Show, don’t tell—the mantra of every screenwriting teacher. Film is a visual medium in which character is revealed through behavior. As novelists, we are afforded the luxury of exploring the internal lives of our characters, but this can often be misunderstood by the novice fiction writer as “telling, not showing.” The novice writer can sometimes become so absorbed in the internal lives of his characters that the story collapses into burdensome exposition. The writer doles out more and more backstory in a desperate attempt to get the reader “caught up” so that the actual story can begin. An aspect of the craft lies in disguising or dramatizing exposition to keep the reader turning the page. Showing is not relegated to film writing. Storytelling, regardless of the medium, is dependent upon showing and not telling.
Let’s examine the difference.
Showing is objective. It allows us to draw our own conclusions. Do we trust what we are told in our everyday lives? Hell no! Why should we trust some dude we’ve never met just because he filled a couple hundred pages with words? Telling suggests opinion. Readers are not interested in opinion. Readers are not interested in psychologizing, intellectualizing, philosophizing or conjecture. Readers are only interested in what is happening. Story is the series of beats that leads to our hero’s transformation. This is an infinitely broad canvas on which to paint, but it is a canvas, meaning that it does have borders, that there is a context for that story. And when the context is broken, it becomes something else; essay, manifesto, diatribe, or worse, therapy.
Showing is visceral, immediate. It pulls us into the experience. Telling is playing God, dictating what one ought to think and feel about a given situation. Telling carries the stink of agenda, of the writer having his thumb on the scale. Telling is boring. It lacks energy and immediacy, and engenders distrust in the reader. As I write this, it occurs to me that I am telling you my opinion. This concerns me. How the hell does this guy know what he’s talking about?
Which bring me to my final point.
There are no rules. It either works or it doesn’t work. You are accountable to no one. You may write a story that is entirely in the mind, a completely non-narrative book or screenplay that defies all known laws of structure, and nobody will stop you. But after you step back from it a little bit and the dust settles, you may discover that you have shown us something new.
Thanks for this- very helpful this week. And I love your choice of the old man looking next to his wife’s empty chair to illustrate your point. Perfect.
Are there any techniques that we can use to let us know when we are showing and when we are telling.
Hi Jim.
Yes, in the rewrite you want to revisit your work and ask yourself 3 questions?
What are my characters DOING to get what they want?
What is the obstacle?
Is it urgent?
If you have a big obstacle and an urgent goal in the scene, and you have a protagonist actively pursuing the goal, we will likely be experiencing the scene – and you will be showing and not telling.