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How To: Show, Don't Tell


For sale, baby shoes, never worn. - Ernest Hemingway


Show, don't tell. If you're looking to improve your writing, it's likely you've heard this idea before. Becoming a good author implies many things. You need to understand the business as a whole if you want to see your book next to the greats. Before you do that, though, you need to take make sure that you're writing in the first place, and it must be worth reading.

If you've read somebody like Tolkien, then you're probably that skillful description can make you believe in a world, no matter how different from reality it may be. You'd also know that reading pages upon pages telling you about every stone that the protagonist steps over, the story can get dull pretty easily. If only there were an easier way, right?


Show, don't tell can convey

  • Emotions
  • Thoughts
  • Scenery
  • Appearances
  • Anything, really
Let's go through a few examples:

Telling: Andrew noticed his father had been drinking. He was nervous, but had to do something about it. 

Showing: Andrew's father stumbled in the middle of the room. As he helped him up, he was overwhelmed by the smell of liquor in his breath. "You never know what he might do," Andrew thought. He was filled by a sense of impending doom, and braced himself for the chaos that would ensue once he cut his father off the booze. 

As you can see, you can use this technique to get a little deeper into the psychology behind your characters' actions than simply showing would allow.

Telling: It's a very cold Winter day.

Showing: I want to go outside, but I can't find my snow boots. 

Simply enough, you can imply what's going on in the world with your characters' actions. You can also talk about the hot cocoa to warm someone up, the pine trees that people are taking home, somebody's singing Christmas carols outside, the possibilities are endless. 

Telling: Jason Voorhees is a supernatural killer. 

Showing: The camp counselor held her harpoon, drenched with the blood of her closest friend. "He ripped her in half with his bare hands," she thought, "How could I make it out of here?" She had to try it, though, and she plunged her weapon through Jason's chest, straight through the heart. He didn't mind, and kept chasing her.  


Showing is excellent for characters concerning what they do and how good they are at particular skills. A movie which did the exact opposite of this was Return of the Jedi. After two whole movies where we heard how much of a badass Boba Fett was, we get to see him fight Luke Skywalker, only for him to fall to the Sarlacc Pit almost instantly. The reverse of this is true in Avengers: Infinity War, concerning Hulk and Thanos. 

Is it always useful to show, not tell? It depends. You'll pretty much always want to use it when writing a novel, but you can be a little more lenient with short stories where you won't always have the space to expand upon descriptions. At the very least, now that you know this technique, you can choose when or when not to use it.

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