Why You Need to Show and Tell

One of the first writing tips you’ll receive as an apprentice writer along with have your main character always want something is the show don’t tell advice. Show don’t tell? What does this mean? Basically it means that by showing you are creating a picture in the reader’s mind as oppose to just enumerating a bunch of facts about something. Because fiction’s main purpose is to create an imaginative world for the reader is necessary then that our writing is vivid and evocative rather than informative.

In his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, novelist Walter Mosley argues that the highest possible praise for the fiction writer is a complement like “the words came right up off the page.” He says that when the reader feels that he is actually experiencing the sensations and emotions, the life and atmosphere, the novelist is showing rather than just telling. He offers some good advice that all of us should consider when we are writing our stories:

            “It is often better if you use images and physical descriptions rather than mere informative language to present people, places, things, and events in your novel. To be told that someone is violent or seems to be violent is too general; the reader is left to come up with their own notions of Piggott based upon their personal experience with violence.”

Is telling a bad thing? Telling is a great and necessary element in your story. Am I supporting both then? Yes, I am. Telling creates a balance. You don’t want to write your entire story show-writing from beginning to end. You will tire your readers. They need to take a rest from all the action, and that’s when you tell-writing. Telling is necessary when you need to summarize, or create background for one of your characters. So, How do you choose when to show, and when to tell? I’ll borrow Alice LaPlante advice from her book Method and Madness. “Ideally, these two elements of writing are organically intertwined. That is, what we tell doesn’t just echo or repeat what we show. We use the two together to achieve whatever effect we want. When a section of “telling” can be eliminated without taking away from a creative work’s meaning, then by all means cut it, and allow the showing to carry the piece. But the opposite is also true: often we can tell something more efficiently, elegantly, beautifully, or subtly than we could hope to do if dramatazing it. in such cases, we should eliminate the dramatization, or scene, in favor of the narration.”

Now go write. 

Check out this two amazing books where you will find both; showing and telling equally balanced.

Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Check this brief interview with Junot Diaz