I believe that both showing and telling (narrative) have their uses in any story. We often need to use both tools–for example, in the image at left, do you tell the reader about the waterfall or do you show the person feeling the spray of water? What serves the story best–that’s the real question.

Here are some tips to decided when to show more and what telling better can help with in a story.

SHOWING

• Showing means convening the character in action and words.
• Showing takes more words because the goal is to create a picture and feeling in the reader’s mind with only words.
• Showing requires good visualization by the writer.
• Showing is strongest when all five senses are used: smell, touch, taste, sight, hearing.
• To better show a character, give your characters mannerisms (physical and verbal habits) that reveal their inner person.
• Showing is the continual search for how to reveal what your character feels and how that character displays (or doesn’t display) those feelings.
• Use of deep viewpoint allows the reader to ‘discover’ your characters through showing that inner person.
• A character’s actions always speak louder to the reader than any thoughts or narrative about that character; actions reveal true character.

TELLING

• -Telling means conveying exact meaning to the reader; it is, literally, telling the story.
• -Telling compresses word count (useful in short stories and a synopsis).
• -Telling, in a synopsis, is the ultimate compression of your story.
• -Telling alerts the reader that the information, or the character, is relatively unimportant.
• -Telling can smooth transition in time, distance, or viewpoint.
• -Telling can establish a mood or setting when you do not wish to do this in any character’s viewpoint.
• Telling is the continual search for fresh ways to give your reader information.
• If dialogue is only about plot exposition, it is really telling a plot point to the reader.

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To know if you’re telling vs. showing, look for “clue” words that tip off you may be telling more than showing, such as was, were, are, to be. As in, The sun was hot.

Showing and telling do not have to be absolutes; mix show, use more show than tell, or use more tell than show; part of the choice is your style, and part is the effect you want to have on the reader.

-In general, most people respond to any motivating stimulus (something happening) with FEELING, ACTION, SPEECH, so that’s how you want to structure scenes, so that a character feels something, acts on that feeling, then says something.

-Words and sentences and paragraphs that do not add anything actually detract from what is there–the end result is to weaken the good stuff.

-Multiple edits are your friend; it’s not necessary to get everything into one pass.  Make one edit about dialogue, the next edit about punching the narrative (telling), the next edit about adding more showing details.