Episode Seventeen: Why is it so hard to show instead of tell?
This week, I’m continuing my discussion of “show, don’t tell”.
This time, I’m taking a step back and instead of talking about how show, don’t tell works, I’m talking about what makes it so difficult for writers to show in the first place.
Here’s the headline: showing in fiction runs counter to our default storytelling mode, the way that we are taught to share stories from childhood on.
In this episode, I’m sharing three specific ways that “showing” requires us to break free of our storytelling defualt mode and instead craft stories in a different way. They are:
Showing runs counter to the natural way we tell stories verbally.
Showing requires more words than telling. The opposite of writing for school and business where being concise is put above everything else.
Showing is often linked with writing in scenes, but most people write their stories as one long series of things that happen.
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)
Welcome to episode 17 of the Better Writer podcast. I am so excited for today's topic because I am continuing my discussion of Show Don't Tell and all of the things that can go wrong with Show Don't Tell when we're thinking about it the wrong way. Last week I talked about how Show Don't Tell is more than one thing. It is not just one technique that we either do or don't do. It is the combined effect of multiple techniques working together. And last week I shared a couple different levels that Show Don't Tell is operating on in your manuscript.
Today I'm taking a step back from that and I want to talk about why Show Don't Tell is so difficult for writers to master in the first place. Because I think, again, we are told Show Don't Tell, Show Don't Tell, Show Don't Tell. It comes up over and over and over again in writing courses, in conferences, in podcasts, blog posts, you name it. If you are being taught writing, you have probably heard Show Don't Tell mentioned in the context of writing fiction specifically but it's still so hard for people to master. It is one of the most common issues that I see in client manuscripts, whether that person is experienced or not. And Again, it is not one thing, it is different techniques working together. And that is probably the core difficulty. That is the one underpinning everything else. We are not even having the right conversation about show don't tell. And that makes it really difficult for writers to understand it and address their show don't tell issues because we don't understand how to employ multiple techniques together to show instead of Tell. So if you have not listened to my previous episode about Show Don't Tell, I recommend starting there. But even when we know what we're supposed to be doing, it's still not easy for a lot of people. And I think that's because there are three things happening that make it really difficult for people to show instead of tell. And it all goes back to our education and how we are taught to tell stories and how we're taught to write in school and life in general.
Alright, the first thing that makes showing so difficult is that it runs counter to our default storytelling mode. As in, it runs counter to the way that we are taught to tell stories as children. And I don't mean in writing, I mean verbally. So I want you to imagine...
You are a child once again. Let's say you're five years old and you are coming home from a day in kindergarten. Whether you're half day, full day, it doesn't matter. You come home from school as a five-year-old and someone asks you, was your day? And you, being an excited five-year-old who still wants to their parents or guardians stuff about their life, is going to answer that question with a series of things that happened. First, was reading time. Then, we played in stations and then we had story time and then Jimmy threw up on the carpet and it was really gross and then we all got to go to recess early and that was awesome and then and then and then. The story is not going to have any sort of guiding principle to it. You're just going to list things that happened and we do the same thing as adults. We keep that storytelling default mode when we are gossiping, when we're telling stories about our work, when we're catching up with friends. You can imagine you meet up with your best friend for dinner after a hard day of work and they ask, how was your day? You're going to say something like, well, my coworker Janice is a total, you know what? She's horrible. She broke the copier, didn't even fix it, walked away, left me to deal with it. Then my boss came in and he was angry because I wasn't at my desk because I was fixing the stupid copier. And then, and then, and then. That is our natural mode. That is how we tell stories in real life when we are gossiping or sharing with people that we care about.
And that's not a bad thing. That is not a bad thing. However, that default storytelling mode does not translate to writing fiction. When we start writing fiction, we have to get out of that storytelling mode. And you'll notice we even call it storytelling. And we have to start crafting experiences for our readers. We have to start showing stories. We have to start putting them on the page in a way that is engaging and interesting to our readers. And that isn't easy to do when you have been naturally telling stories one way your entire life to then start putting them on the page in a completely different way. So that is the first problem. Our default mode is telling, not showing. And we have to get over that. And the only way to do that is to consciously recognize, I am a storyteller, and now I want to become a story crafter.
the second reason why Show, Don't Tell is so difficult for people is because in life, in school, in business, on social media, if you are trying to promote your writing there, we are taught to be concise and precise, not detailed and evocative.
Essentially what I mean by that is, take school for example. You write an essay and your teacher tells you, you can only write 500 words, but there are 10 million parts to the prompt and you have all these questions you have to answer in that maximum 500 words and you know that if you go even one word over, your teacher's going to stop reading and your grade is going to be affected as a result. In business, you are taught to keep things as short and sweet as possible because no one has an attention span and no one cares and you have to give them little sound bites so they're going to be able to digest and listen to super easily. I'm sure you have seen the TLDR snippet, the end of the email summarizing it in case people didn't read. Now people are probably just using AI for that or something, I don't ⁓ know. I've never been a concise person, so this is definitely something that people have attempted to drill into me over and over over again, that we want to keep things as short and as sweet as possible. We want to cut words whenever we can.
And then when we try to write fiction, that is no longer the goal. Yes, we don't want to be overly wordy, and that is super important. We don't want our books to be bloated. We don't want to use more words than necessary. But more words are necessary in fiction because you're not just trying to communicate a simple message. You're not just sending someone an email saying, hey, we're meeting at four and that's something you can do in five words or less. When it comes time to write fiction, you need to paint a picture for your readers that will show up vividly in their minds. And again, we don't want to be overly flowery. We don't want to use more words than needed or make it super, super long and bloated and unreadable. However, the number of words that you are going to need to paint a picture is higher than the number of words that you need to communicate a simple message in a business transaction or in an essay for school. And if your only goal is to be concise, your writing will suffer because you will not put description on the page, you will not evoke emotion in your readers because you will not be giving us enough information to show on the page. And it runs counter to so much of what we're taught, but showing often relies on using more words than just telling. Because just saying, she ran across the room, she was angry is fewer words than she curled her fists and stormed across the room. Her face was red, her brows furrowed, and I knew that if looks could kill, I would no longer be breathing.
That is more words, it is more evocative. Obviously, that was a very off the cuff sentence. There's probably something even better that I could come up with, but the point is, option one is telling us that she's moving across the room and she's angry. Option two is showing us and it takes more words. It needs more words. So again, we don't wanna use more words that are necessary and I'm sure if I went back and revised that sentence, I can make it stronger. But it takes more words to show and that runs counter to so much of what we're taught in school where it is all about reducing, reducing, reducing, refining. And fiction often, showing means expanding, exploring, going into more detail and using enough detail to really bring that moment to life, to create a vivid, detailed image in the reader's mind that draws them in and immerses them in the world of the story that you've created and the situation that you've created with your plot. So it is not just about reducing your story down to as few words as possible. Often your story is going to grow when you're showing and that is a good thing, but it can be really scary if all you've ever been taught is to condense and refine and you've been told that no one has the attention span to actually pay attention to more than two sentences. And that's not true. It's just simply not true. think this is a total tangent. I have no data to support this. I don't believe that attention spans have actually dwindled. I think people have more choice now. And yes, there are more distractions. There are definitely things that are affecting our ability to sustain attention.
I do think part of it is also that we're more interested in passive engagement now. That was a whole other story, especially if you get into my experience teaching high school students. But sometimes when we are talking about low attention spans, what people are really saying is people are choosing not to devote their attention to what I created because they have chosen to devote their attention to something else. People are still binging. People are binging shows. People are binging books. People are binging content and they are giving content their full attention for sometimes hours at a time. TV marathons still happen. People sit down and binge a show straight through in one sitting. That is attention and that is an attention span of longer than three seconds. People are still flying through books, reading them super quickly, whether audio or on paper. So I think that it's not just an attention span issue or maybe not at all an attention span issue is that people are spoiled for choice.
And if whatever you've created for them is not drawing them in, they are going to go somewhere else and they're going to go somewhere else faster because there are so many things out there for them to consume that there is no reason for them to stick with your book if it is not drawing them in, especially when we no longer have to drive back to the bookstore to choose something new.
You can just flip to the next title on your Kindle and choose something different. ⁓ So, there's a whole long tangent and there's probably going to be some researcher in attention and memory who's going to contact me and say that I'm totally wrong, but I do think that part of the problem has nothing to with attention. It is about creating content that actually hooks people and when we don't, when we do not draw people and when we do not immerse them, they go somewhere else more quickly because they can. People are spoiled for choice. There are infinite things that we can be reading nowadays. And if we are not hooking people, if we are not immersing them, if we are not showing, then they're going to go elsewhere. And that's that.
All right. Again, that was a bit of a tangent. But the final reason why I think it is so hard for people to show instead of tell, the third thing holding readers back is that we are often not taught to think in scenes and I want to be careful here because I think, you know, if you are someone who writes solely in chapters, you think in chapters, that can totally work for you. That's totally fine. What I really mean here is that writers are not thinking about their story in terms of discrete moments that move the story forward. They're just kind of giving us the series of events. And it's very similar to what I said in the beginning where, you know, we were taught to tell stories to children in a sequence of this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and in a novel, we don't necessarily need the entire continuation. We don't need, we started with story time, then we all walked to the playground, then it was recess, then we walked back to the classroom, and then it was story time. In a novel, we might jump from story time to recess to Jimmy throwing up on the carpet to the end of the day. We don't necessarily need to show all of the connective tissue in between. And I tend to see a lot of telling in those transitions, those connective moments where instead of just ending the scene at the last moment that was actually interesting, the scene drags on with the transition. So it's like, we decided we were going to rob a bank. That was a moment of high conflict. It was a great moment. Then we start packing our bags to the bank robbery. Then we all pile into the car. Then we debate over what station to listen to as we were driving to the bank to rob it, and the drive goes super smoothly. We're a little bit nervous because we're about to rob a bank, but generally speaking, we were just driving to the bank like it was any old Thursday. Then we get to the bank, we throw our masks on, now it's exciting again. And what we want to do in a novel is just skip straight from we decide to rob the bank to we are at the bank and we are robbing it. Obviously, if something interesting happens in the drive over, that is a completely different story. But again, we don't necessarily need to see them packing their bags if that is boring.
In a novel, we want to jump from interesting moment to interesting moment to interesting moment. Yes, there will be quieter moments of processing, but that's still interesting if the character is dealing with what is happening, the decision to the bank, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't necessarily need to be a separate scene where they're processing that could happen within that same scene. But I think if you are just thinking of your novel as a continuous progression of things that happen one after the other and not thinking about: What moments do I actually need to show? What moments are going to be interesting to my readers? What can I cut? What transitions can we skip over? What can I move past because it is boring and uninteresting and is going to lend itself to telling because there's nothing really exciting to show on the page? The sooner we can start moving past those moments and not including the downtime, the transitions, that is going to help us show instead of tell. And generally speaking, I think when we are thinking in scenes, scenes lend themselves to showing. Because in my mind, a scene is following a character in a specific moment in time, and is showing us what is happening in that specific moment in time. And that is a great way to force yourself to show instead of tell, because we are just focusing on the action in front of us. We are focusing on what is happening in this specific moment. And just bringing in the thoughts, the emotions, the reactions, the world building, etc. that is relevant in the moment.
Caveat I work exclusively with genre fiction, which is much more plot and scene based. If you are writing literary fiction that is a different story, and often we are depending on a narrator who is telling us the story, but because the narrator is interesting and the story is character driven, for literary fiction that can work. I don't work with literary fiction, so if you do, you probably don't need to be listening to me in this regard because literary fiction operates a little bit differently and there are still scenes in literary fiction, however, you can get away with more telling. Even though in some ways that telling is still super specific, super voice driven and it feels like showing a lot of the time, but the mechanics of how we show in literary fiction can be different than what we do in genre fiction. So important caveat if you are a literary fiction writer listening to me and you're thinking, I don't you know, have a bunch of bombs going off and things like that in scenes and a lot of genre fiction doesn't either, but ⁓ they do operate a bit differently.
All right. that was three reasons why it can be really difficult for writers to show instead of tell.
First off, our default is to tell stories. That is what we are taught as children. That is what we do verbally even now and we have to break free of that default storytelling mode in order to start writing fiction effectively. And until you are consciously aware of your default, it is going to be impossible to break free and start showing on the page.
Second, in school and business and life, we are taught to be concise and precise, not detailed and evocative. In fiction, we want detail. We want you to evoke emotion, to paint a vivid picture in your writer's mind. And that is going to come from using more words, not less, even though that is what we are usually taught to do. And again, to get out of our default telling mode and into showing mode, we have to break the habit of putting concise short sentences above all else.
And then finally, we are not taught to think in scenes and we are not taught to think in terms of discrete moments that move a story forward. And that can really push us into telling mode because we are just narrating the entire sequence of what happens, we are not thinking about bringing readers into one specific moment at a time, showing what is happening in that moment. And when we can shift into scene mode, when we can shift into thinking about putting one specific moment in time on the page, it is going to make showing so much easier. All right. That is it for episode number 17 of the Better Writer Podcast.
I hope this episode was helpful. I hope it has helped you reframe some of your default storytelling habits and hopefully that will make showing instead of telling a little bit easier in your stories going forward. All right. Thank you so, so much for listening. If this episode helped you, if it resonated, please share it with a writer friend who you think would benefit and I will see you next time on the Better Writer podcast. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing. Keep getting better one word at a time. See ya!
