Show; Don't Tell

In Kindergarten, the sweet 100-year-old motherly woman who called herself your teacher forced you to participate in a weekly satanic ritual known as "Show and Tell." If your school was anything like mine, that is. Then again, if your school was like mine, you got a day off for mourning when Barack Obama was elected president.

Anyway, I will be learning you today about how to correctly write fiction. Unfortunately, day care "Kindergarten" has put you at a disadvantage. You see, the word "and" makes Show and Tell a conjunction, which is wrong... at least in writing. There should be little to now "telling" involved. Your writing should be all about the showing.

"The city was dirty and poverty-stricken, inhabited only by the poor, sick, and orphaned."

What's wrong with the above sentence? At first glance, maybe nothing. Sure, it's not the greatest writing you've ever seen but would your eyeballs bleed if you read that in a fanon? Would they? Actually, they should bleed. I'm not a huge fan of capital punishment, but it should be sentenced to literary death.

The problem with my sentence is that it tells you straight-up what the city is. The creative part of your mind does nothing when all you read is the Encyclopedia entry for Detroit (kidding, no offense Detroit). Jokes aside, a good writer would show us the city so that we can "see" it for ourselves, as if we're right there with the characters witnessing the same scene they are.

"A scrawny, dark-skinned boy in tattered clothing wheeled a cart carrying his dinner, a dead street rat, passed the wheezing old man huddled in between two dark green dumpsters."

Again, what I wrote wasn't necessarily brilliant. I'm not winning any Pulitzer Prizes, but the second sentence is infinitely better than the first. You may be wondering how I could even compare them since they aren't saying the same thing, but wonder again. I am saying the same thing, except I'm showing you instead of telling you. In the first sentence, you are told that the city is poor. In the second, you can infer the poverty of the city through carefully selected details described, and you can imagine the sight as if you were there. You were shown the poverty.

Another way to show and not tell is by invoking the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. If you're like Varrick, you have a sixth sense called fashion, but that's beside the point. What you can do as an author is transport your reader into the fanon.

Let's say I'm writing a first-person narrative story, and the main character is in the midst of a fight with a Firebender. I could say "I glared at my deadly opponent as I panted to catch my breath before he shot another blast of flames" or I could show you what's happening:

"I had to ignore the mixed taste of sweat and blood and fight through the piercing pain in my chest to barely evade the intense blast of flames, the heat suffocating me as it signed the tips of my hair."

In the second sentence, I never told you directly that the protagonist was tired or out of breath, and I never told you that her opponent shot a fireball at her... yet you knew it happened and you could imagine it happening. I'm not literary genius, and the sentence isn't going to be published anytime soon, but I was still able to invoke the five senses. You can imagine the taste (and smell) of sweat and blood, gather that the pain in her chest is the same one you feel when your fighting through an intense workout, feel the heat of the fire, and smell the horrid stench of burnt hair. None of those things could have been found in the first sentence, which was merely a statement of what happened. When your righting fiction, stating what happened doesn't cut it. You're not in Kindergarten anymore.