Elevate Your Writing with Show & Tell Techniques

Introduction (00:01)

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:40)  

Welcome, welcome. I’m so excited about this episode. I have been wanting to do this for – Marie and I were just saying – almost three years. Marie and I did a podcast. First of all, I’m sorry, I need to tell you: I’m here; I’m Boni Wagner-Stafford, Ingenium books. And I’m with Marie Beswick-Arthur and Amie McCracken, both of them accomplished writers and editors; both of them also part of the Ingenium Books team behind the scenes. And I’m very happy about that. 

So we’re talking about show versus tell today and the bane of many an author’s existence. But we have a little bit of a twist on this today, which is, we’re going to take a look at differing points of view. And I’m not talking about POV from a writing perspective; I’m talking about points of view on what the best ways to show are. And we have a position from Marie that arose in a podcast she and I did almost three years ago from the date of this recording, that dialogue is the best way. And Amie, who has the opinion that there are a range of ways to do it. Now, these are positions that we’ve created. We’ve established the boundaries a little bit more rigidly for the purposes of this podcast. So we’ll just see how that goes. Okay. So, Marie, do you want to start us off and talk about why you say dialog is the best way to show? And then I’ll come to you, Amie.

Marie Beswick-Arthur (02:21)  

Well, I think, yeah, I have to be careful and say, I know, it’s not the only way to show. But dialogue is such a powerful way to show because it does a lot. And one line of dialogue can talk about setting, can introduce a mood, advance a plot, and show you the character. And so it can carry a big load. And that helps when you’re not just cutting words, but when you’re really wanting to have your reader move through a lot of different things in an intense time. Certainly, the telling part has its purpose too. So I like it, because it’s a really, really – it’s a workhorse.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (03:12)  

That makes sense. Amie, what do you think?

Amie McCracken (03:16)  

The funny thing with dialogue for me is I actually like using it to show how the character is hiding pieces of themselves. Whereas the description, the narrator can give insight, depending on if – it depends on the narrator because sometimes the narrator is not reliable. But the narrator can show, where I think dialogue could actually be used in a negative sense where you wouldn’t use it to show in order to hide what the character is truly feeling or give an undertone. Although in that sense, if you’re giving the undertone, like you said, it is a workhorse. It does its job, for sure.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (04:08)  

I guess we should just back up a little bit; there may be listeners who are new to the concept of show versus tell. So I’m going to ask each of you to describe one of the show versus tell and talk about what it is. So Marie, if I get you to talk about what show is, and then Amie, I’ll get you to talk about tell. And then after that, we’ll explore when you would use one or the other. So Marie, first of all, what is show? What do we talk about? What do we mean when we say we’re “showing” in your writing?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (04:42)  

Well, showing – and especially, we probably have to talk about whether it’s first person or third person because obviously dialogue is a lot different in first person than it is in when you have a narrator, whether they’re insecure or not trustworthy. They can do a lot more telling. So dialogue is – you sort of caught me off guard here because I wasn’t going to say too much – but dialogue: Dialogue is so much the opposite of what telling is it. It takes us through long pieces of very powerful places where we want, I think, where we want the reader to slow down and where we want them to catch every detail. So I always say the important stuff, which doesn’t mean the tell is not the important stuff either, but it’s more long and sweeping than transitional for me.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (05:48)  

Right. Okay, Amie describe what telling is.

Amie McCracken (05:54)  

Telling is describing. Very shortly, telling is when you’re utilizing what you see, and you’re describing it. You’re not necessarily letting us feel it; you are giving it to us by describing it. So in the sense of if someone is angry, “She was angry,” is very simply telling. We want to experience that anger; we want to be in that moment and feel what that person is feeling. And so telling is somewhat the opposite of that, in that it simplifies everything and gives us detail but in a descriptive way.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (06:47)  

Right. So I’m just looking off to the side here, because I’m looking to see if I have a fairly quick example. So I’m going to keep looking while we’re talking about the next thing. They each play a role. I was trying to – there is a quote that I can’t remember the second half of, which is what sent me over here to see if I can find another example. But there’s a quote from somebody whose name I can’t remember; this is so bad. Talks about, “Don’t tell me the moonlight is glinting off the water. Show me,” something. Do either of you know that quote?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (07:23)  

Yeah, it’s a Russian author. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (07:29)  

Right, right. 

Marie Beswick-Arthur (07:33)  

I can’t remember. I can see the book.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (07:35)  

Yeah, anyway, not to hold us up here.

Marie Beswick-Arthur (07:42)  

But just to add here, just to add then, I think Amie and I are saying exactly the same thing. Because in a book, the author is in dialogue with the reader the whole way through. It’s just how they’re choosing to speak and share the message with the reader and balance their dialogue with the characters’ dialogue and the description. Because I made it sound like, oh, well, then we’re just saying, “Oh, well, meanwhile, Arthur did this. And four years later, they landed in California.” Well, I didn’t mean to sound like telling is that because telling can be extremely proseful where, say you’re describing a dance: That is not dialogue, but you can describe a dance in an almost poetic way. That is a telling as well. So as Amie was describing that, I was like, “Hang on a second.” Yeah. It’s fulfilling a promise to the reader to have a dialogue with them that will include dialogue and telling.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (08:56)  

Right. I have a little quote here. It has a little bit of dial— I’m going to read it and then I’ll get you guys to comment on is it showing, is it telling, would it be more effective one way or another? It’s from a draft manuscript. This is not from anybody that I’m going to mention because I haven’t got the permission. I’m going to change a couple of things just in a minor way. So the dialogue starts with, “‘Call me Shelley,’ she corrected, slightly annoyed that he was interrupting her now.” So is that showing or telling?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (09:39)  

It’s editable. (Laughter.) 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (09:42)  

Everything is editable. 

Marie Beswick-Arthur (09:44)  

I’m not comfortable with it, so – as an editor.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (09:48)  

Right. So that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. So if you saw that as an editor …

Marie Beswick-Arthur (09:52)  

Don’t tell me, you’re interrupting, like dialoguing me, but … Sorry, do you feel that way too?

Amie McCracken (09:57)  

Yeah, no, I totally agree. The funny thing is it has potential but it needs adjusted because just by her saying, “Call me Shelley,” especially if she interrupted the line before …

Boni Wagner-Stafford (10:12)  

And she did. 

Amie McCracken (10:14)  

Then you don’t need to tell me that she interrupted. I think that’s the main reason this rule exists, is telling tends to be repetitive. It tends to tell us what we already know. And that’s why you avoid it. You don’t avoid it when you need fast-paced, easy description. There is a place to tell me something. But if you have her interrupt the line, and then tell me that she interrupted the line, you’re telling me as the reader that I’m too stupid to realize that the other speaker got interrupted. And that’s what you want to stay away from: You want to trust that your reader can understand body language, even through your writing; that they can understand how humans interact and the way that humans work. And you don’t need to repeat the information so that it’s like, ingrained.

Marie Beswick-Arthur (11:15)  

And that’s what we talked about three years ago with one of those, you know, seven year thing, is that this is what we end up doing because we don’t understand showing and telling very well. We show it and we tell it a moment later. And it just destroys the whole narrative. Because there is a place for both. And that – I mean, I love that you hit us with something we’ve never heard before. We both responded the same way, like just cringing, because sorry, to whoever did that, said that, but it’s just such a common mistake. And Amie and I both heard it. And we’re both very different editors. But that we both heard it and had that same feeling ...

Boni Wagner-Stafford (12:00)  

Yeah. So one of the things I always look at, rightly or wrongly, is if I’m looking at a manuscript and the narrator/author is putting the name of an emotion on the page, or what I really like is when they say the feeling had no name. It’s like, “Eh.” So let’s talk about that. Is that something that you both look for? And is there a place for us to do that, to say, in telling, “Oh, she was angry,” as opposed to showing us how that anger manifests in either the behaviour or something else?

Amie McCracken (12:57)  

Hugely. I think it has a lot to do with pacing, because you want to emphasize certain things. So if the emphasis of that moment is that she’s angry, we want to be more in it with her. But if the emphasis of the moment is something entirely different, you don’t want to put our focus on her anger; you want to put our focus where it belongs. But the fact that she’s angry adds to it, so it doesn’t mean that you completely skip that part. I think it’s just a matter of making sure you’re directing the reader’s attention to the proper things and not giving us emphasis on unnecessary things.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (13:52)  

Right. 

Marie Beswick-Arthur (13:54)  

Agreed. I think to that, you know, as soon as we start talking about this, it sort of starts layering and you’re like, well, we’re not going to be able to talk about this without talking about structure and ways of narrative because if this was a child narrator in a book, it might look very anger; it might look very different than anger in, say, an adult written book or depending on who the character is. But what I like what Amie said, and what I think, is that if you’re going to use dialogue for the anger, you’re not going to use it in the attribution, “she said angrily”. You know, there’s, it’s just, “she said”. But if you’re going to use it in the tell – and I don’t want to step over into the tell part if the show part is mine to handle here – is, then you’ll maybe want to tell what it is she’s angry about, and don’t even have to have any dialogue. Because whatever would make us, you know, raving mad, is going to be able to be described: If it was someone that cut you off in traffic, rather describe, say, the road and the car, and the feeling of being late than how she felt if it was something related to how she was going to shout at the driver who made her angry. So it is a balance and it is pacing, if that’s key to the plot.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (15:26)  

Right. Yeah, exactly. Amie, comments on that?

Amie McCracken (15:30)  

Yeah. Yeah, I think, also going back to what you had said, Boni, about describing the feeling itself: One of the key ways to see where you might be telling is to look for those cue words, like, “it seemed,” “it heard,” “it sounded,” “it felt,” “it smelled.” Those are not getting across what it actually feels like. They’re giving you a sense of what it feels like but we want to be immersed; we want to feel it with the character. And that’s just a nice, easy way to catch yourself and see when you might be telling. And you can then decide, “Does it make sense here? Is it okay to do that?” Because it’s not black and white; it’s not, “Get rid of every single line of telling.”

Boni Wagner-Stafford (16:24)  

No, otherwise, the manuscripts would all be 100,000, 200,000 to 500,000 words long. So that’s the other thing, is that showing takes longer. Right?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (16:40)  

Showing takes longer in most cases, I think, unless you’re describing something incredibly from a, you know, eagle’s view, and you’re using a lot of proseful words to really have this epic scene that has no dialogue. But typically, yes, dialogue takes longer. That’s why it needs to work harder, and do more things than just be a conversation.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (17:10)  

Right. So that brings us back to that opening position about whether dialogue is the only way to show or can we be showing in prose. And I think we are all in agreement about when it’s done effectively, dialog is a really important tool. But can we show when we are just writing in the text? And Amie, you just alluded to a couple of ways to pick up whether you’re telling with those “saw”, “seemed”, “heard” or “felt”, those kinds of things. But can you talk a little bit about what are some other ways to recognize and to use showing outside of dialogue?

Amie McCracken (18:02)  

Yeah, I think the funny thing is, is that it also tightens up your writing. Because one of the main things you can look for is if you’re using active writing and really strong verbs. And just by changing that – so instead of saying, “She was angry,” you’ve got passive going on there. And if you can get rid of passive voice, if you can make your writing really active, if you can give her a verb that goes with it, that is really doing the work, you’re tightening up your writing, but you’re also switching a lot of the telling into showing. And I think that’s where the original rule comes from. It makes for more active writing; it makes for more interesting writing. It’s just that you need to find a balance because it shouldn’t all be showing.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (18:57)  

Yeah. I recently looked at a manuscript and one of the things that jumped out at me when I was reviewing it, was how a character’s inability to identify his own emotion didn’t jive with the rest of the character development. And so I know this is crossing over from showing versus telling into character development, but you know, as with so much in our writing, everything is interrelated. But I’d love to talk a little bit about that, in how we match up how we show, particularly in dialogue, with where the character is at from an internal development perspective. Who wants to take that on first?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (20:02)  

I can start because I know Amie has way more experience than I do, I think, in joining it all together for other people. But what I was going to say as, that answers your question and also as what Amie was saying, is you have to get creative. So by combining the two and building your skills, you can – now I’m going from show to tell – you can combine the show and tell by simply, let’s say, instead of saying what they like to eat, you could work, say, a grocery list into – and that just came to me, just as Amie was speaking: If you were to put a grocery list, that’s not dialogue, but it’s certainly a different way to tell and develop and show who your character is. Because if they were to have a grocery list, each one of us has a very different grocery list: shows where we live, what’s available, what kind of food we eat, and also the mood we might be in. And so just that alone is a way to cross over and join that. You know, it is not one evil of showing versus telling. It’s, as Amie says, it’s a combination. I don’t know if that answered the question, but it starts the conversation.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (21:21)  

Yeah. It started there. It’s, you know, maybe there are – Amie, we can tweak the question for you in terms of how to match up the amount of showing or what we are showing with the character – and I guess if it’s a dialogue, it’s always character – but to make sure that they’re in alignment: How would we do that?

Amie McCracken (21:47)  

This is always something super hard to see in your own writing. It’s great to have someone else point it out to you. Because, like I said before, you want emphasis on the right things, which means you can use telling to have less emphasis on the things that still need to be there but don’t need to be delved into. And the same goes for dialogue: You can have your character say something or not say something, and getting that undertone really shows us who they are. But that can be very difficult to pick up in your own writing. It’s, this is where someone else reading it, even if it’s just a friend, they can say, “That doesn’t fit the character,” or, “If you said less here, I would be more intrigued.” That kind of pointing out is really helpful.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (22:50)  

When a writer is working on their draft – maybe it’s the first or second; doesn’t really matter – when do you think is the best time to be focusing on this? Is it as the first draft is coming out? I’ve heard it called a puke draft. I’ve heard it called, you know, “Make sure it’s craptastic,” which is my new favourite, lately. But when do you guys think it makes sense to start paying attention to that for a writer? I know it depends.

Marie Beswick-Arthur (23:28)  

It depends, for me, on the freefall because I’m a W.O. Mitchell fan, which for other people would be like a stream of conscious: I don’t worry about anything. That makes it harder for me later to do a search for all the times I’ve put the word “feel” or “felt” or “smelled” or “heard”. Or if I’m working on someone else’s manuscript. So, you know, Anne Lamott says, “that shitty first draft”. On the freefall, I don’t worry about any of it. But really on my second, third, fourth, and definitely on my fifth or tenth – and I’m serious about that – then I am really watching for that. And I miss it on my own stuff, but I catch it on other people’s.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (24:19)  

Right. Which is, you know, the value and purpose and benefit of having an editor, but that’s not the focus of today. So what do you think, Amie?

Amie McCracken (24:29)  

I would definitely say not in the first draft. But the funny thing is, the harder you work at skills like this, the better you will find your first drafts come out. The more you’re practising this type of thing – because it tightens your writing, because it makes for stronger writing – the more you practice it, the easier it’s going to come. So it’s not necessarily that you’ll always write terrible first drafts or that you won’t grow in your writing. It’s more the more you can play with it, the more you try to build these skills, the better those drafts will come out. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (25:13)  

Right. Which makes total sense. 

Marie Beswick-Arthur (25:15)  

True. Like your hands won’t even go there on the keyboard at certain parts because you know, you just don’t go there. You’re automatically going to (indiscernible).

Amie McCracken (25:25)  

Yeah. One of my pitfalls is the word “look”: My characters like to look at a lot of things. But I have edited my own work so much that I now know when I start to type the word “look”, I need to go backwards and pick a different verb.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (25:45)  

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, for writers who are – and I didn’t prep you guys for this in advance, so sorry for putting you on the spot – for writers who would like to practise or read more about it or what: What would you say? Do you have any go-to resources or books or, you know, we could ask people, offer to take a look at a paragraph: If people want to send us a paragraph, we can all kind of take a quick look. And maybe we can do that. 

Amie McCracken (26:17)  

Yeah. I would say, Show & Tell in a Nutshell by Jessica Bell is awesome, because it’s super simple. It shows you exactly – “show”, haha – exactly how to look at telling writing and reverse it around into showing.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (26:38)  

And I like that example because Jessica Bell is another one of our Ingenium Books team members. She does all our cover designs and she’s also a publisher. So again, the title of that was?

Amie McCracken (26:51)  

Show & Tell in a Nutshell.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (26:54)  

Show & Tell in a Nutshell by Jessica Bell. Marie, anything else come to you on that vein?

Marie Beswick-Arthur (26:58)  

So I’ll extend it from practices and into practices from books, because that is an excellent book. And Stephen King’s book On Writing is also very simple to understand, too. I really liked that, especially about his attributions for dialogue. But I would say a couple of other things that I have done in the past, especially when I was first writing short stories and entering competitions, that kind of thing, was when I finished my work or thought it was finished, I would actually physically take something comparable, but by someone who had won an award or was a very well written or well reviewed, and I would place my page beside theirs, and I would read a couple of paragraphs of mine, then I would read a couple of paragraphs of theirs. And I would think, what is the difference here? What am I doing differently than this person who has, you know, won awards or been recognized? 

And I mean, this was like 20 years ago. I still think that that’s so important to see it physically side by side: printed, not on the screen. On the screen, we miss all that. Although on the screen, I think the word searches and having your list of “feel”, “felt”, “look”, “watched”, “heard”, “sound”, those work really well. And also really checking for the dialogue. Doing word searches on “said” to make sure you are being so simple, like King says. And to also make sure that if it isn’t an attribution, but it’s a what they call a said bookism, or they used to call a said bookism, that there’s a period and end of quote, and then what they’re doing as the act, as an action. I know we do trail off but if we go like, “she said angrily,” we don’t need to say, “she said angrily” again, because the anger would have been in the dialogue or in the tell. So I would do word searches and put my put my work, printed out, beside, side by side with something.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (29:18)  

Yeah. Great suggestion and great advice. Well, I’m going to go out on a limb – and again, apologies to Amie and Marie, because I did not prep you and set you up in advance – but I’m going to say that we will agree to take a look at, let’s say, between 150 and 200 words of the first 10 emails that I receive. You can send me an email to boni@ingeniumbooks.com. And in the subject line, “Show and tell sample”. And we’ll take a look at it and give you a little bit of feedback, if you like, and we’ll, you know, just see how that goes. 

So I have this – if you’re a regular listener to the podcast, you know I have a totally arbitrary self-imposed limit of 30 minutes. And that’s, we’re coming down to that in 30 seconds. I want to thank very much our two guests, Marie Beswick-Arthur – who, I didn’t explain before, is a ghostwriter and an author and one of the editors and writers on the Ingenium Books team – and Amie McCracken – who is an author and is our publishing manager at Ingenium Books and a wonderful editor as well – giving their time and perspectives on that thorny and jello-like issue of show versus tell for writers. That’s it from Ingenium Books today. We will see you next time.

(Outro)

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