Writing Ideas #1

Understanding Show Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It) by Janice Hardy

I’d heard the old saw that a fiction writer should show and not tell. I thought I knew what that meant. I didn’t. I thought of telling as someone you did in great swaths of prose. Janice Hardy taught me that “Show. Don’t Tell” happens not only at the paragraph and page level but also at the sentence level and sometimes at the word level.

For me, this lesson elevated my writing (granted, I probably have many more levels to reach, but it definitely helped 😊). Here is an example of telling at the sentence level…

“I watched the horse trot down the street.” No. I should say: “The horse trotted down the street.” I should not filter the sentence with the telling comment “I watched”. So, I need to get rid of filtering words like: watched, looked, saw, thought, remembered, decided, felt, smelled, etc. (Understanding Show Don’t Tell gives us a longer list of these filtering words that deaden writing.

How did I not know this?

“I reached for the gun, picked it up, and shot the bad guy.” No. If you’re going to end up getting the gun, don’t waste the reader’s time saying you reached for it. Just say, “I grabbed the gun and shot the bad guy.” Forget the reaching part.

There are certainly other books that will go through the rules of show, don’t tell, and many talk about filtering words, but this was the book that made me sit up and take notice. And, this was the first book I gave to members of my writing group, five years ago, when I started my campaign of giving writing books for Christmas.

Now, I can take show, don’t tell too far. Some of the finest writers and agents I’ve run across have suggested that books today often need more telling. Often these folks suggest writers use telling for time and distance transitions (like: “I spent twenty minutes driving to the suspect's house in Vermont”—showing the drive will likely bore the reader and keep the writer from getting to the point of the scene) or for “going deep” with one’s characters through introspection. And this comment takes me to the tipping point of what my own little brain has integrated. So, while I have further thoughts on this, I’m getting over my head. So, I’ll stop here and recommend Janice Hardy’s book Understanding Show, Don’t Tell to anyone who wants to know more about the topic.