Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a creative writing class.
Professor: To write really good fiction… something that feels really immersive, where your readers will really start to trust you and engage with what’s happening… to do that, you have to do more “showing” than “telling.” What that means is that you can’t just tell your readers what’s going on, or what they should think about it. You might know what you want them to think, but you don’t just tell them what to think. That makes for a boring story. Instead of that, you show them what’s going on, but you don’t tell them what they’re supposed to think of it. You just write it in a way that, hopefully, they start thinking what you intended them to think in the first place.
For example, suppose you’re writing about a character who’s angry because she was just fired unfairly from a job. You could write, “She was furious! She was outraged! She felt as if her boss had treated her unfairly.” But that’s telling, not showing. You’re telling the reader that the character is mad, and that’s not very interesting. Plus, why should readers believe you? They don’t know whether the character is mad, or sad, or perhaps doesn’t even care.
So, to get your point across, you show them that the character is angry. You do that through her words, or through her behavior. So, instead of saying she was furious, you might say that she stormed to her boss’s office, pounded on the door, and demanded to speak to her immediately. While she waited for her boss, she paced back and forth outside the door, glaring at everyone who walked by. Now, the reader knows that she was angry and frustrated, even though you didn’t tell them. Plus, the reader has a picture in her head of what the anger looks like, which makes the story more descriptive, and therefore more immersive and more interesting.
Narrator: Using the examples from the lecture or similar ones, explain the difference between “showing” and “telling” when writing fiction.
When you’re writing fiction there’s a big difference between showing and telling, and uh, fiction writers, um… the better ones, uh, tend to show rather than tell. Telling is with words. So if you’re describing someone, you know, and you wanna show that… uh, tell that they’re frustrated you just write, uh, you know, “She was feeling very frustrated.” And it’s almost like you’re a voice inside their head and actually talking about the emotions and uh, and using those actual words. Um, if you’re showing someone is frustrated it may be more through actions and behaviors, like describing how someone might be pulling out their hair or throwing things, uh, around the room, or… or, you know, kicking something, and maybe through, you know, facial, you know… describing, um, facial expressions or shouting, um, but rather than saying...
The student conveys the difference between showing and telling. She uses examples that are very similar to the examples in the lecture, but not exactly the same. Changing the examples a little bit shows that she really understood the content of the lecture. Note that there is no need to change the examples, however. In fact, doing so can be risky, if too much time or thought is involved. The student could improve her response by training herself to reduce the number of times she says “um” or “uh.” In order to translate each thought to a complete sentence spoken aloud, she would be better off planning in silence for a moment or two.