“Show, don’t tell” is a storytelling principle that allows authors to convey character traits through action and dialogue, enhancing immersive experiences without relying on exposition. It is an engaging and creative way to tell your story while allowing the readers to create the animation in their heads. Here’s how you can effectively write such a narrative.
1. The Pitfalls of Telling:
Telling can cause slow pacing, lack of depth in character development, and reader disconnection, disrupting the reader’s flow and hindering active engagement with the story. Excessive explaining often bores the readers and distracts them from the story due to the large information that they have to remember. It also makes your story way too long than it actually requires to be.
2. The Benefits of Showing:
Showing creates empathy, builds tension, and enhances credibility by allowing readers to understand characters through their actions, developing suspense and conflict through interactions. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words; your readers will remember the characters through what they have witnessed about them rather than what they are told about them.
3. Techniques for Showing Character Traits:
Character traits are revealed through physicality, behavior, dialogue, subtext, internal monologue, and interactions with others. Speech patterns, tone, and language expose character traits. Subtext reveals character traits through underlying emotions or motivations. Internal monologue provides insight into the character’s thoughts and feelings, while interactions with others demonstrate relationships and conflicts. Explaining what a character feels through dialogue is more reasonable than just writing what they feel.
4. Best Practices for Effective Showing:
To effectively convey character traits, avoid heavy-handed or obvious demonstrations, consider the scene’s context, use various techniques, trust the reader, edit and refine the narrative to maintain reader interest, and balance showing with necessary exposition. It is important to balance out dialogues and actions according to what is required rather than making one more dominant than the other.
5. Examples of Effective Showing:
There are many pieces of writing that can be used to understand what it really means to show instead of telling, for instance. Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” showcases Katniss’s selflessness through her actions; J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” reveals Holden’s angst through internal dialogues; and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” showcases Elizabeth Bennet’s wit through dialogues.
The “show, don’t tell” principle allows writers to create captivating characters through action, dialogue, subtext, internal monologue, and interactions, allowing readers to infer and interpret, resulting in a rich, immersive storytelling experience. This increases engagement and decreases the length of the narrative, making it intriguing and compelling. Hence, it is worth writing your story in a way that depicts action rather than just words.