Writing Exercises: Showing vs Telling

Showing is not as difficult as most people make it appear. It is not about grammar, voice, or style. In fact, good showing often breaks some of the academic grammar rules, even though it should follow the Chicago Style of Grammar, the publisher's bible, fairly closely. Most new writers mistake showing with active writing. This is wrong. A story can be written in active voice and still fall into one of the four levels of passive writing.

What is Telling?

When a story is telling the action, it sounds like the narrator is telling about something that happened, past tense. It almost sounds like the narrator and reader are on the telephone talking about events that happened.

What is Showing?

Showing creates a movie in the mind of the reader. This is done by writing a book in such a way that narration and exposition sound like thought when read out loud. The story is written in such a way that it sounds like the narrator is telling the reader what is happening, at the exact moment the events are happening.

Writing Exercise:

Take a example of your writing. Look for non-descript words, such as nice, beautiful and wonderful. List these words, and write a description of what they are describing.

A nice suit.

Nice means as many things as there are people. Does nice mean the suit looked good on that person, or it was a fashionable outfit?

They ate almost all the cake.

What does this mean? Was there one piece left or ten? Did they eat the top and leave the bottom.

"No!" He screamed.

Rewrite the above lines before taking a look at the corrections below.

What is it about exclamation marks that fascinate fiction writers? What does screaming the word no mean? Does it mean the speaker is angry or in his death throws, making one last grasp for life. Many writers in my classes start explaining what the exclamation mark means until I stop them and ask them if they will phone every reader's home and give them the same explanation. Non-descript words rob a story of emotional impact.

Corrections

The red suit made her look like a model.

Now we know why the suit looked nice. It looked nice on the character. Using the word model allows each writer the opportunity of creating their own image of beautiful.

The boys ate two thirds of the cake.

Now we knew who ate the cake, and how much remained. We can even become more descriptive.

The boys dove into the cake, leaving nothing but a pile of crumbs.
The boys ate the cake off the platter, leaving nothing but dry crumbs.
 

Do not write in a vocabulary that you wouldn't use in daily life.

The boys attacked the cake, reducing it to a mass of broken crumbs.
The ravenous boys devoured the cake, leaving only a smattering of crumbs on the platter.

"No," he screamed, barely containing his anger.
"No." His arms rose to ward off the blow

Both of these examples make it easier to understand what the speaking character means when they scream "no." However, the sentence makes it more descriptive.

The rule of thumb in one publishing house that I edited for limited exclamation marks to five in an entire manuscript. In our publishing house, we limit them to three. A good rule of thumb is to eliminate all exclamation marks in the first fifty pages. This removes them from the partial that will be submitted to the publishing company.

If you are accustom to showing when you write, then try writing a complete dialogue using only body language and dialogue. Eliminate all the tags and pronouns.