Show, Not Tell, for a Winning Story by Jean Knill

When reading short story submissions, if there’s one thing that will put editors’ or competition judges’ teeth on edge it has to be telling instead of showing. Many stories of old were written like this – that’s why we sometimes find them a difficult read. We haven’t been given word pictures to stimulate our minds.

All the creative writing gurus nowadays tell us you can no longer get away with this. You can’t ‘tell’ your readers that someone felt scared, for example. You have to say the person’s hands shook or heart pounded, so that readers are shown how to make the connection for themselves.

You may believe showing will be easier if you write in the first person. Your readers can get to know your character by what he or she thinks, as well as what they say and do. But you can still fall into the trap of telling. ‘I remembered the tales of the goblins and I was terrified as I walked through the dense wood’, is telling, while ‘My mind imagined hungry goblins behind all the trees, waiting to pounce on me and drag me off to their cooking pot’, shows the readers just how scared your character is. It’s a word picture that can jump into their own minds.

The other disadvantage of first person writing is that you have to stay in the head of that one person all the time. If the person walking through the wood is Mary, how can you show your reader that Pauline is secretly following her? Mary doesn’t know, because Pauline is doing this in secret. This can only work if your plan is to reveal it somehow later in the story. So choosing whether or not to use a narrator, and write in the third person, is an important decision in choosing how to show, not tell.

How can you be sure you don’t commit the crime of telling? How can you stop the anxiety about this from interfering with the flow of your writing? The answer is to forget about it until the editing stage. You wouldn’t write a story and submit it on the same day, would you?

No, you leave it for a couple of days, and then come back to it. And you go through every sentence carefully to check for errors and ambiguity. You want your work to say exactly what you mean in good and correct English.

So you need to add one more layer to this. Ask yourself more questions. What is this telling me, and then, how is it showing me? How else could it be shown? That is the point when you can decide to make changes that will show, not tell.

Once you get into the habit of this, you may find that you need to make fewer changes, because it becomes second nature to write in that way in the first place. And your competition entries will be more likely to reach shortlists and become winners.

Jean Knill is an talented writer and I’ve adored reading her lively and genuine voice. You can read more about Jean and her writing life on her blog, Jean’s Musings and at WriteLink.