“Show, don’t tell” is advice we hear so often it fades into the background. Yes, we get it, great guru. What’s your next insight? Kill your darlings?
But even we jaded veterans need reminders and pointers. It’s easy to fall into a rhythm of telling your reader too much backstory. It’s even easier to avoid telling so much that you forget to show anything, and your reader is left in the dark about character motivation or desire. In a post on DIY MFA, Barb Geiger urges us to remember and understand this good advice, and discusses different ways it’s applied.
Geiger says that writers who understand show-don’t-tell tend to fall into three groups:
- Writers who set up their story and characters so well that the reader knows the stakes and why they matter. They don’t need it explained.
- Writers who don’t need high conflict scenes to create tension or even outside obstacles. Instead they rely on internal conflict.
- Writers who think telling is fine, if it’s done well.
Geiger has advice for the third group. She suggests marking up a story or a few pages of a novel. Highlight all dialogue, tags, and reactions in blue. Highlight all description in red. Highlight all “telling” in yellow. “This includes when the character explains what they already know or looks up a reference,” Geiger explains. “If they had to go to the library, make it yellow.”
Whatever is left in black text is what the character does independently of what the reader has been told through narration. The black text should exclude what the character saw, said, or knew. “In a well-told story, what is in black must still take a well-read reader on an interesting journey, unless what is in color is genre-defining,” Geiger says.
Geigher suggests a simple question: If the story revolves around a character needing to grow to overcome their challenges, have you shown your readers everything they need to understand the character, even if the character never comes to that realization? In other words, what do you need to show your perfect reader so that the climax of your story is as meaningful as possible?
