How to Show Instead of Tell
Sol Stein

Example of Telling: He was nervous.

Example of Showing: He tapped his fingers on the table top.

Sometimes longer is better for showing: He put a yellow pad in front of himself on the desk. He placed a pen on the yellow pad. This is ridiculous, he thought, I'm not going to write anything, just call.

That character is about to make an important phone call. The reader isn't told he's nervous. The character is given a nervous action. Whenever possible, an action can often be used to show how a character feels.

Let's look at the evolution of telling into showing in the following examples:

Telling: "She boiled water."

Show a bit: "She put the kettle on the stove."

Shows: "She filled the kettle from the faucet and hummed till the kettle's whistle cut her humming short."

Shows best: "She boiled water in a lidless pot so she could watch the bubbles perk and dance.

As you can see, we have gone from the general ("She boiled water") to showing a kettle being put on the stove. In the third example, the addition of detail makes the visual come alive with more action. Finally, a different approach to the subject matter adds characterization and distinction, bringing us a long way from "She boiled water." The key to the improvement is particularity.

Fiction is not about something, it is something: an active experience. The writer has to change his mind-set from telling what happened somewhere else to creating an experience for the reader by showing what happened.

Twentieth-century readers, transformed by film and television, are used to seeing stories. One of the chief reasons novels are rejected is that the writer, consciously or not, is reporting a story instead of showing it.

There are three areas in which the writer is particularly vulnerable to telling rather than showing: When he tells what happened before the story began, when he tells what a character looks like, when he tells what a characters feels, sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Those are all places where the author's voice can intrude on the reader's experience.

* What happened before the story began should be shown rather than told about in either narrative summary or in a flashback.

* What happens off stage can be brought onstage and shown. What a character sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes can be shown through actions rather than described.

* And feelings, of course, are best shown through actions.

The reader wants an experience that's more interesting than his daily life. He enjoys and suffers whatever the characters are living through. If that experience is interrupted in order to convey a character's background, or anything else that the author seems to be supplying, that's telling, not showing, a major fault because it intrudes upon the reader's experience. Put simply, the reader experiences what is happening in front of his eyes. He does not experience what is related to him about offstage events. If his experience is interrupted, he gets antsy. "Telling" starts the reader skipping. Elmore Leonard said he avoids writing the parts that readers skip.

If a writer said, "Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool," he'd be telling, not showing. Information is being conveyed to us. We do not see Polly. John Updike, however, shows us Polly in a writerly way.

With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.

The author is showing Polly, her "clumsy jubilance," hurling her body, we hear "the rattling board," and see Polly surfacing, grinning through "the kelp of her own hair," the last a marvelously precise image. Note that Updike didn't say "her hair was like kelp" (a simile), but "the kelp of her own hair" (a metaphor), an excellent example of particularity.

Let's look at another evolution from telling to showing:

• He took a walk tells.
• He walked four blocks begins to show.
• He walked the four blocks slowly shows more clearly.
• He walked the four blocks as if it were the last mile shows more by giving

the reader a sense of the character's feelings, which the previous version did not.

He walked as if against an unseen wind, hoping someone would stop him shows most of all because it gives the reader a sense of what the character desperately wants.

If you are concerned about whether in any passage or chapter you are telling rather than showing, there are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Are you allowing the reader to see what's going on?
• Is the author talking at any point?
• Can you silence the author by using an action to help the reader understand what a character feels?
• Is any character telling another what that character already knows?

While showing rather than telling is important throughout a work, it can work a miraculous cure for ailing first pages of a novel or story. Showing means having characters do things that excite our interest, making those pages visual, letting us see what happens first hand.

I have a small suggestion that carries with it a big reward. In a three-word note to yourself say, "SHOW THE STORY." Then hang the note where you will see it whenever you sit down to write. Think of it as an antidote to a lifetime of hearing that stories are told.

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