WTF is Show Don't Tell?

Readers are like CIA agents. They want to find information about your prose and poetry instead of having it handed to them on a silver platter. Clues that make readers draw information into their heads and mull over it to figure out their meanings force them to internalise your work and thus respond emotionally to it. When readers have internalised your character in this way, they flesh him out three-dimensionally, using their imaginations to build all the sinew and blood that sentences will never be able to achieve. In this way, you have created a walking, talking protagonist whose actions readers can develop intimate relationships with. They see, rather than intellectually understand, what your protagonist looks like. They know how he walks, they hear his voice, and they actively like or dislike him.

Show don't tell also achieves economy. A picture provides information that is the equivalent of thousands of words of text. A single well-placed detail in your piece can give enough information to replace two pages' worth of telling.

A picture is also visceral while a word that appeals to the intellect is only cerebrally understood. The paragraphs you've read in this post have been abstract and have told instead of shown. You draw them into your intellect and understand them without seeing, feeling, hearing, and tasting them. Contrast your reaction to them with the way you respond to this:

In a Station of the Metro--Ezra Pound

______

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound's poem aims only to make you see and feel. It doesn't want you to derive meaning from it, and you will have seen and felt far more from those two lines than you have from all that I've written in this post.

This poem wants more from you than the Pound poem does:

The Red Wheelbarrow--William Carlos Williams

_______

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

You will probably mull over its meaning for quite some time. Why does so much depend on a red wheelbarrow? Why one beside white chickens? You've internalised the image, the 'show don't tell', and now you will sit with it as others have for almost 100 years, and when you arrive at a meaning, it will be one that is real to you. You will be more likely to respond emotionally when you come to a conclusion in a way you will not respond to my post. It might even change your views on your own life as it has mine.

This is 'show don't tell' at its simplest. Show me that 'so much depends' on the present moment and all its beauty the way The Red Wheelbarrow does. Don't tell me, "So much depends on the present moment and all its beauty," because when you do, I will probably forget about what you told me a minute later and it will not have changed my life.

In fiction, 'show don't tell' looks exactly like the above poems, and it also looks like this:

Tattoos Are Forever--Roy Blumenthal

"He walked carefully, making sure that nothing would spill. The glass was so full the water bulged up over the edge. He got to the door. "Knock knock?" He said.
"Thank you my darling," said Mrs Bosch, "come in.
He tiptoed to her bedside and started the slow process of placing the glass on the table."

From that text, we are shown that the protagonist is nervous about small things, that he's walking on eggshells, that he cares about something as insignificant as delivering a glass of water. You might already feel sympathetic with him. You might even have figured out already that he is a child. What follows in the next sentence is:

"Don't be stupid! It's too full! Here give me that!" She thrust her hand at him, jolting his elbow. The water splashed over his legs. Some went onto the bed."

Why is this character so aware of the details of this accident? Usually, when I spill glasses of water after having been shouted at, I'm not aware of that kind of detail. I'm aware of my anger at the person who shouted at me. What does this show us? That Mrs Bosch is far more dangerous than the words and insults she has used thus far. It follows:

"You're useless." She sipped from the glass. "I said you're useless. What are you?"
"I'm useless."
I'm useless who?"
"I'm useless, Mommy."

I'm going to tell, instead of show, that story. Johnny has an emotionally abusive mother. She forces him to repeat the verbal abuse she dishes out to him so that he internalises it. When Johnny makes mistakes, his mother overreacts.

There will likely be a difference in your response and a comparative lack of information the telling gives you as opposed to the showing. That is the 'show don't tell' premise in action.

Every genre achieves show don't tell in a different way, but some genres are more forgiving with it.

In nonfiction commentary, show don't tell happens like this:

"When I was bearded and my mother visited me, she stared at the floor, addressing me without making eye contact. Why did she hate beards so intensely? She adored her hairy grandfathers and her cousin Freeman. Her father, Wesley, of the next generation, shaved once or twice a week. On Saturday night before Sunday’s church, Wesley perched on a set tub. Looking into the mirror of a clock, he scraped his chin with a straight razor. " (BY DONALD HALL, New York Times.)

In fiction...

...it's important to stay aware of the difference between the protagonist and the author so that you avoid giving omniscient details that your character couldn't possibly know. The protagonist is always unreliable. He sees only what he sees and his thoughts or ideas reflect on his personality and not on world truths. That is how show don't tell is carried out. Try to think of your character either being a camera or carrying a camera over his shoulder. What that camera sees is all that your character sees, and your character can't see anything more than that.

Narrators

Some novels tell stories through the thoughts of their narrators instead of protagonists. Show don't tell is not so easily apparent in this kind of writing, but it is very much there. There is, in my view, no better piece of first person show don't tell than Catcher in the Rye. Salinger created a character who was so unreliable and believable that the reader must question everything and link what he observes to his personality and not to the author's view of his protagonist. The author's judgements of the story stay out of the picture. The reader gets to feel intimately acquainted with Catcher in the Rye's Holden:

"I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad."

While we are being given thoughts that seem to be telling and not showing, Salinger puts us inside Holden's brain and shows us what his character is like through his thoughts. Was 'he stinking it up'? Prolly not, because Holden is wildly judgemental of everything. From that excerpt, we know that he is pretty abrasive and rebellious. He dislikes pretension. He dislikes those who are fooled by pretension. What we don't know is what the crowd, music, and room were like for everyone else. That's show don't tell through narration.

Another amazing example is American Psycho.

"Where are you going?" she asks again. I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs, finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, Kenkichi Nakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids."

He's been asked something by a woman and he thinks of the rape he committed at 14. We're shown he's a rapist and that he has thoughts of raping the woman who asked him the question. We're shown that when this woman talks to him, he's distracted by thoughts of meaningless things. We've not been told what the character does for a living, but you might have concluded that he works in the finance industry. We're shown that he's ostentatious. We're shown that rape is considered to be as important a topic as hot executive gadgets. We are shown that he's unfeeling. If you told, instead of showed, everything that's in that excerpt, you might be typing for two pages. Your reader would not have been jolted by that last sentence. You would also have been far less stylish and sexy.