The Golden Rule

[Shaun]

One of the things that I find so profoundly common not only in young writers, but also in older writers, is this constant argument over that age old rule "Show, don't tell". If you haven't heard the rule you probably aren't reading enough. And if you have heard the rule you fit into one of three categories:

1. The "I don't have to listen to that rule, it's stupid and old and all the best writers don't listen to it" group.
2. The "My goodness I am not following that rule one bit and I should be" group
3. The "I love the rule, but it certainly has its limits" group.

Whatever you do, avoid, with all your might, that first group. Those are the people who become so arrogant over their writing that they profess to know everything there is to know about the writing world, yet for some strange twist of fate they have yet to be published, or haven't even submitted to anything. The latter is more often than not reality.
Now, some of you might be thinking that I'm one of those people since I'm writing the tips section of the TW Blog. Here's the difference: I don't know everything. I don't, ever claim to know everything, and never will know everything. No great writer can honestly sit there and say they know everything there is to know about writing. Those that have talked to me about anything I've written, aside from poetry, which is a whole different ballpark, will have recognized that I'm actually rather humble about my writing, so much so that I like irritate people from time to time. You should be humble about your writing. Don't proclaim that you have written the next best novel. Why? Because unless it's published and hailed as the next best novel, it isn't anything but an unpublished novel. Perhaps this sounds really negative, but to put this all into perspective some of the greatest writers of our time were very much like you or me, or worse. Take Stephen King, who spent much of his early writing career broke, humble, and stuck in a rut where no short story publishers would take his work and no publishing houses would give him a second look. Now look where he is.

"Show, don't tell" is the golden rule for a reason--because it is almost always connected to every problem you will find within your own writing, or that someone else finds.
So what exactly is Showing and Telling?

Telling
We'll start with this first because, well, it is the root of almost evil. Telling is when you attempt to convey information to the reader in an info-dump or in such a way that doesn't actually 'show' the reader that information. This is a flexible rule, but we'll get back to that later. Here's an example of what I mean:

John was a rude man who always picked his ears with an old rotten toothpick.

Now, what exactly is wrong with this sentence? In some ways, there isn't anything wrong with the sentence. But in the most important ways it is wrong. What is the sentence doing? It's telling you something. It's not showing you anything.

Showing
Showing is far different from Telling, for very specific reasons. When you are showing something you are actually giving the reader a visual about what is going on. This could be through dialogue, character action or interaction, or in description. Here is an example of what the above scene might look like if you were trying to show that information:

"John, please leave Mrs. Marx alone," Abby said.
"Why? She's just an old cow anyway," John said, retrieving a moldy toothpick from his pocket and depositing it in his ear.
She cringed. "Do you always have to do that in public?"
He grinned, pulled the toothpick from his ear and deposited the fresh orange glob that came with it into his mouth.
She rolled her eyes in disgust. "You need help..."

Can you see the difference? Here we learn a little about who John is through his interaction with Abby. It's showing us him using the toothpick, being rude, etc.

Flexibility
Now, like with all rules, the "Show, don't tell" rule has some flexibility. It has to because if you were to show every single little thing in your work it would be so convoluted. Many of us have read those older works from the 1700's, 1800's, and early 1900's, where things are described in ridiculous detail to the point where you just don't care anymore. The opposite of this is also true. You don't want to simply tell us everything about something either. Have you ever read one of those paragraphs where the author describes the entire history of a chair that has no importance to the story?
So when it comes down to it, what exactly gives this rule flexibility? Often times it's length. In novels it is acceptable to have occasions of telling. In fact some of the best authors do tell all the time in novels. You might not notice it because it doesn't hurt the flow of the story. They've learned how to bend the rule and get away with it. Almost any sentence with "was" or "had" in it is telling, but it's okay to actually use those. You have to be selective in what you tell. If something is very important to a character--perhaps an action that defines the character--you should be showing it to the reader. But if it isn't really important, maybe a bit of character history that otherwise cannot be done with showing, then some telling is okay.
What about short stories? This is where the rule really gets tricky. Can you tell? Yes, but very little or none at all. Short stories do not have the luxury of length and character development as novels. Telling should be kept to a very minimum in short stories, but you can still have a little bit of telling. Again, just be selective.

So, now that you know the Golden Rule what are you going to do about your writing?