Show and Tell Time

I've been writing about how to make your pieces more literary.  For the next few weeks, I'll be pairing that theme with experts' suggestions that I heard at the League of Utah Writers conference this last weekend.  This week's featured expert is McKelle George, author and editor of Flux Publishing. 

Authors are always being told to show not tell, but George says that the trick is to find the right balance.  Doing one or the other all the time gets boring.  Show can get confusing if there's no tell to pin it down and explain. If it's all dramatized, the reader can get lost.  If they have to infer everything without any confirmation they're right, they won't be sure what's going on.  Tell can get boring because it's simply narration.  Narration without action is summary and gets dull.  She described telling as the skeleton and showing as the soft parts.  One without the other is incomplete. 

I once read a novel that showed EVERYTHING.  The author described every moment in vivid detail.  It dragged.  I couldn't tell what was important.  It was all highlighted and got dull.  I've also read pieces where there is next to no description.  I put them down as quickly as possible because they're intolerable. 

George said good telling "marks a change, a physical jump in time or space or a subtle shift in mood that carries the reader from one emotional beat to another."  Those parts confirm what the reader infers, "directing emotional takeaways."  Meanwhile, show is useful in getting the reader to feel things, to have a "strong visceral reaction."  She says, "A novel is a series of dramatic scenes joined together by narration, which covers the passage off time."  If nothing is happening, the writer may be lovely, but the show isn't doing its job. 

It's your job as a writer to carefully review your writing to make sure that balance of show and tell is there.  If your story is dragging or confusing, work on paring back description, so you're narrating to avoid confusion.  If your character is eyeball deep in major events, show them.  Don't describe every detail of the ornate hallway on the way to the big combat, or your description of the combat will just blend in. Highlight what the reader should feel strongly about, not just what looks pretty. 

At that same conference, I had the first chapter of an early chapter book I wrote reviewed by freelance editors.  I found I'd told in all the places that I should have shown and was showing things that could just be summarized.  It can be hard to strike that balance, so it helps to get outside eyes to look at your work to see if it works. 

It's your turn.  Go and read your piece out loud.  Are there places it drags or is unnecessarily pretty?  Are there places where your reader might get lost?  Are there places where something interesting or important is happening that you haven't described?  It's time to fix it.