Showing versus telling: tread the minefield...

This is a subject I've spent the last few weeks exploring and have come to the conclusion that novice authors must slavishly stick to the rule "show and don't tell", whilst those with a track record sometimes break this and many other rules such as author intrusion (which is a form of telling), going off at tangents, shifting viewpoint etc. This is because they have an established readership, which, in theory, means a ready market for future novels.

Showing rather than telling is also a thing of literary fashion. Many Victorian writers did it with impunity. Dickens did a whole load of telling, especially of the author intrusion kind, but, in doing so, provided us with a wonderful social history of the time.

Put simply:

"telling" is desciption,
"showing" is dramatisation.

You don't write: Suzie looked really sad.  ...telling
You do write Suzie slumped in her chair and hung her head. ...showing


You don't write: 'You are so annoying, I could punch you,' James said angrily.  ...telling
You do write: James punched the wall and then shook his fist at Luke. 'I'll rearrange your face if you don't shut your fat gob.' ...showing


And now an example of a first draft extract from my novel for older children. I've coloured green anything constituting "telling", when "showing" would do better:

A smooth-talking presenter, called Denis, flashes a smile stuffed with polished dentures at a rather dim-looking woman called Bev as she coos over a velvet-lined box of cheap jewellery that Denis is holding. His hands have immaculately manicured nails emerging from pinstriped shirt cuffs fastened by gold-plated cufflinks with pretend diamonds.


Apart from having obvious examples of telling, there is also too much information in these two sentences. This holds up the story. The reader doesn't need all this detail, because the reader is intelligent enough to fill in the gaps for himself. Make it as simple as the brush strokes in a Japanese painting and leave the rest to imagination.

And now a revision of the earlier draft:

The presenter, Denis, flashes his false teeth at a woman called Bev, who has straightened hair and a fake tan. She shrieks with delight at some gold loop earrings that Denis shows her, as if they're special, when I've seen ones exactly like them in the Pound Shop. I expect Denis' cufflinks are from the Pound Shop, too.


In the first draft, the author speaks. The twelve-year-old first-person narrator, Noah, might as well have disappeared off for a cup-of-tea backstage. It is a description with all the gaps filled in and with no room left for imagination. Also, all of us have different ideas about what constitutes a "dim-looking" or "smooth-talking" person.

The rewrite is a narration from Noah's point-of-view and in terms that relate to his life experience. The word-count of the two examples are about the same but somehow the second one reads faster and is simpler to take in. This is further assisted by dividing it into three shorter sentences rather than two longer ones.

As a general rule, be sparing with adjectives and adverbs. If you're using too many of them, you're probably also doing too much telling. Especially don't use adverbs in dialogue, as above in "James said angrily".

Of course, sometimes telling is a perfectly justifiable way of building a narrative bridge between scenes. For instance, you don't want a scene dramatised with a whole load of action and dialogue, when you need to get a character from A to B and the finer details of the journey are not essential to the plot. You don't need to describe every time someone stops at a traffic light in their car, or how many trees they pass on route, or if they have to stop for a pee, and so on. But you would want to dramatise a journey in which a deer runs across the road in front of the car and causes an accident, or your wife goes into labour miles away from civilisation.

On closer inspection, often a bridge passage can be dumped altogether in the same way that scenes are cut in films.

Summarising is another form of telling and a cop-out at the end of a novel for which your readers may not ever forgive you. Novels must have a dramatic conclusion and not give an impression of the writer having run out of steam or lost interest in the project. Summaries at the end of books are for non-fiction.

How do I know all the above?

...Because I'm savagely revising my novel for older children and wincing every time I come across blatant examples of inappropriate telling, or the author standing on her soapbox moralising about some environmental or social issue, when the story is meant to be told in the voice of a 12-year-old.

...Because there's a whole chapter towards the end of the book, posing as one of the book's characters telling their side of the story to Noah, when it is really a summary.

In the above instance, the use of summary isn't because the author was getting bored with the novel, but because she was getting worried about whether publishers would consider her word-count too high for a first novel!

In conclusion, it is quite permissible for a first-draft to contain too much telling, author intrusion, summaries, over-use of adjectives and adverbs, misspellings, grammatical errors etc., as the most important thing is that nothing should interfere with the author's flow of thought as she gets her idea down on paper. But the author must acknowledge it is a first-draft and not final copy.

The majority of published authors have done numerous revisions prior to seeing their final work in print.    
        
Good luck ...