The Problem with “Show, Don’t Tell”

The old writing adage of “show, don’t tell” is good advice, but it can occasionally get writers in trouble.

The Value and Purpose of Showing

Let me quickly explain what’s good and right about showing, as I see it. Readers enjoy inferring subtext and motivation and mood and significance. When you tell them that stuff, it robs them of the chance to do something they love doing. If you want the reader’s attention and devotion, you need to provide something that allows her to read between the lines. In other words, you want to simulate actual experience. Which means you don’t tell us that Angie was angry. You show us what we would see if we were in the room with Angie. (Or if we were Angie.) Even if stories are speculative and fantastical, we pretty much want them to simulate aspects of authentic, real life. That is, we want to consume an alternate reality in the same way we consume the reality we inhabit—by experiencing it. Some writers understand showing to mean that the job of writers is to do his best to put the reader in the world of the story, to see it all as clearly as the writer does. But that’s not the writer’s job. No, the writer’s job is to get readers to identify with the experience of a character (or characters). And if we’re to mimic real-life experience in our stories, we need to be sure not to convey everything. After all, we don’t percieve everything around us in the real world; the characters in our stories shouldn’t perceive everything either.

Hyperdetailing

I certainly see lots of writing that fails to show enough concrete, physical detail. But I also see lots of manuscripts that err on the side of excessive showing. I call it “hyperdetailing,” and it occurs when writers “show” the wrong things. What do I mean by wrong? I mean irrelevant detail. I mean descriptions that are not significant and are thus boring for the reader. Consider the various ways in which you might narrate a trip to the grocery store. You may begin with a simple, “I went to the store.” Or you could specify a little: “I drove to the grocery store yesterday.” Or you could really try to “show”: “I opened the door to my ailing, late-90s Toyota Sienna, noting the chipped burgudy paint on the fenders just above the wheel wells. I sat on the crusty leather seats, burning from the day’s heat, which weighed heavy in the humid air already at 10:00 am. Turning the key in the ignition, I listened to the old beast cough to life. The fan belt screeched for a full minute as I backed the van out of my driveway and headed south on Park Street toward the Pick N Save next to the old labor temple.” If this is to be a story about what happened at the grocery store, how many details do we need about the car and route that got you there?

Kinds of Hyperdetailing

I’ve come to recognize four kinds of hyperdetailing, but I don’t often label them when I comment on manuscripts. It’s just that knowing the potential places you might find yourself hyperdetailing may get you looking in the right neighborhoods for this problem. (And I want to be clear, by the way, that this problem is mostly one I see in very competent writing. Showing is a skill that comes with experience. And it’s probably the most oft-complimented craft accomplishment I see writers give one another when I run workshops and critique groups. That is, writers get a lot of positive reinforcement for their ability to show. And that may be part of the problem.)

Characterization

I land solidly in the camp of minimal character description. Readers will form ideas in their heads about characters, mostly based on character behavior. If you do describe characters, chances are readers will entirely miss those descriptions anyway. Remember all those people who missed that Rue from Hunger Games was dark skinned? And did you know that Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby was a blonde? Now, there are certain genres in which physical appearance is pretty important, most notably romance. But in such cases, physical descriptions are appropriate because they have so much to do with character desire, which drives the whole story. Other stories use physical description to great effect--like Children of Blood and Bone, in which physical appearance often has to do with conflict; white-haired diviners are discriminated against and seen as a threat to the kingdom. It’s the gratuitous, paragraph-long descriptions of characters that rankle me. Make description relevant to desire or conflict and you’re in business. Otherwise, you might be hyperdetailing.

Info Dumps

I get it; we writers really like our imagined or remembered worlds. And we also like doing research about those worlds. So it’s really tempting to compose eloquent passages about salt-water exotic fish aquariums or the civil-war era paper mill your protagonist worked at as a teenager. And you know what? Go ahead and write all about that stuff. Just be sure to cut as much of it as you can in your final draft. (For more on incorporating information, see this article.)

Setting

Descriptions of place and “set” do a lot for the mood of the scene and can definitely help create a world that readers enjoy visiting. Setting is a key for vicarious experience. So I’m not saying that you should eradicate descriptions of place by any means. (Nor am I saying that all information and characterization are unnecessary.) But if you’re using a full page to describe the British countryside in your historical novel or if you’re cataloguing booths at the marketplace in your high fantasy novel, chances are good I’d flag those passages in my edit of your work and ask if they’re important to the current scene. And yes, they need to be important to the current scene, not to some scene 50 pages from now. Later importance does not justify the inclusion of a long descriptive passage.

Clumsy Interiority

How can interiority be shown? The most common method you'll see promoted is through physical signifiers. Don’t tell us someone is sad; show us how they hang their head, cry, mope, etc. It’s well-meaning advice, but it leads right into cliché land. Because how many external signifiers are there for emotions anyway? Writers tend to fall back on the same old stuff in first drafts at least: hearts racing, palms sweating, knees wobbling, jaws hanging open, brows furrowed, etc. That kind of showing is going to get you in trouble because it will feel like a poorly acted film. So what should you do? Well, if you want to go with physical signifiers, try to make them relatively idiosyncratic. But there are other methods: sometimes you can show interiory via a flashback or via speculation about the future. Flashes to the past and future can remain vivid (showing) as they relay a character’s state of mind. But sometimes interiority just needs to be explained. It’s okay to tell it, especially when it’s complex. Still, I do see people go overboard with all of these more advanced methods of conveying interiority: excessive flashbacks, overly-long imaginative riffs, and, ironically, too much telling the reader about a character’s internal processes. (For more on interiority, by the way, check out these two articles: Lessons from "Cat Person" & Juggle External Action and Interiority.)

The Bottom Line

Showing is an incredibly important skill for a writer to cultivate. In fact, “show, don’t tell” is probably the most important part of “good writing.” But if you’re telling a story, the imperatives of storytelling trump the imperatives of good writing every time. Or, put another way, writing must serve the storytelling, and the problem with “show, don’t tell” is that it sometimes rips readers away from the story. So take a look at your writing to see whether it may succumb to any of these hyperdetailing pitfalls. If it does, you’ve got a pretty good problem on your hands. All you need to do is cut.

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