Writing: When to show & when to tell · 4:47am Jan 13th, 2014
We’ve been kicking around show vs. tell a lot lately, so I want to keep a list of all the reasonable-sounding theories on what’s good about showing or telling. I’m just trying to organize my thoughts here. I have no doubt that you, my alarmingly clever readers, will immediately poke them full of holes.
It’s traditional at this point to give a list of examples of badly-written tells vs. well-written shows, but that’s cheating. We need to consider real examples of both shows and tells, and figure out what circumstances makes one or the other better. And first we have to have some idea what “showing” and “telling” mean.
One definition is that “showing” means things that could be shown in a movie: bare facts such as setting and events, body language, and facial expressions. “Telling”, respectively, then means describing a character’s thoughts or feelings.
Another interpretation is that “showing” describes things as they happen, while “telling” summarizes them, whether they’re externally-visible events or internal thoughts and feelings. In this view, transitory, sensory feelings are “shows” (“The subway car was hot”), while moods (“Jill had never been so happy”) or attitudes (“The bar was unnaturally quiet. I didn’t like it.”) are tells. Consider this passage from Camus’ The Stranger:
A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.
Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.
Camus could have written this:
His knife glinted in the sun. Sweat blinded me. I pulled the trigger.
The first passage is all internal monologue and descriptions that are symbolic or impressionistic rather than literal. The sun makes no noise, the knife does not gouge into his eyeballs, there is no gust from the sea, the sky does not crack in two, and no sheet of flame pours from the sky. You couldn’t have shown any of that in a movie, so by the first definition above, it’s all telling. But it’s not summarizing anything; rather, it presents a series of sensory impressions that flash by, after which the narrator discovers the gun has fired, almost on its own. So by the second definition it’s all showing.
The first definition is easier to use, but I think the second is more useful.
A third definition, which several comments below mention, is that "showing" gives the reader clues that they must assemble, while "telling" spells out what the author wants the reader to know. Mystic writes about "implication outside the initial scope", quoting someone else:
There is a technique where you baldly state how a character feels or what a character thinks about something, and that statement can imply things far beyond the scope of what you wrote. If you've ever read Bubbles you might remember how the style is very simplistic, with Derpy telling the reader all sorts of things that other writers might try to show instead, like the things that makes her happy, or her favourite foods, or what might make her sad. The thing is, telling here is not an error, because what the writer was trying to portray subtly is not Derpy's emotions or her interests. The thing the writer was trying to infer here was Derpy's simplemindedness, and the relationship she has with her mother.
By this definition, that is "telling" us individual things about Derpy, but "showing" the big picture of Derpy that we put together from those things.
Showing
Catlett's voice said, "I like you to meet my associate, the Bear. Movie stuntman and champion weight lifter, as you might've noticed. Picks up and throws out things I don't want."
Chili looked at the thickness of the guy's body, at red and gold hibiscus blossoms and green leaves on a field of Hawaiian blue, but wouldn't look at his face now. He knew they were hibiscus, because Debbie used to grow them on Meridian Avenue before she flipped out and went back to Brooklyn.
Now the guy was saying, "I know Chili Palmer. I know all about him."
The Bear sucking in his stomach and acting tough, his crotch right there in Chili's face. This guy was as nuts as Debbie. You could tell he had his stomach sucked in, because the waistband was creased where the guy's gut ordinarily hung over and rolled it, the pants as out of shape as this guy trying to give him a hard time. But Chili didn't look up.
Catlett said, "We think you ought to turn around and go back to Miami."
Chili still didn't look up. Not yet.
The Bear said, "Take your ten grand with you, while you still have it."
And Chili almost looked up—this guy as much as telling him he had been in his hotel room, nothing to it, saw all that dough and left it—but he didn't. Chili kept his eyes on the guy's waist and saw the stomach move to press against the elastic band, the guy still putting on his show but giving his gut a breather. Chili looked at the guy's crotch one more time before moving his gaze up through the hibiscus till he was looking at the guy's bearded face.
Chili said, "So you're a stuntman," with the look he'd use on a slow pay. "Are you any good?"
What the Bear did in that next moment was grin and turn his head to the side, as if too modest to answer and would let Catlett speak for him. It made the next move easier, the guy not even looking as Chili grabbed a handful of his crotch, stepped aside and yanked him off the stairs. The Bear yelled out of pain and fear and caught Chili's head with an elbow going by, but it was worth it to see that beefy guy roll all the way down the stairs to land on the main floor. Chili kept watching till he saw the guy move, then looked up at Catlett.
"Not bad, for a guy his size."— Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.
He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose.
His head was still inclined to one side and his glance was oblique. He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation. And when they had paid for the rounds of beers and were ready to depart they did not suggest that he join them.— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
A movie couldn’t show you that Singer “could think of nothing else to tell about himself”, so by the first definition above, it’s a little telly. But it describes what passes through Singer’s head, rather than summarizing it as “Singer was too depressed to say anything else,” so by the second definition it’s more showy.
On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of humankind. He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternity. Dahlmann was warmed by the rightness of the man’s hairband, the baize poncho he wore, his gaucho trousers, and the boots made out of the skin of a horse’s leg, and he said to himself… that only in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”
Telling
Long after separating from Oki, she was shocked to read in A Girl of 16 that on his way to meet her he would be trying to decide how to make love to her, and that he usually did exactly as he had planned. She found it appalling that a man’s heart would “throb with joy as he walked along thinking about it.” To a spontaneous young girl like Otoko it had been inconceivable that a man would plan in advance his lovemaking techniques, their sequence, and the like. She accepted whatever he did, gave whatever he asked. Her youth made her all the more unquestioning. Oki had described her as an extraordinary girl, a woman among women. Thanks to her, he wrote, he had experienced all the ways of making love.
When she read that, Otoko burned with humiliation. But she could not suppress her lively memories of his lovemaking; her body tensed and began to quiver. Finally the tension was released, and delight and satisfaction spread through her whole body. Her past love had come back to life.
— Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Nobel for literature, Beauty and Sadness
“I think we shall keep friends.”
“I know we shall.”
“Quite so.”
As soon as they had exchanged this admission, a wave of relief passed through them both, and then transformed itself into a wave of tenderness, and passed back. They were softened by their own honesty, and began to feel lonely and unwise.
...
Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers’ quarrel. Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable. And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by gleams of day that leaked up around the edges of the earth, and by the stars.
…
The English people walked a few steps back into the darkness, united and happy. Thanks to their youth and upbringing, they were not upset by the accident. They traced back to the writhing of the tires for the source of the disturbance.… Adela in her excitement knelt and swept her skirts about, until it was she if anyone who appeared to have attacked the car. The incident was a great relief to them both. They forgot their abortive personal relationship, and felt adventurous as they muddled about in the dust.
...
They sped off, and Mr. Harris, after a reproachful glance, squatted down upon his hands. When English and Indians were both present, he grew self-conscious, because he did not know to whom he belonged. For a little he was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended, and he belonged to no one but himself.— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
For the hours that Gogol is at nursery school, fingerpainting and learning the English alphabet, Ashima is despondent, unaccustomed, all over again, to being on her own. She misses her son’s habit of always holding on to the free end of her sari as they walked together. She misses the sound of his sulky, high-pitched little boy voice, telling her that he is hungry, or tired, or needs to go to the bathroom. To avoid being alone at home she sits in the reading room of the public library, in a cracked leather armchair, writing letters to her mother, or reading magazines or one of her Bengali books from home.
...
From the beginning he feels useless. Moushumi makes all the decisions, does all the talking. He is mute in the brasseries where they eat their lunches, and in the shops where he gazes at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens; mute on the rainy afternoon they spend together at the d’Orsay. He is particularly mute when he and Moushumi get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute and arguing around paper covered tables. He struggled to grasp the topic of conversation — the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K — but everything else is a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices.— Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the Pulitzer for literature, The Namesake
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist — somewhere in some hexagon.
— Jorge Luis Borges, winner of the Pulitzer for international ilterature, “The Library of Babel”
They went outside, and while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they stuck the needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”
The usual formula for showing is that a scene is shown, with some told embellishments (e.g., the first Borges quote). For telling, a passage’s or a sentence's purpose and critical information may be told, and then rounded out by the details shown (e.g., Lahiri, Borges), or explained by a shown simile or metaphor ("A spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly", "He was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended). Or showing and telling may mingle freely, as in the rest of the Forster passages.
Here are some ideas about what showing and telling do differently:
Showing is more engaging
That’s the reason Ezn gives in his guide’s section on show vs. tell. But this begs the question: More engaging in what way? This is not a useful theory, because I don’t know what “engaging” means, and because it doesn’t tell us when telling is good. We need an explanation that gives us a test for when to show and when to tell.
Showing gives more specific images
Consider these pairs:
Jenny was happy. / Jenny skipped down the sidewalk.
Ben was embarrassed. / Ben’s face reddenned.
Rarity revelled in the joy of creation. / Rarity hummed a tune as she passed a long strip of red cloth through her sewing machine. (from Ezn’s guide)
Some say that the showing is more specific than telling. But is it? No; it paints a more specific image, but is more ambiguous about abstract emotion and thought. The examples on the right each give us a visual image, but Jenny may skip while bored or restless, Ben may be hot or angry, and Rarity may be looking forward to her hot date with your OC that evening.
Telling gives more specific thoughts & feelings
Telling is better when you need us to know exactly what a character is thinking. It’s essential when there’s no way to show what they’re thinking. How could Lahiri have shown that Ashima missed Gogol? How could Borges have shown that Dahlmann was thinking back to his time in the sanitarium?
Conversely, as GhostOfHeraclitus noted, showing is better if you want a character’s motives or feelings to be ambiguous, as for instance when describing the actions of a suspect in a mystery.
Showing vs. telling is a trade off of being specific about visual imagery (showing) versus internal thoughts and feelings (telling). These two approaches appeal to different types of people. The kind of person who goes to see movies because they have great special effects and doesn’t care about plot or character will prefer stories that show. The kind of person who prefers fiction about ideas and feelings should be more tolerant of stories with a lot of telling.
I don’t know if that’s the case. Harry Potter has more telling than the idea-laden writings of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, or even Lahiri's, which start most paragraphs with a single told summary and then fill it out with shown details. But certainly action scenes need showing, because action is kinetic and visual. And if Ezn’s statement that telling is more “engaging” means “has more action scenes” (e.g., “Peter Jackson made The Hobbit more engaging”), then showing is more engaging than telling. But I wouldn’t use the word “engaging” that way myself. I found Tolkien’s Hobbit more engaging.
Summarizing directs focus
Jhumpa Lahiri could have shown Gogol remaining mute while Moushumi and her friends talked, and failing to grasp the conversation. But we could have inferred many other things from those bare facts, and wandered down many digressing lines of thought. We might have thought the author meant for Monica Lewinsky or Y2K to be metaphors for something. Summarizing the conversation tells us that they signify nothing and we should ignore them.
Showing lets you communicate feelings that we don’t understand
That’s the claim I made in my annotation of that excerpt from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers, the author, shows us for three pages what John Singer does, without entering his head and describing his feelings, because Singer does not understand and could not describe his feelings at the time.
GhostOfHeraclitus responded that we can also use telling to express feelings that aren’t lexicalized, such as “the emotion of wanting something, being ashamed of wanting it, but being unable and to an extent unwilling to give up that want”, or “the admixture of melancholy and nostalgia which happens when you return to a place you haven't been for a very long time and see the fragments of your past life scattered and decontextualized, familiar yet foreign”.
If you understand what you’re trying to get across well enough to summarize it, then you could tell it, probably in many fewer words. But to do that, you need to analyze that feeling, and you risk getting it wrong, because:
Telling states an opinion; showing pretends to reserve judgement
That’s one of the points I made it in a blog post I wrote last year and haven’t posted yet called “Superman Taught me to Kill”, and again in a comment on that same annotation post: Good authors deal with things that they don’t entirely understand, and if they tried to summarize them, they’d probably get it wrong. A reader can rarely tell whether a long explanation makes sense or is possible in the real world, but can easily tell when characters act unrealistically. Showing keeps the author honest.
Jorges Luis Borges argues the opposite in his short stories “Funes the Memorious” (a man who remembers so many details about everything that he understands nothing) and “The Immortal”:
I reflected that Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes; I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos combined them differently than I, constructed them from different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives.… I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been 1100 years since last I wrote it.
… [several pages of detailed show-don’t-tell autobiography intervene]
A year has passed, and I reread these pages. I can attest that they do not stray beyond the bounds of truth, although… I believe I detect a certain falseness. That is due, perhaps, to an overemployment of circumstantial details, a way of writing that I learned from the poets; it is a procedure that infects everything with falseness, since there may be a wealth of details in the event, yet not in memory.
Borges seems to be saying that telling is less truthful because it presents too many distracting details (and says something similar in “Funes”). I am saying that summarizing—choosing which details to keep and which to throw out—is the main source of falseness. I could argue that the purpose of literature is to pursue arguments that are too complex for humans to reason about logically. Writers who summarize will inevitably get some of it wrong.
Telling invokes conscious reasoning; showing bypasses it
One might imagine that it would be more difficult to write propaganda using showy language, if it is more honest. This is not the case. Triumph of the Will is imagistic and therefore showy. While showy language does not distort what it presents, the person who chooses what is shown can still control its message. Telling risks being false by making a logical mistake, but it states its opinions explicitly, putting the reader on alert. Showing risks being false by choosing a misrepresentative set of things to show, and can slip lies by the reader more easily because it never gives them a chance to argue.
Telling gives information; showing makes the reader work for it
Showing the reader pieces of information that they must piece together may be more satisfying to them. Have you read a mystery where the solution comes entirely from one critical piece of information? I hate that. The more different pieces of information that come together to form the solution, the better the mystery.
The theory is that this operates in all forms of fiction, and readers enjoy / are more engaged with stories when they have to work harder to understand them. I think, though, it may be more important that conclusions they draw for themselves are more convincing than ones they are told.
Showing is masculine / sociopathic; telling is feminine
Stereotypically, women like to talk about feelings, and men do not. Romance novels are overstuffed with long telly monologues. Pornography only shows.
Hemingway seldom talks about his heroes’ feelings. In Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, the narrator tells us that Chili (“chill”) Palmer, the hero, is a man to whom right action is instinctive. He doesn’t dwell on things. When a woman wants to sleep with him, he is neither surprised nor excited, and doesn’t wonder why. He acts in ways that would seem to require planning ahead, yet we never see him plan ahead. He is behaviorally conditioned by life on the streets so that he acts immediately and impulsively in the correct way, whether this is punching or shooting a man at the right time, or leaving the key to a locker full of drug money outside the airport before going in to examine it. A rich internal life would only trip him up. And Leonard uses Chili’s voice as the narrator’s voice regardless of which character’s point-of-view he’s in.
You can see something similar in Camus’ The Stranger, whose main character claims not to have strong feelings, and who is supposed to represent the human condition (but appears to me to deliberately misrepresent it). Camus wrote The Stranger in first person so that we could get inside the narrator’s head and verify that he is unaware of having normal feelings. The story shows the narrator’s actions throughout events that should be charged with emotion (his mother’s death, a sexual romance, a killing). Even with his interior monologue, he has only sensory impressions that he can never translate into the expected emotions.
Anthony Burgess’ narrator in A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, is a different kind of sociopath, one who feels intense emotions, but doesn’t care about the feelings of strangers. His life is ultra-”masculine”: He is a gang leader who thinks only of status, sex, and violence. So his narration is mostly showing, though he sometimes uses adverbs to tell us how much he enjoys “the old ultra-violence”.
I’ve included two quotes above from Borges’ “The South”. The old gaucho, who represents masculinity, is only shown, and takes the pivotal action yet says nothing. Dahlmann, who is aware of his unmanliness, tells and talks.
Showing is remote; telling is intimate
This is a generalization of “Showing is masculine”. Bradel suggests this as a reason for the showing in that same scene from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Showing Singer from the outside moves us further away from him, which might be appropriate because of spoilerish plot issues described in that comment. In the excerpt from The Stranger above, the narrator doesn’t “pull the trigger”; he watches his grip close on the revolver, as if from a distance, moving himself outside of his body. Telling, conversely, draws us in closer to a character’s point of view.
Showing is slow; telling is fast
Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, quoted in Titanium Dragon’s annotation
In many great novels, things are told mostly when they would be difficult or time-consuming to show. Here we’re learning backstory. Back story is, by definition, not the story, and can usually be summarized. (But see Titanium Dragon’s comment below.)
This is a fantastic piece of blogging, and I don't feel like there's really anything I could hope to add to it or want to discuss right now. I think this is one of those things I'm going to want to come back and look at, frequently. It's a small reconceptualization of showing and telling that you do here, I think, but it's one that hits home for me a lot more than the conventional way of thinking about the two. I find it a little harder to categorize passages according to this, but I feel more of a natural balance between the two. In particular, I think it's worth comparing the Borges passage in your "Showing" section and the Lahiri passage in your "Telling" section. There's a natural similarity between the two, I think, and between the way they use listing—but there's also a considerable difference in effect.
The only other thing I particularly want to mention, before heading over to my own profile to tell people they need to come read this, is your bit about summarizing directing focus. This is one of those things I occasionally see very well done, and I wanted to mention a particular example from Amit's "A Description of a Fountain in Canterlot". There's a particular section of this piece that I found very striking, for the juxtaposition of detail and simplicity, and for exactly the reason you're describing.
I love that bit. It's like having a bucket of cold water upended over my head, every time I read it.
Blog post too big, everybody scared of commenting.
Well, anyway, I still find it interesting. You keep putting into words things I've learned by imitation. I think I could find examples for most (save the masculine/feminine one) of these show vs tell decisions in what I've posted on FimFiction. I've used them all deliberately, but without ever having put words to the decisions I was making.
1713815 Is the part you love the "perfect and unremarkable", as in, "perfection is uninteresting"?
Here's a potentially useful definition of showing vs telling: The purpose of writing its to communicate information. Telling is when the information is presented directly to the reader, and when the information is presented indirectly (i.e. grasping the information requires some inference on the part of the reader), that is showing.
In this sense, showing vs telling does not depend on the actual content of the writing but the purpose of the writing, such that a passage can be telly in one context but showy in another. If the purpose of a passage is to tell the reader that the narrator fired a gun, then "he fired the gun" is obviously telling while the Camus passage is showing. However if the purpose of the passage is different (e.g. showing that the narrator its a sociopath), then the sentence "he fired the gun" could still be part of a showy passage.
Of course, this begs the question: which information should writers tell and which information should they show?
1713841
Yes. There's this great extended description of one of the two inscriptions, going into not just how it was translated but the historical basis for the mistranslation, and the history of the fountain itself. This is near the beginning, but all part of one long passage of pure description. The whole thing is Amit basically giving the bird to storytelling, because this is Amit.
And then one paragraph, in the middle of all this description, that says, "This part isn't interesting."
As little narrative structure as there is to the piece, I don't think you could get away with this if you just said, "This part of the fountain is boring." Though I don't think the connotation of perfection being uninteresting is really that critical. Rather, it's the idea that every single thing about this fountain is worth commenting on, except one particular detail. For me, anyway, it flips the entire piece on its head. The only part of the fountain I find memorable is the one part openly declared not to be memorable.
Conventionally, I think the historical digressions would be considered telling, but the vast majority of this piece is showing and I feel like the digressions ought to be considered of a piece with that, since they're largely offered as fact and without interpretation. It makes the rare instances of telling all the more intrusive and all the more compelling.
1713847 Well, writers shouldn't tell us the stuff that they want us to figure out on their own. "Telling" also kinda means "giving away". The stuff Mystic wrote about "implications outside the frame" have to do with this, her example being Bubbles, which had Derpy tell us things that made her happy and things that made her sad, but all that was showing us something about Derpy's simple nature. So it was "telly" language, but it was giving us clues that we still had to put together.
Okay this is a brilliant blogpost. I swear, forget the pony anthology, I'd buy "Bad Horse on Writing: A Bad Horse Blog Chrestomathy" in a heartbeat.
Also, when do you write all of this? Do you even sleep?
I don't have much to say--mostly because you've sort of said it all--but I have a minor heresy to suggest (semi-seriously).
"Show, don't tell," doesn't mean anything at all. It's not advice. It's barely actionable. Instead it is a mantra, a platitude, and as all such things it is either preposterously reductionist and false, or banal and true. We either interpret it to mean we ought to write like alien anthropologists or we interpret it to mean "write so the reader is engaged" which is to say "write so the reader believes you" which is to say "write well." The former is clearly rotten advice and the latter isn't really advice at all.
That's not to say blogposts like this one are useless. Quite the opposite. They are full of insight into the craft of writing. But their aim of understanding what "Show, don't tell" means is a futile one, because it doesn't mean anything.
Hah. How's that for (device) heresy?
I like to quantify "engaging" using its direct meaning: you engage the reader's mind, making it do work. Telling only requires that the mind accept, but showing (more like giving details sans the implications - body language, the chief of them all) is giving the brain puzzle pieces to figure out. Too much and it becomes boring, of course, all things in moderation and whatnot.
1714089
It's like the adverb scolding in that sense, then. Once you've hedged around it and made it vague enough to actually be true, it no longer means anything.
They're both pieces of advice for a 9th-grade composition class, because 9th graders are more likely to be way too tell-y, and more likely to use a bunch of adverbs instead of having a decent vocabulary. Trying to apply it once an author has moved beyond that level makes as much sense attaching training wheels and putting on arm floatees while training for a triathlon.
This is the definition I have been taught, and it makes me question the truth of "show, don't tell". It implies that the best literature could be just as easily (if not better) communicated via film, which conflicts with my instinctual (or perhaps learned?) preference for literature as the superior medium. And yet, in consideration, literature's greatest advantage over film is that it can be used to tell rather than show!
What advantages am I overlooking? Or isn't literature the better medium? Is any medium truly superior to another? Does Superman: Red Son belong next to 1984?
And if telling is good, then when and how is it so?
1713817
It ain't that it's so long, it's that it's vague and doesn't go beyond the basic weakness of the adage in question. "Show don't tell" sucks for a reason: it's usually not the correct criticism for the problem.
1713847
Catalysts Cradle is onto something here.
1714089
and GhostOfHeraclitus completely nailed it!
What 'show don't tell' means in practice is, 'you're taking me out of the story by giving me shortcuts that prevent me experiencing what's happening'. "Twilight was sad but then she felt better" vs. twelve paragraphs of hopefully evocative purple prose. Really, evocative is the main word to use in understanding this complaint: 'show don't tell' ALWAYS means 'you're not being evocative enough'.
You don't always want to sit around being evocative. Some details and perspectives are not relevant to the point of the story or indeed the point of the experience.
Neither the word 'show' nor the word 'tell' are particularly illuminating of this dilemma, which is why folks get dragged into endless rumination about 'showy' and 'telly' with examples that could be either.
If you're not being evocative enough, you're not engaging the reader: you're giving them a set of facts to file away. If you're being TOO evocative, your reader is floating around dazedly in a cloud of vague impressions with no clue as to what's relevant.
If you get evocative over the stuff you want experienced, and summarize the stuff that the reader needn't 'walk through' personally, you'll strike the balance just fine.
I think most of the ideas here on the meaning of "show, don't tell" can be tied together by 1713847. "Show, don't tell" usually means "Don't be blunt, let your audience figure it out," where "it" is the main idea the author is trying to get across. I believe this resolves The 1713875 Paradox. If "telling" is synonymous with "being blunt" then it should be usable for shock effect since it can reveal things suddenly, more so than any "showing" can. It looks like this is exactly what Amit did, and exactly the effect it had on Bradel.
With that possibly out of the way, we can get to question you thought you posed: When is it better to dive into a thorough description, rather than summarize things? Looking at it like that, I believe the only proposals open to questions are:
I'll comment on these later, but for now I want to point out that all of these hint at seemingly much deeper questions than "What functionally is the difference between elaboration and summary?"
--
Easy to focus on. For stories, this usually means "immersive". With the first definition, I believe it's obvious that thorough descriptions aren't always more "engaging" since details can be boring. I also think it's obvious that subtlety isn't always more "engaging" since the reader can miss the implication.
1714130 What advantages am I overlooking?
Similes and metaphors outside of dialogue.
1713950
Yes, Mystic's "implications outside the frame" is a good description of what I'm talking about, and the passage from Bubbles illustrates the point quite nicely. You focus on the question of whether language is showy or telly. My point it that these descriptors apply not to the language of a passage, but the underlying ideas expressed by the passage. Because the role of the passage in Bubbles it not to describe Derpy's likes and dislikes but to reveal her simple nature, the passage succeeds in showing but not telling. However, if the exact nature of her likes and dislikes were important to the story (maybe they are; I don't recall having read the story yet), perhaps this passage would count as telly rather than showy.
My view on show vs. tell has always been that showing respects your audience's intelligence. That's how it engages the reader: by giving them something to chew on and figure out for themselves. The short passages cited as examples are ambiguous because they lack context, but a well-shown story, in total, is going to provide enough "clues", if you will, for the reader to piece everything together and come to a conclusion about what's happened and who felt what. Unless, of course, the point is for the conclusion to have multiple interpretations, which can be its own reward.
1714168
That sums it up for me:
Though I always approach it as a "point of view" question. If I read a passage where a character is given a piece of information, and his reaction is reported to me with the words, "But he didn't care," that to me is bad telling. It's infodump, the author breaking the fourth wall, turning directly to me, and telling me rather than taking the time to figure out a way to get that information to me within the context of the story itself. I'm kicked out of the story's world, out of the company of the characters who I'm supposed to care about and out of the setting that I want to be immersed in, and I don't like that.
It's why I never write in the omniscient viewpoint: because this sort of infodump seems to be second nature to that POV.
If, on the other hand, after the character above gets the information, I read, "But he decided that he didn't care," I'm getting the same information from the character's point of view. I'm still in the story, and while it's maybe not the more elegant way of getting the info to me, I don't react with nearly as much of a mental wince as I do from the author stopping the story to give me the same info.
Mike
The murders were on the tongue of everyone in the village, but no one could be seen wearing black.
The funeral service was short; the pews sat empty as the deacon spoke of Providence and Heaven before the gilded coffins.
Do those constitute "showy" ways of indicating someone was unmourned? If so, those are quite short indeed - shorter than many ways of telling the same, and the second even implies that they were rich, but still unliked. Though perhaps they are telly, just telly in a different way, and perhaps less so.
1714432
This may be one of the reasons I so often have a problem with show vs. tell advice. I understand the point you're getting at here, but at the same time I'd contend that in anything that's actually well-written, there's no appreciable difference between "But he didn't care," and "But he decided that he didn't care," except for an element of timing or the potential effectiveness of the phrases in 3rd person omniscient.
Why do I say this? Because in well-exectued 3rd person limited, the reader should be immersed in the perspective character's viewpoint far enough that any declarative statement like the above will be interpreted as character thought rather than author intervention. If you can't convince your reader that you're aware of what you're writing and you've put it there for a reason, all sorts of devices fall apart: foreshadowing, parallelism, unreliable narration, etc. The reader needs to believe in the author's intentionality—and that's, I think, probably the biggest issue with grammar, spelling, and usage errors. When I read a story and see basic English mistakes, it blocks me from assuming that the author is choosing what to write carefully.
I tend to agree with the idea that the real crux here is engagement or evocation, but this is one of the reasons I found that Lahiri passage so interesting: it's both engaging and evocative without being showy at all, really.
So I really believe that 1714089 is hitting this on the head: "show, don't tell" is basically a cheap analog of "write better". Past some point of skill, I think it's essentially worthless as advice.
Though I don't think looking at showing and telling like Bad Horse is doing is worthless. There are good reasons why an author might want to choose one technique over the other to relay information, and clearly the wholesale abandonment of either would be idiocy. But understanding the effect that the two have on what a story is accomplishing and how it's affecting the reader is important to understanding when you might want to pick one over another—or perhaps more importantly, when you might want to go back and alter something you've already drafted to shift around the tone and the way it'll hit the reader.
1714534 I'd call those showy. Did you write them? They're very good.
1714687
1714534
Seconded! Those are properly good lines. The first one, especially, would be a killer way to start a story.
I feel like I could graduate in writing just from your blogposts.
So many of them are already in my bookmarks for later revisits and you still keep adding more, expanding my limited knowledge. 
A sincere thank you for your blogposts.
1714687
1715214
Yes, I wrote them. I was thinking about different ways of saying the bit from Harry Potter about the much unloved Riddles in a more showy way.
1715503
Well you managed it, and then some.
I feel as if I've finally cadged an invitation to some literary dinner party, only to find that everyone else has brought a nice bottle of wine while I've shown up with a case of PBR.
All I can do is try to act hip and hope the pants carry me through...
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"Labradors? Nah, those're flatcoated retrievers. You've probably never heard of them."
No but seriously, for someone who's as keen on the written word as I (think I) am, I've only read "smalle Latine and lesse Greeke"--that is, very little of what we'd call literature. And I can't even claim it's due to misfortune or injustice, merely inclination.
I aspire to the standards of the better genre writers. That is all. Roger Zelazny, Dorothy Dunnett, Fritz Lieber...one might mention Tolkien but really, Tolkien built his own school of literature from the ground up, hewing every damned stone of it from the roots of English by hand. If he's a genre writer, it's a genre of one. He's out of my league.
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"STFU, Ed."
I don't want to be a Proust, a Borges, not even a Phillip K. Dick. They are cosmologists of the written word. I just want, like Ariosto and Neil Armstrong, to fly to the moon. So my literary pursuits, like my professional ones, run not to clean science but grubby engineering. Nor am I given to rigorous studies of my trade. I cannot be theoretical, impartial, indifferent (worse--I can't even pretend to be). I tinker, jerry-rig, "eye it out" with shameless enthusiasm. I learn by trial and error, like a kid with a chemistry set.
I suppose this explains not just my creative life, but my professional and love-life as well. And I like to think I've learned an interesting fact or two in between the fires and explosions (which I could really have done without but if you're going to screw up--fires and explosions are the way to go).
Philistine? Well may be. But I like to think the roots of inquiry are there, even if they're ill-bred and running to seed. And while I might learn as much by just showing up to lecture, I prefer to learn it by blowing up the lab. Experiment, and you'll see!
1714534
It's as if Roger Zelazny had written the Waverly novels!
"In a fit of despair he read all of the Waverly novels in one month, scorning anything so easy as suicide."--Richard Armor
1714401 Yes; that's important enough that I went back and added it.
1716920
Your original post is now mixing orthogonal translations of "show" and "tell", and it's not trying to differentiate between them when saying "Showing does X; telling does Y." That's like asking for "soda" at a restaurant.
1716977 Can you point out where that happens?
1730352
It happens for most of the "reasons proposed for why X is better".
When I'm talking about "telling":
(1) means "describing thoughts and feelings"
(2) means "summarizing events"
(3) means "blunt"
and for "showing":
(1) means "bare facts"
(2) means "as things happen"
(3) means "subtle"
Showing is more engaging
This one references Ezn's guide, which itself mixes translations. Looking at the differences between the show and tell examples, the first example with Twilight and Celestia uses (2), and it does the opposite of (1) under "show". The following Pinkie example uses (1) and the opposite of (2) under "tell". The Fluttershy example uses the opposite of (1) and (2), the Applejack one uses all three, and the Rarity one uses both (1) and (2). That post is either confused or misunderstood.
Showing gives more specific images
Telling gives more specific thoughts & feelings
Showing lets you communicate feelings that we don’t understand
Only (1) and (3) can be consistent with the explanations under all of these. (How can a summary of anything be more specific than a moment-to-moment description?)
Telling states an opinion; showing reserves judgement
The explanation here focuses entirely on (2).
Telling invokes conscious reasoning; showing bypasses it
This one states the exact opposite of (3), and therefore cannot be using (3).
Telling gives information; showing makes the reader work for it
And this one exactly states (3).
Showing is masculine / sociopathic; telling is feminine
Showing is remote; telling is intimate
The explanations here only work with (1).
1730531
Telling gives more specific thoughts & feelings because showing doesn't give thoughts or feelings at all. It gives external indications of them.
Yes.
I disagree. "Subtle" often means subtle effects invoked by bypassing reasoning. "Blunt" typically means "stated directly" versus "implied by e.g. body language (telling)". You seem to be using "blunt" and "subtle" in ways that are orthogonal to the "show" vs. "tell" distinction as I see it. I don't really like your (3) distinction for that reason; it's too ambiguous.
You keep saying some explanation works only with one definition, as if that were a problem. If they don't contradict the others, it isn't a problem.
1731209
This was supposed to be a clarification of (2), but it sounds exactly like (1) to me. Is (2) supposed to be a generalization of (1)?
They give results that don't work with (3). (3) seems to be the main problem here, and rereading some responses here, I think I can understand the confusion.
First thing, I believe Catalysts Cradle, presentperfect, and I (and no one else that commented directly on this) are all using the same interpretation of (3). If you're trying to understand (3) as we do, you can skip Augie's, Ghost's, and Applejinx's posts, which don't make sense if you try to relate them to (3).
Second, a question to clarify what you're thinking:
1713950 >all that was showing us something about Derpy's simple nature. So it was "telly" language, but it was giving us clues that we still had to put together
Can a sentence tell when read alone, and show when read as part of a larger passage?
And third, my own response to clarify what I'm thinking:
Yes, the scope of an excerpt can determine whether or not the excerpt is showing or telling. That means the distinction is sensitive to some context, and so we can rule out (1) since it does not take any context into account. The context for (2) is the perceived narrator's focus, and the context for (3) is the perceived author's intent. Both can change between "reader reads a single sentence" and "reader reads a scene". "Show, don't tell" under (2) means "Explain exactly what the narrator is thinking or seeing," while under (3) it means "Don't state this explicitly, but make sure you give the reader enough to figure this out."
Back to my earlier comment about (3) not working with Showing is remote; telling is intimate. Off the top of my head, there's only one instance I can think of where subtlety brings me into a character's head, and that's Chapter 16 (Generosity) of Siren Song. At the beginning, the protagonist is just describing the irregularities of the city she's in, and the implication is one that hits in a way that drops me squarely into the protagonist's head in a "oh damnit, I understand what she's thinking" way. I believe the same method can be used to get readers to empathize with characters they consider villains, cases where the reader is reluctant to empathize and has to be tricked into it by making their own connections.