![]() ![]() When you tell, you’re stealing to the readers the opportunity of discovering, by themselves, the world you created, to add something personal to the scene - for them to get involved. Show keeps the readers actively involved in the story. Showing concrete and vivid details will make the reader create his own conclusions - that will be the same as yours, only he’s going to interpret them by himself. This happens because you’re making the reader interpret what’s happening, instead of telling him what he should understand or feel. By using it, you’re creating a connection between the reader and your scene/character. Show is a tool used to pull the reader to a scene. The difference between show and tell is that show invokes on the reader a mental image of the scene/emotion, while tell is a statement of an action/emotion. The difference between Show and TellĪs a writer, your goal is to provoke a reaction in your readers, take them to feel the emotions your character is feeling. The writer, Anton Chekhov, defined Show don’t tell like this:ĭon’t tell me the moon is shining show me the glint of light on the broken glass. However, it can be complex to apply it.īut the good news is, once you understand it and use it, there’s no going back: your writing will include it, intuitively. Show don’t tell is easy to, theoretically, understand. Telling, while not overused, can be well-written and complimentary to the piece of writing as a whole.Show don’t tell is one of the most relevant writing techniques, it confers quality to the texts and involves the readers, it grabs them. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders - a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed. In these first few opening lines, Wolff uses telling to pull readers into the setting, give them a sense of character, and begin creating atmosphere:Īnders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. The following is an opening from the short fiction piece, “Bullet to the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. Telling only becomes an issue when the writer uses it in excess. Telling between significant portions of showing helps transition the reader and give them a stronger sense of what the writer wants noticed, and what the reader can just accept as simple information. If this is the only style the writer uses, the reader is likely to feel overwhelmed with details that may not seem significant. showing fills the space on the page with intimate details. While showing is recommended for significant scenes and details, telling has an important place in narrative and academic writing because it is concise. By giving these specific details, readers are pulled into the scene, not just given a generalized overview of what happened.Īlso referred to as summary, this technique takes details (or revealing information) and describes it in a small space on the page. In the telling example, readers are not given descriptions of the water, or how the narrator felt the boat move. That is, sensory and concrete details that play a part in building an important scene with an emotion the writer is trying to convey. The difference between these two passages is the use of significant detail. To better understand the technique of showing, here is an example of how O’Brien may have written this passage if he were telling:Įlroy drove the boat for fifteen minutes until we reached Canadian waters. Bending down, he opened up his tackle box and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to himself, his eyes down. Elroy cut the engine, letting the boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. For a time I didn’t pay attention to anything, just feeling the cold spray against my face, but then it occurred to me that at some point we must’ve passed into Canadian waters. ![]() I remember the wind in my ears, the sound of the old outboard Evinrude. STORYWRITING SHOWING NOT TELLING FULLIn the following example, Tim O’Brien uses significant detail in his short story “On the Rainy River,” to show instead of tell.įor ten or fifteen minutes Elroy held a course upstream, the river choppy and silver-gray, then he turned straight north and put the engine on full throttle. Many writers, however, experience frustration when trying to understand the process of showing. This technique is essential for describing significant details and events, because showing allows the reader to experience the scene along with the narrator. Also referred to as scene, showing expands details and describes them across a large space on the page. ![]()
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