Activity

I don’t know about you guys but one of the most common pieces of writing advice I’ve heard is “Show, don’t tell.”

It’s also incredibly confusing and hard to piece together what on earth that means. There’s a lot of courses and articles out there telling slightly different versions of what telling is and what showing is, and—let me tell you—that had me confused for quite a long time when I started writing.

 

Today we’re going to have a quick look at identifying what showing is, what telling is, and some easy tricks to make your prose more vivid.

 

Telling = summarizing. Giving the reader only the bare minimum without going into any detail.

Showing = expanding into more detail. Giving the reader information about what the character is seeing, tasting, touching, hearing, feeling emotionally, and thinking.

 

Telling:

Das fed the pigs as quickly as he could, accidentally spilling some of the slop onto his feet. It was disgusting. His master yelled from the doorway and he hurried back silently, his limbs aching with weariness.

 

Showing:

Das sloshed the contents of the bucket over the fence, groaning through his gritted teeth. His hands shook and some of the slop splashed from the trough and onto his ragged trousers, sliding down onto his bare feet. The slime oozed between his toes as he stepped back, dropping the bucket.

He pressed one hand to his pounding temples, not bothering about the muck coating his skin. He could hardly get dirtier than he already was.

“Get on with it!” the master bellowed from the doorway. “Don’t lag about all day. Must I tell you that every moment?”

Das pushed off the fence post, staggering back through the clinging mud. Too tired to respond. Too tired to care. The world reeled around him and he tripped, barely catching himself against the door frame. He let out one shaky breath and closed his eyes, bracing himself for a blow. Too tired to protect himself. Too tired for anything.

 

As you can see from those two examples, telling is giving facts. Showing is bringing the facts to life.

Instead of calling it showing, I like to think of it in those terms: bringing the story to life. 

 

So the questions is how do we bring our stories to life? There’s three fairly simple steps that I find useful.

 

1: Use the five senses

Obviously sight is a big one, but the other senses are important too. Describing what the character can hear and smell, etc. can be a great way of adding more to the prose.

Note: When doing this, it’s tempting to say “He/I smelled/heard” but that verb tag isn’t necessary. You can just describe the smell or sound and the reader will know that the main character can smell or hear it.

 

2: Use small details

Unique, little details bring things to life. In the coffee shop, everyone knows there will be a counter and tables and chairs. But not everyone will know that there’s a quaint bell over the door, or scented candles set along the back wall.

This uses some of the 1st point too. The details of the bell and the candles fill in the sound/hearing and smell.

Don’t go overboard with your descriptions. In today’s world of movies and short attention spans, most readers aren’t going to want to read pages and pages of description—even if it’s the most stunning description they’ve ever read.

Just use a couple choice descriptions and utilize them throughout your action and dialogue.

 

3: Choose vivid words

Again, this is something you have to make sure you don’t go overboard with. But you should be using specific words to bring your scene to life. I could’ve just said that Das was walking back to the house through the muddy yard, but instead I said he was “staggering back through the clinging mud.” The words ‘staggering’ and ‘clinging’ give us two clear, vivid details to craft our mental image as we read.

 

With those three steps, your prose should be able to come to life right off the page in a vivid and realistic scene.

 

One thing to note before you move onto the activity is that not everything should be showed. Unimportant events can be summarised. Violent/unsavoury details can be skimmed. Recaps (e.g. when your character explains the events of a previous scene to another character who wasn’t there) can be mentioned in passing but not detailed.

Showing is a matter of ‘enough but not too much’ just like most other things in the writing craft.

 

The activity: Write a short scene with your POV character walking into a shop or cafe, and utilize these methods to really bring the scene and setting to life. Remember the three points I mentioned.

The scene doesn’t have to be polished or perfect. It just has to be showing. Make that prose live! 😉

 

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