Show and tell

"Show, don't tell."

This piece of advice has been repeated in several discussions I've had and books I've read on the subject of creative writing. Being from Northern Europe (Sweden to be precise) some of the literature I've grown up with does the opposite. It tells a story. Very little details, broad strokes, brushed by in high speed.

The good thing with showing, instead of telling, is that the story reveals lots of details that can easily capture the audience. You get to feel, hear, see, smell, taste what the characters experience. You get to "be there."

However, there are other concerns than revealing detail. The downside to showing instead of telling is that everything takes forever. You can hardly have a character sneeze without writing half a page about it.

Stories that show too much lose tempo, and become dreadfully long. I've seen amateur authors write a normal sized story (say about 3-400 pages soft cover) in twice, three even five times the number of pages, and when you analyze the story for this specific aspect you find everything is shown in painstaking detail.

I'm willing to bet, if you take your favorite book or author and analyze their texts you will find both showing and telling. This is done because showing gives detail, whereas telling gives speed, and higher tempo.

With telling you can manage the weekend trip to aunt Ruthie's in a page, even half a page, with showing you could spend the whole book writing about it (I'm sure several authors have).

I can think of one reason this rather strange advice has been introduced in books on creative writing; it may have been borrowed from books on screen writing. When writing a manuscript (for the movies or the stage) being visual and showing details becomes important, unless the characters will start blathering the piece to shreds, or the crew filming the whole thing will have to improvise details. However, recent developments in movies have introduced a narrator as a story telling tool, and the theater has had story telling in it from the beginning (story telling may even have been the beginning of theater).

Telling or showing can both be as capturing for the reader if done right. When to use which becomes a question of what story you are telling, the rhythm versus details, and the ultimate measure is more about feeling than anything else. You have to read and write until you gain an ear for when to show and when to tell, in order to write the story you want with the rhythm that will capture audience the most...