Six ways to show, not tell, in fiction (and when to ignore this advice)

Showing (not telling) in fiction is a key concept to grasp if you want to immerse readers in your characters’ world, but it’s not the full story.

Unless you’ve just entered the world of writing, you’ve probably heard the phrase ‘Show, don’t tell.’ Showing the emotions, motivations and thoughts of your characters will engage readers and immerse them in your story world. However, sometimes it makes more sense to do a bit of telling instead of showing.

Let’s dive into what ‘show, don’t tell’ means, how to employ this technique in your writing, and when to ignore this advice.

What does ‘show, don’t tell’ mean?

Instead of telling you what ‘show, don’t tell’ means, I’ll show you. Which of the following two extracts do you find easier to engage with? Which one puts a barrier between you and the character’s emotions?

Telling:
I felt sad when Penny told me about the death of her uncle. She found it hard to speak, and I comforted her.

Showing:
Penny’s voice was scratchy. ‘My uncle never woke up.’
Tears stung my eyes, and I put my hand on hers.

In the second extract, the narrator’s emotions are shown to the reader through the tears stinging their eyes. The fact they comforted Penny is shown through the action of putting a hand on hers. Penny’s news about her uncle is shown through dialogue, and her emotions are shown through the scratchy voice. This fully engages the reader and enables them to virtually feel the emotions of the characters.

The first extract tells the reader how the narrator felt on hearing the news, tells that the uncle died, tells Penny forced out the words, and tells that the narrator comforted Penny. It blocks the reader from sitting in the room with the two characters and seeing – almost feeling – exactly what happened.

Now we’ve kicked things off with an example, let’s look at how you can introduce more showing, not telling, into your writing.

Six ways to show, not tell

Don’t name emotions

Look out for places in your manuscript where you’ve named emotions. Have you written that a character is scared, sad or happy?

Instead of telling your readers how your characters are feeling, show their emotions through physical sensations, action/reaction and dialogue. Try to engage the five senses, not only sight. What can your characters hear, feel, smell, taste?

Vary the emotional actions, and try to veer from the most common route. It can be difficult to avoid the trap of using the same movements when showing characters’ feelings through actions. There are only be so many times that characters can scratch their chin to show they’re puzzled, or bite their lip to show they’re feeling uncomfortable. Be aware of which actions you’ve already used and read widely in your genre to discover those actions that are overused in general.

A resource I have found invaluable when trying to find alternative ways to show how characters are feeling is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. This incredibly useful book lists physical signals, internal sensations and mental responses for a host of emotions.

Avoid verbs like ‘felt’, ‘saw’, ‘heard’ etc.

Rather than telling the reader that characters are thinking, hearing or seeing something, simply describe what they are thinking, hearing or seeing.

Which of the following examples do you find more engaging as a reader?

Telling:
Oliver trudged into the wood. He heard a blackbird singing in the old oak tree and saw bluebells emerging amid the ancient tree’s roots.

Showing:
Oliver trudged into the wood. A blackbird was singing in the old oak tree, below which bluebells were emerging amid the ancient tree’s roots.

Hopefully you found the second paragraph more immersive and less distanced from the character’s experience. As we’re already seeing things from Oliver’s point of view (POV), there’s no need to tell the reader that it was him hearing the blackbird and seeing the bluebells.

You can find more examples of verbs telling rather than showing in KM Weiland’s article, Most Common Writing Mistakes: Are Your Verbs Showing or Telling?

Use dialogue and thoughts effectively

Dramatising a key scene through dialogue, rather than summarising it in the narrative, is a great way of immersing your reader in a scene. However, when writing dialogue, remember to avoid telling as far as possible.

Think about how people speak in real life. We don’t necessarily state the obvious or give a running commentary on all we’re thinking, feeling and doing.

Show characters’ emotions, reactions and thoughts through what they don’t say as much as what they do say (subtext), their actions during the dialogue, and how they react to what the other person is saying.

When expressing a character’s thoughts, there is rarely a need to explicitly tell the reader your character is thinking. As long as you’ve made it clear whose POV the scene is from, your reader will know who is doing the thinking, without you spelling this out.

For example (note the use of italics and first person to show direct thoughts):

• What a terrible way to begin my day, he thought. [with the superfluous ‘telling’ thought tag]
• What a terrible way to begin my day. [thought tag removed]

For an even more immersive reading experience, if you’re using third-person narration (‘he/she’ rather than ‘I’), use free indirect style/speech instead of italicised direct thoughts. This is a blending of third-person narration with the POV character’s thoughts. This would render the above example as:

• What a terrible way to begin the/his/her day.

Use metaphors and similes

To avoid being too ‘on the nose’ with your description, use metaphors and similes to elevate your writing and introduce more showing. Both these techniques are ways of comparing one thing with another, but with a subtle difference. A simile says the thing is like the other thing (e.g. The buffet was like a zoo at feeding time.). A metaphor says it is the other thing (e.g. It’s raining cats and dogs out there.).

When using metaphors and similes, avoid clichés. Try to come up with your own or tweak a well-known phrase. Extra marks if you can use a simile or metaphor related to your character or plot.

For example:

• He jumped up from the starting block like a bullet from a gun. [simile, but rather cliché]
• He jumped up from the starting block like a greyhound on race day. [simile, with a little more pizzazz]
• She was a bag of nerves. [metaphor, but a cliché]
• A swarm of moths had taken up residence in her chest. [metaphor, with more interest]

Show through description

When incorporating description into your writing, avoid telling the reader what something was like and instead show them. For example, rather than telling them the house was rundown, show the paint peeling off the walls. If you aren’t sure whether you’re telling or showing, look for constructions such as ‘it was + adjective’, then ask yourself how you know, for example, the house was rundown. If you can answer this question, that’s the ‘showing’ you need to do.

Describe the setting from your POV character’s perspective. What does the setting look like through their eyes? One person may see a rundown house as quaint and full of potential, but another might see it as eerie or a sign of decay. Use your descriptions to reveal more about your POV character’s motivations and backstory.

Be careful not to write long descriptive passages. This was more acceptable in Dickens’ day, but modern readers get bored with too much description in one block. Instead, convey the setting with strong, carefully chosen adjectives and metaphors/similes, and pepper the description throughout the scene as the characters move through it.

CS Lakin’s article Showing Settings Through the Eyes of Your Characters is an excellent resource if you’d like to learn more about how to write from your POV character’s viewpoint.

Avoid ‘suddenly’

The word ‘suddenly’ tells readers how something happened (quickly!), rather than showing them how it happened. There are plenty of verbs that convey this quickness of action, instead of using suddenly + verb.

You might find the solution is even as simple as removing ‘suddenly’ but retaining the verb. For example, instead of writing John suddenly burst into the room, you could simply write John burst into the room. You can’t burst into a room in any other way apart from suddenly! This also helps to reduce your word count and keeps your writing concise.

Read more about avoiding the word ‘suddenly’ in Louise Harnby’s blog post, Why ‘Suddenly’ Can Spoil Your Crime Fiction or Thriller.

Sometimes telling is better than showing

Although showing in fiction is usually the most effective way to immerse the reader in a scene or a character’s emotion, sometimes we just need to get a character from A to B without dwelling on how they get there.

Telling:
He jumped in a cab and was soon outside Laura’s house.

Showing:
The door slammed shut behind him, and he splashed down the puddle-soaked path to the waiting cab. Rain trickled down the windows for the entire journey, and the rush-hour traffic fumes invaded his nostrils.

If it’s key to the plot that we dwell on the character’s emotions and sensations during the journey, you may prefer to describe the fact his nails were worn to stumps by the end of the journey, for example, or his stomach tumbled as the cab crawled through traffic. However, if you just need to get your character to Laura’s house for the next plot point, you can save the showing for that scene.

Using telling occasionally to show time passing or movement from one setting to another can support the pace of your story and prevent it from lagging.

Telling rather than showing is also a good option if you have to summarise something the reader already knows or speed up the pace to get a reader from one key scene to another.

Final thoughts

Showing, not telling, is an important element of writing craft. It immerses the reader in the story world and allows them to empathise with the characters.

By learning how to wield this skill and when to not use it, you will elevate your writing and engage your readers, keeping them turning those pages.

A professional editor can help you to weed out unnecessary telling in your writing. I offer various editing services for all budgets, so drop me a line to find out how I can help you.

If you have your own tips about showing and telling in fiction, drop them in the comments!