"Show, Don't Tell" What does this mean?

[HPL]

@Voyager

I disagree that this is telling. The point of these stories is not the murder, but how Holmes solves the murder. The discussion of the possible solutions is showing us Holmes’ chain of reasoning, which is far more interesting than being shown yet another murder, especially since knowing what happens takes away some of the suspense, and the thrill of playing along. Telling here would be for Watson to say that Holmes went though the possibilities, without saying what they were.

The only thing that ever bugged me about the Sherlock Holmes story is the fact that he gave you his answers, based off evidence the reader doesn’t have access to.

Holmes: “I noticed he had dirt on his pants, and thus concluded he was tunneling into the nearby Bank”. Bravo, Holmes! The problem is, it never mentions prior to that point anything about that character having dirt on his pants.

@Voyager

The alien/monster example is interesting also. “The monster was horrible” would be telling. Describing the goo of the monster would be showing, but since prose is usually not up to this, a lot of horror involves showing the character’s reaction to the monster.

How about one of my favorites? “Charles Dexter Ward took one look at the thing with many tentacles and turned into drooling vegatable, incapable of articulate speech”?

Technically, isn’t that showing?

@Voyager

I’ll have to look at the conversation with Card. I’m most of the way through his book on characterization. I don’t like his fiction much (not because I think it is bad, it doesn’t connect with me) but his book is fantastic. But talking about characterization would be a giant hijack.

being the one who started this thread, I have no problem with straying into that. Characterization is probably my biggest weak point. I can get plot done well, I’m good at atmosphere, fairly good at pacing, but I suck at characters.

[HPL]

@Voyager

Your scene would be a turning point in the story, and as such seems to lend itself to action. But what if the scene were Bob giving John an unsatisfactory review, which John sees as unfair? I’d think the action would be a lot more subtle, perhaps John turning the paper upside down to keep from having to look at it. But there wouldn’t be any books slamming, or raised voices - unless the scene were a climax, not part of a buildup to the actual climax.

Tell: John was Angry.

Show: John snapped, and stalked from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers.

or

Tell: Milton was upset with the loss of his stapler.

Show: Milton burned the building down, taking his coveted stapler.

[Lamia]

I wish to reassure you all that I made up that little vampire story myself; it’s not a real sample of my students’ work. I teach EFL, and few of my students are fluent enough in English to write that badly! It’s hard to do a lot of effective “showing” when you’re struggling with a foreign language, but the language barrier does at least encourage people to get to the point and not fool around or try to be oh-so-clever.

When I do fiction writing with my students, their prose sometimes strikes me as almost Hemingway-esque in its sparse efficiency. Well, I mean, if Hemingway wrote about aliens and Harry Potter. (I’m particularly fond of the one where Lord Voldemort is revealed to be living with not one but two Dementors…and “Miss Ramia”.) There are plenty of people writing fiction in their native language who might do well to approach their projects with the same level of thought and concern for communication as someone writing in a second language. You need to actually know what story it is you want to tell, and you need to do your best to get that story (and no more or less than that story!) written down in a way that your audience will understand. Knowing when to “show” and when to “tell” is just a subset of that.