Tell me and I’ll forget.
Teach me and I’ll remember.
Show me and I’ll understand.
In my previous life as a teacher these words were written on a poster in the staff room. They were a gentle reminder that lecturing students might not yield the best results. Experienced teachers knew that a far more beneficial technique was to ignite the student’s imagination and get them to participate in the learning process. Those who followed the formula enjoyed the most success and had the least amount of yawning in their classroom.
In the literary world there is a more concise version of this mantra, show don’t tell. The meaning is almost exactly the same. Readers don’t want to be told, or lectured, about what’s happening in a story, they want to be active participants. They want to feel and experience the events unfolding on the page. This is human nature, to prove it, just ask yourself, would you rather be told you were loved or be shown you were loved?
Show don’t tell is short and snappy, and easy to understand, but it’s not so easy to implement. It increases the already heavy workload for the writers. They are not just responsible for telling a good story, they are also responsible for bringing the details to life and making them pop in the mind of the reader.
Take A Christmas Carol for example. Dickens describes the character of Scrooge in the following way.
(He) is hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel has ever stuck out a generous fire: secret and self-contained, and as solitary as an oyster.
There was an easier way of doing this. Dickens could have told us directly that a Scrooge was a bitter and selfish old man. But this would been flat and uninteresting, and our brains would lose interest. Instead, he involves us, makes us reach for the answers. This technique is more satisfying because, believe it or not, our brains are configured to solve problems, not to be spoon feed.
Good teachers understand this, and to become a great writer you need to incorporate this type of thinking too. But don’t get too cocky. There’s more to show don’t tell than making the readers reach for the answer. It’s also littered with nuance. My first attempts can illustrate this very point.
She eyes him from head to toe, and it was as if all the air had been sucked from the room. She grasped for breath and there was a tightening on her chest. He played on his phone the whole time. The one time him smiled in her direction, he was only getting the attention of the barman.
In isolation this might not sound bad, in fact, when I wrote it I was very pleased with myself. But the problem is the rest of the story went on like this. No telling, just showing. It was too much. Every sentence doesn’t need to be a puzzle.
Like most other writers, I misinterpreted show don’t tell. I assumed all telling was bad and it needed to be stripped out. That’s not the case, there is a balance. While you don’t want the reader’s brain to be bored, you also don’t want to overload them. The most important job for any writer is to determine what to show and what to tell in the story. This is the skill that will make you stand out from the pack.