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This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
| Tell, Don’t Show Now, you’ve probably read that and thought, Well, Steven’s lost it. Surely it’s the other way around! Well, no. Not all the time. This is when not to use show, but to instead rely on tell. 1) A short story Short stories can be any length under a specific word count (under 12,500 words is the definition I tend to use), and that is great. But if you have a market for a short story, the chances are it is going to be much more limiting. So, the markets I tend to submit to have a maximum word count of 5k-6k words., some as low as 4k. Sometimes, to not exceed the word count and to make a story therefore sellable, we will need to tell some of the events and not show them. 2)A recount You have character A spend an entire chapter watching the enemy army, noting what they are doing. They return to the camp and character B asks them what they saw. A quick recount is all that is needed, not the complete show of everything A said. It is not only boring, but a repeat of what we, the readers, have already experienced. 3) A jump Character C is woken by a strange noise, and we are shown how they feel about this. But we then want to show that the rest of the morning is fine until an event at lunch in the work staff-room. Telling us the details of the day that show the mundane without getting into the emotional nitty-gritty is perfectly fine. It does not affect the story, and allows us to get to the next interesting point smoother and without drawing things out. 4) A repetition avoidance When we, the writer, know that what we are about to describe and show is very close to something we have already written because of similar events, emotions, etc., then it is fine to tell us that it is a repeat and to not go over old ground. 5) A means of hiding We do not want one of our characters to be known to the reader. Their motivations, thoughts, feelings, etc., are supposed to be hidden from the reader because we want them to be completely unknown. The mysterious entity, the inhuman entity, a being that is too different from humans to make sense; or we just want them to be in the shadows. So, when it comes to their actions, we just tell the reader what they do and let the reader wonder… So, there we are – five times when telling can be better than showing. Now, in most cases you are definitely going to want to show, not tell. But sometimes… sometimes rules are made to be broken. |
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