Book review: ‘Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It)’ by Janice Hardy
This is a book my developmental editor recommended to me after reading my manuscript. I apparently had some opportunities to tighten up my third-person close perspective—and I’ll tell you, this book really helped me understand where I wasn’t quite nailing it.
Now, the book includes an appendix that lists all of the common red flag words that indicate you may be telling instead of showing. However, you won’t need to rely on that, because the book does such a great job of explaining telling versus showing that you’ll be able to easily recognize it when it’s happening.
The title promises that you’ll “really get it” and, for me, that was 100% the case. I give it 5 stars, 12 dog ears, and 2 Post-its.
It’s really about closeness to the POV character
It’s not that telling is bad all the time. Depending on what you’re trying to convey, sometimes a bit of telling can be faster and less awkward than showing. However, telling creates distance between the reader and the point-of-view character. It does that primarily by injecting the author in between the reader and POV character. That’s not ideal, because today’s readers want to occupy the POV character as much as possible.
Dialogue is the most natural way to show, not tell. I have a firm handle on that.
Description is another way to show, but the key is to filter the description through your POV character so their attitudes, tastes, and preferences color what’s being described. I wasn’t doing that all the time. In some cases, I just needed to remove tags like “he sees” and “she hears” and just describe the things seen and heard.
And the final way to show is through internal dialogue. I was the least consistent at using this tool.
A few things happened when I did an editing pass with a focus on using those three methods of showing, not telling:
- My descriptions became more interesting because they also helped readers understand the POV character better
- Replacing “told” reactions with internal dialogue led to more unique and colorful reactions that felt more organic and in the moment
- Chapters got little tighter, with the manuscript dropping around 3,000 words overall
That may not sound like many words to cut from a 90,000 word manuscript, but it’s amazing how much faster a chapter reads when you take two unnecessary words out of this sentence and replace three okay words with great words in the next paragraph—and do that again and again and again.
Related posts:
Book review: ‘The Fantasy Fiction Formula’ by Deborah Chester
Book review: ‘The Writer’s Journey’ by Christopher Vogler
Book review: ‘Story’ by Robert McKee
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