Show (yourself the door) Don’t Tell (people this rule)

Writing advice sucks. They’re usually very short snippets of advice with a grandiose, authoritative tone that feels like there’s no room for discussion. They are a trump card when giving feedback, and, by necessity, there’s no nuance to them. What’s a good example of this?

Show don’t tell.

It really sucks. Especially because it sounds like it could also be a discriminatory policy instituted by the United States concerning military service from February 28, 1994 through September 20, 2011.

…

Anyways.

Compare the following passages:

Jimmy’s body language said it all. He was furious. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Vs.

Jimmy jumped up and down in place. His face was contorted with his eyes clamped shut, his mouth a firm frown, and his eyebrows sloped downward like daggers that threatened to poke out his eyes. His breathing was fast and heavy. Spittle flew from between his gritted teeth as he said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Which one was better?

(And, please, try to refrain from judging me, those sentences are hardly my best work or the best example, but I don’t want to angst over them all day, that’s what my actual manuscript is for.)

((Shout out to the guy in this stock image for helping me break up this massive wall of text.))

The second one conjured a better image, certainly. It helps us imagine the action in the scene, it paints a picture of what Jimmy’s expression looks like, and above all, it communicates Jimmy’s emotions to us without telling them to us. It helps the reader connect more with the character. There seems to be a clear winner in which passage is better.  But I think it depends more on context, on the flow of the scene.

Why is it that sometimes, it’s okay to tell instead of show? It can be beautiful, even. Whereas other times, your writing group admonishes you with that classic line. “You need to show instead of tell here.”

It’s because this ‘rule’ isn’t about what people think it is. It’s not about flowery descriptions. It’s not really about painting a picture in the reader’s mind. After all, our goal as storytellers is always to conjure images and immerse the reader in a scene. I think it comes down to resources.

Showing things takes a lot of time and effort, but often helps immerse someone in your story or setting. Telling things takes less time and effort. It can help things move faster, so if you use it at a pivotal moment, it’s the difference between a reader blazing through a tense page and losing their attention.

If you’re always showing and you get to a climactic scene and you spend a lot of resources (wordcount and reader attention) on description, they may get bored, put your book down, and pick up their phone to watch a TikTok instead. Or, if you know when to tell instead of show, it gives the reader a quick line of summary that tells them everything they need to know succinctly to get them right back into the stuff they really care about.

Imagine, now, that Jimmy has spent most of the of the book up until now angry.

If there’s nothing particularly special about the way Jimmy is angry, if there’s nothing unique about the way he looks when he’s angry compared to how he has looked in the rest of the book when he’s angry… Then do we need to show it in this scene?

If Jimmy is a character who never gets angry, you want to show that. This is new and interesting, and very unlike Jimmy. But if Jimmy is mad about something every chapter he’s in, then by the time we get halfway through the novel, we know exactly what Jimmy does when he’s angry. In that case, I’d describe how he looks if it was very unlike his reactions up to that point. If Jimmy usually hops up and down with his face scrunched up, but this time he’s angry in a calm way, it can have a much bigger effect. It shows there’s something different this time, maybe Jimmy has changed as a person.

Imagine for a moment that the villain has just captured someone Jimmy loves, and that Jimmy often has overblown, angry reactions to things.

Jimmy ripped his breastplate off. He slung it against the wall which rewarded him with a loud clank. He set his shoulders, curled his face into a sneer, and bared his teeth. The knight raised his sword and pointed the tip at the necromancer. “I’m going to kill you,” he said.

Vs.

Jimmy took a deep breath. Calm washed over him. The knight raised his sword and pointed the tip at the necromancer. “I’m going to kill you,” he said.

Sometimes it’s fun to watch the big dramatic emotions play out. But if we’re used to that emotion, give us the opposite in a quick burst of telling, and it can have twice the impact. Is there anything scarier than seeing the usually enraged barbarian completely cool, calm, and collected in the face of his greatest fear? I don’t think so.

Can you imagine if instead of charging as he roared his classic line, Hulk simply pointed at his enemy and said with a determined, even-tempered tone “Hulk smash”?

Gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

(Disclaimer: I did not make the image to the right. I am not making this disclaimer because I don’t want people to think I am trying to steal credit, but rather because I want to remind people what terrible memes we had in the late 2000s/early 2010s eras and to assure you that I can meme better than whatever this is.)

Show don’t tell gets touted as being all about the theater of the mind and putting an image into your reader’s head. But since it’s about resources, it also means it plays an important role in pacing. It’s hard to give concrete all-compassing advice on pacing since scenes are dramatically impacted by a writer’s style, what they’ve written up until that point, tone, etc. (In fact, giving any sort of concrete, all-encompassing advice is hard when it comes to writing. That’s why we have writer-isms like show don’t tell, because it is a good rule in general, but not one you need to follow all the time.)

It's up to you, the writer, to determine if you need to move faster or slow. If it’s the time to paint a picture, or if it’s the time to keep things moving and make stuff happen on the reader’s mental TV screen.

Television is a great way to think about this. It’s the difference between taking the time on-screen to show a character go through their feelings vs. just having the character say how they’re feeling or have a big reaction to tell the audience.

One of my favorite scenes from Love Actually does this brilliantly. Emma Thompson’s character is crying after she realized her husband might be being unfaithful. She saw some pretty jewelry he’d bought in an earlier scene, but when it came time to open her Christmas present, all he got her was a CD. Screen time is a precious resource when it comes to television, you only get so much of it.

(Most writers don’t start writing with a limitation on length, which is why we often have to try so hard to trim down our novels.)

But this scene, just her reaction, is given almost a minute and a half of screen time to show the full range of her emotion.

It would have been easy to have her character stay in the living room, pull out her phone, and text her friend that she’s sad. That would have told the audience how she felt. Her character could have pulled her husband into the other room for a teary or angry conversation to show the audience how she felt.

But sometimes telling, or even showing in an overblown manner that we come to expect, just can’t do a scene justice. One of the best pieces of advice my undergraduate creative writing professor gave me was: The least interesting thing for a character to do when they feel like crying is to cry. It’s almost always more interesting to see a different reaction from them.

Thompson’s character does cry in this scene, but it’s so much more interesting than that.

She stands there, off-center, presumably on her side of the bed, listening to the album her husband gave her (one of her favorite artists). The wide shot really reinforces how alone she is. Like her other half is missing. She looks around the room at her and her husband’s history. She allows herself a few moments to cry before trying to collect herself, to make herself look presentable for the family, and then distracts herself with tidying the already immaculate bed. The same bed she’d share with her husband that night and have to decide whether or not to walk away from in the future.

A question that the movie doesn’t give a firm answer to, whether or not she does leave him. But we can’t help but feel sad for her in this scene, by herself in this empty room wondering along with her: Does this scene reflect her future? Sad, alone in her bedroom, still keeping to “her side” of the room?

The depth of emotion we get from Emma Thompson wordlessly crying for a minute and a half in her room by herself does more than any number of words in a verbal argument could. It does more than her screaming at her husband or storming out of the room. The beauty is in the subtleness of the performance. Despite little action on the screen, the audience doesn’t get bored watching it.

It would have been easier, more comfortable for the audience if she’d thrown things around the room. If she reacted the way we might expect a heartbroken wife to react. But it’s uncomfortable to watch, seeing her quietly fall apart on her own. It feels personal, and intimate, and like we shouldn’t be there. That’s how you know they did a good job showing the scene.

(Don’t worry, she did win a handful of awards and was nominated for a handful more for Best Supporting Actress in Love Actually, surely in part due to that magnificent scene.)

In conclusion, if you know when to tell, if you know when to show, and you know how to tell and how to show, that’s how you’ll get the biggest impact and the best effect on a reader. It’s all a balancing act, just like the rest of writing good fiction. Unless your name is Raymond Carver, you’ll never be perfect at the show don’t tell rule, and that’s okay. Writers never really stop learning, and the best ones never assume they’ve mastered the craft.

You’ll figure it all out as you go. There are no hard and fast rules in writing, but understanding why the common writing advice is common will help you learn a little faster along the way.

Here is your reward for reading.

He is mad at Alan Rickman’s character from Love Actually, we’re still working on the concepts of “acting” and “fiction”.