KATIE MARIE

Today I’m starting a new series, with little bite-sized nubins of information.

Today I want to talk to you about Show Don’t Tell.

While the origin is disputed, popular culture has attributed it to Russian writer Anton Chekhov and his line:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Show, don’t tell is an approach to writing in which stories and characters are conveyed via actions, thoughts, words, and sensory details — instead of straight forward exposition. 

So:

Show

Ice glinted on the pond, catching the orange light from the street lamp.

Tell

It was cold and night-time.

You get the same information from both statements but one invokes imagery and tries to elicit emotion, the other gives you straight information.

Show, don’t tell is meant to enable an immersive reading experience. Instead of asking readers to process a story on a purely intellectual level, this writing rule intends to pull readers into the narrative, allowing them almost to experience it first-hand.

When you use vivid details to show what’s happening in your story, you close the gap between the story and your readers.

Incorporating showing into your writing technique moves the plot from feeling like a third-hand account to something the reader is living, seeing, breathing in real-time.

You hear “show, don’t tell” all the time in creative writing, but it’s not that one is better than the other, rather it’s more about knowing when to use Show and when to use Tell. When is each tool going to be better suited to what you are trying to do in the scene?

In a nutshell, showing is something to do when the pace of the story is slower, you want to pull the reader in. Telling is best left for fast-paced, high-action scenes, where you are keeping the tension high and you want your scene to be punchy.

Both tools are good.

It’s just about knowing when to use them.