestly, I am really, really happy with the results. ⁓ I have more space now. It's really the same furniture, obviously besides the desk, but I think this desk is actually bigger but just the way that it's laid out, the way that things are stored, I just feel like I have more room. There's better light in here. This desk rises on its own, it's electric. It is such a game changer. I've talked before about some of the changes that I had to make in order to physically make the job of editing work. There's a lot of typing, it's a lot of sitting, and having a desk that allows me to stand is truly a game changer. I had one of those desk risers, but only you know, the riser itself would move. Most of the desk just stayed there. And now the whole desk rises. It's amazing. And it really is going to make a difference. ⁓ It's only been a couple of days, but I'm already so excited about the changes. If you're watching on YouTube, I'll just, you know, move the camera so you can see, try not to, you know, mess up the whole setup. You can see the rest of the office and, you know, my soundproofing thing is behind me. Over here we got computers, all that good stuff. So I love it. I'm very excited about the changes and ⁓ yeah, it was a lot of work for a couple days, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. So on to the episode itself. First off, I want to say I am officially moving this podcast to Tuesdays. I am really trying to switch some things around in my business, make the scheduling work. And I think having the podcast coming out on Mondays just really pushed me to create the podcast on weekends.
And I am slowly trying to do less and less work over the weekends. In case you don't know, I came to editing through teaching first. And teaching is really a profession where a lot of people work seven days a week. It is very normal to work seven days a week because the time that kids are in the school building is just one part of the work that teachers do. There's grading, there's lesson planning, there are a million other things that have to happen. So I think I just really came from a world where it is totally normal to work seven days a week. And I brought that into business with me. And I am trying to change that because I know that it is not sustainable. I know it's not healthy. I know that I do better work when I actually rest and take breaks. So I'm slowly, slowly trying to evolve and change. And I'm not going to go, you know, cold turkey and start, you know, just working like four days a week or something.
Right now I'm working on just working six days a week and one very small change that I think is going to help with that is moving this podcast back a day. It will now come out on the same day as my newsletter, The Better Writer Weekly. If you are not already a subscriber, you can find a link below this episode to sign up and hear more from me. yeah, so those two things are going to come out on the same day. And hopefully I will be doing less work on the weekends going forward ⁓ if I can. We'll see. Okay, now onto the topic of today's episode.
And this is one that I think is so, so important. I mentioned in the last episode that conflict is one of the most common issues that I see in client manuscripts, and this is another one. It's show, don't tell. And you might be thinking, Olivia, you're a developmental editor. Why are you worried about show, don't tell at all? And that is at the heart of why show, don't tell is so difficult. It is such a misconception about what show, don't tell really means, how it functions. And I am not going to get into everything you need to know about Show Don't Tell in one episode, but I wanted to address the biggest misconception out there, the one that I see writers getting wrong all the time, and that is this idea that Show Don't Tell is one thing. There is this myth that Show Don't Tell is just a single technique that you do, and we often think of it as something that happens at the line level, but it's so much more than that. Show Don't Tell is not one thing.
Show don't tell is a collection of writing techniques that create the effect of an immersive experience for your readers. There are so many different aspects of your story that contribute to whether you are showing or telling. And if you are trying to just do show don't tell at the line level, you are going to get it wrong. Again, that is why it is one of the most common things that I see in client manuscripts, one of the biggest mistakes I see writers making is not embracing the totality of what Show Don't Tell is. And they can be doing some parts of it they think they're showing, but they're not doing all of it. And that means that what they are trying to show falls flat, or they just end up telling us a story instead of putting that story on the page for readers to experience for it themselves. So like I said, I am not going to be able to share everything that you need to know about Show Don't Tell in one podcast episode.
And it's definitely something that I might talk about in a couple episodes going forward as well. But what I want to do today is just talk about the different levels at which Show Don't Tell operates. Because again, it isn't one thing, it is multiple things.
The first place where Show Don't Tell shows up is in your outline. And I don't mean that literally in terms of like your Roman numeral outline of what's going to happen in the story. What I mean here is what you choose to put on the page in terms of your scenes, your moments, your chapters, that is the first decision you make that is either showing or telling. What I mean by that is you can either choose to put specific moments on the page that have action and conflict and dialogue and interesting things that readers want to see. Or you can choose to put boring moments on the page. Sorry, not sorry, it's just true, where characters are sitting and thinking about interesting things happening. And I know that sounds so weird because it sounds so obvious that you would put the exciting thing on the page, but I cannot tell you how often I see a client manuscript where someone is doing something inactive.
They are walking across a campus. They are sitting and drinking a cup of coffee. They are laying in bed in the morning before they start their day. And in summary, in narration, that character tells us, I am so tired today because I was fighting a unicorn last night. This is a completely made up example. I have not yet seen anyone fighting a unicorn in a client manuscript either on the page or otherwise, but they will tell us that something really cool and exciting happened, whether that is a fight with their parent, a really beautiful relationship moment. Maybe it could even be the characters having sex for the first time. Something big happens and readers don't get to see it on the page.
And the problem is that readers don't want to see your character laying in bed thinking about something cool that happened. They want to see that cool thing happen on the page. And you as the author need to bring that thing forward and actually write it. Let characters experience it. Your characters can then reflect on the thing that happened, but we should never find out that something awesome happened after the fact and then just hear about it in narration. That is not going to work. That means you are telling us that a cool thing happened. You're not showing the cool thing. Again, there's a big difference, a world of difference between your character waking up sore the next morning after we saw them fight a unicorn versus your character waking up sore and telling us they fought a unicorn. It's a major difference.
And I also want to be clear with the example I gave of your characters having sex the first time. The problem isn't that you're not showing the spicy scene. Your book does not need to be spicy to work, but in that case, we don't want to find out that they had this whole grand romantic evening after the fact. Show the romantic evening on the page. Take us right up to the moment when you're going to close the door and then move on and show us the next morning where your character is reflecting. But we should have seen the buildup, the romancing that happened before that. Then, of course, you can skip over the actual graphic parts, you know, as much or as little as you want to show and then catch us up in reflection later. But the point is, the good stuff should be happening on the page, and you only get to have your characters sit and think about exciting things if you have already shown them. All right.
The second place where showing happens is in your scenes at the line level with specifics. And I think this is one that people miss all the time because they are describing the setting. They are describing the action. They think that they have shown that scene because they told us the character ran across the field or the character moved across the room and that is a verb. There are verbs on the page that should be showing, but it's not specific enough.
And this can also show up as generalizations. So for example, if you have a group of characters who are doing something, for example, they're riding into battle, I'll often see a character say, we rode into battle nervous about what was going to happen. And you might think that you're showing because you're showing them going into battle, but you are just telling us about this experience as a collective, as opposed to really bringing us into the experiences of a single character. So you want your story to be specific enough that readers can visualize what is happening in a really specific way. Because he ran across the field could mean many different things. That could be a full-on sprint, it could be a light jog, it could be a casual, I'm running up to talk to a friend, it could be you are running for your life because there is a serial killer behind you. And some of that is going to come from context, but you can make your writing more specific.
He sprinted across the field. He jogged across the field. Just by changing one word, we're already getting more specific. That visual is already clearer and we now have more information about what's actually happening. Of course, you don't necessarily need to go into that much detail if the run across the field means nothing and is just getting your character from point A to point B. But if readers need to be able to visualize what is happening, we want to be as specific as possible as often as possible. The next place that showing shows up is in your character's internal thoughts. And this one is tricky because a lot of people think that narrating character thoughts is telling. And it can be if you are doing it incorrectly. If you are telling us things that are boring, if you are telling us things that we don't care about, if you are telling us information about the world or backstory in a big info dump, that is all going to feel like telling.
But if those character’s thoughts are specific to the moment. If they are conveying a reaction to the conflict in that scene, if they are giving us context, if they are showing us why the conflict matters, if your character is specifically reacting to events on the page and showing us why it matters, that is a form of showing. And the line is so thin, and this is where people get tripped up. Interiority is a form of showing when it is done right. If you actually look at some of your favorite books, you'll be surprised by how much time we spend in a character's head seeing them react, hearing them give context for the situation around them. And that context includes backstory, it includes world building. We need all of those things to immerse us in the world of the story. Because if we have no context, we're not going to understand what's going on. You can't be immersed in something if you don't get it.
And again, it is a difficult balance, but if we're not getting into your character's head, if we're not seeing what they are thinking or feeling or experiencing on a visceral level, on an emotional level, on a physical level, then we're likely not going to be immersed in their experiences. And even though character thoughts are sometimes talked about as a form of telling, they are an essential part of showing. But when they go wrong, they feel like telling.
This is where we can see how complicated this is. Show, don't tell gets thrown around as this simple little thing that you just show and you're good, but it's actually kind of complicated. There is a lot that goes into showing. There are a lot of ways that showing can go wrong, and it's not just about what you do at the line level.
First, you have to put your characters in a situation. You have to put them in a scene where things are shown. Then you have to actually be specific. You have to narrate exactly what they're doing, exactly what is happening. You need to show us where they are in the world by giving us a description of the setting, giving us detail. Then you actually need to take us into their head, give us their thoughts, their emotions, their reactions, give us context for what is happening. All of those things together create an immersive experience for your readers. All of those things together are going to make it feel like your story is showing and not telling.
All right, that was a very, very brief introduction to what it means to show instead of telling. Obviously, this is just getting started.
Show Don't Tell is actually so hard for us, especially when you're just starting out as a fiction writer. And ultimately it comes down to the fact that we are not wired to show stories. We are wired to tell stories. And I will talk all about that next week.
All right, thank you again for listening to another episode of the Better Writer Podcast. I hope this helped you understand Show Don't Tell a little bit more. And like I said, this is just the beginning. I will be talking about this topic again ⁓ because it is so important and I think one of those things that is just so misunderstood in the writing world. Thank you again for listening to another episode of the Better Writer Podcast. I will see you next time. Thanks for listening. Keep writing, keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.
