3 common “tell” constructions and how to turn them into “show”

So many writers are fond of reciting the mantra "show, don't tell" like it's some holy passage that will lead writers to the land of glory. New writers hear this being said and are always left wondering what it really means.

When I first started writing fiction, nearly fifteen years ago now, I too was confused beyond belief.

"Describe the action. Describe how the character is reacting." Wasn't that what I was doing?

It actually took a fellow writer who writes fantasy to explain it to me—properly.

Imagine your book being turned into a movie or television series (the ultimate dream of most fantasy writers). A scriptwriter is going to take your book and fashion it into a script where the only way to get an insight into a character is through their actions. How true that scriptwriter remains to your book will be related to how much show you give them to work with.

And trust me when I say that seeing your words of descriptions transformed into the visual format is an incredibly satisfying feeling. (I've had commissioned artwork done based on lines of my manuscripts.)

I have written about the concepts of show vs tell before in Show the story. Tell the ride through the countryside.  and in Is First-Person Really More Intimate?

Today, I want to take this from a different perspective, explaining how to identify a tell statement and how you might transform it into one of show.

There are many flavors of tell and some of them are not so easily identified—at least not to start with. But after a while, identifying those pesky tell statements becomes second nature.

The Emotional Tell

The first and most obvious category is when the emotions of the character are explicitly stated.

Marie was mad.

Lucy was scared.

Gerald was lost and confused.

With statements like this, you want to describe some sort of physical reaction (internal or external) that can be connected to that emotion. By using the actions instead of the word for the emotion, you encourage the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Marie curled her hand into a tight fist and glared at him.

Lucy's bottom lip quivered as she took a step back, pushing herself up against the wall and holding her breath.

Gerald's eyes darted between Marie and Lucy, shaking his head slightly and holding his hands up in surrender.

As a reader, you might not pick up the exact set of emotions, particularly with the last one about Gerald, but that's okay. It's about connecting the reader to the action of the story.

The best resource I have ever found to help with this particular version of transition from tell to show is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

The Setting Tell

Related to the emotional tell is the setting tell, where little description is provided of the setting.

She ducked into the alleyway at the end of the street and quickly changed her clothes before reemerging on the city streets.

For some stories, this brief concept of setting is all that might be needed, particularly if you are dealing with a short story. But sometimes, you require a bit more detail.

Another set of sirens rushed past, and she ducked into an alleyway. The narrow entranceway hindered the light, inviting shadows across the ground. The dank smell of rotting food invited the rats.

A shiver ran up her spine. Dirty, filthy creatures. She kicked a big, fat one away.

Tearing her wig off her head, she squished it into her handbag. She removed her jacket and put it back on inside out. Even if they had found the body by now and suspected her, they would be looking for a blonde bimbo in a black trench, not a brunette wearing bright purple.

More sirens. Meanwhile, Alexa carried on her way through the busy city streets.

That last passage is from one of my own manuscripts. At the time this blog post was posted, it was sitting in the query trenches.

Take a look at The Rural Setting Thesaurus and The Urban Setting Thesaurus, both by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, for ideas to help you build a more in-depth setting for your stories.

The POV reminder

This particular variant of tell is one that many new writers use—and they don't see it as tell, because they take careful thought about giving us the descriptions of what a character sees, hears, feels, tastes, smells, and realizes.

To make matters worse, the concept of passive vs active voice gets in the way.

Consider the following sentence.

She could see the door on the other side of the crevasse, and wondered if she would be able to make the jump.

Again, depending on the story, this might be perfectly suitable, but the usage of the words see and wondered create a level of distance from the character and the actions.

Depending on the passages around this one sentence, I would call this shallow POV, where the narrator is reminding me who the POV character is and not providing me with any internal reactions to her situation.

Within deep POV stories, this sentence would be constructed in a different, more visceral way.

She skidded to a halt at the edge of the crevasse and scanned along the wall on the other side for any way to escape. A door was nestled in a dark recess, barely visible. The ledge just outside the door was perhaps only two feet wide and the crevasse itself was at least fifteen feet.

With her heart racing, she backed up and sprinted for the edge, leaping across, praying that this wouldn't be her end.

This particular variant of the tell/show conundrum is the version that will help to define the depth of perception used within a narrative. Words like saw, heard, knew, realized, felt, wondered, tasted and smelled are all tell words, where the writer will take steps to remind the reader whose POV we're in. However, if the POV for the story is strong, then the use of such words won't be necessary.

Finding the balance between show and tell.

Stories should never be 100% show or 100% tell, but rather some combination thereof. Certain genres require more tell within the narrative, such as crime noir, but the reason that readers seem to favor show—and the reason why the "show, don't tell" mantra came into existence in the first place—is because of the connection that readers develop to the story and the characters with those deeper narratives that come from show.

Of course, crafting show into a manuscript also incorporates a character's behaviors and interactions with others, the layered symbolisms (such as weather, colors, and smells), and any ritual behaviors. But this is why understanding show is so difficult at times.

It does take time to become comfortable with using show more often then tell, but with hard work and practice, I do believe that the style does pay off.