Show not tell

Chrismax2

Chrismax2

Hi everyone, I been reading a lot of writing books and I did not realise until recently how important show not tell is.  However I am having a hard time placing it into my short story I just written.  I only done the first draft and I am new to all this, but it got me thinking.  Do other more professional writers find they got to rewrite large sections of their writing because it's not written correctly, or is it just me being bad at writing stories?

Tessa Tangent

Hello and welcome from me. 

The idea is to show what people do, rather than telling the story on their behalf.

I've had a few stories published and have been lucky in my success.  What I did, if it helps, was just kind of "become" the characters, so that I knew what they'd do or say at any point in the story.  You then have the characters' feelings, points of view, speech, actions etc. settled.

Description came into my stories in order to show moments in time or place + feelings, senses and so on.  I'm not writing a book on how to do "Show Not Tell" in this post so I hope I don't get anyone crabbing away at me for what I've missed out but the essential points are above.

Try thinking of it like a film, or tv programme: what does the reader see, hear, feel, smell, sense, taste etc?

Scene: She is cooking such and such in the kitchen.

He appears and surprises her with a gift.

She says.

He says.

And so on...

Back to scene/feelings/sensations/thoughts...

The thing is to have a basic idea of where your story is going and what it's saying.  Is it carrying a message of some kind to be revealed at the end?  Is it going to have some twist at the end?  All that has to be thought through before you start (or at least during writing) and, further, you can draft out the idea of beginning, middle and end to give you guidance.

Hope this helps.  Others will be helpful, too, I'm sure.

Jay Mandal

There's another thread on the same subject, also called Show not tell.

Tessa Tangent

True, Claudia...  My first draft always gets tweaked before sending.

Chrismax2

To the people who helped me, thank you.  I feel a bit more confident in it now.
But to the others this problem is personal to me!  That other thread is not affecting me personally while this one does, reading the other thread is not going to be 100% related to my problem.  Their is more to writing then show and not tell. 
At the end of the day, if we all never repeated threads we would never learn, and sooner or later this board would become nothing more then an archive as there would be nothing new to say.

(I wrote this better the first time and did not save it)

Kind Regards

Betsie

There's more on this topic on page 2 under the thread entitled Dialogue