Why even “show, not tell”?

You must have heard the famous advice “show, not tell” around a hundred times by now. It’s one of the most used writing tools today, I’d argue. Recently in a blog post, I’d even talked about what it actually means and how you could execute it.

But now you must be thinking why it’s even such a thing, you know. Why do we follow this advice? What’s so advantageous about it? Why do even people care? Or do people care?

After much brainstorming, I have the answers to these questions. I hope it can spark some discussions on the issue.

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#01 - Why yes

So, why you should “show, not tell”? Classic authors didn’t use this technique often. Most of the literature at the time was written in third-person omniscient narration technique, and that means the authors had no means to actually describe how the characters felt or what they thought.

There were a lot of classics that used first-person narration, but maybe those were the only times we could notice the advice actually in use historically. Third-person limited was non-existent, perhaps. Personally, I’ve never read a classic novel that’s in third-person limited narration.

Anyway, time began passing, and people noticed that somehow, this “show, not tell” thingey kinda works. It can convey emotions and information in a lot more efficient way. So editors began searching for stuff like that.

So, one reason can be that it’s simply a superior way to convey emotions. Taking from the example I used in my last blog,

I was angry at Sara. But she didn’t care.

It’s a lot worse than,

She couldn’t believe this. Was this for real? Was this… really happening? Really?

Her fists clenched hard. Her arms were trembling. And her eyes… They tried hard to fight back those tears. But the dam could break any moment now.

How could someone do something like this? And… And to her? What had she done to be betrayed like this?

The latter one actually makes you feel what Sara is feeling—you feel like you are Sara. You can understand her feelings on a much deeper level—you do not just know that she’s frustrated, you know how frustrated she is at the whole ordeal.

Another reason—it’s immersive. Reading in detail how the character is feeling is really a lot more interesting than just reading what they feel and understanding it on an intellectual level. This way, you can relate to the character on an emotional level.

And because it’s immersive, the readers would love the novel. And if they love it, they’d buy more of the author and publisher—and that’s more profits for both of them. So why not?

A third reason—the world is changing. And so are our forms of entertainment.

Today, most of our entertainment is in the form of visual media. When we read novels, we do not always imagine them as someone speaking to us—as readers a century or two ago used to. But rather, we try to create mental images based on the information we’ve gathered. Why?

Because most of our entertainment now is visual. Comics, social media, films—all these widely consumed media are visual. So subconsciously, we all agree that story means visuals. And visuals—along with monologues—are a part of “show, not tell”.

Readers today have a set of expectations that the stories they consume in novels would be visuals, based on happenings. Yeah, there are monologues and narrations, but they sit on top of the foundation that the visuals create. Most commercial fiction does not stand on monologues alone—they need visuals.

Now, I’m not saying that all novels are like this, or all readers are like that. No, far from the truth. I’ve read Murakami’s short-stories that are certainly based only on monologues, with little to no visuals. Or even dialogues, for that matter. And believe me—these stories are just as immersive.

So we can argue that not all fiction needs visuals, but most do. And it’s the same for monologues—read McCarthy.

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#02 - When to “tell”

Yeah, you heard it right. There’s time you absolutely need to ignore this advice. Writing is subjective, after all—every rule and advice has instances where it needs to be ignored. Exceptions form a big part of learning the application of any sort of rule or advice.

Firstly, time-skip. If you’re writing a scene where you need to have a time-skip, but you also need the reader to kinda know what happened in that time, you can just tell instead of showing.

For example,

And we crossed the seas. The journey wasn’t long, but those days we had nothing to do. We were bored the heck out of our brains. Those days felt like an eternity. Until today, when we finally found what we were looking for—a piece of land in the middle of the Pacific. The Hirohoto Islands.

It’s completely fine to write stuff like that if whatever happened in that time phase has little to no relevance to the story whatsoever. If you want to, you could have expanded a chapter or two out of this little paragraph, or even a whole full-length book (lol, really). But if you feel that expanding it would provide no extra meaning to the plot, and you can just skip to the better part, writing like this is extremely fine. In fact, adventure novels are filled with this sort of telling narrations.

Secondly, you can’t show the monologues of the other characters that your narrator is interacting with. Yeah, you can still make use of the visuals, but not the monologues, which is half of the “show, not tell” advice. So you’re heavily dependent on the visuals in terms of showing. But in such cases, remember that you can tell—it’d be the narrator’s interpretation of the emotions of the other characters. It’d be better than head-hopping, I mean. Not recommended, but definitely correct if executed well.

Thirdly, action scenes. You may tell during action scenes because remember that action scenes are supposed to be quick-paced and punchy. This doesn’t really leave you enough space to show the narrator’s emotions and monologues—or the scene would turn up to be slow. And you don’t want an action scene to be slow.

An action scene relies heavily on visuals, though. But if, by any chance, you need to describe anything other than the actual action, you can just tell at that moment to make sure you don’t break the flow and pace of the scene.

Fourthly, you can use tell literally anytime, anywhere. You can use it without restraints. Remember, there’re no hard rules about where you can show and where you can tell. There are gonna be instances where you feel you can apply any one of them—so do apply any one of them. It’s your novel, write it the way you want.

But don’t just keep on telling. It’d be boring. But sometimes, it’s necessary. And sometimes, it’s just a shorter, better thing to do. Use “show, not tell” as many times as you can, but don’t overuse it.

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Conclusion

I’d said in a recent post that I wanted to talk more about “show, not tell”. And now that it’s over, I guess I’d be doing something else with my life lol.

Anyway, explore the blog if you want more helpful content about writing like this one. Love you guys.