Stop telling, and start showing in your writing

By Dennis Mellersh

One of the key concepts of learning how to write a book is to practice showing readers situations rather than “telling” about them.

If you are writing about a character in your novel and you want to indicate that he is angry, you need to show or demonstrate that anger, rather than just using the word angry as an adjective.

You don’t even need to use the word anger to convey the emotion. In fact, you are better off not using the word.

Natalie Goldberg makes this point well in her book, Writing Down the Bones: “…don’t tell us about anger (or any of those big words like honesty, truth, hate, love, sorrow, life, justice etc.); show us what made [the character] angry…Don’t tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation and that feeling will awaken in them.”

Let’s see if we can write an example illustrating Goldberg’s point.

Of the following two sentences, which is more effective in showing anger?

“On hearing this deliberately cruel and sarcastic remark, Kyle cursed and threw his coffee cup smashing it against the wall.”

Or,

“When he heard this remark Kyle became visibly angry.”

In the first example, we are showing. In the second we are telling.

The reader of your novel will be able to construct much more vivid mental pictures of what you are trying to describe if you focus on showing instead of simply telling.