In a guest post on Writers in the Storm, Janice Hardy identifies three ways you can instantly spot whether your writing is filled with the dreaded “telling.”
“Show, don’t tell is subjective, which is why one rule doesn’t cover it all,” she writes. “If you look at only the text, you risk missing ‘told prose’ in your writing, since a sentence that technically shows can feel told in context. It’s important to examine the different levels of telling so you know what to look for.”
Here are three places to look:
- Sentence level. This is where you’ll find most telling, using words like because, since, or when. Some telling works well in context, but others may require some consideration. For example, telling that explains why your character feels or acts as they do. Writers often fear that the reader won’t grasp character motivation or a thematic point unless we point it out, but most of the time this isn’t necessary. Telling that summarizes action or conveys too much information is also problematic.
- Paragraph level. Paragraph telling is where you’ll find extraneous backstory or infodumps. “You’ll find these tells most often when you pull away from the point-of-view character and start describing what’s going on from afar,” Hardy notes. “These told sections can read like a summary of the scene in your outline. It might even read as if you planned to do more, but never got around to it.”
- Scene level. You might discover you’ve told an entire scene. “These are scenes that contain important information, but you don’t show the scene unfolding—you just explain it and why it matters,” Hardy explains. These often appear as flashbacks. While not traditional telling, these scenes can be boring.
To fix telling, Hardy suggests looking for ways to:
- Suggest motives through what a character does, says, or thinks.
- Show world-building rules through how those rules and details affect the character’s actions or behavior.
- Show character backstory by choosing details and actions that had an influence on someone who lived through that history.
