The Most Common Writing Mistake: Why Telling And Exposition Are Actually Good
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.ค. 2024
- In my experience, this is the most common mistake intermediate writers make, and it all comes back to the most basic piece of writing advice out there: show, don't tell. Show, don't tell is good advice...but there's another side of the equation that we never talk about.
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Intro
1:04 - Show, Don't Tell is incomplete advice
2:06 - What problems does this cause?
8:28 - Why does this happen?
11:43 - What is good telling?
14:41 - Good telling example (from Eileen)
18:41 - Closing thoughts
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The problem with the "show don't tell" is that this phrase makes showing and telling seem opposed to each other when the two in fact complement each other. Telling is essential because it allows you to summarize the superfluous parts of the story that would slow the pacing. If you rephrase the rule to "show the primary, tell the secondary" the advice would be far more complete.
this is such a great way of putting it!!!
@@ShaelinWrites thanks.
“Show the primary, tell the secondary” is so well said!!
@@o_o-lj1ym I learned that when I ran into a point in my writing when into a scene in my writing that where one character is arbitrating between two people who claimed to have been wronged by each other. I realized that having both people explain their sides of the story and bicker with each other the dialogue would drag on for at least two pages so I summarized the explanation down to a paragraph.
"Show the important, tell the rest"?
The metric I employ is to use TELLING when the reader needs to understand information about the story in a rational way and to use SHOWING when I want the reader to process the scene information in an emotional way.
So, 'telling' is like, "what's for dinner." And 'showing', the "cooked goose?,"
A bit like a lyric? The verse shows, the chorus tells- a summation.
I'm convinced "excessive telling" isn't actually the problem most beginners have. The real problem is not "too much" telling, but rather bad telling. If you can write good prose, you can literally write a story with nothing but telling and readers will love it. See, e.g., the Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian.
This is so true, and that story is a perfect example of a style with a lot of telling that is extremely effective!
Brandon Sanderson says most new writers think they're too obvious with their themes, when really they aren't obvious enough. I know I've fallen into that.
I’d consider myself an “intermediate writer” as you put it and I do think one of trickiest lessons im trying to learn is picking up on when it’s better to tell vs. show. Unlearning that show instinct has been hard! But I’ve been getting back into reading lately and noticed a lot of books I like do employ telling when necessary & I always think “oh right, you can just do that!” Tbh now I think telling can be characterful in its own way. Like, I think another thing about telling that I keep in mind is the voice of who is doing the telling, whether the narrator is a character or they’re 3rd vs. 1st person or what. As in. The teller’s relationship with reliability. Sometimes concrete information can just be told without question (like you said, “my dad is a baker”) but other times, I think telling can be more characterful than showing bc it can reveal how the character perceives themselves or the world around them, and the reader can make a personal call on how reliable that person’s pov really is
Such a wonderful point!! Telling can absolutely be used as a character building tool!
I am an intermediate writer and I have been being published since the 1990s. My stories were publishable but lacked style.
Maybe have a look at one primary trope of telling: The “Picard speech”. Captain Picard will often go ahead and explicitly spell out the thematic conflict of the given episode - basically telling you straight to the face what the authors wanted to say with this. Yet, Picard does this so eloquently that the speeches themselves become quote-worthy.
To make it simple, show when it matters most. Tell when you need to move things along to reach the next showcase moment. Think of telling as a long camera view and showing as the close up. Use both elements in balance to serve the story.
Precious words, thank you so much!
I did most, if not all of that. I got a "writer's block" because I was so afraid of telling and I didn't know how to show it. It took me over a year to realize that it's okay to tell and to only show the important things.
The difficulty with time skips has plagued me for SUCH a long time.
All my writing projects have ended up being minute by minute accounts😂 because of this
It's bloated my word counts consistently. I have 200,000 word YA work in progress and I'm only just starting Act 2.
And it's mostly because I'm holding fast to show don't tell
I use like a mini header in my latest because I needed time skips. My beta reader suggested them to me for another novella.
This resonates so much! I also think it has to do with writers trying to be “cinematic,” when movies and books use some fundamentally different tools as storytellers.
I don’t even wait to like your videos anymore. Honestly, you are the only person giving writing advice that I can reliably trust. Of course, everything is subjective and people should tailor their process/craft to what works for them, but I feel most advice is very much filler, a way to generate content rather than something that is actually practical and usable.
I literally click and hit like bc I know it’s gonna be perfect for what it’s trying to do
She's great, yeah. But there's another TH-camr who gives writing advice I very much enjoy and I thought you might be interested: Hello Future Me.
@@noriakikakyoin8478 I’ve seen some of HFM’s videos, and I do like their content too. I was mostly referring to people in the authortube community. 😄
Great video! One thing that annoys me about the show don't tell advice (and I'm so sorry but I can't stop myself ranting, I need this off my chest) is it's often blamed on Chekhov, but if you read his stories they're actually full of telling! It's not his fault! He just meant if you want a powerful image use showing. Like, these are the opening paragraphs of The Lady with the Dog:
'People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade - a lady with a dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov had been a fortnight in Yalta, and was accustomed to its ways, and he, too, had begun to take an interest in fresh arrivals. From his seat in Vernet’s outdoor café, he caught sight of a young woman in a toque, passing along the promenade; she was fair and not very tall; after her trotted a white pomeranian.
Later he encountered her in the municipal park, and in the square, several times a day. She was always alone, wearing the same toque, and the pomeranian always trotted at her side. Nobody knew who she was, and people referred to her simply as “the lady with the dog.”'
Loads of telling! But importantly the parts where he's more show-y aren't random, they're all describing the lady, who is the focus of the story and the main character's attention, with the telling used to introduce and summarise the surrounding context. He's using showing to slow down the pace to bring important details to the foreground while telling speeds through the necessary background. The balance between showing and telling is a tool of pacing, focus, and for reflecting character psychology, and you absolutely need them both
Another thoughtful breakdown of what is often a glib, brief piece of advice. It gets easier to feel your way the more you write.
I agree
Thank you for this! I'm probably at that "intermediate writer" stage, and while editing my second YA novel, I've realized that I shy away from repeating the same phrasing more than once or twice, which leads to a lot of creative (and sometimes unnecessary) descriptions. For example, I feel like I have to talk about the same emotion a million different ways when actually, the repetition of said emotion is a key part of my MC's personality. Or, I'll avoid telling more than a certain amount of times for fear of flat diction. I also struggle with purple prose as someone who enjoys flowery language and who writes poetry, so I lean towards describing smiles as "the apples of her cheeks swelled with a rosy flush" rather than just saying "she smiled." (Of course, those descriptions are fine sometimes, but if the fact that a character smiled is just a reaction and not important to the plot, it comes across as dramatic and slows the flow of the scene).
This is where i think fiction writers could borrow from nonfiction writers since its all telling and yet it still manages to be engaging. My favourite piece of writing is a nonfiction essay, "Landspaces of Memory" by Laurence J. Kirmayer.
That’s so insightful!
Great video and I'm glad somebody FINALLY said it! Telling is so important and I see time and time again so many manuscripts that lack this type of telling... Things that showcase a unique authorial voice and interesting information through telling!
Saying "show don't tell" in fiction writing doesn't make any sense, and people don't really understand where it originally came from, which is why it's constantly spouted without understanding whether it's good advice for their story or not.
"Show don't tell" comes from screenwriting, where showing something on screen is preferred over having characters talk about said thing. It is common to instruct screenwriters to lean towards showing without having the characters exposit what can otherwise be on screen. It's why screenwriters do exercises such as writing scenes without dialogue (to practice showing not telling).
Obviously this makes no sense in novel writing because literally everything is told via the use of words on a page.
Btw this isn't to say "show don't tell" is silly, it's just confusing advice for prose and, as you've pointed out, is "incomplete" advice when it comes to novel writing.
This is a great comment and made me reflect on something really interesting, which is that I always found show, don't tell a bit confusing (in that I knew what it was saying but never really how to apply it) until I started screenwriting, and the advice suddenly clicked and felt very easy to apply. Which makes sense, because it's advice literally meant for screenwriting and is very easy to apply in that form, whereas in fiction everything is telling, in a sense, because everything is through a narrative lens.
not naming names but i read a book where a character succeeded in a science experiment off-screen and goes to tell the protagonist, but instead of just TELLING the protagonist what they found, we spend pages recreating the experiment so that the character can SHOW how she came to the scientific conclusion. and it just!! reads so much like TV rather than a book. in a visual medium you WOULD be more pressed to show the experiment so that the audience has something cool to look at, but this is a book, and that info really could have just been a paragraph of dialogue at most, and it wouldn't have lost any of the impact.
(this author later said that sometimes they would add unnecessary paragraphs to their manuscripts because their editor told them they had to hit a certain word count, which just felt so counter-productive to me)
Think of your story/novel like a painting. There is the subject of your painting, and there is also background. The subject of the story are the the things that you should focus on showing, and the telling is everything else that happens that supports and highlights the subject (which is what your story is about). Both make the painting more beautiful. The subject is the highlight and the focus, and the background gives it context and brings out the best parts of it.
Imagine you were painting a single flower as the subject of your painting, and then spend an inordinate amount of time painting each blade of grass surrounding it.
I just re-read one of my favorite books by Adam Silvera and when he introduces a character he tells us a few things about the character to contextualize their current actions in the scene. It's quick and to the point and yet I get a clear picture of the character just from one paragraph.
He also gives us interesting telling. Instead of just saying the character was stingy/selfish, he'll say something like "it didn't matter who asked, Kevin never let anyone in our neighborhood play with his toys even though we all let him play with ours when he came over." (This isn't actually in his book, I just came up with an example because I didn't want to go get it 😂)
I really love the framing of "What does the reader need to be convinced of?" I can see that being super helpful for me. great vid! thank you!
I think we are told to "Show not tell" at the beginning of stories because our. readers don't care enough about our characters to sit through uninteresting bit of information about the story/characters. Once they are invested, it can absolutely make the story better, as you have outline in this video.
Maybe we should approach show v. telling about our characters like first dates. You essentially have to tell somethings to get the other person interested and so they can get to know you, but if you're hogging the conversation and going on and on about yourself, that can be off-putting and unattractive.
I think the word you're looking for with that quote from Eileen you call "telling as showing" is "introspection". Introspection is a form of showing, as it is part of character development. It's great for characters to figure out their own flaws and strengths, and name (or "tell") them. I agree it is a form of showing.
I absolutely cannot tell you enough how accurate this video is. I fell into this. For my first book - i was TERRIFIED of telling. Guess what - no one understood what was happening in my book, there was ZERO world built, I threw in boring scenes of mundane things happening to try and "show" what the world was without telling, and it was just an honest mess. I've overhauled it and I've put some small amount of telling in there and boy howdy, did it make a huge difference without it being a huge infodump.
The premise is: tell truth and show subjectivity.
I love this!
You're the best writing teacher on TH-cam! Great stuff, Shaelin! :)
In the excerpt from Eileen, man there is SO much characterization in those sentences, hell, the voice alone is so rich with it. I love “I’m not that strategic,” those four words say so much about her, I immediately like her, I know she’s probably not a very “nice” person, but probably a person of integrity. Then the following paragraph follows up on this, letting me know that she’s not particularly likable in the conventional sense, maybe messy, but I want to get to know her, I want to hear her story.
I am a dialogue writer, I lean rally really heavy on dialogue, probably because I come from theatre, so I naturally read a lot of dialogue-based stories. Which is good. I love reading and writing dialogue. That said, dialogue is NOT a tool to avoid info dumping. On the contrary, if done wrong it can lead to even more info dumping and akward situations. "Hey, Joe? Remember your sister telling you about her friend who found that old lady Margaret's jewels in the dumpster the other day?" - "Oh, Jack, good you reminded me. I had forgotten about it all. When have it been?" - "Yesterday."
Thanks for sharing this! I had a successful author friend tell me that there's nothing wrong with exposition as long as it's engaging.
This video was what I needed. I thought I was alone when I felt afraid to tell. When I did, writing became less fun and I lost a lot of motivation. Thank you for sharing your experience and advice.
I recently read The Circle and then The Every by Dave Eggers. I enjoyed both and was a little surprised at how much Eggers tells in his prose, and how natural it feels when it’s done well. “Show, don’t tell” has led a lot of new writers down a path of doubt and fear!
It probably isn't going to work all the time, but a think that helped me figure that out was to think about what information you would be told in real life. If you meet someone new at your job or whatever, they most likely won't tell you things like "I'm sad" or "I'm a stubborn person" (at least not before acting accordingly), but what the will say are things like "I'm an engineering student" or "My mom's Japanese".
I also think one reason why the example in this video works well is, that as a reader I want to know how aware the character is about themselves. So while the character is telling us how they are, they are at the same time "showing" that they themselves understand how they are, they have the self awareness, this is something they can consciously observe. Two characters can have exactly the same behavior, but they are very different if one in capable of self reflection and another one is not.
That was perhaps bit off topic comment, though. Just popped in my mind as a specific subset of showing vs telling. Self-aware characters are able to tell about themselves.
That was a great point.
I love self-aware characters (and people). REAL ones.
The ones who think they are but aren't really tend to be annoying because they have the attitude that goes with it.
Actually telling VS showing is a good way to show how self-aware or not, how honest or hypocritical a character is.
Today I was in the middle of writing my fantasy novel and on the page I wrote "She looked at him with fear in her eyes/ edit: "with fear plastered on her face". I was so scared of "telling" that I was obsessed with showing what she looked like. In the end I changed it to "She looked at him." and moved on. Felt so much better! I'm sure when it comes to redrafting and editing, I'll find way of saying this better. Perhaps I might just keep it- I mean, how many different ways are there to look at someone? My writing mentor always says, "let the reader figure it out for themselves." I have cut out so many unnecessary words and parts of sentences by writing in a way that allows the reader room to imagine and feel.Thank you for this video. xx
I really needed this, Shaelin. I’m in the editorial trenches with my second novel and this is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you so much. I hope your own editorial journey is going well and that you get to go on sub with Honey Vinegar very soon.
happy it helped and good luck with your novel!!
Your phrase about being in the editorial trenches is true. Len Deighton said that writing a novel is like being in a battle field.
And Deighton knows about battles since he has written complex non-fiction books about the Second World War.
Penguin reissued all of Deighton's books in their Modern Classics editions and he has written an afterword on the writing of each book.
He said he did not feel established as a novelist until he had completed five novels; A.J.P. Taylor helped Deighton with his history books.
Jennifer Johnston said she had to teach herself to make minor characters real like the servants in Chekhov plays who bring the soup.
Once your characters start to breath & talk & laugh, the story and structure and subtext will emerge. A battle is not fought in a day.
FINALLY someone who appreciates the art of telling
I remember once writing out a scene, and I liked it...then realized it was essentially a rehash of an earlier scene. All the beats were the same. I needed the scene in there, but it didn't have to be spelled out beat for beat. I didn't need hundreds of words to convey the idea, so I changed it to telling instead, shortened the scene by several hundred words, and the pacing was a little better.
Language is an identical pulse which Shaelin describes well, her ability to perceive reader expectations through craft is an exercise of navigating streams of our civilizations thirst for good stories. Well done Shaelin
I've found that a lot of this (and, reasonably, other writing errors) can be fixed or 'grown out of' by simply reading more books and paying attention to how they're written. Seeing how other writers convey their information and when, what emotions to use in a scene, etc
As you know, Bob, the primary way of info dumping within a dialogue is to use the trope “as you know, Bob”. 😁
Great video! This is definitely something I’ve been trying to get better at. Frankly showing everything, implying everything, is just draining and exhausts the reader. Telling serves as an easy way to get them exactly where you want them before using showing to either support or subvert that position!
I do fall into the opposite trap of you though where my characters will think A Lot About Everything, continuously, for pages and pages, grinding everything to a halt. It’s sort of what I lean towards, and while I really like that stuff, it gets so monotonous after a while. Any tips for that?
This also brings to mind something I learned about in recent months, namely the difference between diegetic and memetic writing. (Overview vs. being in the moment.) I really think that this whole dichotomy is very present here, and in analyzing authors like Tolkien I’ve found he likes to use several shorter diegetic paragraphs in between longer mimetic scenes. It’s really interesting and breaks up the pacing, and I feel like that’s a whole wealth of territory worth examining!
Shaelin, that was hilarious about how writers avoid “telling” so much! I’m scanning your other videos, I like how you talk fast. I’m learning so much to improve my writing. The more I do it, the more I admire good writers. It’s all about the “IDEA”!
shaelin fucking it up again being the most insightful person on the platform we love to see it
I think the best advice isnt "show dont tell", is clarity. Do the reader needs to completely visualize the scene or not, just telling in singles sentences? How the emotion would better convey THIS scene, specifically?
Clarity is what makes great writing.
This is SO true, Shaelin! THANK YOU for bringing this up! I spent my first 4 years exactly as you describe it in the first 2 minutes. One insight that truly changed it for me emerged just in recent weeks; I began to think more in terms of "strong nouns/verbs/adjectives" instead of trying to "show not tell". (Now, back to your vid. ;-))
I was thinking about this recently reading Thomas Pynchon. He writes a lot of exposition but it’s entertaining, sometimes moreso than in his “show” scenes. He loves to tell and it’s always brilliantly written. He’ll use exposition to jump from one scene to another so cleverly and smoothly that you don’t realize what you’re reading is a different scene entirely from before.
This is excellent advice. Clarity is underrated. Knowing when to play coy with information is an art and should be used sparingly, especially in the beginning.
Terrific, nuanced video, Shaelin. You pack in a lot of advice that can be helpful to a writer editing their manuscript. I agree that there are ways that “show don’t tell” can go wrong. There are ways exercise, diet and reading a book a week can go wrong. I think ultimately writers benefit from doing all these things correctly. Editing my manuscript, the first major problem I found was instances of telling instead of showing. “Show don’t tell” is sound advice, but I got a lot of value in your deeper dive.
Great topic. I roll my eyes at the show don't tell "advice", because clarity is probably the most common issue that I have encountered with indie writers, and on the flipside, reader comprehension. You pretty much covered all the points I was going to make in terms of the writer's end (with overwriting, purple prose, dense/convoluted imagery). I would add that it is another challenge for the writer to find that balance, because not all readers may be able to pick up on subtle clues, and have the ability to "read between the lines" (so to speak). Not to say that writers should intentionally "dumb down" their writing, but I think it's more about developing a certain degree of "accessibility" within your prose, through telling/exposition. (lol, I was writing that last part right as you mentioned "accessible" @12:23). Cheers!
I think clarity is not just one of the biggest issues for indie writers, but just writers in general! And I think if you can master clarity, it will solve most problems in your writing. I've found over the years that most edits in my work can be fixed just by attending to clarity, because most critiques don't come down to issues actually in the story, but the story not conveying as I intended (ex. someone notices a plot hole that isn't actually there, but the explanation was unclear) but, because I used to be so afraid of telling...the clarity in my work was nowhere to be found lol
@@ShaelinWrites I get what you're putting down. That tracks back to what I was saying about reader comprehension also playing an important role when it comes to the "show don't tell" rule, because clarity issues aren't always the fault of the author. It's inevitable that there will be readers who may not be able to connect the dots, so to speak, but that doesn't mean the author's writing style needs improvement as much as the reading level was inadequate for the writing style. I hope that doesn't sound as pretentious as it did in my head. lol
Nope I totally get you! Sorry if it sounded like I was disagreeing with you, I just was adding on because I thought it was an interesting point!
I agree with you and I always told this to my friends. I've read books when I don't even know where the characters are in an entire scene of many pages. At a personal level, one of my main goals is how to combine Telling and Exposition in the correct order, quantity, in the most interesting, fun and entertaining way possible and how to link both of them with the plot and character relationships and arcs. One very important thing is to have good judgment and see those "opportunities" when you have then in front of you.
As someone who has been writing for years, this is most likely one of the videos that has taught me the most through TH-cam! I have never really thought about this when revising and editing, sometimes wondering why my text felt strange, boring, even though I had spent a lot of time making sure that the reader was in the moment, avoiding info dumping. Amazing advice I've never been told before!
Absolute golden advice and so refreshing to hear. I'd always wondered about this: Can't I just say some things straight? It would save a whole lot of words. Thanks so much Shaelin for telling and showing us that we can.
If you treat show and tell like partners that work off of each other rather than exclusive ideas, then you can focus more on balance. I also feel like telling an important detail is a good way to make the reader at least subconsciously aware of it, therefore when it is shown later it will be noticed more immediately than if it were only shown and made a bit too abstract. As well, it is a lot easier to edit a "telling" line and show more, than to work backwards from entangled sentences to clarify them. (Not in all cases do these apply of course) Great video!!
I just watched your Scene writing video and you related to this one. Telling gets a bad rap because it's done poorly or overdone. Thanks for the clarity and encouragement! That example you gave with the dad being a baker v being intelligent was right on the mark! I appreciate your videos! Keep them coming, as they are extremely helpful!
If the base unit of stories is information, clarity without breaking immersion is goal of exposition.
For people writing hard magic systems -which are popular right now- this is very important advice! Magic systems are narrative structures that require a tremendous amount of information to understand (relative to typical descriptions of setting, emotions, etc) so learning to use artful and engaging telling is crucial. If you want an example, read the first chapter of Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. He's famous for his magic systems and in this example, he cold opens with a magic user using their abilities at a high level, yet it's perfectly understandable because he dips into exposition frequently.
The other genres that *need* to understand this advice are sci-fi (scientific, economic, and political concepts are often core to the plot) mystery (often solved with hard clues and reasoning) sports (game based stories have rules that need to be at least partially established) and so on. Litfic and other character focused genres simply don't have the same need to explain abstract ideas, but even they could benefit from being straightforward from time to time.
Yet another example of how advice that splits the world bimodally is very popular (like plotting vs panting) but in reality causes just as many problems as it solves.
There is a time to show and a time to tell. The best writers do this all the time. The only question is when to use them.
I've definitely gotten over this hurtle by now and passed on into the "advanced" stages, but god damn I wish I had seen this a few years ago before I embarrassingly went hunting for agents with a bad second draft, the rejections leading me to conclude that I was a terrible writer without knowing why and then taking a year off of writing in my shame. Listen up, all you newer writers! She's spitting facts.
the tale is in the telling! some of my fav writers like Gogol and Kleist are "tellers", their talents lying largely in how they deliver information and the strength of the voice which delivers it, whether it's "enthusiastic old man in a pub accosting you with his life story" vibes or the reporting of a lurid event as though it were historical fact. best way to get good at telling is prob to find writers you love who shun showing like the plague =P
I feel so called out, but this also seems to be where I am in my writing. The overriding feedback I've gotten about my manuscript is that the reader has to guess and infer about the worldbuilding through showing, and I don't just come out and tell the reader things. I'm writing epic fantasy right now, and I'm very concerned about going into the kind of infodump I find so tedious and boring in Epic Fantasy and hard science fiction, the kind that stops the story for a thousand words or more. Now, I'm focusing on learning how to give the relevant information as clearly as possible. I'm experimenting with Show, then Tell. Show what I want to show about the element, and then support that by outright stating the relevant information available through my POV Character. We'll see how this works.
Thank you. I'm just writing my first novel and having done some research on 'how to write', show don't tell was a recurring theme. But it really wasn't working for me. Every time I rewrote something to show, it seemed to obfuscate - lacking clarity and immediacy. As someone who has railed against the rules for most of my, (long), life, I had already decided that this rule wasn't going to bog me down. Your video has given me the confidence to continue along my own path - rather than follow the herd.
Wow, this is some great information! Thanks!
I love your channel and your advice, thank you for putting so much time and effort into making videos (:
Thank you this is great advice as always
Brilliantly put! Thanks, I needed to hear this :)
This is SO helpful. Excellent.
Thank you so much for this great video!!!
This came at the perfect time for me, aaaaah! Thank you so much
You always post at the exact time so need it! In the midst of edits and I can’t see the wood for the trees rn 🥴 okay gonna watch
Yes, it happened! I can already tell I’ll be coming back to this over and over and over to remind myself. Thank you so much and also I hope your own project is going well.
Such a great video! Thank you! Your example from Eileen makes me think that telling/exposition can in some instances be seen as "setting the stage." Quick, clear details that function like scenery, allowing the "audience" to orient themselves.Then characters arrive and add the depth through their words, expressions, movement. And if you have some sort of shift (in time, in plot, in characters' motivations), it's like a scene change. You need to quickly provide some details that let the reader figure out where they are, then get back to the story. On the stage, you could tell immediately if you are in a bakery, but you'd need an actor to SHOW you through words and actions if they were angry in said bakery. (Though I don't know why anyone would be angry in a bakery!)
I'm also curious to look through my books and find examples in first person vs. third, to see how exposition functions differently. I'm tempted to say that in third person, its primary function is to provide clarity (including clarity regarding characters' motives and internal life). In first person, exposition also functions to develop voice and character (as your example from Eileen shows).
I think the number one best thing to do is to visit books you love and highlight where they are using exposition successfully. But perhaps equally important is re-visiting
stories you weren't a fan of and asking yourself if it might have something to do with this show/don't tell issue, and study that carefully too. So you don't do it in your own writing. 😅
Thank you SO much!!!! 🎉
Thank you for this video! You articulated what I've been contemplating for awhile now.
your content is such a salve, thank you
Great video! I see this problem all the time in my university workshop groups.
This is my problem right now! Thank you for helping me identify this issue.
I love you!!
Thank you for talking about a subject like this that some overlook and oversimplify. I think instead of "show don't tell" we should be saying "show AND tell." A balance of boths forms of exposition can be good!
Showing-only reminds me of videogames like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, where they have *such* deep rich lore of the past that you can pick through at your leisure, but almost no present day plot. Like...tell me some stuff!! I want to know why all these things matter! Obviously it's the appeal of those games, but I'm fine with sitting for a moment and being talked at after being lost in the dark for so long. It'll help everything make sense! Like a little reward for your investigation.
Telling-only is obviously a problem that can make things feel like a school textbook, but I find a neat way to make verbal exposition feel good is to have the characters talk about how it personally impacts them, like you're eavesdropping them having a conversation. That great war of the past, that legendary hero guy, a scourge of monsters, etc... Don't lecture us about it in a prologue. Have your characters actively chat about their personal experiences with it and name-drop it themselves! Feels way more tangible and cohesive.
It's like you were getting at towards the middle of the video: make show and tell work hand in hand. If you've shown it, don't be afraid to sit and discuss it deeply later on given it's already been established! And if you've told it, make sure you demonstrate it later on through action to confirm the claim! We need both!
A staggering proportion of my all time favorite paragraphs in literature are exposition and telling. If you find the right words to convey a character's unique psychology or motivation, it can crack open the whole soul of the book. Examples:
"What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise." - All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
"I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive." - The Secret History, Donna Tartt
And I won't bother writing out the famous opening passage of Pride and Prejudice, which explicitly sets up Mrs. Bennett's motives and the situation of all her daughters.
If I could find the words to express how much I appreciate your channel. Thank you for being a beacon of writing knowledge for so many of us.
Another excellent video! Thank you
Thanks, Shaelin. I'm just starting my writing journey, and this video is quite helpful. I look forward to reading your book.
Yeah! Thanks, this helps.
Listening to the "if you're going to use exposition, do it, just do it well" bit made me realize, the common bad advice given to beginner writers who are bad at a particular skill boils down to... don't do it at all. "Show don't tell" as it has been misused often seems to mean "you didn't do this exposition well, so quit trying." Which is so counter-intuitive. Write the bad thing. You need to write the bad thing to improve.
I really love the thesis statement analogy!
I've struggled with this advice as a novice writer, and I think I've come down in the same place as what you said here. I get the showing, but allowing myself to tell really opened things up, especially in short stories.
This was an amazing video! I think you gotta find a happy medium. It's okay to show and tell but only when they fit the context. I wish there wasn't so much stigma behind it. And I know info dumps are bad, but trying to show everything can lead to the opposite problems you listed. Just use whatever works for that particular scene/section/element. And I completely agree that people usually teach others to avoid exposition instead of just teaching them to do it well. It feels like lazy writing advice honestly when the solution should never be "avoid it" but rather "learn to do it well."
If you want to see what happens when you take “show, don’t tell” too far, watch Mad Max: Fury Road. Next to nothing is explained in that one. A lot of people treat it like this huge masterwork. But while that may apply to the visual-effects side in isolation, if you don’t understand what’s going on, because nothing is explained, you have no reason to care about any of it. “A confused mind always says no.”
The fun part about this is that, when you read famous authors, you realize that they're telling.
And at first you're like "Okay, well, it's because that's a very talented artist, he/she had reached the next level where he/she can ignore certain rules." but then, you keep reading books, and you're like "No, actually, they're all telling at times. And it doesn't feel jarring because they manage to show most of the time and only use telling as a tool to make their writing more fluid and digest."
Btw, the example you took in Eileen is perfect.
Showing that a woman is obsessed with the way she looks is extremely difficult. Even if you make a scene where she combs her hair and powders her face, the reader may just take that as a way to make the scene more lively rather than an important character trait.
Telling, in that case, is far clearer and prevents the reader from missing or misinterpreting the information.
I call it Show and Tell. My last editor hinted I was showing too much. My story lacked transistions and clairty.
Damn these videos are good. I have learned a lot in a small amount of time. thanks!
I would say that if the character has angry thought, show he is angry by describing what he is thinking, the introspection. Like show in Eileen's example.
Telling help dispel the confusion.
Bravo! How about "Show AND tell ... learn to show and then do both." As long as you are doing some good showing, telling is grand.
the only main form of telling i strictly try to avoid is directly saying a characters traits, because stating a characters traits from an objective outside narrator perspective can lead to accidentally stepping over yourself down the line. telling how a character feels about another character and what they believe their traits to be is much safer, and will reveal information about both characters. i think it also feels a lot more natural because character traits dont really exist in a vacuum, they are always relative to the other characters around them
Second time watching this video, and I think you might've fixed my short story. I've been stuck on how to quickly convey the science-y premise and the surrounding in-universe debate for *forever* and right now it's shoehorned into a dialogue scene and an informational video. But like, what if I just? Said it outright? What a concept :D
This video was really helpful Shaelim! Do you know any good short stories to recommend?
This is very helpful to make my book better. Show not tell but don't you think some people might interpret that differently. I think telling is only through dialogue if someone asking you a question and a person answers the questions.
Sometimes you need to "tell to show." For example look at this sample, "Jake smiled at Susan; I never liked how Jake smiled at Susan." That second part is telling, BUT it shows that Jake has been hitting on Susan for awhile and the speaker is jealous or something.
The good telling part reminds me of the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If you tell me you have a dog I've no reason not to believe it, if you tell me you have a flying dog I'm going to want to see it.
Actually I love when authors tell. It's another difficult skill. English prose is one of the examples of good telling.
A good writer sense when its beneficial to show and when its beneficial tell
Something I've heard an author (I think it was Mary Robinette Kowal but I'm not sure) say that I REALLY REALLY LOVE is that technically, all writing is telling. Movies show us things, but in books anything we know can only be told using words. The trick is knowing what to tell, which details are best, and how to tell it so that it is compelling.
Luv ya, wish I watched this 2 years ago. Just b4 watching this I told through a fight scene because only the outcome was important.
It's sorta like making music, or art, or anything else. Is it better to use high notes or low notes? Is it better to use water colors or colored pencils? What sounds good, looks good, works for your story, is what you should do.